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All nerds, for sure. I was young, so my idea of age was a bit off... but I recall them being from their mid-20s up to their 50s. Mostly in their early 30s, though.

I should also note - the person who handed most of his equipment down to me was also active on local BBSes, primarily focused on the gay community at a time and in a place where that was not a topic people were really allowed to discuss at all. He was a good friend of my mother's, and I didn't learn that about him until much later. He used to hang out on a BBS called "The Strawberry Patch", which was for those who were attracted to gay, red-headed men.

Yet another example where online communities can help people find "the others" to build their communities and find support.

I was about 12 or so when I discovered BBSes. That was way the heck back in about 1987.

1. I used to go to local computer stores to get a locally produced "magazine" - printed on news print - that was focused exclusively on computing in and around Orange County (where I lived). The back pages were all listings for locally run BBSes with their phone numbers.

We didn't have a lot of money, so most of my equipment was hand me downs. Back then, the phone company charged you by "zones" - the further from your "zone", by area code and first three digits of the phone number, the more it cost per minute to call. If they were in your same zone, it was free.

I'd sit down with the magazine and the phone book and figure out which numbers were in my zone and circle them. Then, each evening when my mother was asleep or otherwise no longer using the phone, I'd dial into each one to see what they were about.

I eventually landed on about five I'd check regularly, once a night. I played doors (online games) and participated in the online forums.

Eventually, I convinced my mom to spend the money to let me run my own BBS, which rang up as busy when I did my nightly rounds to the other systems.

2. The back pages of that magazine. I want to say it was called "OC Computing", but probably not.

3. Fragmented as hell - see my explanation for the zone system above. If you count Compuserve, Prodigy, and GEnie as BBSes - and we probably should - those were the only "big" games in town. I met folks from around the country on them.

But, otherwise, it was all local due to calling costs. We occasionally met in person at local pizza parlors so we could put faces to the handle. That was AWESOME.

4. BBSes were self limiting by location and by technical capability. In my experience, few of the discussions were especially technical. It was really a place where the BBS owners could promote their other interests or build community. Everyone looked out for each other and, over time, got to know each other pretty well. As one of the youngest in the community, they tended to especially look out for me and want to help me on my computer journey. It was an overwhelmingly positive experience.

I was a very lonely kid due to things beyond my control (I lived a 30 minute drive from where I went to school, so I never had any of those after school friendships others had. We moved a lot, so I never really had friends near me, either). When I finally went to high school near where I actually lived, I gained a group of tight friends. I slowly let the BBS go since I was getting my social life organically.

5. It was the first place I ever learned about "open source" - I'm not even sure the term was popular yet. BBSes had a lot of file download sections - usually pictures and, um... pr0n... but occasionally shareware applications. When I was learning Pascal, I found a helicopter side shooter game someone else had written and compiled in Pascal. I asked if they would share the source with me so I could learn, and they just... let me have it. It was incredible.

But that's all I remember technically. Not sure if that was just because I never focused on those things or hung out in those forums, or whether they just weren't a part of my BBS experience. I remember the BBSes being less about technology and more about community - finding friends online to meet up with offline, getting exposed to new ways of thinking, learning about cool things happening in my area...

All of that experience has inspired me to try and build a similar experience on top of the ActivityPub protocol. I just released the first version for my local community - https://sociallyconcord.com - and am actively improving it so more people will want to get on. To simulate the zone thing, joining is invite only, and you can only get an invitation code from an existing member.

I intend on eventually opening another instance for a wider community of friends and colleagues who don't live in my town.

BBSes were what social networking promised us. That we ceded control to a bunch of money-pilled perverts is the problem, not the social network itself.

Very cool take.

So, how have you fought off similar oppression in your utopic part of the world, wherever that may be?

Please, enlighten the rest of us.

Naw, decentralized means not having everyone on one platform. ActivityPub-enabled sites (Mastodon, PeerTube, Lemmy, etc.) can be run by just about anyone, and can serve multiple users.

So, if you have the technical skills and the willingness to host an ActivityPub-enabled instance, you can serve it for others who either don't have the skills or ability to manage it themselves. If you keep it limited just to the folks in your own communities - people you know, friends of friends, etc. - then you limit a lot of the issues that arise from running huge instances - moderation, privacy issues, etc.

We took something natively decentralized - TCP/IP internet - and handed it off to handful of companies to run, thus centralizing it. That was a mistake, especially as they use the power they acquired to push back against folks, for example, trying to build independent community ISPs.

We need to decentralize as much as feasible - it's not all self-hosting, but "just let the money perverts run things" has not worked out so well for us. The solution lay somewhere in the middle, where cooperative groups serve the needs of the communities that matter to them in exchange for fair compensation.

Perhaps not so much "wholesome" - because I can definitely provide a handful of historical and current examples that definitely aren't - but certainly more "community minded".

In that regard, your experiences match mine. I've been in the online community space since the Compuserv, GEnie and Prodigy days. Those platforms were more or less self-limiting - you needed to have access to a computer with a modem in the early to mid 1980s - but it was still a bit of a mess for trying to make any real, lasting online connections.

When I discovered my local BBS community, it was a massive game changer in terms of the quality of connections and conversations I had. It even inspired me to run my own BBS for a while.

I don;t like Bluesky's approach to decentralization because their system requires a TON of resources to run an independent instance. ActivityPub - upon which Mastodon and others is based - is mature, flexible, and allows for true decentralization. I can self host my own instance, or I can host an instance for one or more of my communities. I actually host my own Mastodon instance just for myself, and it;s remarkably easy. I imagine adding accounts would not increase my effort at all.

The right approach to decentralization is for those who can host instances to do so for themselves and for those in the communities that matter to them. That way, those who can't self host should still be able to find an instance they can trust. Then, those instances should be allowed to communicate with one another - only blocking instances if they go rogue and affect performance, but letting individuals have fine grained control over the messages they receive and the individuals with whom they interact.

This creates a world of alternatives for anyone seeking connection. Mastodon already works this way - you have art-focused instances, infosec focused instances, erotic content focused instances, etc. I can follow folks from any of those instances on my own account and engage directly with them. I'm seeing more folks start up PeerTube instances - which also use ActivityPub - as alternatives to YouTube. I can follow everything from my self-hosted Mastodon account. It's awesome.

I eventually plan to launch my own ActivityPub implementation so I can host others in my communities and provide a workable alternative to the centralized social media companies - e.g. I'd like my kid's school PTA to stop using Facebook Groups.

About as effective as robots.txt.

I'm in my fifth decade and I only answer the phone if it's someone I personally recognize - and, even then, I often let it ring out or dismiss it, unless it's my immediate family members.

I'd say I let them go to voicemail, but that doesn't even work anymore. With "ringless voicemail drops" all 20 voicemail slots are filled within two days from the same three robocallers. I've given up staying ahead of it - anyone worth talking to knows one of the other handful of ways to immediately get a hold of me.

This is not a question of "politeness" - it's a matter of enshittification and profit seeking from the same handful of money perverts who own everything, leaving us with the scraps and the pain of dealing with their shortsightedness.

I seem to only use my phone these days for playing the occasional game, doomscrolling, and getting work-related emails when I'm not at my desk.

I question every day whether it's worth keeping. Every day it feels less worth it.

It was recently stated that 40% of owner-occupied homes are mortgage free: (https://www.fastcompany.com/91376388/housing-market-the-real...)

Various stats put the ratio of owner-occupied residences to renter-occupied residences at roughly 70% to 30% (https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/rent-statistics)

Since only 40% of those "owner"-occupied homes have their mortgages paid off, that means the bank owns the other 60%.

Doing the math, this means only about 28% of people actually own the place in which they live. The other 72% is owned by banks, investors, landlords, etc.

That fully 20% of homes in California - intended to be owned by families or individuals as their primary residence - are instead served out as rentals, and this is a low percentage compared to other states, is a massive indicator of the one the key issues facing Americans:

We don't own anything. Not even our own homes. Not even our lives, which we sell to others at a discount as "labor".

When we don't own anything, we have no stability. When we have no stability, we live in a constant state of uncertainty, which is just another word for "fear". Fear makes us act desperately or angrily or selfishly.

And the people who run everything use that fear to manipulate us into agreeing to be exploited by them - to work for them, vote for them, worship with/for/on them, etc.

If you actually want peace and freedom and liberty and all those things Americans claim to care about, we need to start by building stability in our lives.

That starts by taking back ownership of those things that belong to us through our efforts. The mortgage companies provide zero value to homeowners - they simply gate who gets to live in a home vs. who must pay for a rental, which is even more unstable.

Replace hierarchies with cooperatives. Stop using money as the exclusive determining factor of whether someone is housed, fed, clothed, or cared for.

Desperate people make lousy workers - ask any power and money pervert who believes in this system how hard it is to find good indentured servants who will just obey without complaining.

Stable, cared for people make excellent workers - fear may be a motivator, but gratitude is an even greater motivator. When people are stable and able to relax, they are more often willing to contribute toward keeping that stability. You see this when people who have "free" time spend it volunteering for their community.

If that stability comes at the expense of others, however, it's inherently unethical and leads us back exactly to the situation where we are now - where some people gain stability by manipulating others into working for them and stealing from them a significant portion of the value they create.

Have you never been to a Maker Faire?

> Once upon a time, we geeks truly believed that computing and telecommunications would bring us together.

I still believe that. We just lost the plot. We can get it back.

And what, exactly, are we paying congress for? We could save tons just firing the whole lot!

I LOVE My Pebble and even got Rebble working on it not long ago to revive it.

However...

If you want to make it TRULY HACKABLE as you claim, you will not encumber it with cloud dependencies like you did last time. Let ME self host my own Pebble server if I choose. Go ahead and default to your servers and sell services and whatever, but let me host my own and switch the base URL to my own domain, preferably with open source software and simple APIs, without requiring me to go through your servers.

That way, even if this attempt also doesn't pan out, those of us willing to do the work will at least still have the functionality we want. I get the whole VC "lock them into required cloud services for life so we can make endless subscription revenue" model, but it's absolutely corrupt.

And, Eric, I know you know that - you have a hacker's heart. Please listen to it.

Remember: PG&E is a for-profit company. The CPUC consists of folks pretty much entirely in bed with PG&E.

I also love California - it's beautiful here, and the people are generally wonderful. But our state government, despite claiming to be blue, is pretty damned conservative across the board. Corporations first, then - if we still have time - the people.

Currently using SvelteKit for a project, and I dig it. I've used Vue in the past and tried to get on the React train, but both felt a bridge too far from good ol' HTML, JS and CSS. Granted, I'm mostly using the packaging and reactivity in SvelteKit - most of my server side code is written in Node using Express to better separate concerns, with some existing in SvelteKit mainly for BFF purposes.

I feel like if, down the road, I decided to ditch a framework altogether, writing it in Svelte may help seeing as there are very,. very few framework specific elements in it. I may also be deluding myself.

I bought it in the hopes of causing mostly harmless mischief, but its capabilities in that realm are oversold.

That said, I knew very little about UART communication or SPI until I started playing with this and an ESP32 device. I also knew very little about bluetooth, RF, and RFID/NFR type stuff until I started exploring the world with this. It's been a fun journey that's rapidly advanced my understanding of quite a few things.

Others have said its overpriced or that you can build your own or whatever, but it's actually just the right price for a cool little educational tool that also works beyond the educational stage. It may even inspire me to build my own advanced version at some point.

If you're already a hardware hacker or EE, this is probably not much more than a toy for you. If you've always wanted to explore some of these topics but had no idea how to start, the Flipper is a good introduction. I immediately flashed it with custom firmware and it was easier than flashing my BIOS.

The social pressure to "be interesting" is one of the factors that I think leads to a lot of our collective misery. I think the problem is one of scale - if you're not engaging with other people because they don't share your interests, you may be hanging out with the wrong people, but you may not have a choice. You may be required to hang out with them because they are co-workers, neighbors, etc. - members of communities to which you may belong but may not have willingly chosen (i.e. if you're lucky enough to have been able to choose your job and your position and the team you work with, you are in a very fortunate minority).

So much of our self worth is wrapped up in "being important" or "being interesting". We don't ask the question enough, "To whom"? As someone else mentioned here, you should be important to the communities you have explicitly chosen and built - your wife and kids, the friends you choose to keep in your life, etc. If they find you interesting and important, that really ought to be enough for just about all of us. I do feel like an awful lot of this pressure to be interesting stems from people who have not cultivated such communities of choice and are left with a dire need to feel important to anyone who will pay attention to them. It's a sickness that I think a lot of people have been able to muster into the wrong kind of attention building, which makes it seems better than it is (e.g. parasocial relationships through social media, etc.)

All of this is to say: Are you happy? Do the people who matter to you find you interesting and fun to be around? Focus on them and be happy. Our lives are enriched by the people we let into them. So long as everyone in our circles are well fed, well loved, and well rested - ourselves included - we can find peace and happiness. Excitement means different things to different people - you'll never catch me bungee jumping, but I get a rush when a delicious meal I had planned turns out exactly as I intended. Find what excites you, surround yourself with people who love and appreciate you - and whom you love and appreciate in return - and work toward your own sense of happiness without the judgement of the chattering classes.

No - the clapper will kill the power to it, so it won't be able to respond. You need to add a Google Nest device that will respond to your request for claps.

I've been feeling this way for a while. So much human effort spent on producing human suffering and death. No wonder everyone feels like everything is falling apart.

If the org has a software development team, there's really no reason not to roll your own. As stated previously, this is a pretty well solved and well documented problem. A lot of development teams outsource this under the idea that authx is not their core competency, but I'd argue protecting customer data ought to be among every development org's core competency, otherwise they;re asking for trouble.

If you're talking about orgs that don't have a dev team and buy everything off the shelf / through SaaS... well, this is unfortunately part of the risk those orgs run. If you're manufacturing and shipping widgets in boxes, and your box supplier starts using cheaper materials that don't hold up to shipping, the only option is to switch box providers. Same here - if you're org relies on an IAM tool to allow employees to log into SaaS or other hosted software platforms and the IAM leaks data, the only real options are to switch providers or work with the existing provider to fix the damage.

I agree mostly with this observation, but would add to it - people are willing to work when they own their work. There are definitely a lot of jobs and likely entire industries that would disappear tomorrow if we stopped optimizing for money and focused on optimizing for humanity, but a lot of necessary work - farming, construction, distribution of goods, etc. - would still need to happen, and I honestly believe there are a number of folks who would be happy in those jobs if they owned their work.

In a job, you sell a huge chunk of your waking life for a discount to faceless owners and investors who care less about employee and customer happiness than they do about their own bottom lines. In a truly cooperative setting - one where the work and proceeds are as equally shared as possible among all participants - everyone would have greater control over their work and would have full ownership over it. Such companies would necessarily run smaller and leaner with a tighter customer focus, which I think would improve the experience for everyone.

I truly believe switching from corporate hierarchies to radical cooperatives would solve a LOT of societal issues.

"Lobbying and weaponisation of PR" is just artisinal, organic, farm-to-table corruption.

This is a cleaning house / loyalty test: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-prote...

Reddit mods who do not want to be exploited further are best walking away now and trying to reform - if they decide, this must be exhausting - on the Fediverse.

I have a pet conspiracy theory that the leadership there thinks this may rid them of "troublemakers". Huffman's seemingly ludicrous hardcore stance against third party Apps and mods who disagree with him would seem to reinforce this.

Basically, they're chasing away the folks who are most likely to cause a ruckus when Reddit inevitably tries to go IPO or otherwise make a profit. Everyone is saying this is in prep for their IPO, but I agree with Huffman's analysis that now is a really shitty time to be pondering an IPO. My guess is he has a checklist of items he needs to accomplish on the site handed to him by leadership to make everything look good for an IPO. He may have realized a lot of these would not go well with the community - this isn't his first rodeo with this stuff - so he applied draconian measures, hardened his heart against the mods and app devs who made the site what it is, and is hoping and praying there will be something left when the smoke clears. And there will be, especially as they force subreddits back into the light and encouraging mods to turn on each other. Basically, this is a loyalty test, and all of the disloyal people are being forced out. The loyal people who will pretty much go with anything Reddit leadership wants will be all that's left, and they're banking that will be enough. Add the influx of Facebook and Twitter refugees who likely see all of this as just nerd posturing, and, yeah, Reddit will likely survive and go IPO.

But it will not be Reddit. It will be a sad, corporate shadow of the vibrant community it once was. And it will not last. I honestly believe distributed social media - ActivityPub, BlueSky (ew), or something yet to come - will be the future. It will look like your favorite social media feeds now, but it will act like email, just hopefully with better moderation and spam handling. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and even YouTube will eventually relent and tie themselves to this ecosystem as a last ditch effort to stay alive, then probably picked apart by private equity vultures in an ignominious final act.

EDIT: WOW - within five minutes of posting this, this other news story crossed my transom, more or less confirming my theory. Neat! https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-prote...

I run my own instance of Mastodon just for myself - and am thinking of doing the same for Lemmy. I, of course, can do that because I have the skills - most don't, so they must rely on sites like these for their accounts.

I've been working on an alternative that is, ultimately, a standalone and lightweight ActivityPub server that handles only one account at a time. The idea would be to serve an account as - in essence - it's own container. If a person just wants to run an instance for themselves off an old laptop in their livingroom (which is how I run my Mastodon instance), they can do that themselves if they have the skills - which I would strive to be minimal.

But, if they needed to rely on someone like beehaw, they could sintead join a "collective" - a central site on one domain that handles all incoming and outgoing messaging, DDOS protection, CDN caching, and even blocklist handling (e.g. reading a user's blocklist and blocking at the outermost layer) then passes what gets through to the individual service running on the backend. A collective could apply a site-wide blocklist, but the users would be able to opt back in because, at the end of the day, they are the ones who are actually federating with these other instances - the collective is, in essence, a firewall or "management layer", akin to an APIM for APIs.

Obviously, I'm not done building this, but I'm going to try and accelerate my work once I get some paid work off my desk. Why wouldn't something like this work? If an account wants to stay connected to a problematic server for whatever their reasons, how would that impact the rest of the collective if federation is handled at the user level?

Or, perhaps a better question, what's wrong with handling federation at the user level? Should I not be able to follow any account or block any account I want? Why must this fall on the backs of the admins?

And all of their wealth - including that of Gates, Bezos, Ellison, ad nauseum - is built on the knowledge, expertise, and labor of people they ruthlessly exploit and manipulate for their own gain.

And everyone still celebrates these assholes. Even as the scales fall from our eyes, they are still supported by their staff and employees, who continue to sell their lives to these narcissistic pieces of shit for a discount. The folks who do the real work should literally walk off the job and go start their own thing together, sharing the work and sharing the proceeds. Cut the rich assholes out of all of it.

The crypto hype bubble was the new mobile hype bubble.

The mobile hype bubble was the new portal hype bubble.

The portal hype bubble was the new dot com hype bubble.

I swear there's a pattern here... Maybe I'm not seeing it...

Cold calling is a numbers game - better suited for larger orgs with a defined process for driving prospects down the funnel. Not ideal if you are independent.

Your best bet is referrals - from family, friends and especially colleagues in the industry. Make a list of folks you know who may be in some position to advocate for you, then call those folks up and ask them for help. Make sure you are able to clearly articulate the services you are willing and able to offer in a way that makes it easy for them both to understand and share with their contacts.

In the meantime, do some thought leadership - start a blog or do a series of videos helping folks in your area of interest while demonstrating your expertise. Post links to them on LinkedIn and anywhere else your prospective customers are. Don't be afraid to give away "secrets" - most are more willing to hire someone who knows what they're talking about rather than trying it themselves.

Make sure everything you put out there - emails, blog posts, videos, etc. - show how folks can get a hold of you. It can be as simple as including your URL prominently.

You will always have to work - you need to feed yourself, clothe yourself, shelter yourself, etc. How you go about doing all of that is what matters. With that in mind, I think you;re asking "What would I do if I didn't have to have a job," which is a more interesting question.

I would find people in my community to band together to help us build and maintain our community - helping maintain each other's home, build new homes for expanding families and new comers, produce as much of our own food as possible, and adopt various technologies to make it all easier on us so we could also enjoy abundant free time for art, play, relationship, and joy.

This could be us now, but too many people sell their lives at a discount to rich narcissists. If we, instead, turn away from those useless assholes and turn, instead, to each other and form cooperative work environments where the work is equally shared - as are the proceeds - we can start building a better, more freer world where you can answer this question in real time for yourself.

This just... WAAAAAAY too on the nose...

I went through something almost exactly the same a few years ago, and I'm almost completely on the other side of it now - far happier and with a new set of life goals.

We are told that money and our jobs are what are most important in life. I mean, yeah, all the aphorisms deny this - "Money can;t buy happiness", "The best things in life are free", etc., but all of society is set up for us to sell the best parts of our lives to further enrich the wealthy while we're left with scraps. Your boss makes significantly more than you do, their boss makes significantly more than them, and the majority of the profits are directed to investors who contribute nothing of substance to the company. You take a job that pays well that you can tolerate - few of us "love what we do" because we're often doing things we don;t benefit from directly, are doing things we know are incorrect but that;s what the boss wants, or doing things we really don;t understand just to make ends meet. Quit your job and you will find yourself homeless and starving - at least, that's the message.

You need to recapture the meaning in your life. I worked like a dog for years, traveling the world, leaving very little time left for the family I built, the family I wanted. When my father got sick, I had to move to be closer to him, but my wife and kid had to stay behind. We were separated for seven months. That forced separation killed my soul. When I took the time to stop and evaluate the situation, I realized I was so angry because I missed them - that all I ever wanted was to be with them, that even my job was a hindrance to that. When things settled with my dad and I could move back home, I tried to figure out how to change things so I could focus more on what matters to me - my family, my home, the communities that support me that I choose to support and participate in.

I lost my job just before the pandemic, and all the interviews that seemed very far along suddenly stopped as those companies circled the wagons in the face of uncertainty. I watched my savings was rapidly dwindle. My family adjusted and started to learn to live with less - less eating out, less buying things to fill the void of loneliness we felt, etc. After a couple of abortive attempts to get a new job, I decided to just start consulting. I hung out the shingle on LinkedIn (Like you, I thought I had killed my professional network, but I have built up a lot of goodwill over the years that loads of folks were eager to pay back - I bet you'll find the same) and got a couple of clients pretty quickly. It took six months of scraping and struggling and borrowing before we had enough consistent income I could relax.

It;s been two years now. I work from home and no longer travel unless absolutely necessary. Since I don't go into an office - and since I set my workload and hours - I have more time for things around the house. My garden is improving. My house is cleaner. I cook more elaborate meals for my family because I have the time and am in the right place to go and monitor things. We home school our son (he spends some time at a co-op style school as well) and I get to help - I often jump in with math and science issues and get to teach him things like programming and electronics.

The point is not that you need to quit your job and start consulting - that may not work for you. The point is to sit down and figure out what actually matters to you. You already said it - "a wife, kids, a house, meaningful work, etc." Do you have any of these things in your life? If so, it;s time to start readjusting your life to focus on them - these are the rewards for your efforts, you should enjoy them now as life is short.

But, in re-reading, it sounds like perhaps work and life may have prevented you from finding that family. 43 is still quite young, and you have plenty of time left - truly - to find peace and love in your life. But you need to readjust your focus. Let go of the idea that your value lay in the money you make - that is an insidious lie used to control you and force you to work for pennies. We spend too much time optimizing for money as a society and practically zero time optimizing for humanity. You can't change the world - but you can change YOUR world. YOU don;t need to optimize for money. Figure out how to live comfortably with less - all we truly need in life is to be well fed, well loved, and well rested. Figure out what that means specifically for you - for it;s different for everyone - then put your focus on that. Make enough money to support your efforts in finding personal peace and happiness, but don't sacrifice your own happiness for money. You did that for 43 years - so did I - but, together, we can be done with it.

Do you wish you were a happier, more congenial, more friendly person? Then BE that person. Who do you admire and what do you admire about them? Impersonate those qualities until you can truly call them your own. And forgive yourself when you screw it up - because you will screw it up again and again. That's not a personal flaw, that's just being human. Forgive yourself, love yourself, and learn from your mistakes. It's hard work, but it's the most satisfying and will pay in far greater dividends than any job you have ever had.

And becoming a caring, empathetic person has a tendency to draw other good, empathetic people to you. Build a community of people who support you, and whom you can also support. Your friends, your chosen family, groups to which you belong that you genuinely feel improve your world - seek them out with patience for them and yourself. And make sure you stop on a regular basis to evaluate things - many call this a practice of "gratitude" or "counting your blessings". Done wrong, it's just toxic positivity - "Oh things are bad? Just count your blessings!" Done right, it can give your perspective as well as lay out the path for you to follow - "I have a lot of good friends, but I still feel a bit disconnected. Let's try engaging with them in a different way - being more honest and open, or spending more time listening than talking, or suggesting an activity for us rather than just doing whatever they want..."

If you need help from a professional like a therapist, seek it. But you mentioned having a hard time getting access to mental health services. A therapist at this point is helpful as someone neutral to whom you can speak and get everything in your head out - like laying the pieces on the table to examine them and figure out why they aren't fitting. If you can't find a therapist, find a friend. or use ChatGPT. Or start a podcast or diary just for yourself and no one else, a safe space to share and explore your thoughts. The simple act of approaching these problems with the intent to examine and find a solution to them is often enough to unstick whatever is holding you back and get you started on a path toward a better life, so try something now and don't give up.

You got this.