In my head they are very normalburger if that makes sense. They think Trump can stop the war enough to affect the market, right?
The ‘background noise’ is getting louder but for the most part, people are just carrying about their day worried about their own personal lives
I just recently got a bunch of medical stuff and psychiatric stuff sorted out after decades of barely being able to function. So I’m finally feeling “normal” and the state of our politics has me stressed to the point of action, but not to the point of curling up in a ball and doing nothing, which is unusual for me. Very surreal to be functional in a nonfunctional world.
Here’s American right now
I keep it together because a lot of young people are around me. But on the inside I’ve kind of given up on anything good and dread the next fucking crazy thing to come up.
Same boat. I work with small kids, oblivious to politics, full of hope for the future because that’s how they should feel. I clock in and lose myself in their version of the world for 8 hours a day. It’s no wonder why I’m actually happier at work than at home these days.
Glad I’m not alone, but also sad
I’m sure some people are. But constantly crashing out isn’t useful even in the worst situations. What is useful is taking real steps that have real effects. Action is the antidote for anxiety.
In the Midwest, nothing has changed at all.
I’ve noticed that stress is beginning to show in society. When you order groceries, much of the order is wrong. People are using employee assistance programs in certain cases for stress related issues. Many of my friends can’t stand to watch the news. I’m fucked in the head from doom scrolling. I know a person who had a party recently and said the only thing she wanted for her bday was for nobody to bring up politics. It’s awful honestly and I’m crashing out. My health is impacted. Like, a lot.
Delete social media, seriously, it’s a cancer that eats your soul.
I deleted every social media outside of Lemmy and my mental health drastically improved. I only pick up my phone to message my spouse or friends to make plans.
Disconnect from the race, your brain will thank you.
I got off everything other than Lemmy after Trump won. It definitely has helped, but we’re not deleting Facebook or deGoogling our way out of world collapse. …well, at least short term anyway. Most people I know cannot even connect their everyday habits with the consequences they experience.
Lemmy is social media.
From pedantic to pedantic, yeah it is social media but is it not predatory like every commercial social media (meta, tiktok, twitter)
I would dare to say doomscrolling in lemmy is impossible
I would dare to say doomscrolling in lemmy is impossible
Could just be my ADHD but I’d like to contest this. Maybe we need to be really careful about the communities we follow, but besides Linux stuff and some other niche group there’s a lot of politics on Lemmy, and while there’s a lot of insightful discussion there’s a high concentration of unhinged doomerism.
I sometimes feel like I’m addicted, not because of the algorithm but because of the feedback loop that I need to know what’s going on, and I want to reach out and communicate…
Take everything I will say as informal bullshit but I get it, I have both autism and ADHD and I’m addicted to getting new info on currents events but at this point I’m not sure of I’m just letting myself go into doomerism or things have really gone crazy since COVID and I’m just trying to cope by gathering all the info I can to make informed decisions and discuss recent events
You could say this is a kind of OCD, just me trying to think of an answer to this right now it’s taking me into a loop because there is no right answer
Things are bad, and are going to get a lot worse before it’s over.
I’m self-employed, and 2025 had one of my best starts in 18 years of business. 2026 is one of the worst starts in my history. January can be hit if miss, but February is usually pretty good, and March is always one of my best months. Tomorrow is the last job on my schedule, and I have nothing beyond that until the Fall. I’m talking to other small biz owners, and they’re saying the same thing.
Economic indicators always lag by a few months, so the rest of the world is going to find out in a couple months what those in the trenches, like me, already know - we’re already in a really bad economic situation.
And it won’t get better until somebody in power starts admitting it, and committing to fix it. I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Latest jobs report showed a reduction in total jobs in the economy of 80k. The recession that’s been trying to happen for years is finally about to happen.
It’s really hilarious because economic indicators were all looking super good going into the 2024 election, and even jobs were starting to show some growth after being a bit slow following the insanity of 2021-22. Trump could simply walked in and went to sleep and the economy would be in brilliant shape right now but instead we have this
At this point, many of us are numb to the impending whatever. There is always 6 things happening that shouldn’t be happening (that we know about) and that could upend our lives. And usually there is very little we can do besides yell on the internet.
Maybe the Epstein files changed something… Maybe? But it seems there is always a new thing coming up to distract the masses.
The oil prices have not hit the average consumer hard yet. They are releasing oil reserves and taking other measures to artificially reduce the price increase.It will probably take a month or two before it really starts to go down.
Yeah gas prices (about the only commodity that normies interact with) have only gone up by like 30-40 cents per gallon, about the same price they were 6-12 months ago. Normies only wake up once it gets to around $4/gallon or about a full dollar per gallon more than usual.
The last time gas prices went over $4 a gallon I heard many drivers of excessively large gas guzzling SUVs and Trucks complaining that they couldn’t fully fill their tanks due to the $100 limit on most gas pumps.
The $4 mark was also when people started actually making choices to drive less (and voicing these choices) and if it was sustained they seemed likely to choose to replace their vehicles with something more efficient
Behavioral standards plummeted during the pandemic and never recovered. People are a lot more stressed, and they refuse to behave. We’re divided, and it really does not help that our leadership literally believes that AI is going to replace most jobs.
i think it doesn’t help that our leadership will try anyway
How are the schools
In fucking shambles. One of my dreams, if I ever win big on the rarely purchased lotto tickets, is to open a free clinic with free pharmacy, and a private, means-tested Pre-K12 Montessori school that only accepts on the poorest first and donations only buy your name on a plaque.
I live in a rural area in the US. Public school teachers are generally very good at their jobs, but a lot of the school boards around me have been taken over by the far right and so-called conservatives. They run on platforms like “ending forced vaccines for children” and banning transgender flags and they mostly win because there’s a lot of dumb racists here.
Mostly okay. Slow discussion building on why test scores are dropping and are they still dropping. Is it COVID (immeidate shock), Long COVID (long term health issues), or nearly all course work and books being on tiny laptop screens (money showed up for a wholesale transfer to Chromebooks during COVID. They were actually helpful during lock-downs, but were kept after.).
Where I am (major metro) the schools are still decent but severely underfunded.
What do you mean by that? The standards of education or mental health in schools?
In the U.S., schools are funded by property taxes, so schools in rich areas are fine, although educational standards suck across the nation.
Hectic and our teachers are constantly complaining about how kids can’t do basic reading comprehension tasks. Like copy a sentence from the board into their notebook and then repeat it back to you in their own words. There are 13 year olds who cannot do this. There are adults who can’t do this. The majority of Americans read at or below the level of an 11 year old.
Actually attempting to come back to this thread now and it’s hard not to shimmer out of this plane of reality with anger
Seconding this. We’re in freefall right now.
I do not think the leaders believe that AI is going to replace most jobs. They definitely believe that they can use the threat of AI taking most jobs to further exploit the working class.
Yeah that’s mostly a justification for layoffs. They’re not competitive robotics manufacturing AI that cuts down the need for enormous chunks of capital for factory floor space + varied equipment + switching things up to change what you’re producing. They’re not competitive on the large computational engineering models important for R&D (which they’re not doing either) and iterating new rocket engines. It’s a giant grift, but people need to be careful not to universalize the values of Silicon Valley AI companies.
They really do though. Like, you’re assuming a level of rationality that they don’t possess.
Americans really struggle to come to terms with their elites and leaders being fucking evil instead of merely stupid.
Jesus christ, look at your fucking history. Evil doesn’t always look like some hollywood ass villain.
After a certain point it doesn’t matrer, but still come ON
You say that like it has to be one or the other. Most evil people in history were also stupid.
These billionaire dipshits are not as bright as you think
Side topic:
ls “normalburger” a word commonly used in English?
If so, what does it mean (I assume it does not refer to grilled beef patties?)My English dictionary draws a blank here…
🚨 Breaking: the Americans have questions about the burgers
I am not an American.
The word “Normalbürger” is a very common expression in my own language, but that’s clearly not how you used it in your post, hence my question.
So, what does it mean?
Oh, how burgerbrained of me not to think outside the target audience, my mistake man, sincerely, but it also doesn’t work without the assumption of nationality. I made up the word on the spot to indicate an American in declining mental and physical health but overall stability, let me check if someone else used the word first in English.
Burgerbrained would be an actual example of a trending portmanteau in English. Invest now
Then better use burgerbrained (which doesn’t seem like a portmanteau to me btw), avoids possible confusion with the existing word.
“Normalbürger” in German-based languages just means “average citizen” in a completely neutral way.
So not what you have been going for.Bürger has the same root as bourgeois, and Wiktionary lists “bourgeois” as a definition of the German word (besides “citizen”).
The portmanteau in English is presumably not derived in the same way. It’s a reference to the favorite American treat found at cultural landmarks such as McDonalds. Only tangentially related to the German thru Hamburg -> Hamburger sandwich -> Cheeseburger
It’s likely closer to normal+burgerreicher or normal+burgerlander.
I’ve heard magaburger a few times, normal burger is new to me.
No, I think the expression it plays off of is “nothing-burger” which is more common. Like, when everyone is expecting a very bad or very good thing to happen and nothing comes of it: “Well, that was a big nothing-burger” … that and leftist online discourse calling the US “burgerland” or the burger-reich
Maybe it’s a regional thing, but I don’t think it’s a common phrase. I’ve heard “nothing-burger” a lot, and this may be someone playing off that.
The average American barely has any idea there’s a war even happening or who the president is. Half the people I know think Biden is still president. Even people who do know there’s a war wouldn’t be able to find Iran on a map. Everything about our government and everything it does might as well be a TV show to my fellow Americans. They see it as fiction that doesn’t impact our lives and most people think it’s extremely boring so they tune it out.
People are crashing out but for different but associated reasons. Everyone’s broke, no one can afford healthcare, there’s a mass shooting every 3 days. Everyone’s tired and the alienation is so thick that people are all pointing in different directions to where they think the problem is. People are getting more conspiracy brained and twitchy.
Americans are deep fried in every sense
Even people who do know there’s a war wouldn’t be able to find Iran on a map.
I work a customer service facing job at the poop factory. The only person I’ve ever heard mention the war is one overly chatty customer who asked me “so did you hear we’re in another war now?” with the same cadence as “did you catch the big game last night?”
The reality is none of this insanity has directly effected me. So day to day life, working, raising kids, etc. is completely normal for me. However, keeping up with news. Feeling empathy for people being effected now, and worrying about when the other shoe is going to drop on me and my family stresses me out. I don’t like being stressed out and avoid stress as much as possible, so I find myself just trying to stay distracted with hobbies, video games, etc. Then I feel guilty about distracting myself. If I can’t do much about the situation, I should at least inform myself about it. But then there comes the stress again…
So yeah, in a way add me to the crashing out list I guess.
This is exactly me. Fired up the Xbox to play my favorite title, unfortunately its the Battlefield series. So there i am clawing at it in an oil field on fire or some middle Eastern city streets thinking about dead school girls and nothing I can do about it.
