I think this varies wildly from person to person. I've also intentionally gone long stretches without working and those are the times when I've had a dramatically increased sense of purpose and fulfillment. Working for others reduces those things for me.
I'm in the age group where a lot of the people around me have retired. Some of them have fared very poorly, some have straight-up blossomed.
Ok but one of the great things about retiring when everyone else does is you have a community. If you stop working when you're young, everyone else in your network is probably still working.
I'm not against early retirement. One of my points was that, in general, it's harder to find fulfillment as a working age adult outside of work. Not impossible, just more challenging.
> Dropping Google Analytics on a page is not an active conspiracy.
It absolutely is that website deciding to trade data about their visitors in exchange for getting something for free. That's "active sharing" in my book.
What if the help they need is just to talk to someone without fear of consequences?
If they dispatch you to an institution you could lose your job just when you need money to pay for the bills you'll be sent.
With some careers, like being a pilot, you'd never be be to find another job.
You'd lose your ability to take out life insurance (even if it was a short temporary depression that you got over, like a side effect of a medication, the life insurance companies won't care.)
Or the institution's records could be hacked and you'll live in fear of your friends and family finding out.. which could cause rebound suicidal ideation...
There is no way I would ever call these hotlines unless it were 100% anonymous.
> What if the help they need is just to talk to someone without fear of consequences?
Is there actually any consequence free conversations? Even Lawyers can break confidentiality in some situations. I'm not saying that the hotline is perfect, I'm saying that it provides a lot of good. I hope you never feel the need to call the hotline, but it's an option that saves a lot of lives.
I think that's what strippers are for. Come in, pay in cash, say whatever, no paper trail or telephone logs, then leave. They're not mandatory reporters like doctors or licensed professionals and therapists are. From the ones I've known, this is no-shit what a lot of people use them for.
This kind of thing is why I wouldn't touch a site like that. Websites, service providers, and internet-connected software that collects data from you can't be trusted even a little, so I avoid them to the greatest degree I can. The rule of thumb is that anything you tell to them, or any data you have put in their custody, is at risk.
Even if you're in the US and make a phone call to a suicide prevention hotline the fact that you called them, how many times you called them, and how long you spoke with them can end up in the hands of data brokers. That data will never go away and it can impact your employment, your insurance, be used against you in court, etc.
People in the middle of a mental health crisis shouldn't have worry that trying to get help will cause a black mark on their permanent record with lifelong consequences but that's exactly what surveillance capitalism has enabled.
It's not supposed to happen, your call records should be secure, but of course it happens all the time
unsure why you are being downvoted. this is universally true. your data is either being actively shared with partners, or inadvertently shared in the form of weak security, exploits, wide-open buckets, etc.
I dread genAI because the cost/benefit ratio of it is incredibly unfavorable. I see it tangibly making all sorts of things worse, and haven't seen it make much of anything better. It looks to me like that's a trajectory that will continue for the foreseeable future.
I use eBay for certain things, although I decided to stop when I heard that GameStop was going to buy them. That would have been a bridge too far for me.
I don't know anything about Walmart customers, but I know what I did in response to the destruction of ice cream. I just started making my own instead of buying it at the store. It's easy, much less expensive, and produces a very high quality ice cream.
I'm sometimes surprised at how many people don't know that you don't have to have an ice cream maker to make ice cream. Like with a toaster, the specialty machine is purely a convenience item and not actually necessary. When I was a kid, we did it in jars sitting in bowls of salted ice, shaking the jars instead of using a churner. The smoothness is determined by how much the base mixture is agitated while freezing, so you get to choose how much effort is needed to make you happy with the result.
I'm in the age group where a lot of the people around me have retired. Some of them have fared very poorly, some have straight-up blossomed.
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