The activity therapist in me says get some easy to make meals, like canned soup or frozen dinners. You don't need to spend time and energy cooking when you're grieving.

Its going to be very hard, but the best thing for you is to keep living on.

Side effects from wearing a mask, delicious~

I can't prove it, but the vibe I get is the same people who use GenAI to "be an artist" on social media overlaps the population of people who use memes to appear "funny" on social media.

I want actual art and communities too.

I agree with all of this, but I worry that over a decade of normalizing meme culture has made people sick of regurgitative content, but not enough to demand more substance in their media.

I genuinely enjoy mere discussion of movies and shows on topics beyond surface level themes, even if they turn into debate on authorial intent. Just because it's actually something to talk about and the media can invite that question.

The fear of losing that option for literary debate is real.

Brains need stimulation, but its expensive to make art that does that. It takes time to engage with it.

and this ignores some schools punishing you for not getting the right message out of reading an old book and this turning students away from it.

So its optimized and reductive.

GenAI makes tons of stuff to sell. Youtube rewards tons of videos produced. Its all bite sized content to make money via volume - but the desire for money when individual works don't earn it pushes for this microcontent soup of stimulation.

its not even a difference between pop art and fine art either. pop art has more substance than content.

what frustrates me is that the chasing of money will continue to dominate until either all the money is gone or nobody has to worry about money for living.

From my observation, people have been saying this for years but it was tuned out for:

1) it was lobbied at TV and the internet as a whole which was ignored

2) the warnings were treated with the same indifference as climate change and ecological disaster.

Wonder what the common theme is.

So you'll stay put like a good batdog?

In that case, I don't see why you should be let out!

mmmm, nah, I don't think we will