If your choice of self expression makes me stumble when trying to read it, I am not making extra effort. This is how most people feel. It must feel spectacular being so incredibly smart in a world full of first graders. You must be fabulously wealthy and powerful.

I couldn’t read it, but also I don’t care enough to try.

So the moral of the story: you do you, but don’t whine if a lot of people don’t absorb your information. At some point you have to ask if you’re just performing for yourself or if you actually care about what you’re saying on a broader level.

Yes, it’s random firings of light receptors from the absolute ocean of potential stimulators for such sensitive cells and sensitive neurons that connect them to your brain.

Your brain does a profoundly involved job at every moment editing your visual input into a coherent, moving picture, but your brain edits out a LOT of interference and noise every moment.

If you really wanna blow your mind and prove it, make a pinhole in a card and in a dark room and look towards a light source. If you wiggle the pinhole light beam across your retina you will suddenly see all the blood vessels that feed your retina. Evolution decided it would put them on the front for some reason, but your brain normally makes it literally disappear for you. When you wiggle the shadows of the vessels, your brain forgets how to edit it and they appear like a mass of floater-spaghetti.

Edit: you can suddenly see your nose. You’re welcome.

I work at a home office in a fairly active industry so while I do get to wear sweats or pajama bottoms much of the day, it’s still draining as FUCK to be “on” all day. Even at rest the human brain burns enough energy to power a 30-watt incandescent light bulb, which doesn’t sound very bright but I would challenge anyone to keep a bulb lit for 8 hours or more purely by peddling a bike or something. When you’re thinking and stressed and working out problems and focused on tasks, the power consumption of your meat-calculator goes way up, so the exhaustion is real and tied to physiology.

So here’s how I’m trying to tackle having this same problem:

• Higher protein, lower fat and lower carb snacks. A little sugar boost here and there can help but if you’re destroying a box of cookies to get through the day you’re making yourself more exhausted.

• Drink a LOT more water. It’s so easy to forget to hydrate while working, and this doesn’t just fatigue you, it wrecks your teeth when your mouth dries out.

• Walks… walks, walks walks. Take a walk at lunch, even if it’s around the street, even if it’s in circles in the house, you HAVE to keep moving. Sitting for any period of time can be bad for you but it can also make your body want to lay down and go sleepy sleep. Also, no matter how lazy you feel, a short walk after working will always make you feel better physically and emotionally. It creates a mental separation for you to now look at your home life as distinctly different from your work life. Your survival-oriented brain needs this.

• Go to bed early. If your body is screaming to sleep, just go sleep. You’re probably not getting enough. I have a lot of sleep issues so lately I just go to bed at 8:00 PM like an old man, and even though I wake up absurdly early now, it helps me physically and mentally prepare for the day. So maybe it’s as much about shifting your schedule as it is how much time you spend sleeping versus living.

• Sunlight. A giant nuclear furnace spewing radiation doesn’t sound very healthy to stand in front of, but your body is a product of basking in the shockwave of this hydrogen bomb for millions of years, it needs a little heat and warmth on your skin. (One of the nicer feelings is napping with curtains open and sunlight streaming in on your skin on a cold day - holy shit that’s the best feeling in the world. Bonus points if you have a warm pet to sleep on your legs.)

• Less caffeine. I could autistically talk for hours about how adenosine and brain receptors work as I have a neurology fixation, but the short version is the more caffeine you drink during the day, the more wrecked you will feel at the end of the day. There are no work-arounds to this, it’s inherent in how the brain chemistry works. Try to limit caffeinated drinks to a couple a day and spaced apart.

• Healthier dinners. More fiber, more low-fat protein, less processed carbs. Eat early and not late and you will feel less heavy when you get up.

• Talk to yourself. Keep a narration going, and talking out loud actually helps your non-verbal layers of your consciousness to align to what you want. (I told you, I have a neurology fixation.) You are legion, you have a multitude of thoughts inside you, but they don’t have a voice, each vying for attention and reporting things to your “main” controller. It can be amazingly effective to literally talk to these brain layers. If you want proof that I’m not talking out my ass, learn about split-brain syndrome and the eerie effects of a hemispherectomy.

The hard reality is that if you are pursuing higher education and you’re not also part of the culture of connections and schmoozing and socializing and having your parents party with the parents of faculty members and deans and heads of this and that, your chances of getting a job with your degree are about the same as your chances of just lying on linkedin.

Speaking as someone who landed a corporate tech job from lying on linkedin, and seeing friends with degrees flipping burgers if they’re lucky.

Likewise, going to college alone does nothing to ensure you’re going to get a job that can afford a house.

Open communication back up in your relationship and get over that first hump of stress and emotions that you’re avoiding from this communication.

You may want to get a therapist first to help you formulate what your needs and problems are. No time for therapy? MAKE FUCKING TIME. Jesus christ, who is going to help take care of anyone if you collapse mentally or physically. If you get diagnosed with cancer tomorrow, I fucking guarantee you will make time to go get your chemotherapy or leeches or whatever the country’s new health plans are like.

A mental health crash can be AS BAD as cancer, it has high levels of lethality and can leave lasting harm on you that never goes away, and ruins your plans for a better future.

So what cultural norm or image of yourself are you preserving by pretending to be stoic and invincible? Who are you protecting? What is your end game? You have to ask yourself some harder questions than you’ve been so you can prioritize getting healthier and reorganizing your life.

Likely you have a lot more options and solutions available to you to make the grind less soul-crushing but you can’t see those options because your soul is crushed. You have to repair one little thing at a time so you can get to a high enough place to see more options, and this is hard as fuck to do alone. Get your partner onboard with you or get a therapist or both or you will risk losing everything.

edit: I want to add something, to all the people out there suffering in their lives… Nobody is going to notice. Nobody is coming. Nobody will one day realize how much you sacrifice and give you some kind of reward or sudden, new appreciation. As awkward as it feels, if you want people to appreciate you, you have to ask for it, you have to tell people you don’t feel appreciated, you have to tell them how to make you feel appreciated and what you want to feel appreciated for doing. If you don’t do this early on and regularly, you are going to forget how to feel appreciated entirely and nothing anyone does for you will feel good anymore.

Literally exactly what I said, thank you for clarifying.

I feel like if you need more than a plastic toothpick to clean your charging port, you need to reevaluate how and when you’re using your phone and maybe should invest in paper towels to wipe your hands after eating.

The divide between cultures and populations becomes highly apparent on sites like this, which attract a very select group.

Much like how they dumbed-down the original story for The Matrix, they decided that a romance with Death wouldn’t sell as many action figures, lego sets and app games I suppose. Gotta keep dem stories 2-dimensional.

A large percentage of “I need this drug/drink to function” people eventually face some measure of change in their lives that force them to start learning how to manage themselves without outside chemicals or medication.

It may be you, it may not be. The point is, don’t get set-in on “policy” because you may want to change your life and need to understand that the discomfort of change is only temporary and the brain rewires itself to new conditions.

It does get old after a while.

edit: I am fully prepared for the reflexive defensiveness that this topic produces. Please look up psychological addiction even if you feel offended by the very notion. Especially if you feel offended by the notion. Ask me how to get out if you’re starting to feel that trapped feeling and wondering if things ever get better.

I am not an expert per-say on AI, but I have survived economic collapses. Kinda.

Here’s what you can expect.

It will happen a lot faster and more sudden than you expect. It will be a few days of “uncertainty” and you will see reports on the market and spending and fear through investors, and then BAM everything goes deep red for a few days and then you suddenly get sent home from work.

Your job, no matter how skilled or stable or unrelated to finance or the stock market you may think it is- is NOT safe. In fact, service industry jobs are often the first to go, because when the market tanks and investors start pulling out money, one of the first, strongest effects we feel is that people with money immediately stop spending. If you install windows and doors, if you cut grass, if you clean or cook, expect people will suddenly start doing that themselves more and more. You may get laid off suddenly depending on how much reserve your company has.

There will be an immediate and overwhelming strain on state and city services. Unemployment offices, food banks, employment centers, and expect the media to create a LOT of hype around it to a destructive degree, there will be the same kinds of supermarket raiding like we saw with covid for no real good reason other than people feeling afraid.

What you should do now to prepare:

Have backup income plans. Even if modest, have some hustles ready to deploy. Get certified or see what you need to get certified ahead of time to do Uber and/or Lyft, people are going to be using ride sharing more because they won’t be able to afford to drive or make car payments. Think about other services people are going to need if they don’t have jobs - handyman work on the cheap, dog and pet care, unlicensed work you know you can do safely, etc. If you or your family can do art and crafts, set up an etsy market now before you’re strained, open it up to international customers.

SAVE MONEY, have cash savings as well as bank savings, have gold too if you can swing it. Expect any accounts that are tied to investments to be frozen or even wiped out, such as 401k’s and the like.

Whatever you can do to reduce debts and spending - pay down or pay off credit cards or cars if you can. Get your finances in order as much as you can, so figure out exactly what you’re spending and what your margins are.

Stockpile canned goods and basic survival supplies ahead of time like it’s the goddamn apocalypse. Seriously, have at least a month of dry goods and preserved food, you have some time (maybe) so start collecting canned food, sacks of dried beans and rice, toilet paper and soap, other supplies you buy regularly. This will give you a safety net if it gets bad, it’s one less [major] thing to worry about as you shift around your expenses and priorities.

Get information ahead of time about where your local DES/unemployment offices are, and what’s required to apply. Find out ALL the programs you can apply for, from, nutrition assistance to grants to stipends or tax credits for whatever your family situation is. You won’t get through on the website, it will be crashed with traffic, so be ready to go stand in line with your paperwork. You will get some number of months of benefits if you qualify (requirements vary by state) and most likely after some political contention, congress will pass emergency funding for extensions and stimulus checks. But it won’t last forever.

Go visit your nearest food bank now. Bring them some food and socks, get to know who runs things so that when it’s your time to stand in line, they know you already and have good associations.

We don’t really know how bad it could get. So get a gun. There may be civil unrest at some point. Our world is about two missed meals away from anarchy, or at the very least crime will increase and homes will get broken into, and police will likely be understaffed and overworked. You will be on your own.

Okay but that scene wasn’t Andor, that was Mandalorian.

Bur is just as likely to call out stupid behavior on the left, he’s not partisan. It just so happens the right is doing the worst shit right now, but he’s been vicious in attacking leftists in the past. As he should be.

What if you have it with a cup of coffee? Does that count towards the bean counter?

Wikipedia is not perfect, but it’s one of the best things we have ever had in the world. You should delete this dumb question, then go download it. Get it on a thumb-drive, and lock it in a safe.

Everyone should. We need to preserve the archives of information. You can hem and haw all you want about people being allowed to edit articles and the constant propaganda wars being waged through the most controversial pages, but it’s STILL the best we have.

Before this, people could just publish whatever books they wanted and that would become canon history for a thousand years. At LEAST wikipedia is largely self-balancing and so far not in the direct pocket of any one, single entity trying to control knowledge and history. For now.

Dividing it up into a cluster of biased, self-serving spaces would just harm knowledge and further atomize our world.

The vast majority of people who lean right are not individually as hateful as youtube and social media and most of the content algorithmically fed to us would have us believe.

Do they say horrible things around each other? Yes, they ramp up the rhetoric and make it seem like they’re absolute super-villains at times… but what we really miss in all this is how shallow their values are. They are not complicated people. They go with the popular sentiment but are so comfortable living in a state of cognitive dissonance that they will work all day with a team of black and hispanic coworkers, get along great, consider them true, best friends… then go home and upvote the most racist shit you’ve ever seen on facebook because it makes them laugh. They simply cannot make comparisons or connections the way the other ~66% of the population does, so they don’t see things like hypocrisy or inconsistency. They don’t see larger pictures. They don’t understand the concept of punching down.

As a group, they are our country’s biggest problem, a menace, a scourge upon the Earth who are enabling the worst, most malicious people to engage in plans of oppression we haven’t seen in a century.

But as individuals, we could reach almost each of them. They’re stupid enough to believe whatever we tell them and we’re afraid of them. The math is broken.

We have to get more social, we have to get more confrontational, we have to get less isolated.

I will get some rando lefties screaming at me that they don’t want to “compromise with their oppressors” and that’s fine. Don’t. I’m not making you personally, and if you get that insinuation that I’m telling you personally to do something traumatic, you’re part of the problem. For everyone else, I’ve changed the hearts of people with apparently “set in” bigotry simply by listening and talking to them. It’s not jedi mind magic, it’s just a skill that comes from engaging with people in real life.

While I get the concept, it’s kind of as realistic as Star Trek. We have a long, long way to go before people will voluntarily want to live in a system where your government owns the land, starting with developing a government that can be trusted and a society that doesn’t feel insecure about where they live or what safety nets they have. I don’t see that happening in the next several thousand years.

Should buying and selling homes be completely removed as a private institution then? What about land ownership entirely?

edit: when land ownership is controlled by a position of authority who decides who gets to live where and move where, congratulations, we’re back in monarchy. We can do this smarter without holding completely delusional values.