Capitalism, religion, and being born the wrong gender.

Gestures around broadly

Currently, mostly AI and also feeling a bit isolated in a somewhat conservative town as someone who is queer

I am, though?

capitalism, mostly.

I don't make a large enough salary to save for a home, take vacations, or save enough to not be homeless in retirement. The country I reside in is currently undergoing a fascist takeover and considers its citizens chattel to further enrich the wealthy elites.

Almost every issue I have right now goes back to billionaires, fascism, or capitalism. The last two years have been the most difficult of my life so far, and literally existential. I just nearly avoided statelessness and now I can't legally work following a layoff, so I've been living off of savings

Some combination of decades of trauma, a system designed to marginalize and exploit, a lack of community, genetics.

I’m mostly happy, but I want to do a thing that’s going to take time and preparation. It’s not going to be fun to do this thing, but I really want to do it.

sigh I just have to be patient and prepare.

Capitalism. Definitely capitalism.

Is happy an option?

Because 46 and lost remote job, and after working a year from home dread having to go into work. Especially with gas what it is and I live in shit hole state with no public transportation. Add to the fact that I must try find work in this economy while dealing with ageism. Just fucking hate this shit.

Billionaires are alive

I’m not demoralized by the problems the world faces. I’m demoralized by people’s active efforts against solving them, or encouraging making them worse. Racism above economic benefits for all. More expensive gas vehicles over the multitude of transport options that don’t pollute our environment.

In history books, I read stories about how the world had to band together to win WW2; for instance, stories about sharing used nylons to make parachutes, or how the modern post office was reinvented. As horrible as war was, I miss when people would actually try. It disgusts me that a great many people just know that you-know-who lies on the regular and still support him.

I don’t even hate him so strongly. I hate what he showed of our world as a litmus test, and it’s made it hard to trust that world again.

I somehow won’t allow it

I don't really have any complaints, I'm just not a very happy person

Boloco left my town and now there are no good burritos here anymore.

This may sound trivial but you have no idea how much of a staple burritos are to my nutrition

I can't remember a time in my life where happiness was ever my default disposition.

Personally? Failure to live up to my own expectations and the crushing weight of capitalism and the state oppressing the shit out of me.

Because all of these moneymen and salesmen have their collective boots on my throat. I can't just go outside and play anymore what with all of the cameras and evil groups concerned about why I might be outside.

Capitalist hellscape. One of my pets scratched me in an awkward part of my leg. ICE horrors. War. Genocide. Other things removed from my immediate, personal, experience but make me sad or angry when I think of them.

Because the world sucks and there is nothing I can do with it

I’m able to find moments of happiness. When I can’t…well, I’d rather not to open those floodgates (especially publicly). I also think some people simply have predispositions to negativity, which doesn’t mean that they’re doomed to always be that way, but that it requires more effort to override it.

Health.

Also brain.

Also they overlap.

If I knew that I would probably be q lot happier.

At this point I can only blame my broken brain.

I'm lonely and hate myself, and I hate myself too much to move towards not being lonely.

Also I'm in the Navy, and I work insane hours.

I literally can't figure out why. I have a stable living situation, decent income, a loving long-term partner and no health concerns. I don't think I remember the last time I genuinely felt happy. There's short-term excitement or giddyness sometimes, but that lasting, calming presence of actual happiness has been missing for a while.

Why should I be?

Right now? My boyfriend is very clearly emotionally wounded by something he doesnt want to share with me. Feeling helpless makes me unhappy, EZ.

Mostly I am happy - I don't think it really has that much to do with my circumstances, which now are relatively cushy, just a lucky quirk of biology. I have been reasonably happy when homeless, I do get anxious but not depressed, just not how my brain works.

So please never blame yourself if you are unhappy, it can be the other side of the same coin. I do think satisfaction, the ability to be satisfied is a life skill, but happiness vs. sadness, some of that is biological.

Everything is expensive. I'm behind on everything. There's no end in sight.

What would be the point?

If you are happy you are a target, you still haven't lost hope and you still have something that can be taken away.

If i knew that answer I wouldn't have ever done electroconvulsive therapy

I'm happy in my personal life, cause of my wife, pets, family, and friends. But otherwise... gestures broadly around not much to be happy about.

Depends what that means.

Why do I dislike my current situation? That would be nuanced, at minimum, to explain to a Gazan or Rohingya, but on Lemmy I can just say: "My situation is objectively bad."

Why aren't I joyful more often? That's just how I'm wired, it doesn't matter what's happening.

Why do I experience negative emotions often? First off, I'm not sure if I actually have more than average. Probably less. Beyond that, I don't really know. If I was in a better situation, would it stop? Would I find some tiny detail to stress over, instead? How objective are we even about remembering what we've felt over time? There's not enough information.

Why do I feel wronged by the world around me? I don't, really. Shit happens. I'm lucky in that I actually know that.

Everything keeps getting further away economically. It’s like those dolly zoom shots in cinema where the camera keeps the subect in the same spot but the background rapidly recedes. I keep trying to move forward, but it feels like we’re not getting anywhere.

I am happy, but thanks for the check-in.

I suffer with self confidence and consider myself forgettable

Dunno

I don't know how to

Right now allergies, I'm under-caffeineinated for how little I slept because I had to work last night, and I have unnecessary emails in my inbox.

More generally I feel the time I have to dedicate to the things I would like to do and the time I have to dedicate to work and tasks have reached unsustainable levels.

Who says I'm not?

I had a falling out with the people I thought were my friends. Set off a horrible chain reaction of events that fucked me up in a big way and destroyed a longtime dream I'd been working towards.

I don't know how to make friends again, and I don't know how to trust people. I'm stuck with this paranoid fear wondering if people are only pretending to be nice to me but might secretly hate me behind my back. And I want to tell myself that's an irrational fear, most people surely aren't like that, but it happened once already.

I'm not unhappy either. I'm relatively content with my life. Things could be better but they could be much worse too.

Well, I think I am happy. Of course, not everything has gone my way, but enough has. I’m working on getting partial custody of my child from her mother. After a year of searching, I have found someone who is a much better match for me than my previous relationship and this person lives in the same town as me. We’re working on getting my fostering license - she has had one for years. I walked some of the AT with my estranged bio father over the summer. And last week I did an end of summer trip where I stayed on a lake and hiked for a few days - it felt like summer camp. Work has been a struggle for the last few months due to the introduction of some new faces in the company, and I just lost a very good employee because of it, but it seems my boss is finally back in my corner to some extent. I’ve joined a poetry slam on Mondays recently. I’m looking forward to the cold season with hot drinks, campfires and eventually snowboarding.

I think I’m wired to generally stay positive so long as outside factors do not become too overwhelming. Simply trying to only control the things that I have control of helps. Support networks help. Exercise helps. Therapy helps.

Nothing works as it was explained to me how it should. Now everything has ever changing rules and the points don't matter.

Brain chemistry and resistance to medication.

Because everything is awful.

Climate change, fascism, being mislead and lied to by school system that thought I was a lost cause.

the way the world has went. I expected progress toward utopia not embracing dystopia. I mean I studied science with a genuine motivation of advancing progress in genetic therapy.

The main thing making me unhappy is the imminent collapse of the Untied States

Wow. People of this thread, if you think some ideological concept is the cause of all your personal woes, you're projecting a lot.

cause i wasnt born in the scandinavian region

I dont like waking up early and having to sleep early

Mostly happy but could be happier if I had the funds to move or magically have rural transit and closer access to passenger rail.

Fight or flight... avoid or smash... I think everybody is trying to find stable. If not it is a loop spun by a unhealthy environment. Internalize or not. The worm lives for now. On top of that we are all mortal which depending might be good. We are all waiting in line. You would have to define happy in great detail. Maybe there should be a word that encompasses healthy inline with the natural world.

They force you to smile.

But I am. Check mate, atheists.

I have balls.

Japanese black company bullshit. Removing WFH after telling me it was fine, I can move away, etc. Revoking my side job permission (I sell extra veg that I grow on my small farm). I keep applying to jobs in the EEA and even remote US and Canada jobs. Nothing is biting. No one wants Japanese timezone or dealing with cross-border stuff. Japanese remote jobs are going away more generally, especially for someone like me who's a non-Java (recently, at least) backend-only engineer. There are no local jobs either that are enough to support us. If I did take anything, I wouldn't have any time to look for anything better and have a miserable commute. Due to back and leg issues, there's only so much resembling manual labor I can do.

My previous company did it as well. It's all great in the beginning then management or something changes and they decide to treat employees like shit. Many rely on having a job to keep their visas so they are too scared to try to fight back. I planned to retire here, and maybe it will be better years later, but I desperately want to get to Norway for work. Instantly better working conditions and rights, ability to get PR in 3 years and vote, ability to get citizenship without giving up my existing a few years after that. I don't even want some big relocation package. Just support the visa, get us there with a couple suitcases each, and help us get started (I heard it can take a while for the tax authority and everything to straighten out leading to slow/reduced paychecks at first).

This is the very TL;DR version. There's a lot more shit.

Because I'm working for the Devil.

I would say it's because of capitalism but the truth is that my poor health is the real reason for my unhappiness. If I had better health I would fight against capitalism through activism as I did in the past. That would make me happy, at least.