Sorry to hear about everything you've been so far. Things have been rough for me as well lately. The only thing that keeps me from falling into nihilism and despair is God.
Thanks and I hope things get better for you. I wish I believed in a god/gods, but I’m just not wired that way as much as I wish I could. The community that believing opens you up to is a great part of it
Thanks! It's my first project on R3F. So I was both learning and building. It took less than 2 months: I spent last 2 weeks mainly on performance optimization as it was super slow.
This is mostly a thread of things computer-illiterate people don't realize can be automated, like selecting multiple rows before copying. I think Hacker News is at another level.
Take a look at Wikipedia, archive.org, libraries, blogs, mailing lists, usenet, IRC, a huge variety of websites offering free tools, etc. The list goes on and on.
None of them need work on a surveillance model either. To participate in or contribute to surveillance is a personal choice, not something forced upon you when you make a service available to the internet for free.
Wikipedia and archive.org are supported by donations. That is possible for an image hosting site/service.
"blogs, mailing lists, usenet, IRC" are all paid by someone and all tho their are free hosts for them (or similar services), a lot of people are perfectly fine paying for them and otherwise seem mostly content "to participate in or contribute to surveillance". I'm fine with that too.
But it's very much always been "the way the Internet used to be" to pay for things you value sufficiently. Someone has always paid for everything and gift economies are inherently limited. They're also much harder now than when the Internet was younger.
Academia also seems like a poor example of 'the gift economy spirit'. They're struggling to live up to that spirit badly enough that it's disingenuous to suggest it as something to emulate.
Lots of good suggestions here, but they miss the elephant in the room: you are trapped and you feel that. It seems like a lot of your anxiety stems from that.
My only suggestion would be to "climb out" of this trap. Since you can't find another job in your town (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21620176), try looking fo remote job openings. Freelancing and starting your own business are options as well, but I won't recommend them for you, at least for now.
Where would you start? I’m in the “learning sales stage” of my career and have stumbled on Sandler sales training. I’ve talked to a really excellent sandler trainer (link down below). The gist of what I discovered is that I must learn new habits when making sales calls (i.e more listening, better questioning, resist making assumptions). None of these things take an hour. However here is a YouTube video by the Sandler Trainer I talked to. It will take you less than an hour to watch and you could learn something. https://youtu.be/I4qrQz8h0AM
"The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink."
Sorry to hear about everything you've been so far. Things have been rough for me as well lately. The only thing that keeps me from falling into nihilism and despair is God.
I hope you find peace.