Berttheduck

34 male. Grew up with 3 siblings. Always wanted kids when I was younger. As I got older, met my wife and started living together we had lots of discussions about kids. She was never really interested in them and the whole pregnancy and giving birth thing terrified her.

On lots of reflection I realised that I was only interested in kids because of family and societal pressure, I think the world is over populated and generally heading downhill (fascism is massively on the rise globally, global warming, various wars) so decided that I didn’t want to bring a child into that.

There’s plenty of children in the foster system so if we change our minds later we can adopt and give a good home to a child that needs one.

This isn’t a question random people on the internet can answer easily, but I can offer you some things to think about which might help.

I’m in a medical field in the UK and do some interviewing so I’d be asking you why you want to pick a job with long hours, bad pay (comparatively for the responsibility), poor working conditions? Medicine is not a job for people who want to breeze through or are just a little bit interested in biology and people.

I’d recommend you get some work experience, health care assistant jobs are commonplace in the UK and a great way to see if medicine is right for you, universities here look on it very favourably as well. If you can do a 12 hour shift where you are exposed to blood, poo, urine and vomit and still want to go back for more then I’d say medicine is probably an ok field for you.

What are your goals? Helping people is a common response in medical interviews but you can help in lots of ways, law like you’ve already been considering, engineering, accounting etc. What do you get out of medicine that you can’t get elsewhere?

Do you want to make lots of money and have an easier life, don’t pick medicine, pick something else.

Yes please. I love seeing how other GMs prep.

No. Chavs were the school bullies for me growing up so I get a pretty strong visceral ewe from that style choice.

https://yu-scene.net/register

Link to the first post. I’m using boost via my phone without a VPN.

The ml link has posts, most recent was a week ago.

My Dad’s gone totally off the rails conspiracy theory nutty.

Fake moon landings, fluoride in the water is mind control, vaccines cause autism and maybe microchips and mind control again, foreign people are simultaneously lazy stealing benefits and stealing all the jobs, my god the racism. He fell into an echo chamber during COVID and hasn’t come out again.

The best one was when I was telling him as a healthcare professional on the front lines watching patients and colleagues die that COVID was serious and we should take any opportunity to avoid it and make it better, he told me it was just flu and all fake news.

Yeah I don’t talk to my parents much anymore.

Generally speaking a beer is 2 units, in the UK we recommend no more than 14 units in a week. If you want to stop talk to your doctor if you can or seek help. Stopping or reducing is much easier with help.

I’m glad things are moving in the right direction for you. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that the move goes well and you settle into your new place well. Moving house is always super stressful even when everything goes well, change is also hard so not surprising your more nervous than excited. That just shows your being realistic at least. I don’t really have any advice on keeping friends you move away from, video games are the only thing that’s worked for me and not very well. Best of luck to you.

Being single and being alone are very different and I think it’s important to differentiate between them. Being alone sucks for most humans, social species and all that, being single is business as usual for a lot of folks. Go on some dates and have fun, be safe though and don’t expect a life partner unless that’s the standard on the dating app you’re using.

I’d recommend going out and doing fun things with other people that aren’t specifically dating. Join a club or a sports team. Learn a new hobby and join the local meet up. Socialise without the pressure of finding a partner and enjoy yourself, a good way to be attractive to others is by being enthusiastic about something.

Being alone kinda blows but it is really important to be comfortable by yourself and be able to enjoy yourself without a long term partner. A good way to find a partner is to do things you enjoy, grow yourself as a person and put yourself into spaces where you can meet people, take up hobbies which put you in those spaces. It sounds like you are devoted to your kid which is awesome, they are also 17 so nearly an adult so you can definitely do things without them and they can do stuff without you if that is something you both want. It might be easier for you to find a hobby space if you’re only looking for stuff you are interested in.

Try to stay positive, there’s a lot of people on this planet, you only need to find one of them who’s on the same wavelength as you, sometimes all that takes is looking in the right places and having fun while looking.

Yeah they are common beach wear but a visiting a site for looking at women wearing them is not something most people would do at work so they are probably right.

The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn is a perfect example of positive masculinity. Strong, brave, a good leader, emotionally available and connected to all his friends. Sam and Frodo are also very positive. Books and films are good. Cinema Therapy YouTube channel has a few episodes on the lord of the rings and they are all good watches. The Aragorn one covers positive masculinity I think.

I got myself an Onyx boox e ink tablet for note taking. I don’t know if it’s what you’re looking for but it runs android and writes beautifully. Good battery life with the e ink. I love mine. It is more expensive than an equivalent standard tablet though and no back light on my model.

I think a lot of this is due to colonialism. Back when the Brits were sailing around pointing cannons at people and being delightful they didn’t respect local culture and dialects enough to bother with a “tricky” word so replaced it with an easier version. Unfortunately due to that expansion and the proliferation of English as the most common trade language the English versions tend to stick.

You can’t take the sky from me.

Excellent theme tune.

Oh definitely it’s terrifying how good the algorithm is at sucking people in and dumping them in an echo chamber where only those awful views are normalised.

I mean that’s kinda fair enough. Gotta be a boundary somewhere right.

Not anymore. I dunno exactly when it happened but after I left for uni I no longer see eye to eye with my folks.

They raised me and I feel they did a good job: respect others, be kind, help people, everyone is equal. All the good stuff.

Nowadays though my dad has gone hard into conspiracy theories proper tinfoil hat stuff, moon landings fake, vaccines cause autism and have microchips, fluorinated water causes something, COVID was a Chinese plot or fake or just flu (despite half his kids working in healthcare and telling him first hand experiences). He’s gone proper racist Britain for the British bullshit, hates immigrants and anyone not white. He’s dragging my mum into it as well but she’s not exactly innocent in her views either. I’m glad they live at the other end of the country now so I can choose how much I see them, holidays used to involve staying with my parents but now we camp kinda close and just have a meal out together a couple times.

I struggled a lot with coming to terms with the huge change, our relationship used to be fantastic especially with my mum, could talk for hours about anything. Now we have a very very narrow range of safe topics and I have to say no I’m not talking about that with you quite regularly.

I even debated cutting contact because of some of the horrible stuff my dad was posting online, fortunately he’s stopped that and now just consumes the hate instead of tagging me in it. I decided that I wanted to keep my parents in my life but set some firm boundaries and just don’t engage with any of the delusions.

I work in healthcare and it’s an append-i-cectomy not an appen-dectomy. It should have the i pronounced. The Americanised version is just lazy.