Leaving its carnal meaning in oblivion, eh?

That sounds like a challenge…

Not from a video game exactly, but in the early days of the internet, I had urges to delete things instead of putting them into the trash.

As far as I know, everyone dreams every night…it’s part of the sleeping process…but you usually forget it ASAP so it seems like you didn’t dream.

As for dreams I remember…less often as I get older, I find. Although I do get a few vivid dreams when using magnesium supplements, but I also acclimate to those quickly. And if I’m woken prematurely, sometimes a dream sticks around a bit more than it otherwise would.

Because it’s very difficult to get things you need to live solely through barter. Many trades are very niche, and an economy that uses money allows those trades to continue being viable parts of society.

Like, think of plumbing. If everything goes well, you don’t need a plumber. But when you do…you really need it. Now imagine being the plumber who wants some bread and eggs but the farmer has no problems currently that needs the plumber’s skills. Plumber can’t eat, leaves profession, there’s now no plumber when the pipes do break.

Obviously, the next thought here might be, “Well, why doesn’t the plumber say if they get eggs and bread now, they’ll come and fix your toilet later if needed?” But that sort of re-invents credit, right? “I’ll trade 3 future plumbing problems for 3 boxes of eggs now.” If you have that, why not money?

So basically, money is very useful. It can be traded for many things you otherwise wouldn’t be able to get if you were only able to offer as barter a specific item that might be rejected by the other person you want to barter with. Money is a “universal” trade good, and it’s also easy to store (you don’t have to have lots of physical room to store your Universal Trade Good).

The BEHAVIOR of people surrounding this very useful thing can absolutely be suspect, depending on the person (greedy sociopaths hoarding wealth)–but that’s a human thing, not because money is innately a bad thing. It’s a social problem, not a technology problem. You could totally have a greedy hoarder storing up a non-money trade item too…see people and toilet paper/sanitizer during Covid.

The Big 5 is the only “personality” test used in actual scientific studies, if I recall correctly.

I began using Freetube exclusively to watch YouTube when YouTube complained about my ad blocker.

Does it turn into a gryphon when it grows up?

And would the fiber from its cocoon be considered fur or silk?

I was raised Catholic in a deeply Evengelical town. The little girls were saying out of the blue that I wasn’t Christian. I was like 8, they were like 6. They were absolutely parroting what their parents said, there’s no way the little girls I played with daily came up with that shit on their own, and since then I’ve noticed that’s one of the “protestant culture” things that gets passed around in those circles and occasionally escapes. That Catholics aren’t Christian because saints or whatever.

They get all wound up about the “pagan” elements of Catholicism then turn around and worship their dollar bill golden idols. Hypocrites!

But basically, Catholics get crapped on when there’s no other minority around and they are tired of talking about Jewish folks.

I don’t practice, I’m atheist, but in the USA from a culture perspective Catholics aren’t in the WASP good old boy group, even if you are otherwise white. And WASP types are happy to let you know it, although its less common than it was a few decades back.

Biden being Catholic, and JFK before him, is basically a dog whistle to certain rightwing groups to make them lose their shit, it’s just less obvious than, say, Obama being black esp if you don’t have a family background that would expose you to that stuff.

I’ve tried pretty hard to search for relevant examples of this online, but I can’t seem to find the right search terms for any of this. The closest I’ve seen is “object permanence” in the ADHD research, but I’m pretty cautious to start self-diagnosing as I’m not a professional.

So, there’s always going to be the “script kiddies” of the psychology world out there, who throw around words and jargon without actually understanding what they’re doing or playing with. Just like there’s know-nothings in tech who do the same with IT stuff.

But if you’re a measured and logical person, you’re not immediately going to become one of them if you start looking deeper into psychology and mental health stuff. You’ll start out as a newbie, sure, but your brains aren’t going to suddenly leak out your ears just because you’re wondering if you have this or that, and in your case you literally told us in your post that the issues you are having are affecting your work and mental health, which, to me, suggests you wouldn’t be researching to be trendy or to look cool, but because you’re hurting and in distress and want to figure out what’s going on.

That’s a very valid reason, IMO, to start researching this stuff. You’re hurt, you’re in distress–time to research, even if that might on a superficial level make you look like you’re chasing trends. (But I don’t think you would be, necessarily.)

Anyway, your whole post makes me think researching the mental health stuff is actually a good direction to go. What you’re doing with tech (not committing, searching for greener pastures) reminds me a lot of some of my mal-adaptive habits.

I grew up in a traumatic home, and I figured out (eventually, ha!) the reason I (for example) restart video games instead of playing to the end is because my stress response is messed up, and my solution to a fun game going sour is to “reboot” and seek a redo (just like how I left home, or quit some jobs to get away from stressful people!).

And I have other habits that were once useful for managing anxiety in fear in very high-stress environments, but which work poorly once one is in a more normal environment. It’s very easy to pick up an adaption to stress or to something else in your past that is useful initially, but then starts misfiring when you unconsciously apply it to a totally different part of your life.

Therefore, as others have suggested, I think it might be good to take a look at the rest of your life. Are things stressful with your parents? Any boyfriend/girlfriend issues? Is work or school being a dick to you? If you are getting stress from those areas, you might be immersing yourself in tech stuff (and vacillating back and forth) as an unconscious reaction to that outside stress.

I’m a writer and I often submerge myself in writing when I have other stressors going on. So I look super-productive and happy to people who like to read my stuff, but it’s usually masking everything else going to shit. When I was younger, I did something similar when making webpages and learning tech. Stuff was stressing me, and I found relief by throwing myself into learning something new. Set up entire websites and message forums just to get away from IRL stuff that sucked. The more going on at home, the more I was trying new things with my website.

One skill I found to be VERY useful to develop when trying to figure out my own psychology is learning how to kind of…stop and identify and name what I was feeling when I got out of sorts (anxious, fearful, upset, irritated, angry, hyper, manic, etc.). Try to name it and follow it back to its roots. WHAT am I feeling? Can I actually name it? And WHY might I be feeling it? What happened just before I suddenly felt this thing and switched tracks?

It’s not going to be easy at first, it’s a skill you have to develop like any other. But I found once I started being able to stop myself in moments when I was doing something impulsive/avoidant, I got a better handle on what I was feeling, and why, and that sort of gave me the opening I needed to control it, instead of letting it control me. Once you can touch and name something, it’s easier to make it work for you instead of being hauled along by it.

For you, I think it might be worthwhile to do a bit more reading on ADHD, but also look up OCD (it’s not about being a “neat freak” in practice, it’s more about people having fears and anxieties and coming up with rituals in an attempt to control the fears and anxieties), and also look up maladaptive perfectionism. Even if none of this actually applies to you, becoming more informed doesn’t hurt, and sometimes by following links from one topic to another you can stumble upon something that actually does help or apply to you.

You sound like you’re in tech, maybe a programmer, and I’ve noticed several of my friends in this realm struggle with maladpative perfectionism, btw. (I do sometimes too, but to a lesser extent).

Basically, due to having parents that expected much of them, or their own internal sense of competition, folks can end up kind of breaking their “learning mechanism” or their ability to complete projects because tiny humdrum “mistakes” trigger the same sense of failure as true disaster. Things turn black and white–either everything is absolutely 100% perfect, or you’ve failed and you’re going to burn in hell with all the other failures!

Like, for someone with maladaptive perfectionism, sometimes ANY mistake is a world-ending nightmare emotionally, and stress-wise. So one ends up being hugely stressed when small errors happen, stressed and anxious out of proportion to what’s going on. And when you have that shit going on inside, that can snowball into other behaviors. Some people stop learning and stop trying new things (if you don’t try, you can’t fail, basically). Some people avoid things (if I don’t engage maybe it’ll go away). Lots of different ways people can respond, but it’s often in order to get away from the pain or stress that happens when a “failure” happens.

It seems possible to me, from reading your post, that you might be switching back and forth because you’re scared of settling on something imperfect. But–I could be VERY off-base. Which is why you should dig a bit more on psychology topics yourself. See what YOU think, given that you know your brain and history much better than any of us do.

Anyway. I don’t know if this will help at all, but I hope it does.

If you take anything away from this, I’d say you have this random internet person’s “permission” to go look up articles on psychology and things like ADHD or anxiety or the like. You won’t magically turn into an idiot because you looked up a topic once or twice.

The reason dog food is a no for cats isn’t because it’s harmful if they eat a kibble or two, but because dog food isn’t fortified with an amino acid cats need, taurine, so feeding a cat exclusively on dog food will result in a type of malnutrition in the cat.

https://www.petmd.com/blogs/nutritionnuggets/cat/dr-coates/2014/december/what-taurine-32287

I second this. I’m a very light sleeper and earplugs filter out most of the small sounds so I am not awakened by them.

Aren’t there, in blind cave species where there’s no pressure to select for coloring to protect from the sun or to camouflage or display for mates?

Then science better get going on artificial, external wombs. A lot of people would be overjoyed to be able to have kids without the physical risk of pregnancy, and the technology seems like it’d be mandatory for true colonization efforts

Out of curiosity, how would a homeless person in your country accomplish the same things?

This was a smaller moment, but similar to yours, OP, in that it revealed some unconscious thinking in my head.

But I was playing Crusader Kings II quite a few years back. And I basically had a King with the Genius trait and some other stuff I could pass down to his kids. I think I had somehow lucked into the Byzantine Empire or something, so I was basically seducing and inviting a bunch of lovers with other traits from all around the world (north and south, east and west) so I could spread Genius around. I wanted a smart council full of my bastards, heh.

So my genius slut-king has a bunch of kids. I’m naming them after my absolute favorite characters from books and such, because they’re part of my family and dynasty–so I’m giving them names that have a lot of personal “worth” to me.

Then I get to the kid in my dynasty who isn’t white, and I couldn’t figure out what name to give her. I had all these awesome names that I was using over and over through the generations in my dynasty, but somehow none that felt “right” for her. I tried and tried to choose a name, and none “fit”.

And after a while, it suddenly hit me in the face how SUBTLE racism can be. This was just a video game, but I had something that was “high worth” to me to give out, these favorite character names, and I was handing them out like candy until I got to the one kid and struggled, making all sorts of excuses why this not-white video game kid couldn’t get the name of this other character I really liked.

Now, if I was doing that in a frickin’ video game, imagine what people are doing with REAL LIFE things that are “high worth” to them. Hiring at jobs, giving gifts and presents, selling a house, etc.

And it wasn’t like I was going around in the game consciously picking which kids to screw over. (I mean, moreso than you usually do in Crusader Kings, the game where people glitch themselves into marrying their horses and creating witch covens with devil-babies so they can spread satanism across the world.) I ended up screwing this virtual kid over because I was going on this “gut feeling” that my really cool favorite-character names just somehow “weren’t right” for her, even though that frickin’ inbred cousin over there with a family tree like a wreath was proudly wearing it already.

So yeah. Learned a big lesson on how internal gut feelings influence you to do racist shit really subtly sometimes.

I guess you’re right that that’s unpopular.

But let me put this metaphor out there–if someone shows up in the ER and their leg is badly broken and there’s blood everywhere and the bone is sticking out, it is logical to triage that and take care of it first. But if lesser injuries are being taken care of instead, it’s logical and appropriate to raise a fuss. The person fussing about their broken leg isn’t really making it their entire personality no matter how strident and loud they are–they are simply in urgent pain and need the problem attended to.

Given plenty of trans folks end up suicidal, which is the mental health equivalent of a major physical injury, it’s logical and appropriate to try to shed light on what’s happening so it can be corrected. That can seem like the community is being “loud” or that an individual is “making gender their core characteristic”. But it’s more that that is the thing that is currently hurting, so it moves people to try to stop the hurt. Once things have evened out, there’s less need to be loud about it, and it will naturally fall into place as a background aspect, like any other facet of a person.

This is generally the case when ANY minority is “making a fuss”–it’s happening because there’s pain that needs to be attended to. A wound that needs healing.

I’ve seen more than one “well meaning” person online get upset about how this or that minority is being loud with a tone they don’t like.

The thing is–if a person is in pain, they’re not necessarily in a mental spot to perfectly frame their arguments just for you, in exactly the tone you need to be able to hear them. Someone in pain can be pretty harsh and mean-sounding, and it’s important to recognize the times when YOU are unburdened by that pain and thus have an easier time of being “logical” than the other person who is currently crying out in pain and sounds “harsh”.

Basically: have mercy on other people, and understand some harsh things they say because they are in pain, and that you, too, would probably have your discipline fail at some point if you went through something just as harsh.

A rice cooker can serve as a cheaper instapot tho. I can steam rice and veggies without having to babysit a pot.

I also have kitchen anxiety, and in a roommate situation can keep a rice cooker in my room.

It seems to go either way, depending on all the little local variables. Strong communities, or dog-eat-dog.

Also, you can have situations where if you “conform”, you’re protected by the growing-together, but if something makes you different, that community comes after you, out of fear that you being different will bring even more hardship down on everyone’s head.

My social group is made up of basically goths, queers, nerdy weirdos who grew up in fundamentally conservative and religious towns and families, and are (now as adults) generally very supportive and chill with differences–but we got a hell of a lot of bullying from our natal families/cultures growing up. Based on individual personalities, there’s honestly little reason we were rejected…we don’t go out committing crimes, or bully, or be mean. But the differences we do have seem to scare or make our families feel ashamed of us–so, rejection. And so we lose the protection that the community offers others.

I recognize communities supporting each other is important–but the bit where perfectly good people who are kind and smart and aren’t committing crimes are just thrown on the curb like trash because we don’t believe in religion like others do, or because we ask questions when things don’t make sense…I struggle with that bit, for obvious reasons.

Making all these posts on Lemmy be about another site.

The community won’t flourish if the only thing people are talking about is their social-media ex.