Great criteria. Another “straight to the ER” one is loss of consciousness; people get knocked out in movies all the time so it’s easy to assume it’s fine, but it’s not.

It’s a Schacht Flatiron; Schacht is, I believe, the largest American spinning wheel manufacturer. https://schachtspindle.com/products/flatiron-spinning-wheel?variant=45418176250151 I really like it. My first wheel was a Majacraft Pioneer (NZ made).

I got 2 bags of sparkly, brightly-colored art batts (wool, silk, and angelina) at a fiber festival at the beginning of June, and I just finished spinning all of them today (it doesn’t take months to do, but I cut my finger in mid-June and had to take a break from fiber arts for a while). Now the singles need to rest, then I can ply them, then they’ll be yarn! And then I can knit something very happy with them and maybe have it done in time for winter.

Same!

This is an actual Sovcit thing.

There were some good tips in this podcast episode: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/28/1190725808/tackle-your-medical-debt-with-life-kit

The whole “they sent me pages and pages of abuse but they won’t tell me why they cut contact!” is wild. You can read. Read.

Cutting off contact isn’t being an enemy. It’s realizing that someone makes your life worse instead of better, and acting accordingly. Sure, if both sides are willing to have calm conversations and work through the issue, they should be able to. But if one side (and this poster sounds like it’s them) digs their heels in and refuses to respect the other, it’s often healthier to cut contact.

There’s an excellent series of posts about it here: https://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/missing-missing-reasons.html

I went to a Christian University and I’m leftist as hell.

Yeah, I’ve been buying more expensive floss (Cocofloss) and it’s awesome. God I’m old.

Beyond the time/energy cost, you’re comparing two different things: cooking healthy food from scratch vs. buying boxed ‘unhealthy’ food. Buying boxed ‘healthy’ food is more expensive than buying boxed ‘unhealthy’ food, and cooking ‘unhealthy’ food is cheaper than cooking ‘healthy’ food.

For example: I could make a huge mess of white rice and oil very cheaply and quickly. Every other ingredient I add will raise the cost and time investment. People say, “oh, just throw in some eggs/grilled chicken breast/fresh veggies and you have a cheap healthy meal!” but it’s still a lot more expensive to do that (in both money and time) than to just make rice.

Cooking costs time and energy, which not everyone can afford.

Yep. My boomer dad: “When I was a kid, we walked everywhere! Nobody walks anymore!” Also my dad: “I’m afraid to drive into Portland because my truck might get stolen.”

What an enormous public heath issue iodine deficiency was in Switzerland and how completely everyone forgot about it after it was fixed by the introduction of iodized salt in the 1920s: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n23/jonah-goodman/a-national-evil

People never want to confront how close they are to hardship, so if they hear about someone struggling they want it to be the result of that person’s actions, not just that the world is unfair. Just ignore them; they aren’t dealing with their own shit as healthily as you are.

I’ve been struggling with this too, but doing ok mostly. Here’s what works for me:

1. Spend time with people who make me feel hope instead of despair. It sounds like you know some entitled assholes; don’t spend time with them if they don’t improve you.
2. Focus on local. What is happening right around me? What can I do to make it better? How am I interacting with my immediate environment?
3. Focus on what is improving. In many, many ways it’s better now that it has been at any time in human history. Women have more freedom and power now than they ever have. I can learn anything I want to, find out anything I want to, almost instantly. More people are aware of systemic oppression now than ever before, and more people are willing to resist it than ever before.
4. Pick what to be mad about. There are too many things to be angry about, so I try to pick the ones that I think are the most worth it. For me, they are: wealth accumulation (we’ve come so far, and built such a great civilization, and we let a few rich fuckers loot it. It was a mistake! We tricked ourselves into thinking it was a good idea! But we’re realizing it’s not, and it’s fixable) and systemic racism in the US (Black infants in America being twice as likely to die before they reach a year old than white infants is UNACCEPTABLE). Yeah, there’s an infinite amount of other shitty stuff, but I’m only one person.
5. Picking and choosing social media/other news sources that don’t send me into a doom spiral. I don’t go on Twitter. I don’t go on Reddit any more. I don’t have Lemmy on my phone (sorry Lemmy, nothing personal, but it’s a bad doomscrolling hole for me). I go on Discord and I read blogs I subscribe to.

I believe that a person can only handle three big things at a time, and everything else needs to take a back seat to those three. You have your business, your family, and your medical debt. Those are your three burdens. When one of them gets light enough, you can take on something else. Gender equality and entitled rich people and identity politics are not your burdens right now. They can take a back burner until other stuff gets better for you.

Good luck, it’s hard.

It’s regular scrolling but when the longer you do it, the worse you feel, but you still feel compelled to do it, it’s called doom scrolling.

Some examples of short-term consequences that the book explores: who is the last human on Earth? How do they feel? How do humans come to terms with the extinction as it’s happening? How does society prepare, and how do we avoid sabotage and violence on the way out?

Longer-term consequences that the book explores: what lasts longest of what we leave behind? If the extinction happens after we develop more autonomous computers, what do those computers do once the humans are gone? What have they been directed to do?