For me, driving. Its not that driving is difficult or i’m just not able to drive. Its that there are just too many awful drivers and pedestrians you have to care about on the road.
About once or twice a year I have a bad day and turn into a shitty driver unwittingly. Maybe I accidentals cut someone off. Maybe I dont stop fast enough or have o slam my brakes.
Every day I drive near 1000+ people also otw to work. If the math for them remains solid the 3-6 of them every day are unwittingly having their bad day.
Try to give the benefit of doubt when you cross one of theme maybe they are perfect drivers the other 364 days of the year…
This isn’t just good advice for driving, but good advice for life. None of us really know what’s going on in each other’s lives, all you know is a vanishingly small sliver.
We all need to be nicer to each other. It’s a cold world out there, no reason to keep shoveling shit on top of someone.
An adult secret I love to teach kids is that none of us really know what the fuck we’re doing either, we’ve just gotten better at winging it over the years.
It doesn’t ever get better. We are stuck until we mercifully die.
No matter what I do it will always be an endless cycle of unmanageable chores and work, ever-changing medication and dumb productivity tips while I watch other people do everything effortlessly because they weren’t born a disabled retard like myself. My achievements went from getting a good grade to being able to wash the dishesYour success in life is dictated by the social connections you have and how good you are at maintaining them. When I was young I thought focusing on my education and working harder would automatically lead to a successful career, and while good academic performance does help, what’s far more useful is having connections who will help you out, either through referrals or just by being a source of information about stuff you didn’t know and it’s easy to have some social life in school or college without much effort, because everyone meets up at a single place, as an adult socialization takes effort, cause now everyone is away living their own busy lives and it’s not as easy to meet up face to face. This is why rich people like exclusive clubs so much, being able to be in the right social circles and having the ear of influential people will pay huge dividents. Also being a skilled liar is definately a very useful skill to have.
As a kid I trusted adults knew what they were doing. As an adult I now know they have no clue what they are doing.
As a young adult I found out adults have no idea, as an older adult I found out it’s not about knowing what to do in advance but being able to figure it out.
But it’s truly worrying how many people are just phoning it in most of the time.
Most Americans can’t read past an 8th-grade level, and that shocks hell out of me. When I was in 6th-grade, standardized tests pegged me at “college level”, which I figured was utter bullshit, thought I was being buttered-up somehow. Turns out it was true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
In 2023, 28% of adults scored at or below Level 1, 29% at Level 2, and 44% at Level 3 or above.[1] Adults scoring in the lowest levels of literacy increased 9 percentage points between 2017 and 2023. In 2017, 19% of U.S. adults achieved a Level 1 or below in literacy while 48% achieved the highest levels.[2]
Anything below Level 3 is considered “partially illiterate” (see also § Definitions below).[3] Adults scoring below Level 1 can comprehend simple sentences and short paragraphs with minimal structure but will struggle with multi-step instructions or complex sentences, while those at Level 1 can locate explicitly cued information in short texts, lists, or simple digital pages with minimal distractions but will struggle with multi-page texts and complex prose.[4] In general, both groups struggle reading complex sentences, texts requiring multiple-step processing, and texts with distractions.[4]
This explains so much about all the stupid shit I see. Most Americans literally aren’t literate enough to follow a piece of literature, would struggle with any given novel.
“There was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn’t just for fags and neither was writing. People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting. And I believe that time can come again!”
I used to think that movie was implausible.
Mike Judge must have psychic abilities or something because literally everything in the movie is coming true rofl.
Man Mike Judge is great. Between Common Side Effects and the KotH renewal, Judge fans are eating good.
Common Side Effects was stunning. Absolutely recommend.
There is one huge difference though. In Idiocracy, the idiots came from the working class. In the real idiocracy, the idiots are upper class failsons of failsons.
They don’t teach the basics of colonization in school. In school books, the Pilgrims all came over on the same boat and they were all equal. The reality is that some folks came over with a lot of money and some were indentured servants. The rich got much, much richer and their children haven’t had to work since 1600 AD
Mmm yea good point. That’s a good observation.
Except that he thought the problem was not enough eugenics instead of a conspiracy to return the people to that state of ignorance
Fair enough. But the end result is the same haha.
I have a coworker who need help with basic sentences. English is her first language. I have a coworker who speaks English as a second language. Her English is flawless.
That’s one reason so many people cling to quick catchy slogans and memes, or let good looking people spoonfeed them on TV. Reading Is soooo haaaaaarrrd!
Lack of empathy is not something people grow out of, it seems like it is something that grows more severe the older people get.
While that can certainly be true, I would say I’ve gained more empathy as I got older. I was never hateful, but I probably was more dismissive entering adulthood. I didn’t understand what I had when I was younger and thought everyone should be able to do what I did and just didn’t for some reason I didn’t understand. Over time I realized how wrong I was. I saw what advantages I had that led me to where I was, and how many MANY people didn’t have those same things, and that expecting them to have equal success was unrealistic and shameful on my part.
It is so easy for life to knock a human off course or keep them off course. An injury, addiction, an abusive family member, poverty, chronic illness, genetic disorder, political instability, bigotry, victim of crime, economic recession, or a natural disaster. Any one of these things and more can do it. I had little to no concept of these when I was younger. Growing up, meeting people, learning about the world, learning history made me much more open to others suffering and the desire to use what I have been lucky enough to have to help others, and recognize we, as a society, must help others. Its the only way we’ll all survive. Divided we fall.
I can say the same for myself, I just don’t see it as often as I had hoped in others.
I reflect on my past self and wish I had been a better person in my teens/early 20s. I can’t change who I was or how I behaved or thought back then but I can change the person I am now and who I aspire to be. I am also trying to foster that attitude and the skills to be empathetic in my kids.
I’m more empathetic now than I was 40 years ago.
People don’t become less empathetic as they get older. They were assholes already.
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Public lynchings were also a spectacle that was advertised out of state. You could take a drive to visit multiple lynchings as a road trip. It wasn’t uncommon to bring your kids and to take souveniers from the victim. It is untaught because America wants it forgotten
huh???It seems they edited their original comment. They were discussing the commonality of lynchings
Oh. I wonder why they changed it?
Judging from post history it is a privacy thing. They seem to do this with comments after they reach a certain age
Am I seeing the same comment you replied to?
Unfortunately the OP edited their original message. See my other comment in this thread. It would seem that they clear their comment history by editing their old comments rather than deleting. may be automated
“Souvenirs” sometimes being a polite way to say “body parts,” which were not always removed after death.
Yup, there were even black defense groups and militias (and are still many today), like the Deacons for Defense.
But you won’t learn about them in school, on purpose, and you’re taught the illegitimacy of Malcolm X’ ideology and the Nation of Islam on purpose. The state wants you to think that peaceful protest is the only acceptable and legitimate means of protest.
and you’re taught the illegitimacy of Malcolm X’ ideology and the Nation of Islam on purpose.
I’ll say mostly yes, but there was one thing in my school textbooks that contradicted that narrative. It was this picture of Malcolm X and Dr. King:
I felt I got a semi-decent education in public schools about the Civil Rights era hitting the highlights of:
- Rosa Parks/Bus boycott
- Lunch counter sit ins
- Dr King’s speeches and approaches of non-violent protest
- March on Selma + Edmund Pettus Bridge
- Brown V Board of Education
- Little Rock Nine
With all of that picture of Malcolm X and Dr. King said something to me that words in the textbook never did. Dr. King, the man who preached non-violence and moved the USA forward to a better future chose to meet with Malcolm X. Malcolm X could not have been “all bad” or illegitimate if Dr. King wanted to interact with him. Further, after seeing pictures and film from Bloody Sunday (Edmund Pettus Bridge crossing), Malcolm X’s actions made much more sense.
Malcolm’s autobiography is a very good read.
The nation of Islam is not without fault of it’s own though, none that justified the actions of the state, but still not exactly a beacon of morality.
Like most religions, but particularly for those sorts of cult of personally spinoff “new religions”, I’d say it’s far too caught up in its own woo to ever be taken seriously.
The messaging about not needing to confirm to the religious identity imposed upon people of color by their oppressors is well and good, but replacing it with something arguably worse is not the way.
Yeah, like most cults it doesn’t seem like it’s so bad on the surface, but once you start digging deeper into it things very quickly go off the rails.
That “adults” are just kids that got older. Same goes for “old people”. Everyone was once a 14 year old. There is no dividing line where you suddenly become an adult, and there is no dividing line between being an adult and being old.
We’re all born, and we live a life of days, months years, decades… it’s just you and your one, single life. You’re always going to be you.
Make this one life count. Don’t wait. Don’t procrastinate. Make shit happen. You’ll regret it if you don’t.
I’m 28 so not old by any means, but at this point I have an established career with a lot of responsibility and a number of people working under me.
Very regularly I sit in my office and wonder who the hell decided to hire me for this job. Like I’m just some dumb kid! Obviously it’s not true, and imposter syndrome is a hell of a drug.
Definitely. I think imposter syndrome is basically the same phenomenon.
I used to think there was this Council of Smart People running the world and keeping the nuclear weapons from accidentally launching and the planes from crashing and the electricity on and the bridges from collapsing.
It can’t just be me and all the absolute idiots I grew up with now running the world. That can’t be right. Oh, Jesus…oh no.
What I learned in my years of working with younger and older adults is that most people have no idea what they are doing. Sone are convinced they do, some pretend they do, but overall it’s just a lot of whatever.
If more people realized this, life would be a lot more simple. I never grew up. I just got older.
No they’re not still kids!!
People are mostly dumb. Justice is largely a myth. Chaos reigns.
The amount of crime everyone around me (and I also) do is… not what I expected as a kid.
I used to think that if you wanted anything harder than alcohol you were gonna have to go to the sketchy part of town and meet with some shady guy in an alley and hope you don’t die.
Now that I’m an adult it’s bewildering to me how many people rely on weed/coke/Adderall/alcohol/etc just to get through the day. And it’s every career and job I’ve been in! Everything from a shitty kitchen job to now I’m 1 level below the C-Suite.
It’s kind of amazing that we get people to collaborate as well as they do. The downside is that we need to appeal to the lowest common denominator of self-interest.
How easy and fast it is to cook good food. My mom acted like making real mashed potatoes was sooo difficult.
Love me some mashes taters.
Get the right kind and they basically can’t overcook. I just put mine on the stove at 5pm and just do other stuff until I’m hungry, at which point I just drain the water, add butter, pepper and nutmeg and mash the potatos in about 5 minutes lol. We also get frozen creamed spinach in kind of a pellet form so that its easy to dose, throw some of that in the microwave and it’s actually a solid meal. Even more so when you start playing with other things to add. I like to put some cheese in the mashed potatoes as well, especially fresh Parmesan, but I also tried adding some leftover beef stock today which was delicious. Seasoning the spinach with a little bit of nutmeg and pepper also goes a long way.
Sorry, somehow I produced a wall of text there. Thanks for coming to my ted talk or something
Wholegrain mustard is also a great addition to mash. Does very well as a side to beef.
I learned a great mashed potato technique from a nurse in a care place for children:
Nuke a potato like you’re baking it. Then cut it in half, spoon it out of the skin, add butter, salt and milk and smoosh with a fork. Re-nuke a little if it gets too cooled down. Faster than boiling, and it tastes better because you don’t pour flavor-filled cooking water down the drain. Also no pot to wash!
The nurse did this for a single serving for a kid, but it’s how I make any amount of mashed potatoes now.
Oooh good point about keeping the taste bymicrowaving them instead of boiling. Not having to use a pot is also great.
Personally I dont even bother to remove the peel, my potato masher handles them just fine and I don’t mind them in my food.
I normally cut potatoes into chunks, boil 15-20 minutes (with skins on), and use a regular dining fork to smash each piece once. Then salt, and stir in almond milk. I’ve never tried microwaving first, but that would be great for potatos with thick skins that are hard to chew.
What does nuking a potato mean? Unfamiliar with the slang.
Microwave
Microwaving at full power for whatever time feels right
I saw someone comment that they ‘couldn’t cook.’ I wanted to [metaphorically] slap them.
I can’t cook. That doesn’t mean that I am not able to when given time and resources and a receipe, that means that the amount of things I can fight through in a day is limited and I need to use that budget wisely, earning money, caring for my dog and seeing to it that my house and garden don’t fall apart.
That means, I can’t cook, even when it looks like I’m just sitting there, staring into the blue. “You just have to…”, no, you just have to, and the what you have to is “shut up” and “stop using yourself as a reference for everything”.
Do you have a freezer? If not buy one.
You can make enough food for ten meals in the time it takes to prepare one meal.
I have a five quart pot and a lot of pint size containers. I’ll make a pot of stew/chili/soup and freeze portions for later use. Right now I have three choices sitting in the freezer.
Another trick is to roast an entire chicken on Sunday, and then have roast chicken as a main ingredient for the rest of the week. Chicken sandwich, chicken taco, etc.
A big salad can last two or three days in the fridge.
Yes. You explain it as if what I have described were an intellectual problem. It is not, so the support you tried is not helpful in my case. But this is public, so, maybe for someone else.
Cooking most foods is just: take a piece or meat or veggie. Cut it into a few pieces (or not). Put in a hot pan with some type of oil or fat. Add whatever spices/seasonings are on hand (or not). Wait 5-10 minutes. Eat. You don’t even need to be standing by it for those 5-10 minutes.
I don’t know varying expertise’s story, but I’ve noticed that the people who learned to cook as children have a much better time of it than those who didn’t. When my sister was in 5th grade and I was in 3rd we were allowed to bake cakes unsupervised.
I did get to play in the kitchen as a kid, but it all really came together for me when I started cooking from meal boxes.
That my abusive mother had 3 kids by a previous marriage. She gave up full custody so she could keep the (shitty, old) house. I learned this when I was 18 or 19.
Success in life is 75% luck. Everything you control (dedication, tenacity, ambition, follow through, dependability) is in the first 25%. The remaining 75% is just luck that you have no control over. That doesn’t mean you can slack on that first 25%, but even if you absolutely kill it on the first 25% you can still fail in life. I say this as someone that most would consider successful. Yes I worked hard to get where I am, but lots of people work far harder and have far less. I was born in the right place, with the right talents, in the right period in time/history, and with enough of the preferred genetics. Even had everything else been equal and I was born 20 years earlier or 20 years later, I wouldn’t be nearly as successful.
It shouldn’t be like this. Its not fair its like this, but this is reality.
A local YouTuber I follow said this once: “There’s no guarantee that you’ll succeed after working hard, but I guarantee that you won’t if you don’t”.
It sounds cheap and all, but it finally ingrained itself to my brain because it’s a less optimistic quote.
Success is luck, but you can even the odds by throwing my chips on the table.
Not actual gambling advice, but it’s something I heard years ago and it’s stuck with me.
there are common factors of succesful people. Working hard in some areas tends to result in more success than others.
WDYM? I can be a railroad mogul one day, or an oil baron, an automotive entrepreneur, a sugar plantation owner, or even a privateer, if I hustle hard enough, right?
Those are the only definitions of success?
I dont know about you but that’s not “succesful” to me. Or at least not what my goals are.
I know that tongue-in-cheek snark can be difficult to detect for many people, but consider the context here: I responded to somebody who said that success is 75% luck. There is no amount of hustle that would let a person become a railroad mogul, an oil baron, an automotive pioneer, a sugar plantation owner, or a privateer today. Being born into the correct historical era to become one of those things is part of that luck. And my secondary implication is mocking the idea that many of those people achieved their success by working hard, or even working at all.
You need to define succes first. Depending on your definition I will either agree or disagree.
definitions are personal. If you are looking for advice find a definiton that is less about luck.
You need to define succes first. Depending on your definition I will either agree or disagree.
I using the conventional western definition here for this conversation. All of my basic needs are met, I have no worry for my future needs for probably the rest of my life if I need it to be. I am in good health. I have loving relationship. In addition to this I have extra resources that allow me to explore my interests.
definitions are personal. If you are looking for advice find a definition that is less about luck.
No amount of redefinition will help you if you have a genetic condition like Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy which can cause you to keel over dead at 27 years old. No amount of redefinition will help if you’re 8 years old in and are living in an active war zone. In those two examples, they didn’t choose their circumstances. Nothing in their power caused them to be in their situations. Nothing in their power could change their situations. I would be equally powerless in their place. There is nothing intrinsic about them that makes them responsible for their situations. Why is it that those two people have those life threatening issues and I don’t? Luck. Thats life.
Now, I get where you’re going about taking what circumstances you have, and making the best of it. Or possibly exploring the philosophical nature of existence and coming to a different conclusion on what our few decades on Earth are for and how we can all ourselves successful. I don’t think that’s a bad thing to do personally, but understand that’s a luxury that someone starving or dying from exposure likely can’t seriously entertain. Entirely ignoring the base reality, even if we don’t like it, is dangerous, and potentially callous and can lead us to indifference of the suffering of others and how they arrived there through no fault of their own.
i guess I didn’t explain well. If your success means a private jet with pilots on call 24x7 that you can afford to fly where and where you want: you need a lot more money than I can help you with.
your success says something vague about resources to explore your interests. How much resources? If you want to make prinitive pottery that is cheap and a great hobby to be interested in. many other interest are more expensive. There is a reason boat owners call them ‘a hole in the water you pour money in’ - boats are also a fine hobby but if your success includes a boat you need more resources.
i agree that health is partially luck and so there is always a luck element. there is much you can do to earn money - keeping a great job is partially luck. There is a lot you can do to keep a relationship but there is some luck on if the other person doesn’t leave you. There is a lot you can do for health but some luck as well.
i guess I didn’t explain well. If your success means a private jet with pilots on call 24x7 that you can afford to fly where and where you want: you need a lot more money than I can help you with.
your success says something vague about resources to explore your interests. How much resources?
I’m sorry, I’m not going to divulge my personal financial details on the open internet. Why does this number matter to our discussion? I appreciate if you’re trying to offer financial or life planning advice. I don’t think I’m in need, but I appreciate your concern.
I’ll say this. On this chart, I believe I am past the fourth level (Esteem) and working on number 5 (self actualization).
there is much you can do to earn money - keeping a great job is partially luck.
Getting the job initially is a whole series of lucky events sometimes decades in the making.
There is a lot you can do to keep a relationship but there is some luck on if the other person doesn’t leave you.
Not only do you have do work hard on keeping relationships (this is part of the 25% I was talking about) you have to live to enjoy it. Further, your mate has to live and there’s all kinds of things that can happen to them through no fault of their own (this is part of the 75% luck I was talking about earlier).
i agree that health is partially luck and so there is always a luck element. There is a lot you can do for health but some luck as well.
There is a tiny tiny fraction you can do to keep/improve your health vs the vast majority of the things in this world trying to kill you or make you sick/injured. I’d change the percentages on this even further: 10% in your control to 90% luck.
I don’t mean you should tell me your criteria. if your idea of success is chess world champion - many have worked 12 hour days for years at it and failed - thus much luck is needed. likewise you may be great at business without ever making CEO. However more modest goals are reached by many - chess national master is in reach of many more. Engineers don’t make near what the CEO does but many more get there.
i can never figure out relationships but those who study it tell me there are predictive measures of what they call success. (The experts don’t always agree)
I don’t mean you should tell me your criteria.
Gotcha, I wasn’t trying to put words in your mouth. My apologies for misunderstanding your question.
if your idea of success is chess world champion - many have worked 12 hour days for years at it and failed - thus much luck is needed. likewise you may be great at business without ever making CEO. However more modest goals are reached by many - chess national master is in reach of many more. Engineers don’t make near what the CEO does but many more get there.
All of those examples assume you’re starting from a reasonably high baseline of stability, mental & physical health, resources, and likely education. My point is that you can’t assume those things. Lots and lots of people aren’t even lucky enough to have that starting baseline to even start working toward any of those achievements in your examples.
That’s why I said that my particular personal goals are irrelevant, but where I’ve gotten most would look at and define it as successful, and that I recognize that so many points on that path I was lucky to have the “upside” outcome rather than the “downside” outcome which would have left me far less successful, or at worst, dead. It really doesn’t take many of the inflection points in our lives to not go our way for us to be knocked way down or knocked out entirely. I am very lucky that hasn’t been my fate.
Not being able to stand up for yourself against people who can control/manipulate you financially.
I would say having less and less ability to stand up to corps that control you financially. It just keeps getting worse and worse with fewer and fewer options. I mean yeah there are people behind it but its the corp that gives them power.
Shower sex.
In the movies it looks so hot, but in reality, you’ve got a eyes and mouth full of soap and your freezing. 2/10
Rinse your hair and turn up the temperature?
Depends on the shower set up.
One place I lived at had accessibility handles in the shower and a grippy floor, the shower head positioning and spray options kept both of us covered, and one of those heat lights that kept us both warm for the small bits that weren’t in the spray. Most other places have had issues with one person not getting enough heat to stay warm, although a special shout out to the one hotel we stayed at with multiple showerheads.
I haven’t run into the lubrication issue in showers or hot tubs, but also don’t use condoms (monogamous relationships with other forms of birth control). Hot tubs were not public and we were very good about the water maintenance.
You start in the shower. Wash yourselves, wash each other, tease a little, then dry off, get into a clean bed and have at it. Standing sex in the shower is mediocre at best.
Not too mention how slippery it is.
…in the wrong places
You are doing it wrong.
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