While I don't think all of people that are overdosing are "addicts" per se, I know many non-addicts that don't deal well with life that great. Sure, they're fine when everything is going pretty well, but they fall down when the going gets tough.

I feel for people. I've never felt despair or shame like I did when I hit bottom.

Much luck and love to everyone out there. Life gets difficult, and sometimes it gets really, really difficult. Lean on people if you can, anyone that you can. Find a community if you can, online or not.

I know this advice rings hollow when people are worried about putting food on the table or keeping a roof over their head or just trying to stay safe. But you can do this. Don't worry about thriving, just survive.

Sorry, for the rambling, this just really hit home.

The 3 dimensions of sobriety are about BODY, MIND, and SPIRIT.

A) PHYSICAL SOBRIETY

1. Go to AA/12-step meetings daily. 90 meetings in 90 days is a great first start. It's easy, free, all you have to do is show up. Get a sponsor, work the steps. It's the largest community of people who all never wanted to be there either.

2. EXERCISE! Can't stress this enough. Nature's free & sober fountain of endorphins. Aim for 3x/week+. Invest in a trainer at the beginning to help with motivation. Probably one of my most valued practices, critical for my sobriety.

B) MENTAL SOBRIETY

1. Therapy - 12 step meetings / groups are great, but it really works well when combined with an individual therapist. You realize there are loops of thought in your mind that can fester into relapses, and finding out how to articulate these feelings to a professional allows you to snip them.

2. Work - Start slowly, don't jump back into a career that's too demanding or stressful, but I found it important to be intellectually stimulated and constructive with my time.

C) SPIRITUAL SOBRIETY

1. Meditate! I strongly recommend Vipassana-style meditation. There are free, donation-based 10-day programs that are intense, but immersive.

2. Volunteer. Giving back to the community lightens your soul and spirit. Helping others helps you appreciate all the beauty in your own life.

Feel free to try any of the practices above or discover your own!

These are hard times, for all of us.

My background: grew up in the USA, with typical public school education. When I was a kid in school, we (briefly) covered times like the protests against the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, Women's Suffrage, and such. But it all seemed distant to me back then. I knew, at an academic level, that the people fighting for change had a hard time... but we (as a nation) got through it, and made things better (well, maybe not really, but that's another discussion).

We are living through history, right here, right now. I can now see it from the other side. I can see a little more clearly what those people in the history books were going through. I now don't have the benefit of reading in a book that it all worked out in the end (that women got the vote, that civil rights laws were passed, etc.).

It may seem like it will never get any better. That the struggle for a brighter, better future for everyone is futile. That hate and stupidity will drag down this country, and that we'll never recover.

Do we all have the courage to continue on? In the face of unfairness and injustice? What will the history books say about us 50 years from now?

One never knows when one sets out to be a hero what the end result will be.

What about when we try to fit those archetypes over a reality that is inappropriately matched to them? What about when we seek out grievances where there are none just because they have a hint of resembling the past?

The past shapes the present in this way.

The communists and the facists types are both radicalizing around anti-government sentiment more than anything and we've seen real lives lost as a result.

I hope things get better but everything is increasing in polarization at a time when people have a lot of free time and a country being consumed by an out of control virus that has been politicized.

It's a recipe for disaster.

The danger, the reason I point this out, is that when people see too much of it on the internet they start to lose faith in humanity, and they start projecting that world view on to the face to face interactions.

It has some of the most cases, sure, if you compare it by population though, it's still high, but it's not horrible. The US is #12 for cases per capita, most European countries are between 4,000-6,000 cases per capita, while the US is at 8,500, which is definitely more. But fewer people die per capita than in the UK, France, Spain, Sweden, Italy, and some other minor countries.

It isn't like the US has orders of magnitude more infections per capita, and there's more people dying per capita in many other major countries. In such countries you'd have about the same chance of catching the virus, and a greater change of dying, as in the US.

The majority of people that are refusing to wear masks are doing so because they believe the science/data supports that decision. You might disagree with that, and whether the science/data actually supports it is a different discussion, but they aren't just being "childish" and refusing to follow recommendations for no reason.

I think there's obviously political power to gain in making the situation look as bad as possible, so that a group can then use that as a foothold to advance their own political policies. It's unfortunate that the issue is so political already. But you can easily tell when it's happening when people are referring to "society failing" and needing to "reshape society" and saying how horrible it is in the US when it really isn't that bad, etc. You can't advance new politics without a narrative of the old way of things being bad.

I guess you can easily argue that there's political power for me to downplay the situation and make it look as good as possible, in order to prevent new politics from advancing. And that's true. But it's good to at least share both sides of the story.

That's beyond absurd. There isn't a single shred of evidence in support of not wearing masks helping the pandemic and quite a lot of evidence to the contrary. Not only that, but common sense says that putting a barrier between your mouth / nose and infectious particles and thereby stopping some of them from entering your body can reduce the chances of one getting sick by lowering the amount of viral particles entering the body. People knew this in 1918. Now we have science to back this up and have had it for over a hundred years. It is complete idiocy to suggest that science doesn't support mask wearing.

> But fewer people die per capita than in the UK, France, Spain, Sweden, Italy, and some other minor countries.

You listed the countries with more deaths per capita. Excluding countries with < 10,000 cases, there are 6. The 5 you mentioned, plus Belgium.

That means every other country in the world has fewer deaths per capita. The US is the 7th worst out of 66 countries. You can say that you're satisfied with that standing, but you can't say we're doing well.

Disappointment with that metric may greatly overlap with partisan disappointment in the current administration. But Occam's razor suggests the former does not require the latter.