I'm the kinda person who due to depression has difficulty leaving bed most days, but today's one where... I dunno, I guess I just feel so angry about things, but the only object in this apartment worth destroying is myself

So I get to spend today blasting NiN/avoiding self-harm

You can treat depression to an extent but of course I adhere to the idea that its cause is "society", & no element of society is small enough for me to fix

ppl have written loads about the way certain brain states get medicalized & cast as 'illnesses' in adherence to the oligarchy's desires, and yeah depression a main one of those!

Part of having power is the ability to self-define, & this is why non-depression is 'the normal one'

Those with the ability to achieve prolonged states of non-depression have a much better chance of becoming society's 'winners'; social media like twitter basically amplify them to the extent that non-depression is perhaps 'normal' only in that it occupies a larger share of space

Depression likewise, gets suppressed in various ways (consider that it's not really polite or advisable to retweet someone's depressed-tweeting, but is always advisable to retweet their excitement for whatever thing)

Twitter's algos act to project the illusion of normal

There's a funny thing in society where "cheer up!" is regarded mostly as bad advice, but it's also the advice that successful people use, and they are successful in part because their brains are the sort on which that advice works

To 'cheer up!' is to embrace certain illusions

Some people prefer different illusions or otherwise are unable to perform non-depressed, & basically I feel this has always tended to exclude them from public life... but certainly it does exclude you from life in platform world, which in conservative fashion, emphasizes 'normal'

It's a problem I think, because this is the community that we chose/was largely chosen for us! Ppl will talk about how professionally they need to be here, but really I think what they're saying is that this is a public space, and it's a miserable one, but for them it works

Rarely does this rhetoric address all the ppl who are absent; ppl who also 'need to be here for their career', or basically who need to exist in public like all humans! But their brains are not compatible with this kind of conservative/status quo sorta space, so they're not here

It's hard to go outside and have some oligarch's idea of 'normal' thoughts/behavior constantly shoved down your throat, y'know? And today most of the internet is ALL ABOUT the throat shove. So here were are under Covid19 and like, yeah we can't go out, but can we stay in???

What is there to 'stay in' to, except a bunch of these bullshit fake websites where half of what you see is literally an advertisement for the popular product, and then another 45% is implicitly just an advertisement for the product? I dunno, it's really upsetting for me

There are a lot of people like me who have existed on twitter for a decade but by most metrics never existed here at all. & I guess the market solution is 'then go find somewhere that's suited to you'. But is that really how communities or networks or anything actually operate?

The whole thing about capitalist realism et cetera, is that nowhere is 'suited to me', it's more a game of how to make me suited to the things that the rich people own, & each individual gets left to succeed or else non-exist by these rather unfair terms

I've been trying to connect with internet things that 'suit me' for 16 years! Some things that suited me stopped existing over that time, & little that suits me has been created to replace those. It really is not the kind of place where there's 'something for everyone'

So idk, shout out to all the people who are prisoners of this gross monoculture I guess! The alienation you feel is the truth; your sense of being excluded is the fiction (made real solely by the ceaseless injection of vast corporate wealth)

I would do this thread on a 'Let Us Talk Day'... u know, it's a mental health thread! But I won't do it on the day that is branded by the company that doesn't really let me talk, lol

Just gonna do it on a random day