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.

I really don’t like this article because it reminds me of the crazy health nut parents who get disgusted by fat babies and try to make them diet for “health” and instead starve them. Babies are supposed to be fat.

Is the writer here applying guidelines for adults to babies? Babies are supposed to take in foods that are high calorie. I think Nestle is a shit company, but I am extremely suspicious of the article.

Religious rituals.

Not because they know anything about Easter. It’s just that religious rituals seem to be the catch all bucket.

Well, when a mommy and daddy hat bobble love each other very much…

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.

Is this a nostalgia thing? Like how people who grew up without records now get vinyl for the looks or nostalgia of a time that was better or something?

The downside of optical disks for me was how easily they got scratched, plus you have to store them somehow (a big physical library takes up actual physical space, like the wall of a room), plus you have to get up and physically move something to play it. If you’re a super-neat person, perhaps this won’t be downside (I am not, and still have rips of a CD that used to be in my car and got scratched, so the rip has a part marred by skipping).

Also, are ordinary blu-rays kept in ordinary home conditions (that is to say, not archival and not climate-controlled or pitch-black) going to hang onto their data for 20+ years? Or is continually moving it to new SSDs and thinking about raid setups a better defense against data loss for an ordinary home media user? I remember vividly having old CDs and floppies that would not run years later due to becoming corrupted by physical media decay.

Anyway, I have no answers, just want to put some thoughts out there.

This article is worth reading just for the perfect quotes from the couple. I’m American and can still hear the accent they’re said in.

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.

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

I ran into something like this from a company named Botrista who was supposedly hiring remote positions. I got suspicious before they got my personal info, dug deeper and found their site ran on wix, tried to contact them by other methods to see if I could get a real person, and concluded it was all a scam to collect the typical prehire personal info like bank accounts, ss number, home address, etc.

That’s a really good point. There were individual trolls and general cruel maladjusted scum, but they hadn’t yet been courted or manipulated by political orgs and fed collective marching orders to sow discord.

The nice thing about being a regular person is that very few people have any reason to care.

One crazy ex (or, hopefully ex) and one’s tune changes quick.

Or sometimes you’re born into a shit family, and THEY stalk you when you try to get away.

As far as I’m given to understand from folks who are Russian (but got out of Russia) or Ukrainian, this fellow would more be a change from one strongman to another if he replaced Putin. Apparently his Livejournal has him saying some nasty stuff he hasn’t repudiated. (Unfortunately, I don’t speak or read Russian so I can’t examine the sources myself very well, and machine translation doesn’t bring cultural nuance or context.) (Also, as funny as it sounds to people who remember Livejournal as the first English-speaking major social media for fandom, Livejournal has been the place for years for Russian intellectuals and politicians to say their bit, so it has a different cultural context in Russia than it does elsewhere where it was mainly used for fandom drama.)

It’s been strangely fascinating watching as western media tries to hold him up as some hope, when as far as I can tell when I stop to listen to actual Ukranians or Russians with better cultural knowledge on how Russia works than most western commentators, there’s basically minimal hope he’ll be anything close to a (good) Western-style leader and if he gets into power. (it gets swept under the rug in the west that Russian culture is NOT western european culture and things that are a “given” in European and other western cultures actually are not necessarily established culturally in Russia.)

As far as I understand it, it’ll just be exchanging one dude who’s done obviously terrible things (Putin) for another who probably’s not going to be all that different, and will just do his own brand of bad things. I think perhaps people just hope he’ll be a stable asshole, as opposed to an unstable one as Putin’s become.

Or maybe they just like a scapegoat narrative–it has been fascinating to me that he voluntarily returned to Russia, and it really reminds me that people who aren’t necessarily good can still show courage, and shape narratives that way in their favor. I suspect his actions have motivations underneath that I don’t understand because I don’t understand Russian strongman culture. And I suspect other people interpret his actions through a western lens, without understanding there’s cultural nuance going on that doesn’t align with how a western viewpoint might interpret something, and that’s why western media keeps talking about him so breathlessly.

Someone I read pointed out that in the real world, people are actually largely ok with monarchies and authoritarian rulers so long as the ruler at the top keeps things stable enough for business to be conducted. Ideals like democracy fall by the wayside in light of pragmatism when a nation state is unstable–people crave stability over all, over democracy even, regardless of what method of governance brings it. They will flock to authoritarianism if it promises stability.

And in Russia, the early 90s in the aftermath of the fall of the USSR brought a great deal of instability and hardship along with its “democracy”, so there’s not necessarily a positive feeling towards it as there is in more-functional western nations where it’s been working more or less for decades, as people who lived through the 90s in Russia associate the concept with hardship, not stability. Basically, a good concept implemented like crap can poison the concept in people’s minds for the rest of their life.

So I suspect if Putin is ever ousted, whoever replaces him (whether this guy or another) will be there because people think he can bring stability, not because the successor will actually be a good leader (from a western perspective).

But it’s all operating on a lower level of the “hierarchy of needs” than most people in western countries understand–more concern with base survival, less with being able to flower and thrive. So things might stabilize, but it might still be very bad for people, especially minorities, in Russia, and bad for smaller states if this guy gets into power but also turns his eye to conquering or dominating them in order to garner support.

Anyway. I find it interesting this guy hasn’t yet been executed. Instead they (supposedly) shuffle him off elsewhere. If you were Putin, why not kill him? Must be things going on behind the scenes that we don’t see, or understand, things concerning enough that Putin thinks executing him will be more trouble than it solves.

If Navalny ever comes to power, I don’t have any particular hope he’ll be a “good” leader.

But he has an interesting story, to be sure, and you can’t say he hasn’t been through quite a bit of hardship.

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

For me, what’s way scarier is, it isn’t that everyone is being quiet, it’s that there isn’t any one else out there, and we’re one of the first civilizations to develop.

Why would you find that scary?

Is it because of the ‘great filter’ stuff, that there must therefore be something ahead of us in time that wipes us out (like self-inflicted climate change)? Or is it something like humans being awfully flawed to go down in universal history as the “first” intelligent and technologically advanced species? Or something else?

Funny thing…being short, I’m also not that strong. I buy furniture that I have the strength to put together/take apart and move solo, without helpers. Camping tables are lightweight and sturdy enough, and best thing–I can move them around with ease, I don’t even break a sweat which is awesome.

I forgot about the kid’s shoes trick. It can be hit or miss…sometimes kid’s shoes aren’t made as well as they’re expected to be outgrown. But sometimes the toe boxes are bigger, which I appreciate because it sucks looking for 5 wide women’s. (And size 3 men’s isn’t always available.)