I know the feeling. I payed for a new computer with specs higher than needed for any new release game at full settings, and yet the main game I have played on it so far was built for Windows 3 and is best played in a web browser.

There’s heaps of psychology research into therapeutic approaches and all that stuff out there if you’re willing to essentially do a degree on the topic, but personally I like to keep things as simple as possible so anyone can start applying it straight away.

I usually start with the picture story book The Huge Bag of Worries by Virginia Ironside (there’s a read along of it on youtube) to frame the conversation. It helps to set up the idea that the “worries” are real and are having an effect on the individual. Also that many people struggle to know how to deal with them and end up giving bad advice, often because they are carrying their own bag of worries. I also at this point remind them that we are unlikely to get rid off all the problems, eg I can’t cure your depression or rebuild your brain to make it neuro-typical, but we can make it so they are the only things in your bag making it a lot easier to carry.

Then I’ll talk about a Catastrophe Scale. This is where we take a worry and rank it on a scale out of 10 of how bad is it really. 1 is a minor problem that will go away on it’s own, and 10 is an extreme issue that will have a permanent impact on your life. Like in the book, many problems stop being an issue once you realize they are only a 1 or 2 on the scale. This is the “just get over it” point. Other’s need some attention but can easily be solved or passed on to someone else in your support network to handle, but once you’ve spent that small amount of energy, it’s gone. This is the where we see the value of another piece of despised advice, “stop worrying and just do it” or “have you tried going for a walk outside today”. Once again, often spouted advice by people who think of it as the only thing needed without understanding how it fits into a complete treatment plan.

Finally that just leaves the real problems, the ones that are less easy to deal with. But without having to carry the weight of the whole bag of worries, we now have a capacity to take those worries to therapy or a doctor to medicate etc, and just generally do the more difficult and complex work that’s needed.

The problem is that a version of this advice can be very helpful. As someone who has suffered from ongoing mental health issues and also work in an industry where I regularly support people with mental health issues, one piece of advice I often give is to identify what traumas are you unnecessarily holding on to, which are contributing to your depression/anxiety etc.

When you can let go of some of the more mundane stresses in your life, you have more energy to tackle the real issues you’re facing. Of course this is much easier said than done and has to be used as part of a more wholeistic approach, but sometimes the advice to just learn to let it go is very good advice.

Unfortunately, many people don’t understand that intricacy and so just repeat the surface level comment which is far from helpful. And this in turn also leads to a push back in the other direction where people who could genuinely benefit from letting go of some of their stress refuse to do so because they have spent so long being told that’s all there is to it.

Not me personally but related. American Truck Simulator has started displaying in-game billboards for an irl truck driving recruiter.

I’m usually pretty strongly against in game advertisements, but this one just kind of makes sense to me.

It will be interesting to see how the existence or lack of a downvote option affects communities over time. There’s some interesting arguments to be made both for and against. And now we actually have a way to easily test and compare between comparable communities on different instances.

I agree about not using it just to disagree with an opinion, but I do think the ability to downvote is very important. It just needs to be clear that it’s supposed to be used to reduce the impact of stuff this is either harmful or just distracts from the conversation.

If I’m in a thread talking about what the best flavor of milkshake is, I will absolutely upvote someone claiming that chocolate is the best even though they are “objectively” wrong. They are however engaging with the conversation. On the other hand, someone who comes in saying that they hate milkshakes and prefer lemonade, while they’re not exactly wrong in having that opinion, it would be worthy of a downvote because they’re in the wrong place for that comment.

And then there’s the bots/people that if they lost the ability to ever talk again, the world would be a better place. Never feel sorry for downvoting them.