First off, I'm so sorry to hear what you've been through. Your family (especially parents) failed you by not supporting you in your education and early adult life -- that's when people need the most support as they grow. Nobody deserves that, and I hope you're able to keep finding the support you need. It's a relief to hear you have/had a friend to live with, and I sincerely hope you're able to keep finding that kind of support.

Hope is a difficult thing. It's often swayed by external circumstances, but ultimately it's a concept that you foster for yourself. Hope might be an irrational desire, but it's the reason anyone ever does anything. My outlook is that every person has potential to do good, and that potential is only "wasted" if they stop reaching for it -- that idea gives me hope for others and for myself. I've heard some pretty rough stories very similar to yours, but the common thread with many of them is that those stories didn't end there, they kept going and ended up somewhere. It just took them time; years, decades maybe, but it got them to a place where they were happier and more self-assured.

Really, the biggest factor in all of this is time. I'm also in my 20s, and I've also made some mistakes that "set me back" a few years and had me in a similar place of feeling hopeless and incapable. The biggest part of all of this is that we're still very young, and the years it takes to learn and grow feel longer now than they will when we're old. I think it's important to see this part of your life as a time to make mistakes and struggle and hurt, but also as a time to slowly but steadily grow and learn and find your people.

Your past happened and led you here. You had some say in it, but many of those factors of your early life were far outside your control, and now they're a done deal. But now, now is an important time. This moment is different from before: in many ways you have more freedoms, and while in other ways you'll still feel held down by familiar forces, now you have a different environment with different options that could build up to something better. This is what ultimately matters: doing what you can, in this moment.

I know I may also sound cringe in this long-ass post, but I think cringe often a by-product of sincerity. I sincerely do have hope for you, even if you're a stranger, even if I don't know your whole story, even though what you've said is an absolutely horrible experience, I still have hope for you. Why? Because you showed a scrap of hope by even posting this. A truly hopeless person wouldn't care enough ask other people what they thought, but you did. That tells me you want a better life badly enough to keep trying, and that's a huge step.

I hope all that philosophical/life outlook stuff I said helped you feel at least a little better. Even if it didn't, I really do mean it when I say I hope the best for you and truly believe you can get yourself to a place where you're happier. But I'm sure you're tired of my yapping about humanity and hope and potential, so I'd like to say something more materially helpful. The specifics depend on where you are, but I can list a few real things that you can do (or already have done) that can help you build some stability. All I ask is that you go through this list looking for things that might work, and try not to focus on what "won't work." I know I tend to focus on the latter when I'm struggling, so I hope this reminder helps if you do too. Now, here's some ideas that might be helpful:

• Research some local resources. I'm intentionally vague here because there's a lot of ways you can go, but here's some resources to look into:
  • Addiction clinics and treatment resources. You seem like you don't love how drugs are affecting your life, so I think it's worth spending a lot of time and effort trying to find some treatment/guidance to gain back control here
  • If you have a public library, please look into the programs they offer. They're honestly the greatest public good in this world, and depending on where you are and how your library is funded, they likely offer lots of free online education resources and in-person workshops, some aimed at people entering the workforce. If nothing else, libraries offer a place to be, a change of scenery, books, movies, computers, and music, all for free. Libraries are pools of knowledge with people who genuinely want to help you learn, so don't pass them up.
  • Places for art/creative expression. Super vague, I know, but that's because this depends on what your interests are and your location. These kinds of gatherings and communities may be online too, but it's worth finding real people nearby first and foremost. Do you like music? Your city probably has cheap bars or house shows you can go to. Like drawing, painting, graffiti? Good hobbies on your own, but even better when done in a communal setting. Local cafes, restaurants, and other businesses might host artist gatherings. Into DnD, TTRPG, or other games? Same as before, local businesses probably host DnD/game nights, and these circles are often welcoming and have a lot of down-to-earth people. Whatever the case, finding places where you can see and express creative work is important for the human spirit. Plus, getting to know people keeps you sane and increases your "network," so you might stumble into new opportunities thanks to one of these connections. You can find these kinds of meet-ups through city websites and social media pages for your library and local businesses.
• IQ is a scam and has no bearing on your worth. It's a shaky metric and it's validity has been questioned for years. Worst of all, it reduces you to a number; I don't care how "valid" a metric might be, it becomes dangerous as soon as it's used as a value judgement. Besides, you strike me as pretty smart considering you got grades in that B-C range under all that stress with zero actual support, and using a Reddit alternative tells me you're inquisitive. That matters.
• Life might be a series of distractions, but those distractions can be great parts of your life. All this to say, if you don't already have a hobby or creative outlet of some kind, think about what interests you and find some cheap ways to fulfill that interest. Drawing is pretty accessible, you can even get most of the supplies for free if you keep your eye out. Making music is now very doable for free on phones or computers, see things like Bandlab and other online tools for free playgrounds. Writing can be done digitally or physically cheaply too. Reading is free thanks to libraries. Finding things to do that interest you are one of the biggest things you can do for yourself.
• As someone who also has ADHD, I know how that can make everything harder. It takes time and you keep learning, but I know it's possible to build routines and structures that better mesh with the way your brain works. You're not in this alone.

I've written too damn much now, but I hope something there meant something to you. I'm sure you've heard a few of these things before, but I know when I'm hopeless I need to be reminded what my options are. From one young person to another in a rough world, I genuinely hope you're able to find what you need. I'm proud of you.

Looks like the specific design in this video is being sold here, but if you'd prefer something that isn't behind a pay wall there's a few options (like this one).

Side rant: I'm all for people getting compensation for creative work but I feel like it's wrong to put the source file behind a waywall instead of simply selling the actual print directly to people that don't have access to a printer, that seems much more fair imo

I think that does answer the question - for a lot of people, the reason they're religious is because they find it personally beneficial for one reason or another.

Yeah but it's not that accurate, and it leaves most normal mobile users out of the picture. I know YouTube knew exactly what they were doing when they removed dislikes, but it still seems absolutely insane to remove such a useful tool for sifting through the bullshit.

MS really has always done this, what's the name for this kind of marketing maneuver? Manufactured consent? Manufactured begrudging tolerance?

Saw someone post that City Journal article on mastodon a couple days ago and I'm amazed that so few people picked up that the City Journal and the article's author are basically puppets of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. I know most people aren't tuned to look out for think tank propaganda but it came off as really obviously FUD-y and unsubstantiated.

It's wild to me that anyone would say that sentence and not immediately realize they sound like an emotionless robot. Like damn, who would've thought people have a great need for authentic human connections? Not me!

This kinda shit you hear from people so deep in the world of product marketing is sickening and really shows how disconnected from they are from both reality and the point of selling a good product: benefitting people. I guess I'm just glad to see more stories of people ditching dating apps as they continue to become more predatory and less helpful.

This might be a bit of a hot take, but fractional scaling is generally not worth it, it almost always leads to some apps rendering things blurry and uses slightly more graphics resources. I've got a Framework 13 and I can say that just turning on the Large Text feature in Accessibility settings does the trick for me. This obviously doesn't work for everyone's needs, but if you're like me and just want things to stay crisp but big enough to read, this could be a viable alternative.

As long as the blue/red colors are different enough from the current colors, that'd make it a less confusing change. Even if the colors don't change, I think it's best to match Lemmy's setup.

The cool thing is, you're right that you've got marketable skills that employers want, you just gotta present them in corporate lingo that sanitizes it of any humanity and fun, lmao. You could rephrase that part about the Minecraft server to something like "Actively maintaining a high-uptime server with [X amount] of daily clients by utilizing [insert type of tools/languages here, e.g. MySQL databases]."

I've always hated the process of "translating" real life experience into the marketable buzzwords that employers like to see, but until it seems like hiring managers on a wider scale are willing to listen to words that normal people would write, I'm gonna keep trying to speak their language.

See that's the cool part, they can't even sustainably pay video creators via ad revenue 🤠👍

If there's anything I've learned from the past 10 years on the internet, it's that a purely ad-supported business model doesn't work. We've gotten to a point where a significant amount of consumers use adblockers (or are just less responsive to ads/rarely click through to the advertiser), and tech companies are trying to counteract this by raising subscription prices for paying customers and trying to find ways to maximize ad views (see: YouTube testing blocking people viewing the site with an adblocker, smart TVs with software closed-off enough that the average person can't easily block ads, etc.)

At the end of the day, this is ad companies being as stingy as possible to ensure their profits don't keep dropping. To me, I just think that betting on a world fueled by ads and data collection was a mistake, and we're finally starting to see how it's even hurting the companies trying to profit off that choice.

This depends on if you installed Steam as a Flatpak or through the endeavourOS repositories, but one way that should work is editing the Exec line in the .desktop file. You've already tried that, but I don't know what you put there so it might be worth editing that line again. Try editing the Exec line to Exec=GDK_SCALE=2 /usr/bin/steam %U and let us know what happens.