Explore help in all the forms you can find. Feel free to contact me if you like. I'm happy to meet people and do a phone call or video call. I'm not hard to find with a little digging.

I've been through a fair amount of situations in my life, and I don't think have any illusions about places AI could go. I'm definitely not an optimist -- and I don't think being naively optimistic is something we want in everyone! -- but I'm still fighting. I think it takes a lot more strength to say "the world is looking pretty messed up and not getting better if I just sit here, so here we go..." Here are some things I suggest:

- Seek connection and community. This depends where you live, but get out there. Coffee shops, volunteering, just saying hello to people.

- Fill your brain with interesting thoughts. If you are feeling rough or depressed, you naturally may want to feel lifted up most of the time. Everybody needs a break, a laugh, some levity, or at least a change.

- But not everyone, at least not all the time, truly wants a fake sense of "everything is going to be fine". Sometimes we need to find people that are fully engaged in reality who say "yes, this is unacceptable and not getting better anytime soon but we're not giving up". And they find ways to still move forward.

- Back to the personal connections again!: It helps me to know people who have come to the US from other places in worse conditions. It helps to know that people can move forward even when many things are terribly broken. From this point of view, humanity really can be impressive. (To me, sometimes I'm most critical of people who get complacent when things seem good.)

- So, to me, and many others (Stoics especially), pessimism has a huge role to play. Things could go very badly. There are no guarantees. So get prepared -- getting prepared for tough times is a concrete activity that has meaning.

- More sunshine for you: You might benefit most by reading some really hard-hitting authors. Read about how f--ked up wars can be, how precarious the Cold War was. But somehow we made it through. There are no do-overs. Hopefully people realize the best time to do something was yesterday, but today is pretty good too!

- Train your mind. It feels good to invest in your own thinking. I recommend finding the most substantive and engaging material you can find about understanding how your brain works. For many people, this opens up a whole new set of tools.

- Find sources of inspiration. Personally, I'm a secular humanist. I've found great wisdom in the book Replacing Guilt by Nate Soares. You might too. https://replacingguilt.com/toc/ Some of my favorite sections are:

See the dark world : https://mindingourway.com/see-the-dark-world/

Detach the grim-o-meter : https://mindingourway.com/detach-the-grim-o-meter/

Dark, Not Colorless : https://mindingourway.com/dark-not-colorless/

> The last arc of posts has been about how to handle a dour universe. Become unable to despair, learn to see the darkness rather than flinching from it, learn to choose between bad and worse without suffering. Learn to live in a grim world without becoming grim yourself, learn to hear bad news without suffering, and stop needing to know your actions were acceptable. Come to terms with the fact you may lose, use the darkness as a source of fuel, and let go of dreams of total victory. These are the tools I use to tap into intrinsic motivation, in a precarious world where the problems are larger than I am.