I was homebrewing for years in the late 00s and early 10s. At the time I was living in Santa Barbara, and there was a great community there, the Santa Barbeerians, and it was a lot of fun. At the same time I was roasting my own coffee beans and really into coffee. My wife and I floated the idea of opening a place with another couple but it never panned out.

Anyway I don't disagree, in retrospect it was all a way to drink more beer in different styles than I could readily get from a store. It's easy to justify in the moment but having many gallons of beer around all of the time is dangerous...

Mostly online yes, but even offline people have been in a very strange edge lately. Like, if you don't take a stance to one of the two main political parties in my country, that means you support the third option which is a far-right party. If any of the members of that party bumped me on the street I wouldn't recognize them. Anyway, once that implication is on the table people start assuming (and saying behind your back) very ugly things about you very fast, which is why I started disengaging.

My heart is with the people, not the corporations or the elites. I just feel none of the choices right now is for the people. I don't understand why that would make me "hate LGBT people or migrants". It just doesn't make sense to me. The team mentality of the whole thing has gone too far in my opinion. And I don't understand why people get so heated up for groups that don't care about them at the end of the day.

I don't even think I'll be alive to see another election after the emergency one next month though. So it's too late for me to make any meaningful change. So I'm just trying to use my remaining time to leave a bit of a legacy as an artist and programmer. Even if I enjoy AI. One thing doesn't cancel the other. I do mostly analog art and even have been pretty excited to try new tools now that my hand works again (surgeries obliterated my hands for a while and they are permanently blue-ish and cold now, but I regained some mobility this month). AI is for me "that thing I wanted since I was a kid when scifi had AIs doing stuff".

In fact, that whole thing is also another can of worms. People can't seem to understand I can be an artist AND enjoy AI. The moment I mention AI people start assuming I flood the world with slop and want to destroy artists, then they ask for proof that I'm an artist, I show them my work (impossible for an AI to replicate because it's mostly analog), they go "but if you can draw like this why do you use AI!?? You should hate it because it's against you" and they can't conceive that for me it's just fun to tinker with it and test what it can do for fun. Like I should immediately take an anti-AI stance BECAUSE I am an artist. The AI is not replacing me because for me art is a form of expression and doing it is its own reward. It's just fun. Both things are fun to me. I don't see why they are exclusive.

It's like there's no room for human nuance and contradictions anymore. You have to be in a neat little box or else you are a bad person so it's right to fight you and hurt you. It's "justified", you know. Even if they are completely wrong, they already passed judgement.

Sadly, all my loved ones are already gone from the same illness, so I'm afraid I can't take your advice. All I got left is a couple online friends, my job (of which I've been away for too long due to the surgeries...) and my computers. I'm trying to make the most of what time I got left doing coding and art, now that my hands kinda work again. I found a box of very cool quality markers when I could finally get out and been practicing with them. I was always a color pencil/watercolors guy, but this is pretty cool. Since I enjoy drawing robots and vehicles a lot I've been combining them with metallic markers for very cool effects. I am also learning how to do more physical electronics tinkering and getting better with a soldering iron at last, repairing old stuff and so.

I also enjoy the new wave of AI stuff. It took a while but I finally got a little robot buddy like in scifi when I was little. Full offline. It's kind of a dum-dum, but mostly works!

Unfortunately it's such a negative thing outside of places like HN that I can't share that joy with most people. Also a lot of people can't seem to wrap their head around an artist that enjoys AI, as I mentioned in another post in the thread. I have to shut up about it pretty much everywhere.

Anyway, I digress...thank you.

I can respect this view point! I don’t really get fired up against fence sitters, I understand not wanting to be part of the mess. …but at the same time OP seems to have lost all social life and has become a recluse because of it? That is an interesting outcome and one that sounds to have more to it.

> folks plugged into a community live better, happier, and healthier lives

It is this mainly. Community is the reason most people find happiness. Some people find it at church, some on a Sunday at a football game, some at their dnd game that’s being going on for years and some find it in their family. I am not particularly religious but I am 100% onboard the idea that community brings happiness. I find happiness in just having good neighbors.

... or people who attend religious services are less likely to self-report depression because of perceived weakness, shame, etc

> There’s nothing causational about the denomination.

You're right, I'm sure the people that are publishing these studies have never heard of "correlation is not causation."

It's funny that exactly like those religious extremists and other extremists that associate any kind of queer person to the boogieman that tried to convert your kids and have depraved sex parades on the street, it's exactly the same attitude with people demonising any kind of religious person, as if all are the same. We all humans are the same, it's just who and what we hate and appreciate that differs.

Speaking as a gay dude, it doesn't mean you have to follow a mainstream religion to find spirituality, especially one which tells you that you are an evil person because of who you are. Personally I've taken bits of various eastern religious beliefs which now form my 'spirituality'.

It's weird, its like there is some part of our mind that requires something spiritual to fill it, and has been that way every since recorded history. People have always looked for something higher than themselves, whether is be a god or gods, or the idea of nature or the universe, or any matter of similar ideas. And filling that part of our minds with a belief in something, seems to put the mind at ease in some ways. A lot of medical literature I've read includes 3 parts of yourself that you need to take care of: mind, body and spirit. So I really do believe there is something behind it.

I'm a millennial and I feel like nearly all the discourse about who is (generationally) responsible for society's problems is aimed at the boomers. And the zoomers to a lesser extent, though that seems more of a prophecy about how they're going to ruin society. Jabs aimed at us millennials tend to be that we're cringe (or boring), which I can accept.

I'm not saying that every possible path of evolution leads to religion, only that ours did.

If you're trying to establish if X is a cure for Y, then looking at people who don't have Y will not tell you much.

Anti-religion aka the religion of Scienc(TM) is still a religion.

Oh yes, those people were clearly acting out the precise instructions of Jesus as laid out in the Gospels.