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Cake day: July 18th, 2021

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  • Hey. I’m so sorry that you’re feeling so spent, so tired, so helpless.

    Faced with these feelings, you have tried what many sensible people do: we try to feel better by telling ourselves that it’ll be okay, that tomorrow it’ll stop raining. Sometimes that helps, especially if it indeed stops raining. However, if the rain doesn’t stop, telling ourselves that it’ll be okay feels fake. This is actually backed by research on the topic.

    I don’t mean to say that optimism is bad. I mean to say that maybe there’s different paths that we can take, paths that I’ll mention here. Maybe some of these paths are new to you (given that you mentioned wracking your brain). Hopefully they get you closer to where you want to be. Maybe you already know the paths (again, given that you mentioned wracking your brain). Hopefully there’s a new way you learn to traverse them (for example by bike instead of walking, or looking up at the canopies and the valleys instead of looking down at the ground). Maybe they don’t resonate at all with you, and at least you can have the certainty that you’re not alone, that we have all struggled finding our path. It’s all okay. Ultimately, it’s up to you what you do.

    This is a public forum and many others will hear my words. They may have heard me before and they will know that I tend to recommend a set of paths that lead to psychological flexibility. I do this because, regardless of what we’re faced with in life, we will always be accompanied by our brain and its voice, our thoughts and their recommendations, and our sense of self and its aspirations. Psychological flexibility teaches us how to relate with ourselves, how to approach that machine that sometimes tells us that life is unlivable and we are unlovable.

    You mentioned that your brain is telling you that the world is a mess, that you’re lonely, that you’re old. In a weird way, it’s trying to take care of you. It’s predicting where the tiger is hiding and how to avoid it. “Don’t try dating or finding new friend-groups! It’ll be exhausting and you’ll leave there with nothing good”. “The world’s a mess. Don’t even try.” But our mind plays tricks on us. It’s like a friend who is trying to take care of us but is sometimes confused. It’s an advisor who sometimes nails it, sometimes fails miserably, and sometimes gets stuck. It’s usually when our inner advisors get stuck that our lives become full of unnecessary suffering.

    That’s psychological rigidity. Our mind becomes a dictator, entirely sure of how the world works and what can and can’t be done. Our thoughts become repetitive and our life shrinks, kind of like how you described the suffocating walls, closing in on you.

    The good news is that there is a way of pivoting from psychological rigidity to psychological flexibility and that there is solid science behind this. Here’s something I’ve said elsewhere some time ago:

    Imagine the longest essay you’ve ever had to write for school. A dozen pages? Two dozen? Now picture it in front of you, printed out, on a desk. Imagine there’s ten copies of your essay spread around the desk. Add another layer of essays on top. And another. And another. A hundred times. If you organized the documents into a single stack of paper, it would be 1.2 meters tall. That is how many randomly controlled trials there are on the effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

    Here are two places where you can look at the evidence: one and two.

    ACT has changed my life and that of hundreds of thousands of people. While I would suggest to get an ACT therapist (and a good one!), there is evidence that you can learn the skills of psychological flexibility if you engage in the appropriate mental processes, regardless of how. You can learn about how to do ACT exercises in A Liberated Mind, which you can find here https://stevenchayes.com/.

    I hope you can see how those same words apply to this context.

    Now, you mentioned crying daily with a stiff upper lip. But you also mentioned that you can feel your innards wanting to live, to truly live. These two are related. We hurt where we care and we care where we hurt. The crying and the yearning are two sides of the same coin. You have a yearning inside of you for life-affirming experiences. It hurts to see yourself not having them.

    I just wanted to point out that this pain that you feel is tied to the passion for living a well-lived-life that you have inside of you. That energy that you have spent trying to tell yourself that things will get better, crying, putting up a facade— that energy can be redirected to a life that you find valuable. Hopefully the tools I mentioned earlier help you do exactly that.

    Two things before I let you on your way.

    First, you may consider the program “Healthy Minds”. It’s an app/program developed by a non-profit that has been tied to the research of meditation and human flourishing. I donate to them because their research is well grounded, their app is well designed, and they’re life-changing. If you cannot do the investment of time or money or effort for ACT, Healthy Minds is the single easiest thing that you can do daily that will have the biggest impact in your life.

    It’s important to note that, while Healthy Minds is the easiest thing with the biggest impact, it’s not a replacement for ACT or otherwise therapy. Here’s a very cartoonish way of thinking about it, but it exhibits my point. Let’s say you have been crawling on the floor. Healthy Minds helps you to walk. ACT is like the high-speed train. Walking is not a replacement for the high-speed train.

    Second, as to feeling like a rusty and corroded car, it’s worthwhile to point out that there are ways of removing rust and reinforcing existing structures. Heck, there’s even recycling! A phoenix can arise from the ashes in the same way that people can grow from trauma (it’s a thing; look up “post-traumatic growth”).

    I hope this helps.


  • Adding to what others in thread have said, there are languages that are more usable and are more user-centric.

    SFW edit: There are automatic transmission cars and manual transmission cars, both made for humans, one easier than the other. There are calculators that can compute lots of values and mental math classes, both for humans, one easier than the other. Ergonomics matter.

    Although I do concede that, depending on the context, knowing more about something is better than not. I wonder what happened to the original meme’s author for them to create the meme.





  • I recently met someone and minutes later they slapped my thigh and rubbed it, only to reveal a dead mosquito they slapped and rubbed to make sure it was dead. I immediately understood what happened, but, when she realized that her mosquito-killing habit ended up slapping a stranger’s thigh and rubbing, she apologized profusely.

    It’s really, really unfortunate that the girl wasn’t able to see the context of your actions. There’s this saying that you hurt where you care. It seems like you’re aware of how you feel and your values are clear. I hope you can find ways of bringing those values into your life. You can’t go back, but you’ve got now.







  • I agree that mental rules add complexity, mental rules such as “If I run, I’ll be seen as weird”.

    I also agree that the change to running not a reflex in the sense of “This pan is hot! I’ll instantly move my arm!”

    Without looking at the data, I’d assume the switch-to-running point is arrived at statistically. Most people have a point —or a range or a distribution of points— at which they start running. It could be that this switch-to-running point is similar to breathing: most people go from inhalation to exhalation (a point we could call switch-to-exhalation or, if reversed, switch-to-inhalation) without thinking about it, but they can also consciously control it.

    The contradiction you mentioned disappears if you don’t consider the switch-to-running point a reflex, and instead consider it like breathing. You can consciously hold your breath and therefore change the switch-to-exhalation point. You can also consciously walk faster and therefore change the switch-to-running point.

    I agree that the exhaustion is different: different muscles are being used and they’re being used differently. Maybe saying that was factually wrong. My bad. I was trying to get across the point that energy expenditure past the switch-to-running point is higher if you choose to keep walking than if you run. But the fact that there’s more energy expenditure doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be more exhausted; it could be that when you run, even though you can save energy, it actually uses muscles that are not properly trained and therefore get fatigued faster than the muscles you’d use if you walked.



  • snek_boi@lemmy.mltoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldThe T word
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    12 days ago

    Maybe. Sorry for being a pain in the ass… I just worry about Poe’s Law

    Poe’s law is an adage of Internet culture which says that, without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views.

    The downvotes (which atm are 17% more than the upvotes) to SatansMaggotyCumFart’s comment make me think that Poe’s Law did come into effect.



  • There’s a Know How or How To (I don’t remember the name of the YouTube channel; EDIT: @executivechimp@discuss.tchncs.de found it. The video is linked in their comment) that explains why we used to believe moderate alcohol consumption is healthy.

    Turns out, those surveys only ask “How many drinks do you have a week?” Notice they tacitly ask about the present, how many drinks now and not in the past. If you were a very heavy drinker in the past and got sick from it, you likely stopped drinking altogether.

    Not only that, but people with chronic illness many times choose to not drink at all.

    These two populations (sick ex-drinkers and chronically sick non-drinkers) make it seem as if not drinking is not that healthy. But remove those groups from the data analysis or control for past alcohol usage and pre-existing conditions and you end up with a clear pattern: drinking alcohol in any quantity is unhealthy. The more, the worse.

    Sorry for the lack of sources; I’m on mobile. I think there’s a WHO report titled “There’s no safe amount of alcohol” or something like that.



  • Yes, I agree that it’s a hodgepodge of linked concepts. Sorry! Here’s my attempt at explaining:

    When you eat food, it’s like your battery gets filled. If, after eating a good meal you were to stand up and just stand there idly, your battery would slowly drain. Eventually, over the course of hours, you’d get hungry and need more of the food; you’d need to recharge your battery. Now, if your battery is full and you start walking, the battery will drain a little bit faster. You know this from taking walks, going on hikes, or commuting; they can make you hungrier! Now walk a little faster and the battery will drain even a little bit faster. If you take your sweet time on a walk, you will not nearly get as hungry compared to walking as quickly as you can.

    Another useful image is holding a cup full of water and tilting it more and more, spilling the water; the more you tilt it, the faster the water gets drained from the cup.

    Now, think about when you walk. When you walk faster and faster and faster, there is a point in which you automatically start running. Turns out, this point in which you go from walking to running is special because it leads to energy savings.

    Weird, isn’t it? Here’s a way to look at it: if you try to walk a long distance at a very high speed, you’ll get exhausted, but if you run the same distance at that same speed, you’ll be less tired.

    This is similar to some cars and bikes. If you’ve driven a gear-shift car or a bicycle with gears, you’ll understand that, past a certain speed, it’s much more efficient to switch gears. If you don’t switch gears, your motor will get exhausted or your legs will get exhausted. If you do, your car’s battery or your legs’ batteries will be able to push forward for longer.