Satisfactory. It’s been in early access for a few years now, 2019 I think? At the beginning of this year (2024) they announced the next update would be the 1.0 release. I’ve been playing it on/off for years, especially recently with all the strides they’ve made in development.

The game is like Factorio, but presented as an FPS. You get dropped onto a planet in a pod straight out of Halo: ODST by a space-future megacorp called Ficsit, with the goal of harvesting the planet’s resources for Ficsit off-planet divisions.

I have almost 1500hrs in Satisfactory since I got it, there’s no shortage of gameplay. Coffee Stain (devs) have been posting videos regularly, updating the community on new/discontinued features, revamped recipes and production rates, and even just being silly as much as being helpful, to the point where Coffee Stain is my go-to example of good devteam-community interaction.

Oh, and it also has a really good modding community, so if there’s anything that’s not in game, that you want in game, it’s probably already been made by one or two modders.

I can’t express the embarrassment I feel from how long it took me to understand this.

Yeah, antiwork was a low effort pace to cry about having to work for a living. Workreform was where all the genuine discussion about stagnating and/or shitty workplace practices.

Lately when someone asks me if I’m okay, my response is something akin to, “I’ll neve be okay again, but I’m alive so I guess I’ll suffer through it.”

My life has never been particularly bad, I’ve always had people around me that tell me they love me and care about me, but very rarely act that way. Throughout it all I’ve always found someone to lean on that actually shows some level of concern, but as I get older, those people have drifted away from me, physically and sentimentally.

I’ve never felt more alone in life than I do now, even with a person or two that might actually care, I know they have their own lives that take precedent over me, and thus I will end up alone anyway.

I can’t do anything to fix it, because factually, I can’t do anything right or commendable. Even when I’m doing things I’ve done flawlessly in the past, I find a way to screw up somehow and make my whole life worse, and my support network (what little there is) shrinks every day.

So I’m stuck in place, crying myself to sleep every night, hoping to whatever people call ‘God,’ that I won’t wake up. Then I cry even harder because there are people and things that I care about more than myself, but which I will never be able to do anything for.

I refuse to kill myself because of my sentimental debt to them, but if I can do nothing to help or honor them, then why shouldn’t I just end it all, and hope that fate treats them better than it has me? If I’m doing nothing right by being alive, what does it matter if I’m dead?

I hate the world, and generally, but not in totality, I hate people. I hate my life and I hate myself to the very absolute core of my existence. I just want all the pain to end.

I don’t know how much, if any of this, is due to mental illness.

I’ve been on depression medication for 7-8yrs and my grandma and uncles will outright dismiss any negative feelings I express at any given time, with a hand wave while saying word-for-word, “just don’t be sad,” or, “there’s other people out there worse off.”

Boy, I sure wish it was as simple as just not being that way. I don’t like being depressed all the time, and I would gladly just stop if that were possible, but other people’s suffering does not invalidate my own, in fact it directly contributes to my depression, as I believe that most of the suffering in the world could be minimized if more people weren’t so awful.

Not to mention the things they directly do that cause my depression. I’m the only one in my immediate family that is more of an “indoor person” than I am an “outdoor person.” My entire life, when they would check on me in my room, drawing, reading, or especially playing video games, the first question they’d ask is, “wouldn’t you rather be outside playing?” No, if I would rather be doing that, I would be doing that.

All of that was even before I grew up and realized that they’re effectively brainwashed political cult worshippers, but that’s a separate, off-topic issue.