You are only as safe as you let yourself be.

I’ve had no issues with most of the sites in the mega thread, and if you utilise a bit of common sense you should be fine.

Get a VPN, download Malwarebytes and check the torrent comments before you download anything. New torrent with zero comments and no way for you to verify? If it’s not a site you have grown to trust, give it a miss for a week. Even if you do trust the site, if something in your head says “this isn’t right”, just wait or find an alternative.

Most other content is easy because hiding malware inside of a movie torrent is more difficult and easier to detect. Games require you to pay a bit of attention because I can name any malware I want “setup.exe” and a lot of people will mindlessly open it expecting a game to install.

For what it’s worth, I used FitGirl when I was a student and didn’t have any troubles with her packs. Not sure if anything has changed in the last ~4 years though.

Not just companies. Governments. I know of entire governmental departments that run exclusively off of a M$ environment. People who deal with capital C Confidential information are backing it up into OneDrive. It’s lunacy.

That one question “If you woke up tomorrow with 100 million dollars, what would you do to improve your life right now?” Is very powerful. My first response was “Pay off all my debt”.

The second most powerful question is: “What else?”

What else would you do after your debts are paid? What else would make you happy once you don’t HAVE to work? What else would you do now you are debt free and have the time you need to enjoy life? What else fulfills you?

By the time I hit the 3rd/4th “What else?” I realised what I was actually needing. In my specific case it was a creative outlet that I had been neglecting for years. I would remind myself daily about that one goal and, thought it took me 3 weeks, I eventually managed to pull out my guitar and start playing again.

2 years later and I’m sucking at guitar daily and going for runs. I have remade connections with people I thought were lost and genuinely started enjoying the little bits of life I have made. Debt is still there and work is relentless, but my 30min with my guitar has become a grounding point where I can remind myself “Things will get better, incrementally. What else can I do to make the little things better?”

Apologies about the wall of text. Depression is the worst version of ourselves and I hope OP can get through it.

Sorry if this isn’t the right place. But the comments here spurred this train of thought.

It seems everyone agrees that the ultra wealthy are the real problem. Yet there is always consistent divisive arguments about which group of people that the wealthy should be oppressing ‘more’.

Men and women of every race are being brutalized by a system that doesn’t give two shits about us. This system is governed by people who are incapable of empathy.

Studies and articles are released constantly detailing the destruction of our society/civilisation and instead of humans banding against the monsters that control the wealth (and, by extension, the world), yet we argue amongst ourselves.

We are being systematically turned on each other so that the 1% can become the .1%. Until the 99% can actually co-operate against the system, we are doomed to repeat this God forsaken cycle.