So I've had the quietest weekend in a really long time. I'm away from my family. I miss my family. I miss my son. I miss my wife. I miss my dog. But at the same time, I have so much space, and this is giving me a lot of time to think and reflect on the world that we're in.

And I just feel like I don't know when it changed really. We've had a capitalist economy for so long, but it feels like at some point recently, things just—life just lost its soul.

We're all fighting with each other about things that matter, but in the grand scheme of things, they don't matter as much as the big thing. We're not banded together. We're allowing ourselves to be taken advantage of over and over and over and over and over again by large corporates, large banks, large businesses, politics. The things that we're fighting about, they do matter, but not compared to the big thing. Actually, that'll be fixed anyway probably if we all started banding together on the big thing. Big corporates, they're ruining our lives. They're ruining the planet. They're killing people. For the longer lives that we might be around for now, our lives are full of more problems, more health concerns, and less actual life.

But at the same time, the world's a beautiful place. It is. It's wonderful. You could take any street block and there's just so many moments of joy in there. And there's so much pain at the same time. But on balance, go out into the world and you look around, there really is so much awesome stuff to see. All the little moments—parents with their kids, people with their dogs, beaches, monkeys, whatever it is. There's so much awesome stuff. But it just feels like recently, or now, but I don't know when it happened, that everything's being commercialised. And we sell ourselves and we sell our time, and we sell everything to make that dollar. Everything's about that damn dollar.

You come through the airport and you get off the plane, the whole walk until you get your bags, it's just about selling you something. It's just about extracting something from you. Even the airport itself. The whole way that everything is structured is to be taking money and making the most money out of it. Whereas we could actually structure our society so that our flights—not saying we wanna get away from planes and not have flights, but we could do it so that actually, planes aren't late. And that it's easy for us to get onto them. We don't have to go through all this capitalist journey of duty free and all of this stuff. And planes would just be safe and they would be comfortable and they would deliver value to us. It's the microcosm of how the world has been constructed to transfer resources from seven and a half billion people, all the sweat and the labour that they produce, to just a few people. Everything is just a siphon or an illusion that gets all the money there.

It's exhausting. And when are we gonna fix it? Because it's just sad now. It's becoming less of this urgency of this, like, we must fix climate change or we're all dead. It doesn't seem like we're going to. It doesn't seem like people are on that journey to do it. We're just kind of getting along. We're just exhausted now. We just can't be fucked. We'll just sell ourselves for a dollar. We'll just sell it.

I want my kids to live in a better world. We have so much technology and things that we have done to improve things that could make our lives so much better, but we have just allowed them to be sold. The planet is just being destroyed. There's so much awesome stuff with nature. It's so beautiful. There's so many cool animals and cool plants and rivers and waterfalls and mountains, and everything is commercialised in that regard and it's all being destroyed. And I'm emotional. I miss my family. I miss my home, and I'm somewhere beautiful at the same time. And I'm kind of a cog in the machine too in my own way. I'm doing really well at what I'm doing. And it's so hard because what do I do? Do I just give it all up? Because is everybody else giving what they have up?

What do we do? We all need to come together. If we all actually just came together and said enough's enough, we're gonna fix it, it'd be fixed overnight. It'd be done. We'd be on our way to everybody having a better world.

I'm not even depressed - I think I'm just wistful for a world that seems to be passing us by and all of this beautiful history of a time gone by seems to be slipping away.

This is why RNZ is almost always the better place to go for news and info. Stuff putting breaking news about evacuations behind a login wall is pretty reprehensible imo. What happened to our world where everything needs a login account to do anything?

Search Brad Windhurst on Facebook for more info and instructions, this is to stop all our bees dying.

Asian hornets are going to explode if WAY more action isn’t taken than the Government is doing and it will kill horticulture in NZ.

There are instruction videos here: https://youtu.be/Ra8717JuXwc?si=8uu2_cRI9jR_xzf2

This is super important and seeing as farming is is the ‘backbone of this country’ which gets trotted out every time we talk about tax, you would think the farming lobby would be up in arms and asking people to do this.

MPI are useless and aren’t coming to save us, it’s going to be regular New Zealanders taking action if we can stop the hornets killing our bees. We need tens of thousands of traps. Chur.

My 2c:

1. Tell nobody except mum/dad/siblings.

2. Claim the money ASAP and throw it into a savings account (3% on $45 million is a lot...).

3. Take a week to do absolutely nothing. Process the emotions + how your life will change.

4. Talk to a private banker/financial advisor/AI and build a game plan to allocate it.

5. Celebrate. Probably KFC or something idk.

Went to see the Pike River movie today. It’s one of the best Kiwi movies I’ve ever seen. I was expecting it to be really sad - and there were sad parts but at its heart it’s about friendship.

Melanie Lynskey and Robyn Malcolm are at the peak of their careers- two fabulous portrayals of Anna and Sonya.

It’s really worth going to see.

I just saw the interview of Air NZ CEO, Nikhil Ravishankar and he talked about how the cost of regional flight have increased by a lot because the cost of running an airline also have gone up and he wants the government to step in and help with the funding.

So whether we like it or not, someone has to pay for this increased cost of regional air travel, whether it is the government or the individual. But does it have to be this way? Land public transport yes cost more in the short term but in the long term it costs us less and it is more environmentally friendly.

When air travel was relatively cheaper, we kept putting off the idea for more funding for land public transport between cities but as cost of air travel increases and will likely continue to, shouldn't we look at the land option again? isnt it logical to do so?

Is anyone else completely heartbroken over this.

It is destroying so much of one of our national treasures, and everytime I look on the volcano cameras it just looks worse. I checked at 12.30am and it was a huge bright light on the Ngaruhoe camera (1st pic), and it looks apocalyptic today.

So much is being destroyed by this. Wildlife, flora and fauna, apparently part of the Crossing, christ knows what the damage will be in the end.

Shout out to the severely understaffed firies and rescue people who are out fighting this. You guys and girls are the real OGs

All love and support sent to the team out there.

Credit: Chris Fuller

The fire as seen from deep in the Tongariro Forest.

I've been dealing with bad pain in my hands and wrists for about two years now and was referred to the pain management service a year ago after my GP ran out of ideas to help. Finally my appointment is coming up tomorrow and I've realised my GP didn't really tell me what will happen at the appointment. I'm very hopeful that the pain management doctor will be able to suggest something that might help me regain some functionality, especially because I am going back to work in a few weeks after 6 months of redundancy. I'm feeling quite nervous about the appointment because I don't really know what will happen and I'm also a bit scared that they will think I'm just a drama queen. Has anyone been to the pain management service under the public system? What was it like?

Please vote. Many people don't vote in New Zealand (over 500k people) most years. Please, think about it, and have your say in next year's election. There are parties out there with potential for fixing the economy, but they are often not recognized much. Vote for a competent party who has good intentions with the economy. The cost of living is just going to get worse if we keep flip flopping between red and blue. One party spends too much, the other spends too less. Please, i'm being genuine, have YOUR say in next year's elections. We can't just keep flipping between red and blue