u/Electrical_Main6707

It's one of the most genuinely disturbing things about modern life and honestly, nobody talks about it enough.

Japan actually has a name for it — Kodokushi. Lonely deaths. They study it because it happens so often there that it became a documented social crisis. But it's not just a Japan thing, it's everywhere, and it's getting worse.

Think about what has to be true for this to happen. Not just living alone, but no friends who check in, no family who calls, no neighbours who notice, no colleagues who ask where you went. Every single social layer has to fail simultaneously. And in modern society that is happening to millions of people, and nobody notices until they die.

Cities got built for privacy and individual convenience and everyone called it progress. Front porches got replaced with garages so nobody had to make eye contact with a neighbour. Apartments got designed where you can live next to someone for a decade and never learn their name. Independence got celebrated so aggressively that needing other people started to feel like a personal failure. Nobody planned for what happens when you take that to its logical conclusion.

Remote work finished the job. The office was annoying, sure, but it was the last place where someone would notice if you just stopped showing up. That's gone now for a lot of people. You can disappear from the world entirely and the only system with any chance of catching it is a utility provider noticing the meter stopped moving.

Middle aged men are the group nobody talks about in this context. Everyone assumes it's just the elderly, and yes they're at risk, but middle aged men have some of the smallest social networks of any demographic. Least likely to reach out when struggling, most likely to be written off as fine because they're not visibly vulnerable. They just quietly dissapear.

The solutions people come up with are fine I guess. Welfare check calls, smart meters, postal workers trained to notice piling mail. Great. But none of that touches the actual problem which is that a way of living got built that is fundamentally incompatible with people noticing each other exist. A smart meter is not a society.

2000 followers and nobody who would notice you were gone. That's not connection in any sense of the word. The response to all of this has been to medicalise loneliness into a personal failure. Therapy, self help, wellness apps, all of it aimed at fixing the individual. None of it aimed at the society that causes it. When the internet stops being enough there will be nothing there. That's not a prediction, it's already happening.

This isn't a logistics problem. It's not something an individual fixes. It's the result of decades of dismantling every structure that used to keep people connected and replacing it with nothing. Now people are dying alone and decomposing for months before anyone thinks to check. That should be the kind of thing that makes a society stop and ask what it's doing. Insteed it gets a Wikipedia article and a sad news story once a year.

If you'd rather save a cat or a squirrel, almost everyone would say squirrel, but the act of killing it with your bare hands makes the cat seem not that bad.

Both animals are guaranteed to die

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Taking kids on vacation before they can form memories is one of the most confidently stupid things parents do, and I am so goddamn tired of pretending otherwise.

The kid will not remember any of it. Not the beach, not the resort, not Mexico, not a single second. The memory formation is not there yet.

The child does not have experience. Parents are dragging a small screaming potato through three connecting flights to post a photo of them in a sombrero captioned "making memories." They are not making memories. The parents are the only ones making memories, and they are all of a screaming child on a plane. And let's be honest, half the reason it's happening is for the instagram post. The "first flight" onesie. The coordinated airport outfits. The grid. The kid is a prop, and everyone knows it.

The suffering gets distributed to every poor bastard in the vicinity except the baby, who has absolutely no idea what a vacation is. The people on the plane who just wanted to sleep. The couple at the next table who saved up for a nice goddamn dinner. The people at the hotel at 2am. Not one of them consented to this.

Nobody wants to talk about the safety angle either. Three cocktails deep at a swim-up bar in a country where nobody speaks the language, nobody has slept in two days, and somewhere nearby is a twenty pound person with no survival instincts in an unfamiliar place. Kids get lost with sober attentive parents in places they know.

And then somehow, it's a complete shock when the kid is an absolute disaster for the entire trip because their sleep schedule just got obliterated across four time zones. Every single time, this surprises people. Every single goddamn time.

The most infuriating part is that parents do this exclusively when the kid will lose their shit over a slightly wrong shade of yellow and can't enjoy a single thing, then stop taking them on trips the moment they're old enough to behave and actually remember it.

Leave the baby with someone you trust. Go on the trip. Get drunk without a toddler as a liability. The kid will not know the difference. The forty people on that flight absolutely will.

Edit: it will always amaze me how people will dog on the weakest argument and ignore the rest, read the entire thing, people.

Before I get into this, I want to clarify I'm not talking about people who type "Tumg Tung Tung Sahur blah blah blah" into shit.gpt for a laugh. I'm talking about the people who sit down and write out these massive detailed prompts and then turn around and call themselves AI "artists" and post their "art" like they actually made something. Those types of people, the ones that claim to be artists unironicly.

And the thing is, the response to those people is always "you have no talent" which is actually the wrong argument and it's making it harder to criticize AI "art" properly, which sucks because there's plenty to criticize. The skill is real. It's just a writing skill, not a visual one, and they're using it to sidestep actually learning while undermining traditional artists and digital artists who spent years doing so. That's the actual problem.

To show you my point, heres a prompt i saw:

"A candid, mid-stride street photograph of a woman in her late twenties walking through Times Square, New York City, on a brisk October afternoon in 1954. Shot on a Leica M3 with a 50mm Summicron lens at f/2.8, 1/250 shutter, on Kodachrome II color reversal film (ISO 25), with the characteristic warm magenta color palette and soft halation around highlights typical of mid-century color stock. Subtle lens vignetting in the corners. Camera position: eye-level, taken from across the sidewalk at roughly 12 feet away, slightly off-center composition with the subject in the left two-thirds of the frame. A passing pedestrian's shoulder is partially blurred in the foreground right edge, an imperfect, unposed snapshot feel. Slight motion blur on her trailing foot and the swinging hem of her coat. Her face is tack-sharp, and the background neon signage falls into gentle bokeh. The woman: mid-stride, mid-laugh, looking slightly off-camera as if responding to a companion just out of frame. She wears a fitted camel wool swing coat with large bone buttons, a knee-length charcoal pencil skirt, seamed nylon stockings, and black patent leather kitten-heel pumps. A small cherry-red leather handbag hangs from her gloved right hand. Hair styled in soft brunette victory rolls under a small black pillbox hat with a short netted veil. Matte porcelain skin, defined dark brows, a single coat of crimson lipstick, no contouring, a single strand of pearls. Fine pores, a faint blemish on her jaw, natural under-eye softness, no airbrushing. Behind her, the bustling intersection of 7th Avenue and 45th Street. Period-accurate yellow Checker cabs and a 1953 Chevrolet Bel Air in two-tone turquoise-and-cream. Pedestrians in fedoras, trench coats, and tweed suits. The giant Camel cigarette billboard with its smoke-ring blowing man, a Coca-Cola neon sign, a Chevrolet marquee. Asphalt wet from earlier rain reflecting amber and red neon in slick streaks. Late-afternoon overcast daylight, directional from camera-right, casting a gentle shadow across her face, with neon spill from storefront windows filling the shadows. No harsh AI-style rim lighting, no glowing edges, no perfect exposure, just diffuse natural light with believable falloff. Visible Kodachrome grain across the entire frame, especially in the midtones and shadows. A faint horizontal scratch, slight chromatic aberration, inward cyan cast, feel like a frame from a scanned slide. Avoid: plastic skin, symmetrical faces, glowing orbs, modern signage, the 'everyone is beautiful' AI default look."

Now read that back and tell me that person has zero skill. Well, i mean, you didn't actually read it, but still. They clearly have some descriptive knowledge, photography, film history, period fashion, and lighting theory. But here's the thing, none of that knowledge produced anything they actually made. They didn't pick up a brush, didn't grind through Photoshop tutorials, and didn't develop an actual craft the way traditional and digital artists do. They just learned how to describe what someone else's work should look like and let a machine scrape the work of millions of traditional artists and digital artists to produce it.

So when traditional and digital artists are out here saying "you have no talent," it's not the most accurate. The argument that I personally think wins is that these AI "artists" have talent in the wrong place, and they're using it to do something they really shouldn't be.

We are watching a slow-motion extinction event, and we are choosing to look away.

Every single day, free-roaming cats kill an estimated 3–10 million birds in the United States alone. Not per year. Per day. Species that took millions of years of evolution to exist are being wiped out by an animal that doesn't belong in most of the ecosystems it occupies. And our response? We trap them, neuter them, and put them right back.

We already know what needs to be done. we just won't do it. When rats invaded the Galápagos, we poisoned them. When mongoose threatened Hawaiian birds, we trapped them aggressively. Nobody held candlelight vigils for the mongoose. But cats get a pass because they're soft and their eyes are big. That's not conservation policy, that's aesthetics overriding science.

TNR, Trap-Neuter-Return is the dominant "solution," and it is a feel-good fiction. There is virtually no peer-reviewed evidence showing it meaningfully reduces feral populations at scale. Cats are territorial. You neuter a colony, new cats move in. Meanwhile, the birds keep dying. We've spent decades and millions of dollars on a program that makes humans feel better while ecosystems collapse.

Culling is the answer. It's time to say it plainly. There is no gentle solution to a population of 30–80 million feral cats causing billions of deaths annually. TNR has failed. Relocation is impossible at scale. Adoption can't absorb tens of millions of unsocialised, essentially wild animals. Culling is not cruelty. It is the only intervention with a demonstrated track record of actually working. New Zealand's aggressive predator eradication programs have produced measurable, documented recovery of native bird populations.

The science is not ambiguous. When you remove the predator, the prey recovers. The discomfort people feel about culling is entirely about the animal doing the killing, not the animals being killed. A billion songbirds don't register emotionally the way one cat does. That's a failure of moral imagination, not a legitimate conservation argument.

We regulate every other threat to wildlife without this hand-wringing. Pesticides are banned. Lead ammunition is restricted. Hunting seasons are strictly enforced. But an animal killing billions of birds annually gets managed with voluntary guidelines and feelings. The double standard is indefensible.

This argument isn't anti-cat. An indoor cat lives longer, is safer, and causes zero ecological damage. What's being argued against is the specific entitlement that cats, unlike dogs, unlike literally every other pet, have an inherent right to roam wherever they want and kill whatever they find.

The species being lost will not come back. Companionship is replaceable. Extinction is not. When the last Stephens Island Wren died killed entirely by a single lighthouse keeper's cat that was permanent. There is no undoing that. Every year, we delay serious policy, and that list grows.

Australia designates feral cats as a threat to national biodiversity, funds active culling programs, and enforces strict containment laws. The rest of the world is just choosing cats over ecosystems and calling it compassion. That has to end.

I'm not trying to be a tree hugger im just pointing out the absolute hypocrisy that people have.