>>11604140I was on about this the other day. Even if people don't really believe in any particular religion anymore, the presence of a guiding story, and a Right way of being, and an end goal, turned everyone into de facto Calvinists. The alienated and adrift are afflicted with an overwhelming sense of despair and futility. The striver strives regardless and it becomes internalised evidence of their own worthiness. The entitled are seldom faced with being anything less than the elect. And our current trend towards metagamification is just going to double down on that. The epoch of the vaisya is here. They key is going to be finding a way to game on something resembling your own terms. You can't fight them. They've practised this distasteful mercantilism for millennia. The networks are deeper and more tangled than any root system. But maybe, just maybe, you find a game that you like and that gives you the push to get up when you wake up and not roll back over. Maybe others see you playing that game, and ask to join you, and you get a little community out of it. And yes, they're like raccoons, they will know what you're doing, and they'll to get their piece of the action. But if you can get into the mindset of "I did this once, I can do it again", even if the next ten games flop, it becomes easier to repeat. I'm trying to believe in this myself, and it's barely plausible to be frank. It's going to get fucking awful. Larger society's been sucking back LFR tier loot for decades, while the epic gamerz have been pushing legendary difficulty while on drugs to sleep less. There's no sympathy from the elite for the cattle. We shouldn't be in this mess, but we are, and now we have choices. If death isn't an abyss of unknowing, if some part of you survives, what will it return to? Keep learning, keep poking at things. You might never "enjoy" anything, but habits form regardless of their relation to an imagined end.
