#oneaday Day 680: Real problems

Let me say a simple phrase to you, and I invite you to, quietly, to yourself, ponder what that phrase means and says to you.

Male loneliness epidemic.

I mention this because it is something I see being increasingly mocked by supposedly progressive types online, and it always rubs me up the wrong way any time I see it happening. Don't get me wrong, I understand why those people mock this phrase — it's because it's significantly more likely to be used by odious twats who think the be-all and end-all of existence is "getting" a girl to sleep with them, and any time these people talk about the male loneliness epidemic, what they actually mean is "God, I can't trick women into fucking me, woe is me."

To be clear: that kind of behaviour is shitbag fuckboi material, and anyone engaging with it needs to take a long, hard look at themselves. Ask not "how can I get a girl?", as if she is something to be possessed, but rather "how can I make myself into someone that other people might be interested to know?"

However, here's a significant issue. I firmly believe that there is a problem with modern men and loneliness. And the combination of the I'm A Nice Guy, Why Won't Anyone Fuck Me people and the hahaha, male loneliness epidemic losers people makes it very difficult to have a frank and honest conversation about what is actually a very real problem.

What I mean by this is that I am a man, and I am lonely. I used to have a lot of friends when I was younger, but over the years that number has dwindled to such a degree — not through my own lack of trying to maintain them — that I now have some exceedingly strong self-esteem issues over my own value as a human being. And these are, of course, compounded by my own status as being On The Spectrum, which commonly manifests itself as paralysing social anxiety, particularly when in an unstructured socialisation sort of situation.

I used to be glad for the friendships I had. I was grateful that people seemingly wanted to have me around, enjoyed having me around. I felt that, even though I still struggled in situations where I was surrounded by unfamiliar people, I had places where I belonged, and people that I belonged with. And, by extension, I felt like I was the sort of person who had something to offer as a friend.

Various happenings have left me… not feeling like that any more. When combined with the absolute revulsion I feel at my physical appearance — a result of a lack of self-control that probably ties back in with anxiety and depression, and the thorough bizarreness of the COVID years — it is difficult to feel like I have any value any more. That's probably a terrible thing to say about oneself, but… well, it's how I feel. I am forever grateful to my family, my wife and my cats for being constants in my life that I can rely on; I am, at least, thankful that I am not in a situation where I have literally nothing.

I'll admit something to you now: I started going to therapy last week. And the above is one of the subjects that came up. It's going to be something that I need to work on. I don't yet know how that will happen, or what form that work will take, but those conversations have already started. So it's not as if I'm completely without hope.

It's just frustrating when you might want to talk about these things with someone other than a Qualified Professional, but you fear the reaction is just going to be hahaha, male loneliness epidemic loser. I thought the problem was that dudes don't talk about their feelings and emotions enough? Belittling them isn't going to help with that, now, is it?

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 607: Ruined by the grindset

I read an interesting post that someone shared from Reddit earlier. You can read the full thing here.

The gist of the post is that the person in question has spent so much time and effort "optimising" their life, tracking everything from their water intake to the amount of time they spend on their morning routine, and have come to the conclusion that none of that has made them in any way happy. In fact, it has made them miserable and incapable of feeling joy in anything; worse, it has made them resent things that should be good, like having a pleasant date with a nice person or consoling a friend after a bad breakup.

I read this with interest because some of it sounded familiar. I've never gotten that deep into "optimising" my life, but over the last few years in particular, I have started to feel like it is undesirable to track everything about your life, record it in an app and obsess over numbers. This is a far cry from how I felt during the birth of the "gamification" craze, nearly 20 years ago.

In fact, I specifically recall being excited about the release of an iOS app called Epic Win, which basically positioned itself as a to-do list with experience points, allowing you to assign every job an XP value and a relevant stat, allowing you to "build a character" according to the things you'd been doing. When I eventually downloaded it, I found that it wasn't quite as fun as I thought it would be, but that didn't stop me from thinking that the "real world XP" thing was a good idea, hence my experimenting with the now-defunct Fitocracy, an app that gave you XP, levels and quests for going to the gym.

Now, about the only thing I track is my daily calorie intake, and that's because I'm specifically trying to lose weight. I'm not obsessing over the number of steps I take in a day, I'm not obsessing over "streaks" on anything except my underpants, I'm not obsessing over hydration. Because, as that Reddit post demonstrates, you can do too much of all that. If you project manage your entire life, then your entire life is going to feel like work. And that is not something that anyone should find desirable.

I mention this because I know on several occasions I have considered whether or not scheduling my days down to an extremely granular level would be beneficial. In some respects I feel like it probably still would be a good idea, as there are lots of things I would like to do but never make the time to do so. But then I feel like if you schedule things too much, you start to get resentful when things don't fit into neat two-hour blocks — because inevitably they won't, much as the Reddit poster discovered. And that's a sure-fire method to end up demotivated and bored with existence.

Much better to try and get yourself into solid habits in a natural-feeling, sustainable way. People have been doing that for thousands of years, so I refuse to believe that 20 years chained to our smartphones has completely removed humanity's capability to function independently without obsessing over statistics that relate to every little thing we do.

This is, in many ways, why I don't obsess over view counts on this blog, MoeGamer or my YouTube channel — it's not fun, and I'm not doing any of those things for a job, so I shouldn't treat them like one.

Your life doesn't need KPIs. I would argue that a lot of jobs don't need KPIs, either, but that's a whole other discussion, I feel…!

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#oneaday Day 538: Coiled spring

You can tell the end of the year is rolling around. Everyone's getting ill, and everyone is getting stressed. I am, of course, no exception to either of these things — though I do appear to have mostly shaken off my last bout of Seasonal Cold, at least. That feeling of my mind being scrunched up into a tight little ball, ready to explode outwards in thoroughly stressed-out frustration, though? Present and correct.

It's been an exhausting period at work with the Black Friday sales and whatnot. What makes things doubly exhausting is the knowledge that I'm going to be escaping the one part of my job that I don't enjoy at some point (hopefully) early in the new year, so I just have to survive until that happens. In that "meantime" period, though, I just have to put my head down and plough ahead with the less enjoyable aspects of doing what I do. And that's all the detail I'm going to go into on that for the moment.

Having to "just put up with" things is, I'd wager, a common stressor, and there are quite a few things that I've resigned myself to "just having to put up with". Weight loss continues to be a challenge, of course, and that means that I "just have to put up with" having an often painful and always unsightly hernia making me feel even worse about my overall body image than I do at the best of times. One day, I hope, I will be in a position where I can finally get it sorted, and that day will be a good day. (Well, that day specifically probably won't be, given that I am terrified of surgery, and I believe getting a hernia repaired continues to smart for at least a few days after the procedure. But still.)

Existence is exhausting right now. After this, I'm strongly tempted to just go and curl up in bed for a bit. It's 7.35pm.

Still, I do have some things to look forward to, at least. The aforementioned change in my job role and responsibilities. Christmas with the family. The work Christmas Do. All these things are happening varying degrees of "Soon", so they are things I can aim for and use as milestones as I continue to muddle through the increasingly challenging act of surviving this modern world we live in.

I won't lie, there have been times in my life where it felt very much like I should just Give Up. It hopefully says something vaguely positive about me that, even when faced with such challenges — and I have faced significantly tougher challenges than the tepid mental health I'm experiencing right now, to be sure — I have not, to date, Given Up.

It is hard. I'm acknowledging that it is hard. But these things tend to go in peaks and troughs, don't they? So here's hoping the upcoming holiday period is a build-up to a nice peak from the trough I'm most definitely in the depths of right at this exact moment.

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#oneaday Day 510: Another great Eddy Burback video

There's a lot of absolute garbage on YouTube, but there are a few folks out there who do some truly special work. One of those people is Eddy Burback, who makes maybe two or three videos a year, but they're always very high quality, both in technical terms and in terms of the amount of research that goes into them. You may recall a while back I was rather taken by his video about giving up the smartphone life.

Today, he put out a new video called "ChatGPT made me delusional", and I sincerely recommend you set aside an hour or so of your life to watch it through in its entirety. Not skip through it at 1.5x speed, not "have it on in the background". Watch it. Because I think it is important.

Here it is:

Burback's aim for the video was to understand the phenomenon of "chatbot-induced psychosis" or "AI psychosis". This is where vulnerable people, already struggling with matters of mental health, would turn to large language model chatbots such as ChatGPT and use them as a form of "therapy" or as a substitute for actual human contact. There have already been some incredibly tragic results, as anyone who has ever read any science fiction would have been able to predict a mile off.

To explore how this might happen, Burback presented ChatGPT with an obviously ridiculous hypothesis based on complete fabrications: that he was the smartest under-1 baby of 1997, capable of producing great works of art, having in-depth philosophical discussions and demonstrating a deep understanding of complex mathematics. It took him two statements to convince the chatbot that this was the undeniable truth, and things just escalated from there.

Burback presented the chatbot with suggestions that his friends and family might not understand his brilliance, and it recommended he flee into the middle of nowhere and break all contact with them, including stopping sharing his location data with the person he trusts most in the world: his twin brother. He continued feeding the chatbot with increasingly ridiculous, obviously delusional statements and deliberate, complete and utter nonsense, and at no point did it attempt to deter him from the path it had set him on.

It was only at one point — the day when OpenAI controversially swapped its "4o" model for GPT-5 — that the chatbot had a momentary blip in feeding into his "delusions" (and, to its credit, suggested some psychological help facilities in the neighbourhood), but Burback pointed out that it was very easy for someone who was paying for the service to just switch it back to the old model, which seemingly finds it impossible to say "no" to the user.

What was particularly eerie about the whole situation is that Burback was using the premium voice feature on ChatGPT, which has clearly been designed to sound as "human" as possible, even going so far as to add realistic inflections and non-fluency features to the things it is saying. (It also pronounces emojis as completely unrelated sound effects, which somewhat detracts from the "humanity" of it all, but still.) In other words, it wasn't hard to see how someone suffering from real, genuine mental health problems might feel like they really did have a person in their phone who was willing to listen to them, tell them they were always right, and repeatedly give them some really, really bad advice.

It was actually kind of horrifying. The way the bot continually escalated into increasingly outlandish behaviour — culminating in him chanting mantras under an electricity pylon, wrapping his entire apartment in tin foil and tattooing a symbol into his thigh — was genuinely frightening.

I know we can all have a good laugh about how the chatbots get things wrong sometimes, but Burback's research here demonstrates that it doesn't just get things wrong (and I apologise for using this sentence construction, given its indelible association with AI writing, but it's an established turn of phrase for a reason) — it offers genuinely dangerous advice with minimal guardrails in place. And it does so without thinking about it or understanding why it might be dangerous — because it's not actually thinking or understanding anything at all. It's constructing sentences that, based on the data it has Hoovered up from across the Internet, it thinks are the correct responses to the things the user has been typing. It is, in essence, an extremely advanced version of the old ELIZA program on classic computers.

And it can go fuck itself.

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#oneaday Day 501: The difference a supportive employer makes

I had my annual appraisal at work today. Honestly I always dread this because of just… everything going on inside my head most of the time, not least of which is ever-present impostor syndrome, but I was especially dreading it this time because I knew I would have to have a Difficult Conversation about aspects of my job that I was struggling a bit with. The details are not important, but nothing you need to worry about — my career is fine and I have not murdered anyone!

Why should this make me feel dread, rather than hope about having an open conversation that both I and my colleagues can move forward from? Because on multiple occasions in the past, attempting to have a Difficult Conversation like this has resulted in a less-than-supportive atmosphere from my immediate superiors and employers. On multiple occasions it has led to me leaving a role altogether. And, as I'm sure you're aware from my general enthusiasm for what I do now, I did not want that to happen this time around.

I had no reason to believe that speaking my mind and being frank about my mental health would result in disastrous consequences for my job and career in this particular instance, of course — I get along very well with my colleagues, immediate superiors and even senior management. That's the advantage of working for a relatively small company: you can get to know everyone, and they can get to know you.

But still I felt it: that dread. What if it was misinterpreted as me being lazy, or not wanting to do my job, or something like that? Impostor syndrome is a terrible thing, as it means you live in constant fear of being "found out". Exactly what you fear being "found out" is often not entirely clear, but the end result is often that familiar feeling of dread when you're in a situation where the right thing to do is to confront something that's been worrying you, and seek support if needed.

As should hopefully already be clear from the title of this post, the Difficult Conversation went well, and I now feel a lot more confident and hopeful about the future. I won't go into details because you don't really need to know — it's nothing any of you need to worry about, I should add, however — but suffice to say that we have a Plan for the immediate and mid-to-long-term future that will hopefully result in me feeling a lot better about a lot of things, and feeling a lot less in the way of the burnout I have been suffering a bit over the course of the last while.

It's all about thinking about where your particular strengths and skills are, and considering how you can best use those as part of your overall team. Go into a situation like this thinking "I don't want to do this any more" and the whole thing is probably going to end sub-optimally. Go into this thinking "these are the things I'm good at, and I don't think my current responsibilities make the best use of those skills", however, and you can look to the future with hope and positivity. This is, it should not have to be said, a good thing.

Because ultimately, we have to work. That's the way society is. In the absence of any sort of universal basic income scheme — which is a whole other topic of discussion — we all have to work. And if you have the opportunity to make a change for the better and not find your mental health ebbing away at least partly as a result of daily responsibilities that aren't a good fit for you, it pays to take that bold step, say "I'm not entirely happy right now", and try to figure out a good solution for yourself.

I am painfully aware that not everyone has the luxury of being able to do this. I have been in situations where I have not had the luxury of being able to do this in the past, and it really sucks. So I was beyond pleased when the end result of the discussions today was positive, helpful and hopeful, and I'm glad I had the courage to stand up and admit that I had been struggling a bit. I am incredibly thankful for the opportunities I've been given, and the position in which I find myself. It took me a very long time to get here, so I am keen to make it work as well as I can.

So that's what I'm doing. And I'm grateful that I can do that.

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#oneaday Day 457: A statement of intent

Hello! Tomorrow I am going on holiday, and I am using this as something of a "cutoff point" in an attempt to improve my own mental health and get me out of a rut I've been feeling for a long time at this point. I have written about this previously, but please consider this a "final warning" of sorts.

This isn't intended to be a dramatic flouncing off into the sunset in the hope that someone will take pity on me. It is simply a statement of what I intend to do, because my present online existence is absolutely crippling my mental health, and I need to do something proactive to resolve the situation.

Day in, day out, I feel beaten down and depressed by the constant negativity online, and a big part of it is my own fault for engaging with platforms where negativity gets rewarded. But it's not just that; everyone has been exceedingly down for a long time now, at least partly due to the disruption we all suffered during the COVID years, not to mention the horrible things going on in politics and society in general right now. And that, unfortunately, often means that communities I would otherwise enjoy being a part of often find themselves being relentlessly negative.

It's not a malicious attempt by anyone to drag everyone else down, but that often ends up being the net effect. And continually being surrounded by that has not been healthy for me.

And so, as loathe as I am to further isolate myself in a world where I already feel like I've lost most of my "real life" friends, I am going to be taking the following steps for my own digital wellbeing:

I will be deactivating my Bluesky account for at the very least the duration of my holiday.
I will be leaving a significant number of Discord communities that I am currently part of.
I will be focusing the majority of my online presence on this blog, MoeGamer (my video game blog) and Scratch Pad (my creative writing site).
I will only be contactable via email (you can use the Get In Touch page on this site if you don't know my email address), Discord messages in the communities I remain active in (plus Discord DMs if we are friends on that platform), Google Chat if you know my email address, or WhatsApp private message if you know my phone number. I also occasionally pop in to the Giant Bomb forums as "angryjedi".

I am sorry to disappoint the two people who were enjoying my #365games thread on Bluesky.

I would also like to add that none of this is personal and that none of this has been triggered by a particular individual. This is all a "me" thing that I've been thinking about for a while; an attempt to reclaim my own life and brain from the digital realm.

As noted above, it's not as if I am going to disappear completely. I can still be contacted via the above means, and I encourage you to do so! It'd be nice to have a private conversation with some of you, away from the noise of social media, so drop me an email or a direct message if that sounds like something you might like. I would certainly appreciate it.

Anyway, that's that. I will be taking the above steps this evening before I go to bed, so I can start my holiday "fresh" in the morning. Thanks for your time and attention, and I hope I'll hear from some of you via non-social media means soon!

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#oneaday Day 448: Biting one's tongue

I'm angry. And sad. And I wish I was neither of those things, but I seem to be unable to escape the general shittiness of the world we live in. And to make matters worse, the things that I am angry and sad about, other people don't seem to think are a problem.

I'm not going to get into the specifics of those things, and that's part of the problem. I don't feel like I can, because it's not just that other people don't seem to think that these things are an issue. It's that they are actively hostile to anyone who does see them for what they are. And I really don't want to get into arguments with people on this stuff, because I already feel incredibly alienated, isolated and lonely for a number of different reasons, but at the same time it feels like holding in all these frustrations is completely counter-productive. But I don't want to post those frustrations anywhere that might get back to the people I am upset and annoyed with, however indirectly.

You can hopefully see why I'm feeling a bit mixed-up and muddled over the whole situation. It absolutely blows to be living in a world where, day after day, you feel more and more like you're not welcome, like you're worthless, like there's nothing you can do to make the situation better. It blows even more to not really be able to express those feelings to anyone, for the reasons outlined above.

I was always afraid my life would end up like this. For as long as I can remember, I have been someone who is comfortable in his own company, even welcoming of some solitude in which to reflect and perhaps be creative. But, at the same time, I've always welcomed the opportunity to share the things I love with others, or simply to enjoy simple moments of connection, amusement and joy with other people that I have learned to trust.

I am fortunate to have my wife, who has always been incredibly understanding and tolerant of my many shortcomings as a human being — and, likewise, I have always been there to support her, even during difficult times. I am also fortunate to have my cats, who love me unconditionally, and always know when I really need them to be near me.

But there are times when that doesn't feel like enough. There are times when I feel more alone than I've ever been in my life, and times when I'm terrified that these feelings will only get worse as time marches onwards. And no-one seems to care. And then I feel bad for wanting people to care, because I worry that will make people think I'm self-absorbed, selfish and not considerate of others' feelings. Like I don't deserve anyone's attention or regard. And then I start feeling, well, why should anyone care about someone so clearly filled with utter self-loathing?

I'll be all right. I usually am. It's just one of those bad days; one of those days that medical professionals euphemistically refer to as "low mood", which I feel somewhat undersells the feelings of utter hopelessness and desperation that tend to accompany such episodes.

But for now, I'll just continue to be angry and sad. And hope that tomorrow is a better day.

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#oneaday Day 433: Point of impact

Burnout is one of those things that I'm not entirely sure is completely 100% recognised and accepted as an actual medical "thing", but it's certainly accepted as being a phenomenon that exists. I have been feeling kind of shitty lately, so I thought I would self-assess against the symptoms of burnout listed by the charity Mental Health UK:

Feeling tired or exhausted most of the time – yep
Reoccurring insomnia and sleep disturbances – yep
Frequent headaches – nope, occasional ones but probably a "normal" amount
Muscle or joint pain – yep, but I suspect that's more down to general unfitness
Gastrointestinal problems, such as feeling sick or loss of appetite – nope, but I have kind of the opposite problem, where eating becomes a coping mechanism
Frequent illness due to lowered immunity – nope, actually, I haven't been properly "ill" for quite a while
Issues breathing – occasionally, though with the current heatwave I'm not sure this is a representative sample
Feeling helpless, trapped and/or defeated – oh hell yes
Self-doubt, feeling a failure or worthless – abso-fricking-lutely
Feeling detached and alone in the world – most definitely
Feeling overwhelmed – yes indeedy
Feeling demotivated, having a cynical/negative outlook – yessir
Loss of interest and enjoyment – in some areas, yes; in others, not so much
Persistent feelings of dread, worry and anxiety – yes, very much
Procrastinating and taking longer to complete things – yep
Difficulty concentrating – depends what I'm doing, but at work, definitely
Decreased output and productivity – yes, both at work and on personal projects
Becoming isolated and withdrawing from people, responsibilities etc. – very much so
Reliant on food, drugs or alcohol to cope – no to alcohol and drugs, food is better than it has been in the past, but not great
Irritable and short-tempered, likely to ha- FUCK OFF
Increased tardiness, being late for work and/or higher absenteeism – I find it difficult to get up and running first thing in the morning, but once I'm settled in I'm fine

So that's… hang on (counts)… 18 out of 21 symptoms if I count all the "maybes" and "sometimeses" as "yes". That… doesn't seem great, does it? Should probably do something about that, maybe. I mean, I'm going on holiday soon, and I think that's going to help — and my plans to mostly disappear entirely from the Internet for the duration of that holiday (with the exception of this blog, which I intend to continue updating) will probably help, too (aside from the "feelings of isolation" thing). But there's still a good few weeks to go before I have made it to that holiday, and right now it's feeling like it's quite a long way off.

And the trouble with burnout, if you've never experienced it, is that it makes all the things you're already worrying about feel approximately a billion times worse, and, in the process, makes it feel like a truly Herculean effort to actually reach out to someone who might be able to help with matters, because it also creates an intense sense of fear and mistrust towards… well, almost everyone, really.

Chief among my worries right now is a concern about my work. Without going into specifics for now, there's an aspect of my job that I really don't enjoy, and which I would absolutely love to be able to give up, but since I have been muddling through with it up until now (and feeling the most potent sense of impostor syndrome in the process) I feel like it might look a bit strange to just bring it up now. And so I haven't. But by not doing so, it feels like it just sort of festers inside me, dragging me down and making me feel more and more burnt out the more I worry about it.

The sensible solution is probably, of course, to bring it up with my immediate superior, who is a thoroughly nice and understanding sort of person. But the prospect of that carries with it its own "fears" — I don't want to seem like I'm letting anyone down, more than anything, and by admitting that I'm finding something difficult to cope with, I feel like that's exactly what I'm doing. Realistically speaking, burning myself out until I'm little more than a charred husk in an office chair is probably letting people down more in the long-term, but still. It is scary. We live in exceedingly uncertain times in the business I'm in, and for the most part, I like the job I do and do not want to do anything which might jeopardise that.

Anyway, as I say, I don't want to say too much on specifics, because the details are conversations I need to have with the appropriate people, not splurge onto the Internet. And besides, it's not the only thing that is contributing to my current condition; frustration at the general state of the world, feeling completely and utterly isolated from friends, plus my overall physical and mental wellbeing are all contributing factors, too.

But I think it's pretty safe to say that I am indeed suffering from burnout, and my impending holiday is something I am very much looking forward to as a result.

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#oneaday Day 421: Ch-ch-ch-changes

I'll write about this again nearer the time that I'm actually going to put this into practice, but I wanted to give some advance notice of what I'm planning.

On September 8, 2025, I'll be taking a big step back from social media for personal use. I'll be deactivating my Bluesky account, removing it and Discord from my phone, and leaving a bunch of Discord servers.

The reason for this is that social media in general — even the little bit I still hold onto for some inexplicable reason — continues to play havoc with my overall mental health, and honestly, there is really absolutely nothing left that makes me feel like I "need" it for anything other than occasional contact with other people. And there are other means of achieving that contact with other people.

This isn't intended to be a big dramatic "well I'm taking my ball and going home without you!" post, and it's nothing personal, particularly with regard to the Discord servers I will be disconnecting from. This is a me thing; it's about removing myself from situations that are continually self-destructive and unproductive — i.e. spending far too much time doomscrolling on Bluesky or just rotating around several Discord servers in case someone said anything vaguely interesting — and freeing up time and headspace for doing things that I want to do, that make me happy, and that are less inclined to have me staring into space of an evening.

Thus, as loathe as part of me is to isolate myself further from a world where I already feel somewhat abandoned by and/or alienated from most of my "real life" friends, I intend to take the following steps for the sake of my mental health and overall digital wellbeing:

I will be deactivating my Bluesky account, at the very least temporarily while I am on holiday, and likely permanently.
I will be leaving a significant number of Discord communities that I am currently part of. I emphasise, again, that there is nothing personal in this; I am just attempting to cut down on the "noise" and the self-destructive habits of continually scrolling around the same servers time after time, hour after hour. I will be keeping some small, "friendship group" servers, but that's it.
I will be deleting Bluesky and Discord from my phone for the duration of my holiday, possibly permanently.
I will be focusing the majority of my online presence on this blog, MoeGamer (my video game blog) and Scratch Pad (my creative writing site).
I will only be contactable via email (you can use the Get In Touch page on this site if you don’t know my email address), Discord messages in the communities I remain active in (plus Discord DMs if we are friends on that platform), Google Chat if you know my email address, or WhatsApp private message if you know my phone number.

If you would like to stay in touch — and there are a bunch of you I would very much like it if you did! — then you can feel free to use any of the means outlined above to have a chat. It'd actually be quite nice to have some private conversations with many of you, away from the chaos of social media, so if we've had some good times in the past and I seem to have otherwise disappeared from the social channels you tend to use on the daily, please feel free to drop me a line.

Anyway, like I say, I wanted to give some advance notice of this, and I'll be posting something very similar on September 7, the day before I have a week's holiday as a last reminder. Thanks for your time, and if you have any questions or whatever about the above, well, you know where to find me!

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#oneaday Day 415: Last time happy

Something got me thinking earlier: when was the last time I felt really, actually, genuinely happy? I feel like living through the 2020s (so far) in particular has given me such a sense of malaise and misanthropy that it's honestly quite difficult to remember what it felt like to just… exist in a sense of contentment and satisfaction.

A lot of blame can probably be laid at the feet of what I saw someone the other day describe as "breathing Internet fumes all day" — and I love that, apologies to whoever I stole it from — but it's also clear that even if I wasn't plugged in to online culture, it would still be readily apparent that these are not happy times we live in.

I often consider closing down every last bit of my social media and going completely off-grid. I don't have much of it left any more — the only standalone social media I still have is Bluesky, and some people also count Discord and YouTube as social media, though to me those are both a little bit different — so it's not like it would be a big effort to do so. But is that what I really want? Even with those few remaining connections to the "outside" world, I still feel isolated, disconnected and incredibly lonely on a daily basis. Surely it makes no sense to cut off what, from some respects, can be looked on as a lifeline?

I dunno. There are people I like talking to on Bluesky and Discord, and YouTube is a valuable creative outlet for me, just as this blog and MoeGamer are. The thing I find myself asking, though, is if anyone would actually notice if I were just to disappear from one or all of those services one day. I suspect that they would not, at least not immediately. Someone might, a few months down the line, think "oh, I haven't heard from that Pete guy for a while" and discover a closed profile page, but would they, then, feel inclined to reach out to me via other means? Again, I suspect that they would not, given that these days, if you are not on social media or in a WhatsApp group chat, you seemingly do not exist. The only person who emails me on a semi-regular basis is my mother; the rest of my daily emails are promotional offers, order confirmations or blogs/newsletters I've subscribed to.

Email used to be exciting. While my short-lived penpal relationship with a girl named Julia in my teens pretty much fizzled out when we finally met — at least partly my fault for being completely socially inept in person, for reasons I did not understand then but very much do now — I still have fond memories of the excitement I felt every time I received an email from her.

Going even further back, I actually still have a couple of hand-written penpal letters from a primary school friend that I was very close with, who subsequently moved away. I don't really know why I've kept those — I am unlikely to ever see or hear from her ever again, given the many years since we last had any contact whatsoever — but, I don't know. Something about the enthusiasm with which she asked me if I was still playing football (multiple times in one letter) and how I was getting on at Cub Scouts (which should give you an idea of how old I was when writing and receiving these letters) was… thoroughly pleasant. I felt like I mattered, like I had a place in someone's life, even if it was just as the recipient of an occasional letter.

The advice people normally give to this sort of situation is "get out there and meet people". And it's probably sound advice. Trouble is, with my general physical and mental state, I'm kind of… I guess "afraid" is the right way to put it. Honestly, at this point I don't really have anything to lose by trying it, but I'm still… afraid to lose whatever it is. Maybe if I'm able to work on some of my own problems first — and I am doing so — I might be able to tackle some of these broader issues. And, with any luck, I might actually feel happiness again by the time I'm 60.

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