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Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

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91–100 of 349 posts

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#91
post #49

I’m thankful for yeast. It’s so, so convenient that we have a non-pathogenic bacteria which will eat pretty much any simple sugar, can be found on the surfaces of most fruits, and is essentially effortless to cultivate, which also does a bunch of useful things like leaven bread and make a bunch of delicious short chain fatty acids (both in bread and on their own, like in marmite) and make alcohol (although that one m…

I'm thankful for oxygen because we can breathe it! And it can be found pretty much everywhere in the atmosphere of planet Earth. And I'm thankful for all the other elements that I'm composed of. They can even be used to do other miraculous things. Wonderful!

Nestle is fighting over control of freshwater sources. I reckon oxygen is next.

In the future, be thankful with your wallet.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#92
Not going to argue my point or bring up any real evidence because this guy didn't either, but Hunter Gatherers absolutely lived better lives than we do now and the amount of human beings who die to homocide or suicide is higher now than during that time period. This time period is hell, just look at suicide rates and mental illness rates. No other point in human existence has our life held as little meaning as it does now. And our biggest killer in the West happens to be a disease that has some of the worst comorbidites. Most people in the west are living their life in a inflammation, sleep deprived, vitamin defficient, hormonally disrupted brain fog.

I also don't think people realize how the suffering of lack of pleasure and of short excruciating pain like being eaten, is infinitely better than a lifetime of stress, deppression, and nihilism. Slavery to pleasure is the worst hell, and most of us are enslaved in one way or another.

p.s. False positivity doesn't do shit for your brain, it can actually cause harm. Even if it could do something good, you are basically just brainwashing yourself to have a less truthful understanding of the world. Joy is self-evident for Joyful people and doesn't require deceiptful mantras.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#93
post #51

> That the Earth hasn’t recently been hit by a solar flare as powerful as the 1859 Carrington event Is anyone thinking about what to do? It's only a matter of time before we have another flare 2X or 3X the magnitude of the Carrington event.

If it really would set power lines alight, there isn’t a hell of a lot you can do aside from going off the grid and having a small warehouse full of electrical wiring. Emergency and catastrophe planning has to happen at the national level. I would like to see more leaders (especially these days) come into office with ideas about how to recover from catastrophic events quickly.

By what mechanism do they set power lines on fire in a way that it wouldn't set the lines in my house on fire? Is it the power lines themselves or is it just vicious currents being induced in the lines that cause devices plugged on the other end of the power lines to go up in smoke?

If the grid just shut off power for 24 hours until the CME passed would that solve the problem?

I can easily go 24 hours without power, but not months.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#94
I'll take this space to mention two simple life changing gratitude practices that I have habitualized:

1. Every morning, before I allow myself to look at email/news/etc, I think of three things that I am grateful for.

2. Every night at bedtime, my partner and I tell each other three things we are grateful for about each other and one thing that we are grateful for about ourselves.

I find that bookending my days with gratitude like this makes it easier to live each day in a state of thankfulness.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#95
post #68

> Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!”

Obligatory: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Manga/TheEnigmaOfAmig...

> "This hole...! It was made for me!"

> A short horror manga story by Junji Ito. A boy named Owaki, and a girl, Yoshida, meet on Amigara Mountain, where an unsettling discovery has been made. An earthquake has created a huge fault in the mountain, and human-shaped holes are scattered across the face of the fault line. It soon becomes clear that the holes are "calling" to the people they are shaped like. So what happens when they enter the hole? Well, you can be sure that massive amounts of claustrophobia and Nightmare Fuel are involved.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But on the other hand, the Enclosures provoked a number riots[1], so I don't think everyone agreed with you that "free" city life was better than rural serfdom, with common rights intact. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure#Enclosure_riots

Of course everyone didn't agree. People don't work that way. Even today, there are people who prefer living in cabins without electricity or running water somewhere out in the Brooks Range of Alaska. However, most people don't do that (though a large number claim to aspire to something like that, few actually do it, and of the ones who actually do it, even fewer stick it out once the realities set in). The point is t…

I'm not sure that is the point. I personally don't think we can treat the choice made by such large numbers of people as comparable to the choices of a few modern cabin-dwelling weirdos. I think we should take seriously what appears to have seemed preferable for large numbers of people at the time, given the information they had, and lacking the benefit of centuries of hindsight.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing concrete I can point to of course, I'm just wary of being actively grateful for it... it seems to me that some of the subtle and/or knock-on effects may not be fully understood, and there could also be better alternative sweeteners that didn't make this list.

> it seems to me that some of the subtle and/or knock-on effects may not be fully understood There have probably had hundreds of studies done by people who were actively trying to prove something and wrote that they fully believe that there are bad side effects yet not one states they proved something.

I've found that aspartame gives me really bad insomnia. Almost every time this happens I'll go through what I ate that day and it's always something containing aspartame that was not in my normal diet. This is how I learned that those flavor packets that are mixed into water bottles and some zero-calorie flavorings used at coffee shops contain aspartame.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#99

I'll take this space to mention two simple life changing gratitude practices that I have habitualized: 1. Every morning, before I allow myself to look at email/news/etc, I think of three things that I am grateful for. 2. Every night at bedtime, my partner and I tell each other three things we are grateful for about each other and one thing that we are grateful for about ourselves. I find that bookending my days with…

To me this sounds too much like the daily scrum meetings or stand ups where you have to come up with something just so you can say something and, in this case, go to bed.

But I only mean this as a joke. I think it is great to have "rituals" that help us look and appreciate more stuff what we have already or where we are and where we came from.

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