But if the birth isn’t today, the pregnancy might as well not exist. I mean of course the physical disadvantages of having a big belly are relevant, but the baby isn’t, it can’t do anything, it will never be born

What changes though is only your current external situation not relating to humans is staying the same. Everyone can still continue to grow and go to therapy, learn more about themselves and the world. This is basically almost completely still the real world. Most changes a human notices is the humans around them changing, not the walls of the apartment. Relationships still evolve, breakups happen, new love can be found. Science can still continue, we can use human memory and the internet to collect and analyze data. Instead of amassing physical wealth we might amass knowledge.

If I’m very smart, I could just use my intelligence to make money and then get beauty surgery.

For me, I came to terms with this by learning more about human nature and behavior and realizing that, in essence, we’re incredibly flawed beings with only a minimum of accidental rationality. That it’s absolutely not natural for us to “make sense” in a logical way, that truth doesn’t matter to us, that we are all incredibly selfish.

And that working against this nature to a “better” (in quotation marks on purpose, who really knows what’s better) state of mind and behavior requires massive amounts of dedication, conviction and constant effort, which most people simply don’t understand or can’t be bothered to do.

That humans/I have a natural desire within them/me to band together for survival purposes. This includes loyalty to family and feeling bad about being estranged to them.

That our emotions are just motivators making us do things that were/are useful for survival.

That we also have a great capacity for adaptation, which also helped us to survive.

And finally, to put it all together, that I can use my skills of adaptation to change my feelings about things after understanding them and deeming them not beneficial to me. So in other words, I use mindfulness techniques, my natural propensity for rationalizations, training/practice through repetition, my selfishness, etc, etc, to change my behavior/thoughts/feelings to a state I’d like to be in.

This is imo only possible with serious study of all these interactions and years of reprogramming yourself, which you have to decide how worth it is for you. In my opinion, it’s ultimately worth it for everyone, because I went from a state of deep unhappiness to a state of deep happiness/content, which is a massive quality of life improvement.

However, I also realize that because of all of this, I myself could just be talking bullshit and be just as or even more flawed than anyone else, so you can probably safely disregard any advice I give or things I say :D

Edit: oh yeah, and to give a superficial answer: fuck family/people, stupid people are not worth having around and making your life worse just because of some arbitrary tradition/feeling of loyalty/peer pressure. My dad is nowhere as bad as yours and I still don’t really care about interacting with him, and I like it that way.

Just to add semi-related, don’t worry about communities having little to no recent activity. I once posted in a community where the last post was 6 months ago and got relevant comments from 5 people anyway, giving me exactly what I wanted.

There is actually no contradiction. I’m pretty sure everyone would be on board with those CEOs going to prison for life instead of them being killed.

The difference is that a convicted murderer is being punished. Healthcare CEOs are instead rewarded with a life of luxury for killing people. The law does not punish them for their transgressions. A citizen can not imprison the CEO for life. What they can do is shoot em.

So what many people are saying is that “rather a bad person gets punished than rewarded”. And if the only realistic punishment possible is killing them, because it’s fast and easy to do, then that’s deemed as acceptable even though killing is bad. Being rewarded for being evil is worse.