30 People In This Online Group List Things That Have A Much Darker Reality Than One Might Think

gorosheeta said:
Microplastics, the lead paint of our times.

itsleslie000 replied:
I’ve recently heard about this and the scary part is I don’t even know how to avoid it. For example with drinking water, water bottles have microplastics but tap water is also not 100% safe either (my tap is pretty good compared to most city’s) so how exactly can they be avoided in a situation like this. ITS WATER WE CANT REALLY JUST NOT DRINK WATER? thanks!!

Chocolate.

Two-thirds of the world's chocolate is made by child labourers in West Africa. Approximately two million children work on these chocolate farms, mostly in the Ivory Coast. It gets worse: those children often end up working on those farms because they were trafficked across an international border, and have their passports stolen so that they cannot go home; this turns them into child slaves.

Hershey, Nestle, Mars, Cargill, and Mondelez have been named as companies that benefit from the child slavery used to make their chocolate. The next time you eat a Milky Way or a Mars bar, remember that some kid lost their childhood, their family, and their freedom to make that bar for you.

P.S. Want to eat chocolate without guilt? Look up the Fair Trade movement, or Slave Free Chocolate. Yeah, it costs a bit more, but why do you think normal chocolate is so cheap to begin with?

OverallSafety791 said:
Civil forfeiture. You probably already think it’s [messed] up, and it’s even more [messed] it than you think it is. Even the name is gross.

TheSnowSquid explained:
Say you sold your old car for cash. On the way to the bank you get pulled over and the police find the 5k. If they even suspect that it wasn’t gotten legally they can take it. Then not only do they not have to prove that it’s illegal you have to pay legal fees to sue to get it back.

Being an adult with ADD. A lot of people see you as awkward and loud, but the truth is that your brain is operating completely differently than theirs through no fault of your own. Having been on meds for a time, it is night and day: my brain goes 150mph, but with meds it slowed down to 55. And getting medicated for it outside of your formative years is a real struggle. Most doctors will think you’re just after a high, but you’re literally sitting there going “I can’t THINK like other people do and because of it, I am suffering and need help.”

Edit: I’m out of date and did not realize that ADD is an outdated term. It’s what I’ve always called it. But technically ADD is now called “inattentive-type ADHD.” It’s ADHD minus the hyperactivity, basically.

93yourcultleader93 said:
Withdrawal

Jmac0585 replied:
I have a friend who did every drug he could except one: heroin. He didn't do heroin. I asked why, he said His dad was a preacher. When he was a young teen, One night at 2 in the morning he was woken up by loud knocking at the door. It was one of the members of his dad's church, asking the preacher for help getting off heroin. My friend said he watched this guy go through withdraws for a couple weeks, and swore he'd never do heroin.

Jaimaster said:
Recycling.

What, you thought because you did the right thing that the waste gets recycled?

Ha!

For decades it was exported into Chinese landfills by the literal barge load. Now China have banned the import of "low quality" recyclables, and this material instead sits in storage in many western nations as we collectively wonder what the heck to do with it all.

ColorfulBosk elaborated:
I work in the plastics industry. Something many people don’t realize is that the majority of plastics are not recyclable. The logo with a number in it, which looks really close to the actual recyclable logo, is in fact just a resin identification logo, that tells you what kind of plastic it is. It looks really close to the recyclable logo design, intentionally, so you think by actually throwing that plastic in the recycling bin, it get reused. The vast majority of plastic types are not recyclable, and the few that can be recycled and reused, only a small percentage actually is, because that’s just not profitable to go thru that effort.

I don't know about other countries, but here in Australia. Almost all apartment complexes, skyscrapers and hotels and many other structures in this country built in the last 10-20 years are built using PE (polyethene) cladding. It's the cheapest type of aluminium sheets on the market and the reason why it's cheap is because ITS MADE OUT OF PETROLEUM. Highly flammable and WILL cause buildings to burst into flames and deaths are almost an inevitable when they do catch alight.

That's right. Who in their right mind ever thought it be a good idea to build buildings out of petrol ? Especially in a hot country like Australia where summer temperatures can reach as high as 51 degrees Celsius.

And many people are completely unaware. Both myself, firefighters and other construction workers and labourers have commented many times on how those buildings lasted more than 5 years without sinking in on itself or bursting into flames.

It's [messed] up

echoes_of_the_moor said:
The fact that we spend more time with our co-workers and at work than we do with our own families. This is extremely messed up as a parent of a 4 year old. I see her maybe 3 hours a day.

TheMrBigT77 replied:
I did a zoom job reference for a friend and mentioned about work life balance. The two HR people on the call were very impressed that I felt so strongly about it. Like, doesn't everyone? Seems not...

a_tiny_ant replied:
I'm still afraid that mentioning workers rights puts me on some blacklist. Ineligible for promotions or contract renewal.

yosemite369 said:
The fact that most of us wouldn’t know how to survive if [excrement] hit the fan and mass production of goods halted. I live in a state where water is scarce and couldn’t farm if I tried because it’s so dry.

Main-Yogurtcloset-82 replied:
I read somewhere that if the power grid went down and production halted something like 60% of American citizens would die due to us no longer having the skills to hunt and gather. And I kind of felt like that was a [messed up]thing to say. For example, I live in a very densely populated city. Hunt and gather WHAT? Sure squirrels and raccoons, even rats but a city of hundreds of thousands all hunting small animals at the same time would deplete the population fast. There is also no edible growth.

It be different if we lived out in the boonies or in a more wild state like Wyoming or Montana, but for the average American they live in a place where there really isn't anything to hunt and gather to begin with.

ShaDow_R3PlAYz said:
Corporations selling your information for profit. Some people just don't understand how [messed] up it really is. Also ISP monopolies. [Screw] em.

Scalessz replied:
I guess I usually don't understand it because I don't know how much it really affects me, I mean, I don't know what they do with that info honestly.

nerevisigoth explained:
They mostly just try to sell you [stuff] that other people like you tend to buy. They might also try to sway you to a political view using persuasion tactics that worked on other people like you.

Beyond that, nobody cares about your data unless you're pretty important.