You could allow that sadness to draw you to fun and happy things, and then never, ever give them up. You could keep the spark of joy alive inside you.

All it takes is valuing it more than being 'normal'.

No, this is my life experience. I am 62.

At the age of eleven, I read a collection of short SF stories by various authors called 'Tomorrow's Children', edited by Isaac Asimov. In the preface, Asimov wrote about how important it was to keep a childlike sense of wonder alive.

This hit me very strongly - even at that age, I realized that adults were trying to destroy any such thing in me, to make me fit in better, to make me a good worker, to make me as gray and boring as they were.

So, I made a vow to the universe - seriously, I really did - that no matter what I would always keep my childlike sense of wonder for the whole of my life. And I have kept that vow.

As I grew up, and grew old, I watched people of my age grow empty, and gray, and bitter, and hollow. I have seen my generation stop caring about anything good or decent or right in exchange for security, or power, or greed. I have seen them turn to wine and beer swilling pigs who shit on anyone younger or anything fun.

As for me - oh, my room is filled with video games and board games and awesome toys I could never afford when I was young. I draw and write and sculpt and paint miniatures. I read for pleasure and for fun. Science fiction, fantasy. I read stories out loud with one of my spouses (I live in a polyamory!) and we play and sing and have fun.

You have to grow old. But you don't have to grow up into a monster. You don't have to give up wonder, or joy, or anything just because society expects it. Fuck society. Fuck the gray, dead people of the world.

If somebody like me can keep their soul, so can you. Or anyone. You just have to choose to keep being amazed at stuff even if others think you are silly or weird because you can imagine worlds in raindrops, or marvel at the shape of a leaf, or enjoy comic books or tabletop RPGs or whatever.

You are losing the most precious function of the brain - the ability to Suspend Disbelief.

Suspending Disbelief is the very capacity that makes it possible to enjoy any story, movie, radio play, song, legend, myth, tale, or even joke. Within that ability is all humor, song, poetry, play and joy. It means going gray and dull and dead inside, because you are taking life too seriously.

And that is dysfunctional, because life is essentially absurd. You exist in a meaningless cosmos within which nothing you ever do will truly matter, and you will die and be forgotten within three generations. What was your great-great grandmother's favorite color? Did she like sweet or savory? What was her favorite dream? That will be you - forgotten.

Get silly. It is your only hope. If life is so serious that you cannot enjoy fiction, your soul dies. Souls themselves are fiction. Keep what is left of your childlike wonder, because once that is lost, it is very, very hard to get back.

Be amazed at little things. Give up the notion that anything is truly meaningful. Embrace the absurdity and acknowledge it - and you may yet save yourself, and the fun of life and stories.

Play like a child, purposefully. As therapy.

I'm 62, and I have seen things and lived things you cannot even imagine.

And what if there are? We have passed peak, essentially, everything. All of the easily-obtainable metals, fuel, and other unrenewable resources have been used up. That is why we have to make use of fracking, deep drilling, and high tech to acquire more.

Any survivors of a cataclysm are going to be unable to ever begin another industrial revolution. They will never be able to jumpstart a technological civilization again. The industrial revolution was one-shot because we literally had coal and metal laying about in streams or just under the dirt of a hill. That's all used now.

That means living like Amish, farmers, and nothing more, until the sun expands and devours the earth, sterilizing it forever. No space, no colonies off-world, no more computers, no more televisions, no more video games. Just hard work, short lives, and early deaths, for however long Man exists. No future beyond just being an agricultural animal who can only curse your generation for the end of all hope.

The 13th century, for the rest of the human experience. Serfs tilling soil, and nothing more, not ever, period, amen.

That is not worth surviving for. That is literally a dead end.

Oh, god, I'm an idiot. I should have instantly realized. Sorry.

The problem with capitalism is that it always seems to end in a very small 1% owning everything, and everyone else starving, ending up homeless and destitute, no middle class, and those not homeless essentially abused serfs working for a cruel and uncaring oligarchy.

How's your paycheck lately, cuteman? You paying off that lovely home okay? Got that new car this year? You enjoying your vacation days? Got the required minimum million in the bank to begin a reasonable retirement savings?

Unless you are an Uyghur in 2022, in which case massive genocide and concentration camps. Or you say anything negative against Xi, in which case you will be disappeared. Or you support democracy, where you will be censored, and if necessary, killed. Or you protest, in which case you will be killed. Or you do anything the government of China does not approve of, in which case your Social Credit will tank and you will be unable to work, live, or travel.

But, other than that, China is a happy place.

Wow - you never heard of incurable disease or nuclear weapons in your entire life?

You must be very, very young. And sheltered.

From Wikipedia:

There is no human vaccine suitable for worldwide use. Only a few countries such as Cuba, Japan, France, and China have approved the use of inactivated vaccines with limited protective effects. Side effects such as nausea, injection site redness and swelling have been reported after the vaccine was injected. Since the immunity induced by one Leptospiraserovar is only protective against that specific one, trivalent vaccines have been developed. However, they do not confer long-lasting immunity to humans or animals. Vaccines for other animals are more widely available.

What this means is that when they try, the human immune system doesn't remember, for some unknown reason, for very long.

We are not just one being - we are a colony creature. We live only because of other animals that live in, on, and all over us. We couldn't digest our food without our symbiotic gut bacteria. We couldn't avoid being killed by fungus if not for the bacteria on our skin that constantly eats it. We couldn't avoid blindness, save for the microscopic insects that live in our eyelashes - kill them off, and people tend to lose their eyesight.

We are a world, and entire populations live and die upon, and within us. Our biome, our personal ecosystem sustains and protects us.

Yes, sometimes it can all go horribly wrong, when one faction gains an upper hand - that is true. Or if one of the species on us gets into somewhere it doesn't belong, such as if bacteria on the outside manages to get inside. But, in a very real way, we are not one creature.

If we were rendered entirely 'clean', with no cells or organisms upon or inside us of any kind, only human cells, only us, we would die from multiple reasons. It would be a race to see what failed first.

We are many.

Forensics. The marks on bones show where muscles attached and how big they were. Grooves and pits show where nerves and blood vessels ran. All animals with skeletons follow the same universal body plan, and how the bones go together is well known. Wear and tear on the bones shows what stresses they were put on when alive - from that we can calculate weight, habits, behaviors and movements.

But there is always more than just bones. Imprints of skin and soft tissues in the rock tell even more, as well as traces of proteins and DNA that survive intact. Add in parts trapped in amber, or preserved in peat or other chemical laden preserves, and even more can be known. In some cases, such as the Wooly Mammoth, entire animals were perfectly preserved in ice - explorers have literally eaten their meat.

For even older creatures - try tens of millions instead of thousands of years, such as dinosaurs - there are now examples of tails, with feathers, preserved in amber. We know exactly what dinosaur feathers looked like thanks to that. We can recover the color pigments of their feathers, skin and eggs (eggs tended to be blue-green, their feathers every color including neon shades like parrots, and skin, various browns and tans).

Add to that footprints which can tell us size, gate, weight, density and more, and we have a wealth of information!

You are correct, of course. But the disgust is also part of our wiring. We evolved to find such things disgusting, because in most cases, slimy, poopy, bloody situations are vectors for disease transmission. It serves survival to find all such sensations and appearances disgusting.

Which is why we also have a circuit for shutting it down during things like sex. The same person who is disgusted by slime and goop and oozing will, if aroused enough, find all of those things attractive temporarily.

It's amazing machinery, and amazing evolutionary programming, but - also really grotesque.

Though, as stated, I only find it so because my meat evolved to keep me from messing with it in most cases.

It is. Fortunately, bacteria are everywhere, and people are messy and sloppy. One way or another, everyone develops a gut biome.

It's just that the best biome comes from your mother, and establishes early. There is speculation that some issues - including obesity - are strongly related to the specific gut biome people gain in early childhood.

Some morbidly obese people might - I stress might, it hasn't been solidly proved yet - could be victims of, well, not enough poop all over them when they were born. They picked up a gut biome from the environment after, and it may not do the right job - goes the theory.

Put simply, babies are most often born in blood and shit. It's messy. And that shit (or thin liquid, or mucus) contains gut bacteria which the baby needs to survive. All it takes is brief contact. Even a birth in water is not free from this issue, the bacteria get into the water. Gut bacteria are crawling all over the anal/genital region all the time, as well.

Babies born under overly-sterile conditions often suffer digestive problems; that messy birth is actually helpful.

They also get some gut bacteria from the mother's mouth, breasts, and any other part of the body they suck or lick.

Fecal bacteria - gut bacteria - get all over everything in such situations, and some of it gets into the babies mouth. Welcome to biological life; it's disgusting, but it works.

Take it off the wall, put it on the table, grab some wargaming figures and some dice.

That is my thought on this.

Go watch 'Bunny' the dog on YouTube. Has learned around 300 words, through the use of paw-activated buttons. Bunny absolutely has episodic memory, as well as long memory of the past, additionally, Bunny plans for the future and makes requests for things and events yet to come.

Bunny can relate the content of dreams and concerns, and remembers events in order.

Bunny is not the only dog that can use paw-buttons to communicate; there is now an entire industry for this, and some cats have learned as well. The buttons and holders are sold commercially now, and more and more amateur scientists are exploring how much a dog can learn, and how deeply they think about their lives.

The benefit - beyond establishing that dogs have minds like ours - is that the dog becomes vastly less frustrated and neurotic when it can say clearly what it wants, what it fears, or what is bothering it.

The downside is that the dog now can, and does, make requests and even demands, and expects respect as a member of the family. Language access means it can complain if things go badly, or insult if it is angry.