It sounds like you are super depressed right now, and I’m sad you’re going through that.

There are a lot of things out there that are worth living for, and some great experiences to be had. But I’ve had severe depression in the past myself… and I’ll be honest, no one could convince me in that moment that life was ever going to be a positive experience again. So I doubt I will be able to convince you right now.

What I do hope you’ll hear right now, is that your own assessment of life can’t be trusted at the moment. Depression is like a feedback loop. It makes us feel hopeless, and prevents us from believing better things are ever possible. I promise you, there is some way to get help. And your depression is going to tell you I’m wrong. Or that if you could find help, there wouldn’t be any thing they could actually do to help. Don’t trust your depression. It makes us lie to ourselves. There’s help to be had, and you’ll never know if it could help if you don’t actually try.

Don’t trust your self right now. Look for help. Tell professional people that you feel suicidal and trust them to help.

previous theories that equine brains respond only to immediate stimuli and are not complex enough to strategise

Who held those theories? And have they ever been around horses?

Just this weekend my spouse and I had to move our mare and almost 4 month old colt. She’s quite used to riding in a small horse trailer, but the little guy was terrified of getting into it. When his mom realized it, she started getting on and off the trailer several times to show him it was fine. Then she went behind him and kept nudging him towards the trailer. Seemed pretty obvious to me that she knew what was going on and was trying her best to help the little guy understand it was all ok.

I’ve certainly met some horses that could have made me question the species’ intelligence if they were the only ones I knew. But there are plenty of intelligent horses out there. I’m really surprised that the prevailing theory was that they only respond to immediate stimuli.

I think the hard part is, almost no one realizes that they felt that way until they are finally on the outside.

I remember a really interesting article I read a few years ago that indicated the best way to change someone’s viewpoint was to welcome them into your community or group without requiring a change of mind first.

Turns out our social and emotional needs will trump our rational or logical side almost every time.

So you’re 100% right. What people need is a caring group of family and friends who encourage each other to question themselves in an effort to learn and grow.

Yeah, we are a nation, but I can definitely see how we might look a bit dysfunctional from the outside.

First and foremost, remember that it is very rare for someone to write an article or post about things that are doing just fine. So you are mostly going to hear about disagreements or angry opponents or laws that are problematic. That kind of content gets more views.

I’ll also say that our 2 party system is practically designed to cause division and arguments. And it is always at its worst during presidential election years. But at the average citizen level, most of us are just going about our lives with no pent up malice for those who don’t see the world the same as us. We definitely have generalizations in our head about people from other areas of the country, but with a few radical exceptions, the vast majority of Americans view ourselves as a nation. Even if we don’t agree on a lot of the details.

I did bad.

But I expected to do bad. AI generation has become too good.

You tell yourself you can identify them, because sometimes you notice weird artifacts and spot the AI quickly. But we’re really only noticing the bad ones. We’ll never even know the good ones were AI most of the time, so we can’t balance how good we think we are at spotting them against how often we were actually wrong.

This morning actually. I ran the sound system for a memorial service today. Young man lost to gun violence, not even 25 yet.

Felt weird for getting choked up, because I didn’t actually know him personally. Just hard to see all those people hurting because of a senseless and violent tragedy. And rough to know that his life ended so early and all that potential was just gone in a moment.