Johnny Belgium

TRIGGER WARNING: SUICIDE !!! Had I been diagnosed before the LSD, it would have probably been with bipolar. My teenage years were marked by episodes of depression and what I now realize were mild psychotic symptoms. When I was 20, I had been in a mostly depressed phase for over 2 years. I was supposed to be studying. I stayed up watching news channels till a hole in the night. I watched TV till I was so tired I fell asleep. TV stopped me from being alone with my dark thoughts. Had I gone to bed at a normal time, I would be struggling to fall asleep with my thoughts. So I watched TV till I was dead tired, then woke up in the middle of the afternoon. Repeat cycle. For about 2 years until this story begins. I also had episodes which I now recognize as mania or psychosis. But I thought it was my rich and intense fantasy life. For instance: An attractive girl would catch my eye in the supermarket and I would have visions of us together. One thing, they were really intense. But they also kep...

I can’t count on my fingers how many times I’ve come across science influencers making fun of the Y2K bug. For those that don’t know: the Y2K bug was a problem with computers that had only reserved two digits for the year count and when the new millennium came along 1 Januari 2000, the date would become the year 00 instead of the year 2000. That could have led to catastrophic failures. Science influencers, or should I say Techno Optimists, make fun of Y2K and say it is proof that alarm of any kind is unwarranted. And that people who see danger are just crazy and stupid. But Y2K was actually a real problem and a lot of effort was spent updating computers to prevent bad things from happening. The problem was real, the problem was solved, and now they say that people that believed in the problem were being alarmist. In the early 1980s, climate change because of burning fossil fuels became measurable. If we had stopped burning fossil fuels, influencers would be making fun of the climate ch...