TL;DR # Dear quantumwoke, are you ok? Thank you for posting this here. I hope you and your friend are both happy and healthy. You don't have to read this, I started writing and just couldn't stop, feels good to put things in writing. #

I am a 25 year old guy from Melbourne, Australia. This is my first time leaving a comment on Hacker News. For the last two years, my home page has been set to /newest because of the wide variety of intellectually stimulating reading material. If this community did not exist, I would have missed many wonderful articles, ideas and opinions because I would not have stumbled across them by accident any other way.

Over the last few years I have had a little bit of misfortune and made a number of mistakes. I grew up in a loving and supportive middle-class family home and had no major trauma of any kind during my childhood. My parents are both well-educated professionals and have no history of mental illness. I've had issues with moods, sleep, energy levels and body temperature my entire life; self-diagnosed as probably on the mild end of 'rapid cycling biploar' in primary school with the help of WebMD (lol). During early teens, my parents thought I was just "going through puberty" and my high school consellor thought I might have "some anxiety" but I was good at faking happy, self medicating with weed and the really bad days were so rare that I was largely able to keep things under control.

Around three years ago, I randomly got the shit kicked out of me by three guys in broad daylight, just around the corner from my apartment building. I hadn't ever been in a serious fight before and while I was not seriously injured, I was bruised from head to toe and pretty shaken up. I did not realise that this event would mark the beginning of my descent towards rock bottom. About a week after this incident, I decided to go out alone for a quiet drink. It was mid-afternoon, I walked into a dingy pub in the city and bought a pint of beer. I'm sitting alone at the bar for a couple of minutes and I'm not exactly sure why but I decide to put $20 in one of the pokie machines. In retrospect, maybe I was just the right combination of anxious, lonely and restless; I was definitely looking for an escape. I'd never really gambled on anything before but it seemed like a harmless way to kill an hour or two. There were plenty of other people playing, the staff were all smiles and there is a small chance I might even win something, what's $20 right? A few minutes later, I'm tapping away 30 cents at a time and nothing much seems to be happening. I had no idea what a payline was or how the game actually worked beyond knowing that it is impossible to beat the house over time. Suddenly the gold symbols on the bottom of the screen begin the spin, a feature I had not seen before. After plenty of flashing lights and dinging bells, the cartoon character on the screen informed me that I had won a $2138 jackpot. I was in disbelief about how 'lucky' I had been, got the cashier to write me up the cheque and walked straight to the bank to deposit it. A few days later, I had an hour in between appointments so I went back to the pub. I put in $40 and I lost but it didn't concern me. Slowly the frequency of my visits grew; then I started taking $50 notes instead of $20 notes; then I started increasing the size of my bets from 30 cents a spin to $2 a spin.

It wasn't long before I was making multiple ATM withdrawals within the space of an hour at the casino; turning my phone off to avoid phone calls from my ex-girlfriend while I played for hours without a break and lying to everyone around me about my financial situation and whereabouts. It took just a few months for me to go from my first big win to losing every dollar, destroying important relationships and being suicidal on a daily basis. It was at this point that I started to seek help and I was eventually diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. Now that I am better educated and more self-aware, there is no doubt in my mind that I have always been a borderline. Before my addiction, I was probably a 2/10 on the crazy scale; I'd been a little anxious, a bit oversensitive, often somewhat depressed but NEVER psychotic or a danger to anyone. Pokies messed up my brain chemistry to the point where I walked into Police HQ and politely asked them to lock me up; I had plans to kill a government minister and several gambling industry executives and I was genuinely worried that I may act on these thoughts.

It's now been almost a year since the last time I entered a venue, I have a roof over my head again, I'm seeing a psychologist on a regular basis and planning to return to study. The experience has changed me forever in ways I could never have foreseen. I'm suspicious of behavioural marketing, social media and video gaming; I see them playing the same dirty tricks as the casino industry to get people hooked. I'm skeptical of our current political and economic systems; party politics and crony capitalism seem totally incompatible with the ethical and environmental demands of the 21st century. I'm fucking terrified of what happens when we combine modern knowledge of human behavioural psychology, the big data surveillance state, exponentially more powerful ML/AI, bioterroism and gene editing, trickle down economic models and personalised deep-fake filter bubbles delivered to your always connected holo-glasses.

In conclusion, I'm ok but I'm not so sure about the future of the human species. Please convince me that I'm wrong. Or tell me what campaigns, initiatives and projects you think I should spend my life working on (assuming that I want to leave the world in the best state I possibly can when I die).