my thoughts

Ringtailed Fox
18 hours ago
I think the friend blowing you off was just acting out a defense mechanism from learning something they can't cope with or understand.... think like how when a Windows computer crashes, it gives a blue screen error... that's basically them.  "ERROR:  CANNOT PROCESS OR COMPREHEND! PANIC! BAIL OUT, MAN!"

As for the woman that asked you for your opinion and then ran away when she didn't like what she heard?  I've come to the conclusion that curiosity has been taught or bred out of most of humanity so we don't ask questions or think for ourselves... that we think only about ourselves instead.  "you think we're headed nowhere nice?  oh, well aren't you fun... eye-roll pass..." was likely what she was thinking.  The same is true for both genders, to be honest.  Speculative fiction seems to have died in the past 15 years (unless it's the doom-and-gloom type like Population Zero, or After Us, or The World Without Us.... no more of that hopeful, optimistic stuff like Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica... i read a web-comic a few years back that basically touched on that... "this is as good as it gets.. we've peaked, technologically.... no travelling to other star systems, no moon or mars colonies... just that little Japanese robot that falls down a lot, and the internet..."

I've learned to rely only upon myself (and my two cats) for joy in life... enjoy the little things, like a veggie garden, fireflies blinking in the early evening in summer, good books or hobbies like building models.... those are the things i do to keep my mind off of the increasingly horrifying fact that we have maybe 15 years of good livable climate left (before heat waves, deep arctic chills, and behemoth storms wreck our homes and cities).

I've come to believe that it's a combination of our culture encouraging individualism to an unnatural degree, fostering isolation through overwork of civilians in menial, pointless jobs, with how we've built our cities to lessen congregation and social interaction, with how we interact with each other when we DO meet (thanks to propoganda in the news and media, and blatantly false and unrealistic portrayals of human behaviour in the media), along with a subconscious acknowledgement that something has gone gravely wrong somewhere during the 19th and 20th centuries with the climate, with the world, with how our cultures and our species behaves.  I think your depression is a full-on manifestation of this.  I went through this type of awakening when I was fourteen.  It fucked me up well into my twenties but I was able to gradually accept that this is our fate.  I guess one could think of it not as an epiphany, but rather a personal revelation:  a destruction of all previous, false notions built up by our psychotic, suicidal culture with a giant wrecking ball labelled TRUTH.