Hence why the members of c/fuckcars are so intense (I include myself in this).
The only practical way to avoid exposure to society’s car dominance in your everyday life is to live far from society… Which ironically forces you to own a car and drive to get literally anywhere.
To your “edit” point: Don’t take a handful of downvotes personally; it’s pretty easy to do accidentally on mobile so they may have been unintentional
Agree with everyone else that this isn’t normal for someone your age and get a second opinion.
However addressing your other questions: you’re at an age where lifestyle starts to really matter. Diet, exercise, ergonomics, environmental exposure to pollution/toxins, alcohol/drug use, sleep habits: these are all things that many healthy young adults can avoid having to worry about… until suddenly they can’t anymore. It is common, especially starting around age 30, to find there’s unhealthy behaviors from your teens and 20s that you just can’t do or do to excess anymore. It’s different for everyone; for some people it’s that they can’t sleep on a crappy mattress anymore, or drink certain types of liquor, or pull all nighters, or eat garbage, etc etc.
So while it sounds like you have some personal health issues outside of what’s “normal,” you still are at an age where the cumulative effects of a poor lifestyle can start to catch up to you. I think a lot of people greatly underestimate how sedentary their lifestyles are in particular, and of all the behaviors to change for the better as you age, going from sedentary to active is probably the hardest, given that our world is built to keep us sitting: sitting in our cars, sitting at our desks, sitting on our couches, basically sitting from the moment we wake until we go to sleep. Humans never lived like this until very recently: basically every decade since the personal automobile became the standard mode of transportation it’s steadily gotten worse. So yes, definitely do some doctor shopping, but now is also a great age to take stock in your lifestyle and how you’re treating your body. Because yes, it does get a little harder each year, but the speed of which it gets harder is at least partially up to you.
Millennial here. My impression is we’re the largest generation on this platform, but I could be wrong.
I’ll check it out, thanks!
I just want the communities that already exist to have more engagement. It’s pretty demoralizing making a high-effort post and getting only a handful of upvotes and no comments. And it’s like watching a hospice patient visiting a neat-sounding community and realizing all the posts are by the single moderator (and are getting less and less frequent).
I think one of the best ways for folks to contribute to the health of Lemmy would be for everyone to spend some time on “all - new” (or even “all - top hour”) on occasion. “New” on Lemmy is not the cesspool of reposts and garbage that it was on Reddit (although there is a LOT of porn if you don’t have NSFW toggled off), and the quality of the first few pages of “top hour” is usually pretty good (except again for the porn, which it turns out gets pretty decent engagement). I visit “top hour” pretty regularly, and nearly all posts that are stuck in zero-engagement/minimal-engagement pergatory are simply niche content rather than bad content.
Arcane, the animated Netflix show that was based on League of Legends.
Basically all the media.
There is (or at least was) a special kind of joy in discovering a new piece of media (movie, TV, book, video game, comic, etc), getting to the end, and hopping over to the relevant subreddit to sort by “top of all time.” Bonus points if you loved the series and would get to essentially relive it all over again through the sub, but even media that you hated or were neutral about could be fun subs to peruse; maybe you would get to revel in seeing something you hated turned into a meme highlighting how stupid it was, or get to feel justified in your negative assessment upon reading an epic rant from another user; maybe instead you’d find hidden details or explanations pointed out by other users that made you reassess the work (“huh, I though that was a stupid plothole but it actually was perfectly explained by that one scene that apparently went over my head”). The ATLA subs especially were treasure troves of tiny details and “holy shit I just noticed on my fifth rewatch” posts that really elevated my opinion (and thereby enjoyment) of a series I was initially kind of “meh” on.
When I think about what it would take to feel like Lemmy had sufficiently replaced Reddit for me, the number one practical answer is for comprehensive news (political, world, cultural, meme, etc… Reddit really did at one point feel like “the front page of the Internet” if there ever was one), and the second is to have the critical mass to be able to ask a question and get a good recommendation for any specific product or service, via regional subs, hobby subs, etc (although thanks to LLMs and corporate astroturfing that may simply be a bygone part of the Internet). But the “fun” answer is to have the critical mass for a wide range of specific fandoms.
Okay, but even in an efficient system there’s still a waste product. My point wasn’t to compare-and-contrast trade-offs, simply to acknowledge that every form of energy generation has them to some degree. Plus nuclear still requires a mined resource, and again, mining is an environmentally damaging activity. Just because something is better than alternatives that doesn’t give it a free pass.
Obviously I reuse my canning jars, but I still had to go out and purchase my starting stock. At $1.25 a jar it’s not a cheap endeavor to get into.
Barring a major technological breakthrough, all current means of energy generation have significant environmental drawbacks. Even among the “renewable” energy generation there’s problems: hydroelectric destroys river ecosystems, nuclear produces radioactive waste, solar and battery systems require mined materials (and become toxic waste at the end of their lifecycles), wind turbines kill hundreds of thousands of birds and bats annually, etc. Meanwhile rather than solving environmental and climate problems at their sources, we’re relying more heavily on powered solutions, from electric vehicles to de-carbonization systems, while also needing to use more electricity to combat the ill-effects of climate change (e.g. more air conditioning in the face of warming summers). If we’re gonna start turning the boat around on environmental issues we need to dramatically reduce our energy consumption as a society. Instead we’re mining bitcoin and barrelling headfirst into an AI “revolution”…
Agreed, there’s a lot of issues with municipal compost currently. Ensuring cleaner compost output is important for making sure the end product is usable especially for edible crops, but in the meanwhile my understanding is food waste etc produces fewer greenhouse gasses when allowed to decompose via compost rather than in a landfill. Plus using municipal compost has to be better than the farms that are contaminating the soil with PFAS-laden biosolid fertilizer.
I would love to see increased standardization in the food industry limiting the possible sizes and shapes of containers (such as glass) making them easier to wash and reuse as-is. On the home front, for example, it’s ridiculous that I have to go out and purchase brand-new Mason jars for canning instead of being able to reuse a store-bought salsa jar. But more importantly on the commercially-processed food front, standardization would make reuse easier by ensuring that containers do not have to return all the way to their original company; that way a jar used by a raspberry jam company in the Pacific Northwest bought by a customer in Florida could go to a local orange marmalade company for reuse rather than having to travel all the way back to the PNW.
I think should also start seeing a lot more compostable products. We’re already getting there somewhat with paper replacing plastic in shipping, but more products need to be explicitly labeled as compostable, and more municipalities need dedicated compost pickup and processing facilities. It’s insane that we’ve created a soil-to-landfill pipeline for nutrients.
Crazy thought, but what if it differed by industry? Something like blue collar jobs get Monday off, white collar gets Friday off. That way office workers can for example more easily stay home to get their cable serviced and plumbers can more easily meet with a mortgage agent. Obviously because of overlap it’s not perfect (office workers can’t meet with mortgage agent, plumbers can’t get their cable serviced), but there’s a huge issue currently with people working 9-5 M-F being unable to access services that are also only available 9-5 M-F, so this would at least distribute things a little more. (This kind of thing already exists for some industries like restaurants, where W-Su workweeks are common)