Sad and numb

2026-07-14

I just kind of feel sad and numb all the time. I'm deeply anhedonic and depressed in ways that are so hard they've just started to feel like nothing. I feel mechanical, most days. I feel like a list of obligations rather than wants, like a machine that shuts down when no one has demands of it.

No wonder I frequently empathize with "the li'l guys" as I call them, I too feel like a thing that puts in massive amounts of work when asked but has no will of my own.

Yes, yes, this is all angst and sturm and drang and some other German words I don't know. But that's part of the weirdness of an actual personal blog, right? To be that outlet for feelings that you don't know how to deal with otherwise?

Lately, I've been reading the book Taylor (2019) Race for profit: How banks and the real estate industry undermined black homeownership, UNC Press Books. It's a strange one because it makes me think a lot about how, well, attempting to fix systems is incredibly complicated. Like, yes, there are a lot of malicious actors but it's also not obvious how you deal with those malicious actors effectively and there are a lot of roads to hell paved with defensible decisions. "Just stop the racists" sounds like a good plan but, well, how? I think I've been getting frustrated in-the-large with how much proposed solutions are "I would simply make bad people not do bad things" and we don't know what that means beyond a toy model.