• 10 Dec, 2025 *

this is how the world ends, i think.

->> content warning: really long depressing post about the state of the world. i feel the need to share this, but you really shouldn’t feel the need to read it. please tap out at any time. <<-

i’ve spent a lot of time on here writing about my mental illnesses, always focusing on the interpersonal stuff.

that’s what feels fixable, right? as much as i pretend otherwise, the circumstances of my life and the the people in it are the only things i can really influence. even if it still feels like a hopeless, impossible task. i can do something.

so thats what i talk about, when someone asks me how i’m doing, whats been going on in my life, whats on my mind.

it means i dont have to talk about everything else.

for years now, i’ve been carefully practicing an attitude of compassionate indifference towards the world. i do my best to stay aware without getting invested. it’s why i keep social media at arms length, why i’ve avoided ever cultivating a presence that I might feel compelled to use for something. it’s why i vaguely keep track of all the protests and marches going on, but i never attend them.

investment would mean giving what little i have towards a doomed cause, and that would kill me so much faster. so i pretend the social problems are the reason why i’m depressed, something that i can latch onto and slam my head against and feel like i have a chance of changing it.

i remember back in 2019 when the Hong Kong protests were the Big Thing happening, i spent a lot of time thinking about it. i read all the news articles, i talked to my friends to try and get them to care, i signed the petitions, i think i even sent an email or two to whoever was relevant at the time. to my knowledge nobody in my city really cared enough to stage any major protests or rallies, or i would have gone to those.

i was still optimistic enough to believe we could make a difference; people, collectively.

then the war in ukraine started a few years later. i remember feeling appalled. surely we were better than this? i know, the US has been finding half-cocked reasons to shadow-invade whoever they like for a century, but at least they’re polite enough to pretend that’s not what they’re doing (lol).

but now, a major country had just openly declared war on their neighbour over nothing more than a powergrab, and the world at large seemed to shrug and carry on. we all talked about how outrageous it was, but... nothing changed.

i felt like it should have been enough to unify the world against that sort of meaningless, mass violence. but i was losing the hope to be a part of it this time. i think i went to a rally, once. i agreed with my friends when they talked shit about russia, but i stopped starting the conversations.

when the genocide in gaza started, i am ashamed to admit that i was the one who shrugged, turned away from it, and carried on. while people i knew were out protesting and waving flags, throwing metaphorical bricks and signing the petitions and making themselves heard, i was at home trying not to think about it.

a few nights since then i have gone and read the stories, looked at the death tolls, pored over wikipedia articles as they’re updated trying to understand what is happening to our world. on those nights, i usually cry myself to sleep. it doesnt make me a better person.

i remember when i was 15, talking to my grandparents about the climate crisis and trying to argue to them that it mattered, we needed to do something, this was a real threat our species was facing.

i didn’t know i was trans yet, or autistic, or any other minority. i was an optimistic little white cis boy, and i still believed that if it really mattered, the world would pull together and fix these problems. it would happen soon. we wouldn’t leave ourselves to die like this, right?

yesterday i read an article about how we totally fucked that one up. we passed the ‘no return’ line of climate change some time earlier this year; extinction is still avoidable, but thats just a cheap way of saying "we’re not all going to die in the next 50 years... just, y’know, a few million of us."

right. awesome.

what else? how much more does there need to be?

trans people in the US are being treated like livestock to be slaughtered - and instead of this being an outrage, other countries are thinking really hard about following suit.

i walk past homeless people on the streets of my city every time i dare to go outside, and i can’t even bring myself to make eye contact with them anymore, nevermind that i’m one catastrophe away from joining them. meanwhile, one of those Big Tech Bros is about to be the first guy with a net worth in the trillions.

on the topic of money, Netflix is about to acquire Warner Bros, which is an absolutely insane concept. why does our system work like this? Warner doesnt need more money. they dont gain anything from ceasing to exist. they’re one of the most successful studios of all time, but our rigged game of a financial system means that a nobody enteprise who barely existed before covid can pick them up and pocket them like its nothing, all while exclaiming that this is somehow a good thing that the public should be excited about - and not the fucking death toll for a financially functional society that it actually is.

i don’t even wanna fucking talk about AI, not even here in this entry that is unapologetically all of my worst feelings about the world. i can’t. you already know.

the social media ban that feels like another silent step towards free speech becoming a privledge, and is once again failing to take into account the impact on minorities.

my growing awareness of all the ways our government is failing basic human rights checks - and worse, a majority of our population is complicit. how the fuck did we fail the Yes vote a couple years ago? c’mon, people! it was so simple! we nearly made progress for the first time in 250 fucking years!

i havent even talked about gaza properly. i cant. how is something like that happening, and the entire world is not up in arms about it?

i remember thinking once,

"one death. one death should have been enough. as soon as one person died to this, the world should have turned around and said ‘no more.’"

but we didnt. and now i dont think any number of deaths will be enough.

and to be abysmally self-centered for a moment... it’s really starting to feel like there’s nothing left for us here. there is no future amongst all these tragedies. the crushing effort required to eke out a living amongst all this isn’t worth the meagre return anymore.

i have come to understand the important difference between "I want to die" and "I don’t want to live".

heaven forbid you get caught between both at once.

...

and y’know, all this isn’t even talking about my personal problems, the internal ones.

the way i constantly feel trapped inside my own head, and seperately in this body. the way i suspect choices that were made for me years ago have doomed me to feel like this forever.

the drugs that are meant to fix my body fuck up my brain. the drugs that are meant to fix my brain fuck up my body. we go round and round and round.

the way i waste all my days, because nothing feels worth doing unless a particular person is around. all of the things i love are things i love with or because of others. left alone, i am a meaningless shell. a little automaton girl with nobody to wind up her clockwork.

maybe i would have a little more tolerance for the world if i didnt feel like a walking reflection of all the worst parts of it.

...

...

but it’s okay. i cant control any of that. so these days, i focus on the things i can change.

soon, i’ll finish cutting myself off from basically all of my friends, cause i think they’re probably the reason i’m miserable, actually. i think that’ll help.

soon, i’ll have a conversation with my best friend about how she’s been making me really sad, and this will somehow solve a lot of these problems.

soon, i will probably stop talking to my other best friend for some really funny reasons, and i think this will make me a lot happier.

haha.

sorry, y’all. it’s all just another cope at the end of the day, isn’t it?

this isn’t how it was meant to be.

how’d we get here?

...how do we go back?