I genuinely think this guy was born without fear. Like it simply doesn’t function in his brain. The more into his past you dig, the more you realize that him calling himself Reckless Ben is not a joke. We are all lucky that he is using his fearlessness for good. To him, this entire thing is just an interesting experience or however he phrased it. I can’t help, but admire him.

Welcome, friend! 🤗

I dunno if I would call it an endorsement. It was more so to show how impossible it is to have privacy online, lol. You’d have to go to extremes to avoid having any information about you end up online. And honestly, even if you went off grid in a cabin somewhere, there still is no guarantee that you will succeed in keeping yourself offline entirely. Kaczynski is probably also a bad example as you can find pretty much everything there is to know about him online. A selfinflicted fate.

Anyways, the point is that privacy doesn’t really exist if you own a phone, tablet or computer.

Yeah, exactly. I just always found it to be silly and arrogant to assume that I could ever outsmart agencies, organisations and companies that not only specializes in getting my data, but also built the tech and the systems I am navigating.

And I mean, I have enjoyed true crime since the Forensic Files were still explaining to normal citizens what DNA is and how that technology is applied in crime cases. I have casually followed the development of forensic sciences for at least two decades and let me tell you, there ain’t no way you can hide online. The ones who can either have the right connections, are unbelievably skilled and cautious with tech or they don’t use technology at all and live in an off grid cabin somewhere, where nobody uses smartphones.

I mean, I think the best rule of thumb is that unless you’re a tech wizard, you don’t have online privacy. At all.

I don’t believe anything is super safe and secure online. Not even Signal.

I always treat my online activity as if I am being surveilled because I probably am. Luckily I’m a boring bitch, so I don’t really have anything to hide, but I do appreciate that I can stay in touch with friends and family without having to linger on Facebook anymore. So there’s that.

The only time I feel annoyed about people talking about Signal is when they talk about it as if it’s this super sketchy app that shares your data when literally every single friggin platform online does that and the same skeptical people use them all the time without question.

That part annoys me because people keep acting like we aren’t already completely naked and our information owned by companies who do god knows what with it. If people are aware that everything they do is being surveilled and used for whatever purpose, then I don’t really mind, but it doesn’t seem like that is the case for many people. I genuinely still cannot believe how many people jumped on the DNA test trend, for example. Like holy shit, just give them your firstborn too, while you’re at it. XD but hey, we all make stupid mistakes now and again. I remember my first smartphone having a thumbprint lock and I just did that throughout my early to mid 20s without thinking about it. At least they only have one of my thumbprints but yeah. It’s so insidious, the way the tech world has lured us into giving up our information willingly.

The worst thing anyone can do when they are online is to believe they have any privacy. That is hubris.

This is what people don’t get when it comes to that story about the journalist. You literally have to go out of your way to invite someone into a group chat. That does not happen on accident on Signal.

I had to explain that to a few people who heard that story and were super skeptical about Signal being dangerous. Which is ironic because the same people would be using messenger and think nothing of it.

In the end, green energy will win. It’s already happening even though, right now, the black energy lovers are doing everything to pull the brakes on green energy. They will not be able to hold on to their power forever and many countries are already investing heavily in green energy. It’s only a matter of time.

Lord have mercy xD

You’re good, my friend. I should also have used a more friendly tone myself and not assumed the worst intentions in someone else, so I apologize for that as well. I hope you have a wonderful day and that the weather is a bit warmer where you are than where I am, lol. My toes are about to break off, :’)

Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that childfree was offensive, but the word “breeder” about parents is offensive.

The childfree subreddits were - in my opinion - extremely hateful towards children and parents to a genuinely disturbing degree. It’s why I ended up abandoning those subs back in the day because naive little me initially thought it was just a place where people who choose to not have kids gather to chat about their lives and thoughts about being childless. Instead I found myself in a friggin snake pit where every post was like an incel post, so full of hatred and degrading words to describe kids and parents.

Sorry about the confusion. Childfree vs childless don’t really carry any offensive connotations in my opinion. I see them as neutral descriptors and I use both interchangeably.

No. I’m childfree and I find that terminology disgusting. It’s something terminally online redditors use as a slur to feel superior. The childfree subs on reddit were no different to me than the incel forums. Same degenerate energy.

The thing is, as you grow older, your friends tend to have kids at some point and you kinda have to give a fuck about their kids if you hope to hold on to those friendships. That’s the point. If you invest into a community, kids are bound to be a part of that community at some point. Especially if that community wants to survive and not slowly and sadly die out on its own.

It’s not about who is better, it’s the total rejection of reality that I take issue with when it comes to smug childless people who look down on people who have kids. It’s like those people think that they will be 20 forever. That’s not how life works. Better to wake up and understand what it takes to be a part of society - which includes children - than to run around in denial for an entire life and then wake up one morning and realize that you allowed yourself to isolate yourself from society for no good reason. Now nobody knows you and nobody cares about you because you never cared to know them.

You don’t have to be a total fan of children, but if you hate kids and hate parents and look down on them and act like your childfree life is superior, you will end up having to deal with the consequences of that someday and it’s not going to be pretty.

Never said the rest of the world has it easy. People online just tend to only ever look at the world through the American lens.

I’m so sorry that some of us are born in places where we get to have good lives. How terrible of us.

Yeah. I’m Danish which ranks pretty high in almost all areas of social happiness, which includes parents. It’s kinda sad for me to hear that there are people out there in the supposed first world who thinks that traveling or going to the circus, or museums etc is only for the wealthy, when it’s a pretty normal thing where I live. Museums and amusement parks are pretty popular here. My boyfriend and I gifted a close colleague of mine a trip to Legoland with the whole family for Christmas one year and they had a total blast. Enough that they decided to go the next year again, lol. None of us are rich. We actually are in the lower end of the earning bracket in Danish society, but we can still afford to do fun things. You’d have to be really shitty with money or too sick to work or study to not be able to have a somewhat decent life in Denmark. The latter, I have been through, btw.

Sure, I think I can find studies that affirms my biases too if I really want to.

Personally, I don’t believe that parents are so miserable and childless people are so happy. Maybe at some stage in life that can be measured to be objectively true, but longterm, dude, I think the parents win the happiness lottery if the childless people choose to never move on from their 20s and grow up and take part in their community. I invest time and money into my nieces and nephews and into my friends’ kids too. Because they are family and I care about them and their parents and it gives me joy to know that I’m a part of something either directly or indirectly, depending on circumstances. I do it because I know that there is also a day after tomorrow where I would become alone and forgotten and have no one to lean on if I don’t contribute and invest anything into the future, which in this case it other people’s children.

At some point, we have to remember that the world is bigger than ourselves and if we only invest in ourselves our whole lives, we will end up very very very alone.

Right. It changes your perspective and priorities. It gives you the gift of community and culture in ways that someone like me won’t get unless I actively remember to seek it out.

I’m not a parent so there are many things I don’t have first hand experience with, but children have been a part of every stage of my life since I was little. I became an aunt before the age of 10, lol. I have seen the cycle of parenthood over and over and over again and now I’m going through it again with my peers who almost all have kids and their lives change in so many amazing and exhausting ways but they all recieve community and culture and the family is knitted closer. It is something I don’t know how to explain to terminally online childless people who have a very simplistic idea of what parenthood and childless lifestyles are like. I have lived that shit my whole life so I know what is coming for me and what is coming for the parents in my life and I know the ups and downs of both and I find both beautiful in their own ways. I don’t think the childless people who pull up statistics and and talk about parenthood like they know anything about it because they have read a few articles and studies that affirms their biases, I don’t think they realize what is actually coming for them.

It’s not that they will necessarily regret not having kids. But if they don’t attempt to get involved in community and culture in any way, they will be left behind at some point. Then they can brag about hobbies and vacations and sex and sleep, but it’s gonna fucking hit them like a ton of bricks one day when they realize that society moved on without them and that they no longer know how to speak the language of their peers because they will miss ALL the references and the cultural and community context that was built when they were busy jetskiing in Hawaii.

It is going to be lonely and maybe you like being by yourself like I do a lot of the time, but you still have to get up and participate and show interest and investment in other people’s children if you want to not end up completely isolated from society one day. That is my strategy and it really fixes that puzzle I could never figure out early on in my life when I realized I love kids, I just don’t want to be a mom. Now I’m an aunt, a playmate and someone whom parents can rely on if they need me. Win/win.

Oh dude, I know Dx back when I was still using reddit I had a few run ins with the childfree subreddits and I didn’t like the tone on the main one and asked around if there was a sub somewhere, where you could just talk with normal childfree people about the lifestyle. I was recommended the true childfree subreddit and was permabanned for my first and only post where I wanted to start a discussion about the doubts and the difficult choices related to choosing the childfree lifestyle. I was permabanned for trolling, which pissed me off enough to just give up on trying to find people like me online to talk to about it.

I actually really like kids and kids really like me, lol. They always think I’m “one of them” when I play with them at family gatherings and such. They seem to always forget that I’m adult who’s older than their parents a lot of the time. It’s just to say that I don’t hate kids. I tend to not like people who hate kids. I feel like it’s a good way of telling if I will like a person or not. Do they like kids or not? They can even be indifferent and I will be okay with them. But if they hate kids, I reserve the right within myself to label them as someone I don’t want to know.

I just could never be a parent because parenthood isn’t for me, lol. I would be really bad at it, so I leave that up to those of you who actually can do it and I respect you for it.

But to be completely honest, I think the losers who make hating kids and parents their only personality trait, those people are a very loud online minority. I don’t believe they are the majority irl. I could be wrong though. I don’t know any irl childless people who hate kids. They are either like me, they think kids are cool but they just don’t know how to be a parent or they are indifferent to kids or they just never got a chance to start a family.

That may be true in America, but not every country treats its citizens the way America does. In my country, normal families can go travel or visit zoos or circuses without being rich. Unions are your friend.

I very likely have some type of undiagnosed disorder which I will never really know for sure because I don’t have the patience, energy or money to get a diagnosis. There are definitely people out there with similar peculiarities to me who are great at raising kids. I just don’t want to take the chance and hope for the best when there is no guarantee that I’ll be one of the good ones. I’ll rather end up an old lady with a couple of regrets than I want to potentially fuck up someone’s childhood.

I get where you’re coming from! It IS hard work! I have seen it in the faces and voices of my friends and family for decades haha. But I also see the love and how much these kids bring to their parents’ lives. So I totally get what you mean, when you say that your kids don’t affect you the same way other people do. To me that just sounds like you’re one of the good eggs :D

Ah yes, the modern version of the “I hate my wife”-joke.

As a childless person myself, I can tell you that I rarely have the energy to “go have fun” after a long day of work. In fact, I prefer to just be at home and be a boring, basic bitch.

I can also tell you that almost every parent I know, and I know many because almost everyone my age have kids, are super active and do all kinds of fun things with their kids all the time. Especially those whose kids have gotten older and less dependent. It is a big, big, big misconception that parents never have fun. They do. A lot. They travel, go to parks and museums, theaters, circuses and talks with child entertainers. They take part in local community activities like sports and arts and whatever else is out there and they bond with the other parents who also wish to build a good community for the kids.

I have also seen how efficient parents are with time management. Not because they were born with that skill, but because they HAD to get good at it, so they pretty much never have a boring day ever. Are they tired and exhausted? Yes. Do they sometimes wish for a break from the kids? Also yes. But I would wager a guess that they all have lives that are tenthousand times more exciting than or many other childless people do. Not that it is a competition. Personally, I like the boring life where I get to do whatever I want without interruptions. I like that I get a break from other people because it overwhelms me to be around more than three people for long stretches of time. That just how I am and that is why I’m childless.

But I in no way feel superior to parents pr have this childish preconception that parents’ lives suck. You can only have that opinion if you’re never around people who have kids.

Sorry for being a party pooper, but I really, really hate this stupid joke and I hope it soon goes out of style and becomes something we look back at and cringe at in the same way we do with “I hate my wife”-jokes.