Systemic Vampires & Where to Find 'em

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Hello Agora. On this lovely 21 December day, I would like to talk about vampires. I am not talking about the mythological creatures, but some of the systems that plagues the modern world.

The term "systemic" vampire is inspired by a video made by Luke Smith where he described video games as "time vampires". I took the liberty to expand this concept.

A "vampire" described is something that takes something away with you, often in excess. A vampire can have many traits (i.e a vampire can siphon both time and money). Some examples are as follow:

Time Vampires: Most video games can be considered as such. This especially true for MMORPGs. If you want some advice, I would reccomend to stand as far as possible from RuneScape as I can. This game is a very big time vampire.

Storage Vampires: Those types of vampires lives on your hard drive and will often play mind tricks on you to buy some external hard drives. Those are often created when buying modern video games or taking too many photos.

Money Vampires: Those vamps can take a lot of forms: mobiles games debt, addiction etc.

Mind Vampires: Those type of vampires are very prevalent on social media. They drain your mental energy and makes you depressed.

Hope Vampire: Those types of vampire feeds on your hope and happiness. Most people believe that they are manifested when watching or reading news.

Soul Vampires: Mostly web and UI designer who suck the soul out of most things they touches. An historical example of this can be seen with the evolution of Windows.

I have made this thread so that we can collectively identify systemic vampires and ideally takes steps to avoid entering in contact with them. I theorize that by starting to put a "vampire" label on things we don't like, it will become easier to sacrifice them on the altar of personal improvement.

Do not hesitate to list a new type of vampires or any activities that exhibit ones.
 

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Emotional Vampires: Feed on your good mood. They often come with a sob story and the need to toxically vent lots of shit you can't process and they won't deal with it. It's about dumping their shit in your lap and making you think about it, which drains your emotional capacity for people who deserve your attention. These people will not ever get a therapist because they prefer to air their dirty laundry with whoever is convenient, which, unfortunately, could be you.

Care Vampires: These people want you to do stuff for them. They can smell benevolence, and want to get every drop of it from the next soft-hearted, industrious schmuck that falls for their ruse. They need you to do something for them, always. When one problem is put to rest, a new "emergency" arises, that requires the intervention of the outside carer because the care vampire is for some reason just incapable of doing it themself.

Love Vampires: These people love the intense feelings of a new relationship. Once the honeymoon is over, they are gone. They do not want very much, just a few months of your undivided attention before they kick you to the curb because the feelings of a fresh new relationship disappear with familiarity. Beware: they will break your heart, and then someone else's, and then a few more.

These vampires are easily defeated with boundaries you yourself determine before interacting with them.
 
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nsequeira119

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I would argue time vampires are the most insidious variety listed here. It's very important to be aware of one's limited time, and how best to allocate that time. I tend to be extremely conscious of my time- I spend every waking hour doing something productive, or which brings me some measure of happiness. If it doesn't, it's not worth doing. I can't begin to imagine what it must be like to spend upwards of 5 hours or more a day playing video games. That doesn't even sound fun to me.
 
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幽邃森林

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Emotional Vampires: Feed on your good mood. They often come with a sob story and the need to toxically vent lots of shit you can't process and they won't deal with it. It's about dumping their shit in your lap and making you think about it, which drains your emotional capacity for people who deserve your attention. These people will not ever get a therapist because they prefer to air their dirty laundry with whoever is convenient, which, unfortunately, could be you.

Care Vampires: These people want you to do stuff for them. They can smell benevolence, and want to get every drop of it from the next soft-hearted, industrious schmuck that falls for their ruse. They need you to do something for them, always. When one problem is put to rest, a new "emergency" arises, that requires the intervention of the outside carer because the care vampire is for some reason just incapable of doing it themself.

Love Vampires: These people love the intense feelings of a new relationship. Once the honeymoon is over, they are gone. They do not want very much, just a few months of your undivided attention before they kick you to the curb because the feelings of a fresh new relationship disappear with familiarity. Beware: they will break your heart, and then someone else's, and then a few more.

These vampires are easily defeated with boundaries you yourself determine before interacting with them.
you are just listing bpd women personalities

BPD people definitely have these traits. The unfortunate reality is that even among people without BPD, these traits are incredibly common.

They can manifest from depression, but I think they're usually just found in immature adults who still need a "daddy" or "mommy" in their life (and there's an ever increasing amount immature adults in this world).

Thinking that these personality traits only exist in the crazies can bite one in the back as one may think "Well this person isn't psycho so I shouldn't drop them from my life. After all, I have flaws too." Then the next thing you know, you're deep in a relationship with an emotional vampire who also sucks away your time as you deal with their "weekly life crisis #15".
 
I would argue time vampires are the most insidious variety listed here. It's very important to be aware of one's limited time, and how best to allocate that time. I tend to be extremely conscious of my time- I spend every waking hour doing something productive, or which brings me some measure of happiness. If it doesn't, it's not worth doing. I can't begin to imagine what it must be like to spend upwards of 5 hours or more a day playing video games. That doesn't even sound fun to me.

I think its quite easy to spend 5+ hours playing video games, but in my case I get just exhausted of playing the games about hour 2. Now that I am grown I no longer have the game-playing stamina of a child. Lots of fancy tech but the appetite is no longer there when you have tasks to complete of the routine/daily/maintenance/repair variety and people are talking to you constantly.

Hello Agora. On this lovely 21 December day, I would like to talk about vampires. I am not talking about the mythological creatures, but some of the systems that plagues the modern world.

The term "systemic" vampire is inspired by a video made by Luke Smith where he described video games as "time vampires". I took the liberty to expand this concept.

A "vampire" described is something that takes something away with you, often in excess. A vampire can have many traits (i.e a vampire can siphon both time and money). Some examples are as follow:

Time Vampires: Most video games can be considered as such. This especially true for MMORPGs. If you want some advice, I would reccomend to stand as far as possible from RuneScape as I can. This game is a very big time vampire.

Storage Vampires: Those types of vampires lives on your hard drive and will often play mind tricks on you to buy some external hard drives. Those are often created when buying modern video games or taking too many photos.

Money Vampires: Those vamps can take a lot of forms: mobiles games debt, addiction etc.

Mind Vampires: Those type of vampires are very prevalent on social media. They drain your mental energy and makes you depressed.

Hope Vampire: Those types of vampire feeds on your hope and happiness. Most people believe that they are manifested when watching or reading news.

Soul Vampires: Mostly web and UI designer who suck the soul out of most things they touches. An historical example of this can be seen with the evolution of Windows.

I have made this thread so that we can collectively identify systemic vampires and ideally takes steps to avoid entering in contact with them. I theorize that by starting to put a "vampire" label on things we don't like, it will become easier to sacrifice them on the altar of personal improvement.

Do not hesitate to list a new type of vampires or any activities that exhibit ones.

I think if you have any fun playing Runescape long term you might actually be autistic. Very big indicator for autism is the repetitive tasks they provide on runescape. Just kill 20,000 snow crabs and you can level up from 42-43. Boring. Surprisingly Jamflex seems to score a big profit from all the membership purchases. Why are there so many paying autists there? I played it back when I was a kid, but I grew out of it and can't put together enough idleness for the repetitive tasks like woodcutting to trigger any fun anymore. Maybe I've been spoiled by playing so many different and exciting games.

I am on the fence on the storage vampire because I haven't needed anything more than 1TB of space and I still have 600GB free. I don't know what people are storing so much of that they need more than a Terabyte of storage space. If you aren't playing the vidya why are they on your disk? I think cyberpunk was only 60GB a pittance nowadays. I can store what maybe 10 copies of cyberpunk on this drive. Western Digital blues are $40 dollars for 1TB of data storage. I paid $100 for my SSD like 6 years ago.

Money vampires is the biggest one I have to fight in daily life. Everything wants money and bills only go up they almost never go down. Insurance, utilities, foods. All up. And theres always a surprise expenditure somewhere.

Hope vampires can be defeated by culling all negative external data from your sight. Negative news is only designed to depress you since there is nothing you can actually do about it. Even things like global warming. One person can't do much therefore its effectively no longer your problem. Cull negative data. It wastes your mind space and is technically toxic data. If its not something you can address or affects your life its effectively null.

Soul vampires exist but can also be evaded quite easily via not using windows. Upgrade to Debian 12. Free. Outclasses Windoze. Nowadays does 80-90% of what windows does. Is there any reason to use windows anymore other than habit/addiction? Personally, I choose to not let Bill Gates dictate my computer usage. :) But there are other aspects where the UI designers simplify things or make them objectively worse for the consumer. I am not really sure where they even find all the standards but they are all in lockstep and want to make fast changes all the time to the apps.

Greed vampires: Where you want to have so much but only for the sake of owning so much. Its the unproductive hoarding.
 
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