571–580 of 685 posts
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> And kids grow up way too fast. what seems like an instant, they are gone.
I find time passing subjectively much faster when there are close long-term daily social connections (even remote), although maybe that’s just me getting older.
Want to slow time down? Maxwell's equations have you covered.
Loneliness. We don't have meaningful social connections anymore like our parents or their parents geeration had. We are so scattered, that I am unsure how many of my friends are actually friends and how many are just professional contacts. Everytime I switch job, almost 70% of my friends suddenly fall out of contact. Heck, I don't even know the people who live in next apartments both left, right, up and down on the s…
I had to read through your comment a couple of times. From the sound of it, you’re likely in a better position than many other people here, and what worries you isn’t the lack of social contact but the depth and quality of it.
This is a common issue that a lot or even most people face as they get older. I think that a lot of us have been able to fill this gap by finding significant others and starting families. I wonder if the trend towards settling down at later ages and holding off on having a child - or forgoing it altogether - is also part of the issue.
Social media doesn’t help, but the answer to that is to stop using it, or, at the very least, to keep yourself from using platforms that encourage comparisons.
I too once felt aimless and demotivated like the author. But the desire to own things and have friends, as the author put it - this is Nietzsche's will to power, and it is one of the most profound insights into the human condition expressed in modern times. This desire was ultimately what drove me to move across the world, channel my energy and curiosity into learning a productive and marketable skill and ultimately make something of myself.
Humans have evolved over millions of years to be a goal-seeking, load-bearing species not content with mere survival. Our predecessors who were cool with hunting and gathering and spending all of their waking moments trying not to die have by now been largely subjugated out of existence by nations, civilizations, and religions / ideologies expressing a moral obligation to have dominion over the earth. In a world with unprecedented surplus for the select few of us who are privileged enough to complain on the Internet about feeling lazy but not quite knowing why or what to do about it, is psychologically debilitating to focus all or most of one's attention on meaningless noise. We need more than that to achieve a life worth living. All of the world's major wisdom traditions contain this grain of truth, either expressed implicitly or explicitly. I believe that there is an evolutionary reason why these traditions have persisted for the thousands of years they've been with us; adopting them has clearly bestowed some advantage, over many generations, in adapting to one's environment - and, perhaps more importantly, molding it to one's desires.
Best wishes for the author in finding their passion and purpose in life that will propel them out of the realm of survival and into the realm of thriving.
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> Rather than order a pizza ever again, learn how to make a really good hand stretched pizza dough from scratch This is good for different reasons, such as less additives in your food which might be healthier in the long term, taste, and the pleasure in the activity itself, but is unlikely to help with weight loss. There is little difference in calorie content between two similar pizzas, home made and from a restaura…
If you compare the same pizzas restaurant vs. homemade then sure, but learning to do it well allows you to modify everything to suit your needs. A really nice thin crust can be made with quite a bit less dough, which may then need a lot less cheese to saturate the dish. Just like that you've knocked down two of the most calorically heavy parts of a pizza!
My typical dough recipe has 150g of flour and 5g sugar per pizza, which is about 550 calories. Let's say 250 calories of cheese. Raw tomato sauce isn't even worth counting. So 800 as a baseline for one pizza. Fully loading it with pepperoni might bump it up to 1000.
A few months ago I was trying to restrict myself to 1800 calories per day. We had friends over for pizza one night, and I decided to just not worry about it and gorge myself. I counted it all up before going to bed, though, and my daily intake worked out to be about 1900.
Because we humans have a lot of idle time. We feel like we're wasting it, and we feel we should instead spend time archiving goals, to better ourselves, to do something more meaningful. But that is not how life works. You are just unnecessarily burden yourself with guilt. Thinking you should be doing something else. There are so many things to learn about, so many things to experience, right? We fear on missing out o…
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Addiction is just a pattern, a framework of looking at reality. You could say you are suffering addiction withdrawal when you are away from somebody or some place you love. Addiction framework and associated solutions seem to be pretty effective for things like stopping heroin usage. Quite likely it can work for reddit too, but I'm guessing PC already tried it. I'm just offering a different framework and way of looki…
I think there's some value in most of what you're saying. Your overall proposal, etc etc. But when you say "You could say you are suffering addiction withdrawal when you are away from somebody or some place you love", you demonstrate that you have no idea what addiction is. No idea. With respect, I strongly advise you to not say things like that. It's super wrong (which is okay but sub-optimal), you look dumb (which…
IMO I should be able to say I was forced to do some work even if I wasnt in a concentration camp myslef. Or that it bugs me that something is messy even if I dont have extreme OCD.
Internet addiction is a normalized term and I think withdrawal fron losing somebody you love or even a place can be more accute.
Also I'm sorry about whatever you had to experience related to addiction.
I'm going to go out of bounds with regards to the original question and maybe overstep but I would suggest that the mindset that this statement hints at
> A person who i would envy and want to be like or someone who no one cares about and is pathetic
is going to detract far more from life than idle Internet-browsing would.
I used to make similar judgement statements with regards to myself and my future but once I realized I don't devalue anyone that spends a lot of idle time online I shouldn't allow myself to devalue myself.
I strive to direct my attention to where I want it to go, and I fail routinely. I've attached my self-worth more to the fact that I strive to direct my attention, and while I do allow myself to take it seriously when I fail I do not allow myself to take it personally.
Attaching my self-worth to if I succeeded or failed was a too fickle and shallow well from which to derive something so important.
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If it’s meaningless what does it matter? Think about it.
Spoiler alert. It means the statement that "it's meaningless" is, in itself, meaningless. That liberates you to construct any system of meaning that you like. But that freedom can also be quite frightening and anxiety inducing. If that is the case, then you have a couple of choices (broadly speaking): 1. Soothe the anxiety away with opium, doom scrolling, religion, career, keto, multi-level marketing, or whatever. Af…
No. The idea that your life has no transcendent meaning does not free you to “create any system of meaning you like”.
It means your life has no transcendent meaning.
Now the statement, “Your life has no meaning.” is not knowable, but it is true or false. Personally I believe, but cannot, prove that it is false. My point is that if you believe it is true, any follow-up claim you want to make is moot.
What’s even the point?