Perhaps it is normal, it has been a great challenge my whole life.
Every new school, new job, new environment has been a struggle until I made friends in natural ways (either I had to wait someone approached me, or it has been through activities like shared home work etc.)
But moving to a new country has been a disaster in terms of relationships. I'm already very anxious, but I now need to approach people in a foreign language and there's no school-like environment where relationships form naturally. Clubs and events do not help as they are at most an hour a week so nothing like the school.
I am sure there are many people like me, but I doubt it is the majority. I am just back from my kids birthday and as far as I could see, among 20, there were only one or two other adults who did not speak to anyone, majority somehow has less challenge.
Personally, I find how I spend my time outside of work has a big impact on how motivated and productive I am at work, regardless of how meaningful my work tasks are. Obviously basic things like sleep, diet, exercise are important, but I have also found that spending too much time on things like video games, streaming shows/movies or social media really leaves me feeling depleted and unfocused during work hours. The more I avoid screens outside of work hours, the more productive I am during work hours when I have to look at a screen.
None of us have even experienced the full range of what humans can experience, so even we don't fully know what it is like to be any given person, we only know what it is like to be ourselves. It is kind of amazing when you think about it.
That's almost exactly the beginning of Logic's story album "Everybody" which I have listened to so often that I can almost recite it. Despite years on HN I have never seen The Egg though. That blew my mind a bit, thanks!
You guys are aware of Advaita and neo Advaita right? It basically has been the perrinal philosophy underlying all subjective spiritual experiences from Sufism to Gnostics to Buddhism and the Tao
Of course it could all be claptrap that humans want to believe in but I find it to be pretty powerful and I think it is true
> None of us have even experienced the full range of what humans can experience, so even we don't fully know what it is like to be any given person
I sometimes wonder about this, too. Do other people perceive things like I do? If someone was magically transplanted to my body, would they scream in pain "ooooh, this hurts, how could he stand it", whereas I consider the variety of discomforts of my body just that, discomforts? And similarly, were I magically transported to another person's body, would I be awestruck by how they see the world, how they perceive the color blue (to give an example), etc?
Another thing I think about a lot is that our own brains and sensory organs change (degrade) over time, so my own subjective experience is probably different in some important ways than it was like 20 years ago. My memory likely isn't good enough to fully capture the differences, so I don't even fully know what it was like to be me in the past.
In a sense, I think it’s accurate to say we only really know what it’s like to be us right now. Everything we perceive about ourselves through the lens of memory is an echo if not in fact imaginary.
Safe to say most people are so uncurious about/distracted from their interior states/self reflection that very few if any people know what it is like to be them right now. Mostly we know a limited palette of reactions to stimuli, and every day the stimuli get narrower. LOUD FLUORESCENT SUGARY SEX.
Do you, or do you think you remember? Your memories are always distortions, not accurate snapshots of reality.
Have you never thought you remembered something with clarity, only to be told it's impossible because it never happened? Or another example, I often vividly remember something from a book (it was a photograph on this side of the page, lower right corner) and then when I look it up, it was in a different location and it wasn't the photo I remembered. But my mental imagery felt so precise!
I'm with grandparent, I think I would perceive my younger self as simultaneously familiar and alien.
> would I be awestruck by how they see the world, how they perceive the color blue (to give an example), etc
Yeah another example I think about from time to time is our own sense of perspective. It's all relative, but my sense of how far away is "that thing over there" is probably different from yours. Partially because we may be different sizes and heights, but also because our eyes and brains process the world differently. Like a camera with different lenses.
Also, speed. If your brain's clock is faster than mine then you may perceive the world to be moving slower than I do.
Autistic people have in part answered that question. Some of them feel actual pain at unwanted touches or undesirable textures.
Pain, like vision, resides in the brain; like vision it is mostly determined by reports from our (non-brain) nervous system, but pain, light flashes, even objects and people can be created whole-cloth by the brain itself. And "real" inputs can be ignored, like a mild pain you're desensitized to, or the gorilla walking amongst the ball-passers in that video.
Here's another example: When I look at something I "see" the functionality behind it (for example the pipes in the bathroom), or the chemical reaction, or sometimes even the concept of the atoms that make it up.
An interior designer will see the colors, and the layout and how the things go together or don't. I don't see that, and in turn the designer does not see what I see.
So never mind the physical senses, even on a mental level two people do not see/experience the world the same way.
Genetics obviously doesn't break the laws of physics. You cannot get fat without calories in exceeding calories out. With that said, if dieting means you are ravenously hungry all the time, leaves you feeling overwhelmed with stress or leaves you lacking energy to do the bare minimum you need to do (i.e. work, chores, caring for kids, etc), then you're going to find it very difficult to lose weight. These are the actual problems people struggle with when trying to lose weight, which I think lean people often struggle to relate to.
I can relate. I was overweight most of my life. I had to peel away layers of bad narrative and misunderstanding, and also train my discipline circuits to get "lean". And it's still a struggle every day. I'm one of those people who gain weight on a lot less calories than other people. My wife is 2 inches shorter and weighs 50 lbs less than I, and eats twice the calories per day. Mind you, we track every gram of food and weigh it on a scale, and enter it into a diet tracking app (Cronometer in our case). So I am SUPER familiar with everything you are saying.
What I am getting at is that most people are not able to initially grasp this nuance, and the fundamental fact is that there IS a threshold of calories where you WILL lose weight no matter what. It's up to every individual to work on their motivation, but frankly that's orthogonal to the facts of the matter, and it's better to be direct rather than tell half-truths because it's "complicated". I almost never see discussions of motivation and differences in metabolism in these types of threads elsewhere, and to just assume the average person understand these factors is a mistake. The first thing people need to learn is that cutting down food will lose weight, point blank. Then you can add on layers about metabolism and motivation as the journey continues.
> What I am getting at is that most people are not able to initially grasp this nuance, and the fundamental fact is that there IS a threshold of calories where you WILL lose weight no matter what.
Once you cross this threshold, the organism activates every failsafe evolution devised since the first metazoan arised, to ensure you stop and come back.
People who are on a healthy weight just don't have motivational issue. I have a good friend that eats garbage and she knows and wants to change that. She's still not gaining weight.
A properly calibrated body will just do what it's supposed to do. For the rest of us, it's an uphill battle.
Yea, I get what you're saying. It is unhelpful when people act as if cutting enough calories and/or increasing exercise enough won't lead to weight loss, because obviously it will. Insufficient motivation is definitely a problem for a lot of people, but I think it is also possible to be so metabolically deranged that motivation actually becomes a secondary issue when you have very strong hormonal signals telling you that you need to eat more.
They still need to send their orders to an exchange, which is often done with FIX protocol over TCP (some exchanges have binary protocols which are faster than FIX, but the ones I'm aware of still use TCP)
Weird to be wondering if men are to blame here when women are typically the ones who have the final say as to when and with whom they decide to settle down and have kids with. Personally I think it is a combination of couples not wanting to have kids for a variety of reasons (not wanting to sacrifice their quality of life, lack of economic security, anxieties about the future), women delaying childbirth for longer to focus on education and career (and possibly waiting too long and not being able to have children by the time they are ready), women becoming pickier with who they choose to date and marry with the reality of hypergamy (women with higher educational and career attainment typically want to date men who are at least as successful as they are, and women are increasingly outperforming men in education and career these days). I'm sure men have some blame in this too, but most single men I know would prefer to not be single, but can't seem to find anyone interested.
I didn't say it was men. Unfortunately I haven't seen any studies looking at if women have also had a decrease in testosterone levels. Like I said though, it could be another hormone.
Sure, we can find plenty of excuses...but to say that people don't want to have children anymore is like saying they don't want to have sex anymore - which seems to be happening more and more as well. Teenagers are having less sex than ever, in a time where knowledge about sex and birth control is at an all time high. I think something is screwy.
> There is a complete lack of empathy toward those affected by the consequences of hoarding (family etc)
> The hoarders I've met tend to be very intelligent and manipulative (and verbally abusive) if they suspect someone is going to try impress change upon them. (A situation they perceive to not be in control).
I'm sorry, but this is just a horrible way to characterize a group of people with clear mental health issues. The reason extreme hoarders are extreme hoarders is probably because their drive to hoard stuff is stronger than literally every other emotion they have, including any empathy they have for those affected. Maybe the hoarder you know is manipulative and has low empathy, but the hoarder I knew was very empathetic and not a manipulative person. She had a ton of shame about it and refused to talk about it or address it.
Hoarding does have extremes and a multitude of rationalizations. I have several hoarders (I am the oddball thank god) in my family and the rationalizations are across the board from the “saver of past relics” to “the gatherer of all matter” to “the engineer hoarder of tools and hardware”. At the core, they do seem to be related to a sense of insecurity either about oneself or about the stuff being “wasted” and them being the “rescuer”.
If we were to judge by the historical standards of human life, to the intuitive human brain, it all seems wasted. Everything was scarcer back then. A cereal box? Don't waste it, you don't know when your handmade clay bowl will crack. (Not an exactly apt example, but I think you got the point.)
As an adult child of alcohol and drug addicted parents, I can say that the interplay of empathy and anger for a parent with a destructive mental illness is a pretty complicated and personal thing.
That's fair, I'm not saying it's their daily persona. It is what happens when family try to intervene. I agree it may not be the same for every individual
> There is a belief that if they are just persistent enough, their target will see their attempts as affection and fall head over heals for them.
Depends on the kind of stalker. I think you get these delusional obsessive people, but you also get abusive exes who stalk their ex to keep them from moving on or try to scare and intimidate and sometimes assault or kill their new partners.
CBT-I worked for me. The key for this to work (as with all CBT) is to actually do the exercises given and not just read it/try to do it in your head. Good luck.
I mean, if you're focused on reading all the terrible things going on in the world all the time, you aren't actually living in reality. You're living in a reality created by journalists whose job is to get you to click on their articles - usually by reporting the most depressing or terrifying news with a strongly negative bias.
