Ok, sure, but also negative thinking and giving up hope literally never helped once. It doesn't help in real world ways and it makes your mental state worse. Obviously going around in a state of denial doesn't help and ND people have specific challenges a NT person might not get, but ultimately you gotta cling to a positive mindset to make things better.
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2025
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When people keep telling me to basically deny my reality, it makes me feel more shit than anything else. I'd much rather someone empathize and tell me that, yes, things actually do suck. And guess what, that does make me feel better and more sane
If you don't acknowledge reality and stay realistic that things actually are not always that great, then the next time you get knocked down by something, or your challenges make something you aspired to do rail, then you're just gonna fall apart like a house of cards. Especially if you start internalizing that you should be able to do this and that it's your fault you didn't succeed etc
Treating mental health in an individualist way sucks, and sometimes is worse than nothing
I'm not talking about being in denial. I'm saying that if you want things to not suck, you do have to have the idea that things might not suck somehow later. If you think things are always going to suck then you'll never bother to make things not suck.
That sounds like an unmet need in our community. Do you think it would be helpful to have a dedicated thread or comment section where voicing negative feelings and perspectives was expected/encouraged?
Is it really unmet? Many of the default communities, especially the top ones, are constant feeds of at least half posts consisting of negative news about politics, economics, and environmental news. If the articles aren’t negative, the comments often are. Like my comment I guess, though I don’t intend to be argumentative.
I’m struggling with how much is wrong and how hard it fixing it appears to be as well. But I don’t think there is a lack of that acknowledgment here at all.
I completely agree, angry people have never complished anything ever. Not once have people channeled negative emotions into action or art. It's impossible. Just be positive and use that, as it is the only known way of success. Never be negative. Always positive. Positivity only from now on!
Tap for spoiler
/s
I'm not saying never to be angry, I'm saying never to give up.
Also most of the rights we enjoy are thanks to the French and Russian people who had a whole lot of negative thoughts about their kings and expressed them loud enough for the ruling classes in the rest of the world to hear.
You can't say anything positive about Russians on here. People are going to burst a gasket.
Not once have people channeled negative emotions into action or art. It’s impossible.
Except, no? Art is about expressing one's self. There's tons of art out there inspired by negative emotions. Anger-fueled protest songs, Emily Dickinson's poems about death, countless paintings created to express a people's or an individual's plight, the list goes on.
Being positive is definitely better for one's health, but to say negative emotions have never and could never be used to create art is absurd.
Edit: Or was your comment sarcasm? I truly cannot tell anymore.
sorry, I'm an old fart on the internet, my comment was covered in sarcasm haha. I get that negative people drain the positivity out of things, but I think history would call this era in america a trump-led republican-manufactured depression. Negativity happens in depressions, I don't think it's wise to curse it like the person I was originally replying to was alluding to. Positivity is useful as well, and much more so when it comes to organizing things that bring about immediate relief.
Saying 'stop being negative', right now in this moment, is saying "stop being unhealthy" to people losing their medical coverage or "stop being unhoused" to people being kicked out of their apartments or "stop crying" because your wife lost her white collar job too and now youre both working door dash to stay afloat in this economy. Some people are literally trying to survive to not die and don't have the literal privilege of being in a positive mood when a random person on the internet graces upon the comment section of a lemmy thread. How dare they. Fucking people who dare think differently than them because they forgot the random internet person who needs positivity constantly around them might feel a bit sad about negativity.
What people need are good neighbors. I'm obviously not one yet but damn just leave people alone please. Not you but people like the person I originally replied to
Thank you for the clarification. I agree 100%!
TIL, /s stands for spoiler
Sorry that's not how ND works.
Telling us we need to cope in NT style only makes it worse. Not to say there are no ways, but we need to find our own.
I'm not saying that you need to do it in NT style at all! You gotta do it your own way.
Agreed.
NDs know, perhaps better than most, that victory always begins in the mind. It’s the first fight and often the hardest. It isn’t easy to see beyond present circumstances to a reality that does not yet exist. Convincing oneself that it could enables the vision required to know what to do next. Without it one can only react.
That said… I think one of the underlying problems we currently experience here on this site is simple: we have mixed channels that include users who have radically opposing needs.
The problem of forcing our wounded and our fit for duty to use the same channel
I see a lot of people on lemmy who are obviously hurting and scared. They come here to validate their despair among others whose hope for a better future has been cauterized repeatedly, who are similarly traumatized by current events. They are not yet ready to fight and should not be expected to do so by those who are. They’ll be able to fight later. First they need to recover. These are our wounded.
We also have people who are looking ahead, networking, and organizing. Their comments and posts are colored by some degree of optimism and esprit de corps. They are here to help and have the mental and emotional wherewithal to do so. These are our fit for duty.
With our wounded and our fit for duty intermingled, both groups are mutually frustrated.
Our fit for duty are frustrated by our wounded sowing discord and despair in the ranks. It comes across to them as selfish wallowing and doomerism that demoralizes when we need all hands on deck.
Our wounded, on the other hand, are discouraged when their reality is rejected by the fit for duty, who seem to judge their fears as weakness and might even scold them for voicing their despair. That comes across to them as a selfish, uncaring, and individualistic mindset which comes from a place of privilege (be it socioeconomic, identity, neurotype, locality, or something else).
Possible solutions
I’ve been thinking about possible solutions. Obviously, our wounded would not prefer to doom-spiral in front of their comrades, and our fit for duty would not prefer to force our wounded into a head space they’re not ready for.
One approach is technical and requires an unmerged feature. We could offer literal channels, or designated subthreads, within comment sections such that at least one was dedicated to support. There it would be guaranteed safe for our wounded to voice pessimistic feelings free of judgement, and they could expect to have their despair acknowledged and discussed by others who felt the same.
Another approach would be to just acknowledge the mental health needs of users openly in a pinned post with a weekly dedicated comment section for voicing feelings of anger, sadness, and despair. This would obviously require approval at the moderator level but could be implemented immediately.
A hybrid approach that any community (namely those specifically dedicated to current events) could implement with an automod rule, would include a pinned comment in every post inviting child comments and discussions where any degree of pessimism or despair would be considered realistic.
ETA: spoiler sections re: users with opposing needs
This is a brilliant way of looking at this whole situation. I think that if people can contextualize it like you said it would really help bridge the gap!
Thanks! It’s been on my mind for a while. The friction is obvious to most of us by now. Every day I see more examples of strong (and mutually exclusive) opinions about it. Still, we haven’t yet agreed on how to frame it inclusively, much less how to reconcile the need.
Where we’re headed currently, I think, is one group “winning” via consensus-building to censure and alienate the other. We will effectively exile their perspectives to other online spaces, or perhaps a particular space which comes to be thought of as our toxic offshoot.
That process has already begun. While I haven’t figured out exactly where exiles are landing, trends suggest the voices that will ultimately be exiled are our wounded. Right now they’re exiting the dialog feeling silenced and shamed as cowards, so I wouldn’t expect their return.
Before that realization I considered the trend progress, since we’re resolving our doomerism/morale issue, but now I can’t help feeling like it’s both a terrible injustice to our comrades and an unnecessary waste that surely we can avoid. Hence the spitballing.
If you or anyone reading has any ideas, I’d be grateful to hear them.
negative thinking and giving up hope literally never helped once
The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the belief that, if an event (whose occurrences are independent and identically distributed) has occurred less frequently than expected, it is more likely to happen again in the future (or vice versa).
Obviously going around in a state of denial doesn’t help
It's not obvious. That's the hitch. Figuring out when to persist and when to accept defeat is at the heart of the emotional struggle.
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Lol. What middle class? 😂
They must think anyone with a home and wants to give good advice on how to cope with a shitty life is middle class. Even though that poor soul is in so much debt they likely will never pay it off in their lifetime. That middle class probably.
Mood
Feeling that anything or anyone views you as "worthless" is a symptom, not a diagnosis. Just sayin, I've been down this road and back a few times.
You can get better, you can feel better. It takes effort and honesty with yourself that may be uncomfortable, and no, it's not about "positive thinking" as much as it's about learning how your own survival mechanisms work and learning how they're working against you.
Also coming to terms with what you can reasonably change and what you reasonably can't (yes I know how limiting that sounds), and overcoming the envy and the FOMO by just being the best you you can be.
If that last part sounds wishy washy, well... it is..., but you really can develop a strong sense of self-worth by simply being nice to others. Spread a bit of joy in your sphere of influence.
Does the middle class exist?
Do "Neurotypical" people exist? Seems to me like the classic example of how the average woman has 2.5 children, but you can't find anyone who actually gives birth to 2.5 children.
And I thought the ones selling positive thinking were white women? Or maybe Asian men- specifically gurus from "eastern" religions? I thought white men were supposed to be the ones following stoicism or nutritional supplements.
Its almost as if stereotypes and broad categorizations break down under scrutiny.
Do "Neurotypical" people exist? Seems to me like the classic example of how the average woman has 2.5 children, but you can't find anyone who actually gives birth to 2.5 children.
You're confusing avreages with normative pressures. Neurodivergence wouldn't exist if there wasn't some broadly applicable set of behaviors, pathologies, and cultural standards to compare "abnormal" behaviors against. While true that there is no truly normal person, there is a normative standard applied to social groups that is used appropriately and inappropriately. An appropriate use of this norm allows us to identify groups with similar diversions from the "norm" and find ways to either develop treatment for harmful aspects of these diversions or (ideally) adjust aspects of the normative social standard that are needlessly damaging to the out groups. An inappropriate utilization of social norms excludes outgroups and furthers the already existing harm done to those groups (a part of this is the stereotypes that you mention).
Or you could just deny the existence of this cultural technology, call it an abstraction with no use or foundation in reality, and use that denial to invalidate the struggles of marginalized groups because you're so high off your own farts that you'd rather use semantics and "nuance" to be an overly technical weiner and hide your bigotry with a paper thin veneer of "scrutinizing stereotypes".
To throw a personal anecdote in, men generally, and white men in particular, have usually been the ones to inflict their unsolicited "advice" on all sorts of things in my life. Especially things they haven't personally struggled with and don't really understand. Plenty of white men have "the hustle" and "grindset" mentality too. And they're usually the ones to be the most adamant about it.
You missed my point entirely. "Neurotypical" is a term that only makes sense in conversations about specific forms of Neuro diversity, and when talking about groups. There is no such thing as a "neurotypical" individual. This meme is attacking "neurotypical" individuals, but in reality when talking about individuals "neurotypical" just means "I, as the observer, am not aware this person's neurodiveristy so I'm just going to pretend like that means it does not exist".
And your personal anecdotes are as useful to the conversation as any other personal anecdotes is. I've received plenty of unsolicited advice from women and people of color. For as many anecdotes you have about the "hustle" grindset of white men, we can find plenty of similar stories from non-white cultures. My Cantonese friend in high school who faced the pressures of his "tiger mom". The cultural issues Japan and Korea are facing with overwork. Heck, this meme is attacking "positivity" from white men, but you could argue a lot of that "positivity" originated from the New Age movements which got most of that from "eastern" religions.
Attacking "middle class neurotypical white men" is the same bullshit culture-war nonsense that far-right groups use to single out and hate on everyone else. Just because it's attacking different groups than usual doesn't make it any less bigoted or any more correct.
In very broad terms. Quickly. You only get a diagnosis of something like autism spectrum disorder if you are far enough along the 'spectrum' for it to be particularly impactful on your life.
There are plenty of people who exhibit some neurodivergent trait(s) to some degree, at some times, but not enough for it to be an issue. That group of people are considered neurotypical.
If no one is neurotypical, as you claim, then no one is neurodivergent. Which isn't just plainly nonsense/ It is offensive to people struggling with having a different kind of brain that makes functioning in a neurotypical dominated world at least difficult.
(Just to clear up the misconception that the autism spectrum goes from NT to "severely" autistic. It's not a linear scale from not autistic to autistic.)
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I feel the commentary on relative privilege here is meaningful. I think bringing up race in the meme can be off putting to some but the overall message of how relative privilege allows one to approach problems with a more hopeful worldview is accurate.
The relative privileges being invoked here being race, gender and financial security, though the messaging would still convey relatable meaning even if they had only chosen one.
"Be like me I never graduated college and I'm doing fine!"
:: a pelican drops dead in his driveway, throat pouch filled with $20,000 dollars ::
"Oh that happens about once a week, nothing to do with my success though"
I'm convinced that the vast majority of people feel like joker
I do. And I'm tired of pretending I don't.
I once attended one of these talks (not by choice) and the speaker told us a motivating story where through hard work and determination she sold a penthouse. Girl, I don't know anyone who knows anyone who can afford a fucking penthouse.
Not with that attitude
Middle class? Haven't seen one of those in ages.
Yeah its word the kiddies learn but don't have any idea what it means.
Hi.
You should only be legally allowed to give advice to people on the same step of Maslow's Hierarchy
It's negotiation tactics. Buying your time for your lowest offer.
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