I just think they're neat

I walk a very thin line between recycling/anti-consumerism and my hoarding tendencies (don't think it's ever reached the point of full blown disorder but I'm very aware it's a constant lowkey battle to keep it that way) and my perfectionism paralysing me into keeping stuff until I can dispose of it in the Absolute Most Optimal Least Polluting way.

For products for which a large-scale, practical and economic recycling system does not exist (recyclable plastic doesn't have such a system, it's a grift; recyclable metals and glass very often do have such a system but it depends on the material and product and where you live), there is no such thing as optimal disposal. There is only optimal production. Your environmental impact is measured in the effect you have on new things being produced and shipped. Once it is made in a factory, it is already landfill, it's just staying in your house for a bit first.

Trying to repair old boots at home doesn't save them from landfill -- the question is, did your repairing the boots stop you from having to buy new ones, and if so, did that stop new ones from being produced and shipped to your country? Does buying a new pair instead help because you don't have to buy the materials you'd use to repair them, and if so, did that have any effect on whether those materials were produced and sent to your country? In a modern economy, your effect re: repair vs. new is likely to have absolutely no environmental effect at all for most goods, though it does depend on specifically where you live and what the good is and how it's made. Either your old boots go to landfill and you buy a new pair, or you fix your old ones and the new pair goes straight from the warehouse to landfill because the company bought one too many pairs to sell. (It'll probably go on sale and mope around warehouses for a few years first, same as it otherwise would in your closet; this is a completely irrelevant temporary stop).

painfully agree on how "zero waste" type stuff can spiral out of control in a mentally unhealthy way. I have hoarding tendencies and struggle to throw anything away to begin with, and if I encouraged that I would quickly live in a garbage pile.

Reusing single-use plastic containers is...I can't go down that road.

I don't really agree on mending items being pointless as a sustainability practice, because it isn't and doesn't have to be a completely isolated and individual behavior.

this is why specifically Visible mending is a cool thing: it is a way to repair clothes but it's also a visible, public display, which shifts the balance of what's acceptable in society. If people see you wearing clothes that have obviously been mended, that plants the idea in their mind that this is a thing you can do with clothes, and instead of just imagining what it might be like, they can see it.

Doing and talking about these things makes overconsumption more of a thing people think about and notice and less of an everyday, unnoticed norm.

And then, you can teach other people to mend, you can even fix their stuff for them if you're crazy. If you've got a community of people practicing these skills, it's not an individual thing anymore. It's the exact same as any other sustainability practice, you have to do it as a team with other people. It's not about the individual act, it's about the cultural change.

Also. Even if my choice not to buy a thing doesn't impact whether the thing got manufactured, Corporation still didn't get my money if I didn't buy it. On a scale of 1,000 or 10,000 people, that's definitely not nothing.

In contrast, if you are reusing plastic containers, you still bought the plastic container.

If you reuse them in a way that replaces your need to buy something else, that's fine, but the trouble with plastic containers is that you accrue them at a much higher rate than you can reuse them because the use they were manufactured for is so short-lived.

however this does not address the main reason I mend my stuff: because the quality of stuff has gotten so much worse that if I buy a new thing it will almost definitely be much shittier than if I just fix the old thing

Somewhere along the line, we decided that any repeated behavior, any source of pleasure, any coping mechanism, any habit that isn’t monk-like and productivity-optimized must be labeled an addiction. You like scrolling art before you create? Addiction. You watch comfort shows after work? Addiction. You check your phone in line at the grocery store? Addiction. You drink coffee with breakfast? Addiction. The word has been stretched so thin it barely means anything anymore, except “a behavior I personally disapprove of.”

Addiction is not “I enjoy stimulation.” It is not “I have habits.” It is not “I seek input before I produce output.” Addiction is a specific, devastating pattern of compulsion, harm, loss of control, and often self-destruction. It dismantles relationships. It corrodes trust. It hijacks the reward system so thoroughly that survival itself becomes secondary. It is not equivalent to liking Pinterest boards or needing music to focus.

When everything becomes addiction, nothing is. The language gets diluted, and with it, the gravity of what actual addiction is. People who have clawed their way out of substance abuse know the difference between compulsion and preference, between destructive dependence and deliberate engagement. Collapsing those distinctions into a trendy moral panic about “dopamine” is not enlightened. It’s sloppy. Unserious, even.

There’s also something deeply puritanical about it. The 2020s seem obsessed with pathologizing pleasure. If something feels good, it must be suspect. If it captures your attention, it must be hijacking your brain. If it isn’t explicitly productive, it must be rot. We’ve replaced older moral frameworks with neuroscience-flavored shame, but the tone is the same: you are wrong for enjoying things.

What bothers me most is how casually the word is thrown around in creative spaces. If you gather inspiration through music, images, movement, conversation, suddenly you’re “stimulus addicted.” If you can’t brute-force a novel in a silent white room with no input, you lack discipline. Never mind that many artists throughout history have relied on immersion, community, environment, and cross-media inspiration. Now it’s framed as weakness, as though the only legitimate art is produced under self-imposed sensory austerity.

This framing flattens nuance. There is a difference between avoidance and incubation. There is a difference between doomscrolling to numb out and deliberately engaging with material that fuels your imagination. There is a difference between compulsively chasing a hit and consciously choosing input that enriches your work. But nuance doesn’t trend. Alarmism does.

There’s also a strange individualizing move happening here. Instead of asking why people are exhausted, overstimulated, underpaid, isolated, or burnt out, we zoom in on their coping mechanisms and label them addictions. Instead of examining structural monotony, economic precarity, and social fragmentation, we scold individuals for having “bad dopamine habits.” It’s easier to diagnose people’s scrolling than to confront the conditions that make endless scrolling appealing.

Calling everything an addiction also erases agency. It suggests that people are perpetually hijacked by their brains, incapable of intentional choice unless they purge all sources of easy stimulation. That’s not empowering. It’s infantilizing. Adults are capable of enjoying things without being enslaved by them. Adults can have rituals, comforts, and creative processes without it being pathology.

When I hear the word “addiction” tossed around to describe normal human behavior, it doesn’t sound like insight. It sounds like moral grandstanding dressed up in pop psychology. And for those of us who have actually lived through the wreckage of substance abuse and fought to reclaim control, it feels like watching something serious get turned into a meme.

not all rabies victims will be foaming at the mouth. rabies isn't gonna be super obvious to those who don't know what to look for there is only one documented case of someone recovering from rabies

TELL TALE SYMPTOMS:

You can pet the cat in Norway; you can pet the cat in Spain;

Austria and Sweden - Northern Europe, in the main,

In the United Kingdom, which as you know entails,

England Scotland and Northern Ireland and Wales,

You can pet the cat, the fox, the rat, and any of the geese -

You can pet anything that you can catch if you go to Greece.

You’re allowed to pet the Irish cats, and Luxembourg is on,

Anything in Finland, France, Italy and Taiwan!

The world is big and large and strange, and many countries are

Rabies-free and glad of it! Like Germany! Qatar!

Aotearoa’s rabies-free on account of rare mammalia,

But you’re also fine to pet the cat upon entry to Australia.

If in Japan you see a cat you may surely pet away -

You can pat the cat in Belgium, Iceland, and of course Norway.

There are other countries where this virus has no hold,

And if YOU want to rhyme them then you’ll win a star of gold.

On this planet there are many places where you can safely pet the cat,

if there's a task, especially a recurring one, that you find difficult to do and that you keep avoiding, check whether you're in pain or physical discomfort.

For a long time I would avoid doing tasks like showering because they nebulously made me feel 'bad' or i just instinctively felt like avoiding them. It wasn't until I got a shower chair that I realised standing to shower was causing me pain. My bodymind knew that on some level but didn't tell the conscious me.

Similarly with sensory aversions (things you don't like). Before I got kitchen gloves, I did the dishes but it took me a long time and I never wanted to. Afterward, it got a lot easier to motivate myself.

"But how can you not know you're in pain/uncomfortabke?" Extremely easily if your brain is wired a specific way or if you were taught, intentionally or not, to downplay your own experiences or distance yourself from your body.

The numbers clearly show that discouraging individual people from using chatbots is a pointless distraction for the climate movement

Additionally, that legal frameworks don't yet account for Ai doesn't make them moral. The underlying idea attribution issues can't be brushed aside by laws that are significantly older than the systems involved.

but “ai is just bad because it’s bad” will convince no one and is a morally lazy position to take. about anything!

B-17 bomber is riddled with German anti-aircraft fire but miraculously survives. Later they discover the explosive shells were all inert; sabotaged by Nazi slaves working in armament factories.

Do not post your crimes