I think you are wrong about how off-putting your tears are.

In my experience, when someone loses someone they care about, it is comforting for them for other people to be sad and feel the loss as well. I think that if instead of focusing on your own tears and your embarrassment when you get emotional, if you still focused on the other person while you were crying, they wouldn’t feel obligated to comfort you. Then they could just continue to share with you and be comforted by the fact that you empathized and were moved.

When my brother and SiL had a stillborn baby, I went to visit them. They genuinely seemed somewhat relieved to see me crying while we visited together.

The whole reason China winning would be bad is because of their surveillance state ensuring no one gets around their curtailment of civil liberties…

Reminds me of this other terrible dystopian idea I saw the other day: https://nz.news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-announces-plan-control-182840080.html

Glad billionaires think they can steal the sun and sell it back to us now.

Maybe they thought it was like throwing a smoke bomb, and they could ghost while it clears.

As a parent: happiness is about expectations. The exhuberance of youth can carry them as long as we aren’t preparing them for the halcyon, easy days of the 1990s. Life will be hard, it always has been, but there can still be fun and rewarding experiences. They need to know resilience, independence, and be quick on their feet both mentally and physically.

There are many Great Filters, but this one is mine (ours).