Lasting happiness? There’s always going to be downs as well as ups in life. Stoicism will teach you how to handle the pitfalls in life without dwelling on them and helping you to get on in life. Buddhism will help you to understand that life is full of sorrow but that the journey is it’s own reward and that joy can be found anywhere.

A perpetual state of satisfaction can be reached that’s liberally peppered with happiness. Happiness is not an end goal. It’s the after affect of a effortful life that invites playfulness and new experiences.

The key word here is effort. Happiness should not be the main goal. Living your values. Finding a process and journey that meets your values and challenges you slightly will bring satisfaction.

Be carful of self help books and systems. Many are designed to put you on a perpetual wheel of needing more and more books to buy and classes to take. They are money generators that will tell you they offer the golden cure. And if you didn’t succeed with the system in a few months then here’s part two you can buy.

I do like THE HAPPINESS LAB podcast as a starting point. There’s a free Yale course too. The teaching there can get you to examine some stuff.

Be kinder to yourself but do put some challenges in your way. Happiness is not about having a placid life.

Google and Bing search has been horrible with that for some time. Bing AI will at least bypass the crap website’s for now anyway.

Curious if someone in an abusive relationship could use this trick if their phone was being monitored. If the abuser was just monitoring them with the phone’s parental controls this would work but if there was an app probably not?

We need a remind me bot. I’ve no clue other than Putin fled Moscow and they guy controlling a bunch of mercenaries is coming for him. I’ll look back at this post later to see what the consensus is and if they supply links.

Pop or Mint are fantastic. They are my go to.

Agreed but they will bleed off users more than likely with their shenanigans. The Fediverse is at a tipping point. It will either develop to be robust and fun/informational, or it will remain the playground for a few. Societies only become better when more people are actively involved. We need the involvement now more than ever to guard against fracturing.

The thing is that Meta and Reddit are masters of social manipulation through their algorithms. They know what low common denominators get the most engagement. I blame FB for a big number of echo Chambers and that just fed people their own negativity right back, made them spiral into a bad place mentally.

If they have any ability to post to the Fediverse or to track things they’ll do it all over again.

It’s the halcyon days of the Fediverse. Negativity on my feed is nonexistent. There’s discussion. There’s respect for differences. I know things will change with time but it’s important that the big instances never work as proxies for big tech. It’s important that big tech doesn’t get a seat at the table. Voices should remain individual and not some mouthpiece to an industry that wants centralized control.

An excellent read. My synopsis is that if any big corporations joined the Fediverse they would fracture it, and that no matter what Meta, Reddit, Google, etc. would never want to see a decentralized platform succeed.

Pretty much the Fediverse needs to never let a big company tie into it. Our group needs to work at growing but at a sustainable rate.

A big shout out to Lemmy.one. I signed up not knowing but love the fact now. Down votes don’t add to the discussion. And posts and comments that are in poor taste should just be reported. Ignoring poorly made comments and posts is the best way to extinguish them. It forces the writer to improve their input if they care about the up votes. Down votes just make the user give up in wanting to contribute at all. Lemmy is about contribution. For now it is anyway.

Magic can McGuffin any answer you need but it sounds like you want a non magic means to keep people away.

Have a guarded door, be it creature or armed guards. The room that is guarded is not the real room, just a place to hold private meetings. It’s used on the regular to keep the focus on the guarded room.

The real room is in the town’s bizarre. It’s passed by all of the time and is curated by the most hated man. No one likes going to his shop. He’s rude and his wares are over priced. Within his shop is the real room that is visited by the few who know.

My wife is a teacher at a small district. She’s watched student’s abilities drop over the past twenty years and the time of covid left them severely lacking. Yes. Their writing skills are practically not there. It’s truly sad.

The negativity is definitely less. Sure, out of say fifty comments to a post there’s maybe two disgruntled souls. Overall it’s conducive to discussion.

Over on reddit I kept to just hobby subreddits for the most part to make comments. Only way to not come across the trolls.

Yes, the clean UI is wonderful. It’s good to have something simple. It’s also fun to watch something grow.

You make excellent points.

You’re correct up to a point. A statistical bell curve is present in most things. You’ll have those who lurk, those who comment, those who post, and those that will moderate in any group. Make that group bigger and each category will grow too. The group can skew the results, lower the lurkers for instance, by making them answer questions before joining. They self select themselves as being more engaged.

But I agree, the current business models are big on numbers and not necessarily what is going on with those numbers. We’ve been taught quantity over quality in real world applications to our detriment. It’s sad really.

Wasn’t that labor ward responsible for mixing babies some time ago?

Sorry, I don’t follow the rules. wild card

This obfuscation of who works for who via a series of subcontracts is horrible. I personally know of the janitorial BS that got started by Winters Cleaning and the cinema industry in the 90s. There’s an article that Variety did on it some years back. It’s about removing responsibility from the company benefitting from the labor. It increases the likelihood that impoverished, desperate people will be taken advantage of. When problems are noticed the last company in the line of subcontractors just fold up. No one is held accountable.

If Amazon has deep control of operations due their contracts, then yes, Amazon is their employer.

Well written piece. Homelessness is a multifaceted issue.

I do know that if you have no cell service, having internet / Wi-Fi is essential to stay in touch with others. More communities should offer free Wi-Fi.

Loving the kindness and civility. Proper use of politeness is not only a great social lubricant but seems to be abundant in Lemmy. 👍

Agreed. I can’t tell you how many times in business I’ve seen a matter of fact text or email set someone off thinking the sender was some sort of monster. Try to add any humor and it can be 100% worse when it comes to interpreting.

I never had an issue with the /s used. Yes, I could read it as sarcasm 90% of the time before it appeared. But to me the written word should always add clarity. If the one commenting felt it should be used then so be it.

This.

(I said sarcastically.)