I think the word “nerd” got rehabilitated, and was replaced by incel or neckbeard for those even more useless, gross, and uncool than a nerd was ever portrayed to be.
I’m definitely a nerd, but thoughtfulness, optimism and such take me out of the incel or neckbeard category. I just don’t have the blame everyone but myself nihilism outlook.
If you twist yourself into knots due to “failure” you essentially break the learning mechanism in your head.
Often this is due to shit parenting where your parent teaches you ideas of what success and failure are that don’t align with the real world. They burden your immature mind with fear, pain, and guilt, usually for trivial failures. Usually because they have their own baggage they never examined.
But some people accidentally do it to themselves, too, even if their parents didn’t go hogwild on the shame, guilt, and punishment game if they “failed” something.
Anyway … learning from experiences is a human superpower. When you get all freaked out about failure you basically cut out of yourself the mechanism humans use to be smarter than animals. Because you stop putting yourself in any positions where you might be challenged. You close your eyes to experiences where you might learn because you got too conditioned to fear feeling bad things if you “fail”. So you start to lose access to the rewards of trying, failing, and LEARNING from that failure in a way no book can teach you. The fear or failure gets in the way of your ability to learn, and that’s awful.
Learn from your failures, don’t lobotomize yourself with fear and guilt (as if failure is an express pass straight to hell that will damn you forever or something.)
And if you don’t know how to chill out with yourself yet, learning how to chill, maybe with therapy, or maybe by doing a lot of introspection, should be your number one priority. Life gets so much easier once you can roll with the punches instead of carrying a millstone of fear on your back every waking moment.
(Why yes, I have strong feelings about how having a fucked up mindset about failing can cripple one’s ability to learn…why do you ask? Lol)
Why that planet in particular?
A psilocybin laxative for cats would recreate what my robot vacuum did when my roommates cat shat on the rug while I was at work.
Or maybe they just garden.
I don’t, and haven’t, and I’ve lived in poverty before that the average person would find humiliating.
That said, I can see I have a stronger sense of righteousness than the average person, probably due to some type of neurodivergence. I have dealt with plenty of bullying for it. So the pain that comes from it sometimes is something I’m used to and no longer afraid of.
It’s easier once you lose the fear. Fear is what pushes people to compromise their morals.
It also helps that I’m relatively smart and can always find alternative options so far.
Are you completely unable to see images or hear voices in your mind’s eye/ear? No matter what you read? And it’s always been like that?
Or do you just get fatigued after a while? But with effort can have a visual or audible imagination?
The former could be something called aphantasia, which is when someone is born without the ability to visualize things in their head
The latter might just a skill thing. When I was about 10, I had to train myself both to sharpen my imagination, but also not to fall asleep reading every time. I remember doing this distinctly, just constant practice with my imagination. It got a lot easier as I practiced.
Yeah, I tend to reply for lurkers, not to change the OPs mind.
Lurkers who haven’t entered a dog in the fight are more likely to be convinced than someone already wound up and swinging. As they read, they are more open, much as I am when I lurk.
This is also why I don’t necessarily mind “fake” posts. The original situation in the post might be fake, but the discussion from people responding does tend to have good or interesting responses in varying levels of nuance.
Self discipline.
Once I learned the skill of purposely removing myself from certain online things…world of Warcraft and social media arguing were two big ones…I got a lot of my life back.
It really just comes down to self discipline and self control, which are necessary to learn if you want to actually mature and grow up.
Edit: you could also consider it the art of learning boundaries.
It’s sometimes easier to do speeches with a mask on.
My easiest speech in high school was in a grim reaper costume that covered my face.
Sounds like I should test if going on testosterone does the same someday.
Escitalopram fixed my Raynaud’s at a low “taper up” dose basically immediately. Although it wasn’t prescribed for that, this was just a happy side effect. I guess some SSRIs do that.
For depression, it took about a month to ramp up enough to see a difference. It did ease the anhedonia, but it also masked my emotional flashbacks until it was too late to disrupt them.
I also had SEVERE issues with my sodium while on it, which is why I didn’t stay on it past a month. However, I don’t snack or eat salty stuff so someone with higher sodium intake might have fared better.
I would have tried to get used to it to see if the masking of the early signs of flashbacks got better as I got used to it if it hadn’t messed up my sodium so badly.
Also, the sexual side effects are real.
I was going to say something about head/eye coordination…but the snake I used to have could strike at a dead rodent and miss.
So you have a good point.
Awareness not cynicism, yes. Very important for self growth.
The head in the clouds of over optimism and the head in the mud of cynicism are two extremes that’ll both extra super duper fuck you over.
Reality has both good and bad things.
Most people hear that you have to learn to pull your head out of the clouds, but honestly the cynics need to be beat up more about their cynicism because that attitude ALSO lays the foundation for shitty times.
If you go into things having decided they’ll suck beforehand, you contributed to that outcome by not creating, seeing, or seeking better things.
And it takes time and work to kill off the parasite of cynicism if it’s already wrapped around your soul. But it’s hard work that must be done.
Solar panel and battery tech are finally mature enough to keep small electronics powered off grid near indefinitely now if you take the time to understand its capacity and build properly.
If your system is too small you might run into problems cooking, charging a car, gaming, or running an ac, basically things that draw huge amounts of power, but it can run a freezer, phone and laptop, and led lights pretty well. And those things can get you 75 percent of the way to feeling civilized if weather or disaster affects your neighborhood power.
So I’m a fan of this stuff, we are nearly in sci-fi territory with it, and think smart people with a backyard and some space should consider it for storm preparedness and the like. The tech will only improve with time, there’s some recent developments with new battery tech on the horizon that are hopeful.
When I’m elderly in 40 years, I hope to live in a home with plenty of solar and a huge house battery setup in the basement. If I can cover all my electric off grid including cooking, I would feel very rich and secure.
Buy up all the media outlets, especially Fox, and ACTUALLY turn them into progressive propaganda outlets.
Once actual progressives are in power, Lobby for government with the teeth to break up my big media empire monopoly and prevent a new one from forming.
Make a trust in each state to have local news outlets with good journalists.
Fund something to help find and stomp out propaganda bot/slave centers in other countries.
Lobby to regulate the fuck out of AI to stop its use as a programmable propaganda slop machine.
Didn’t the FBI already say shit about bombing California?
Given every accusation is a confession with the GoP I immediately figured they were going to do it themselves and blame Iran. And that California was chosen to try to scare it into line, much like other blue states have been targeted by the current administration.
I’ve been fascinated by pterosaurs lately. The book Pterosaurs by Mark P Witton is great.
Pterosaurs interest me because of their wing morphology. Instead of having the wing membrane between all the “fingers” like a bat, it’s attached to their equivalent of a pinky finger in such a way it can fold up enough that they could use all four limbs to navigate on land. They just have such an interesting body shape that no animal today really has.
They also got much bigger than birds. Like, to the point that I want to write a fantasy book where the premise is that dragons are like …the only pterosaur that survived extinction. Because it would be cool to have a dragon that’s directly not related to modern reptiles, birds, or mammals…but still is speculatively based on a flying animal that did once exist.
I got bifocals.
They’re already not strong enough :(
So, I am normally very skeptical about people yelling about bubbles…but I went from working in IT like you to working blue collar, and thus essentially went from being mildly smarter than most of my coworkers to being very obviously the smartest in the room barring infrequent encounters with others like me.
There are folks around me in blue collar work that are very experienced at what they do and wise in that specific niche due to their experience, but in general my overall mental capacity seems quicker and more flexible than most individuals I meet now, which wasn’t showcased nearly as much when I was with other nerds in IT.
So yes, you’re in a bubble. I had also been in a bubble for many years and had forgotten WHY I had fled to IT and nerd shit, and got a pretty pointed reminder.