I have a friend who is a vet, and she has become my main source of medical knowledge

Being lost at sea is reality. Society is the dream

You can just do that. No one is stopping you from buying a canoe and floating away

You are better off regardless of how much your interest rate is, as long as it is fixed. If your mortgage payments are fixed, but your pay increases with inflation, your real monthly mortgage payment goes down over time.

Eg, if your mortgage is $1000/mo, but at the end of this year a cheeseburger costs $1000, then your mortgage payment is the same cost as a cheeseburger. Doesn’t matter if the interest rate you got originally was 1% or 99%.

Most likely, this is because the nerds who know how to present themselves have already gotten nabbed by some girl. Nerds who are unable to present themselves well are relegated to the bottom of the pile, since nearly all women will swipe left on them. Jacked, divorced military dads are at least jacked, which is something many women find appealing, so they end up higher on the stack.

Honestly, I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum. Completely deregulate markets. This would make the stock market a constant churn of volatility and pump and dump schemes. It would gain a reputation for being a scam. People would be forced to once again invest in local businesses where they actually knew something about the owners and the conditions on the ground. Large financial collapses would cease to be a thing, since a small collapse in one city wouldn’t affect the next city over

Source: Google it bro

Whoosh

All of them.

About 10 years ago, I was playing BioShock. It was fun, but I kept losing interest. Which was weird, because it was pretty much a game that was made for me - a pretty deep plot, a cool adventurous aesthetic, exploring and discovering different places on the map. I realized I was getting distracted thinking about all the other things I wanted to do - hanging out with my friends, figuring out how to talk to girls, studying so I could get good grades and a good job, learning all about things that interested me, going backpacking and rock climbing - and so I finished the game out of habit, and then set down the controller and didn’t pick it back up for a while.

My last game was Red Dead Redemption, which I blasted through in a marathon play-through while spending a month crashing my sister’s couch between semesters. My sleep schedule got all fucked, I ate like shit, and I felt like shit. Once I got to the end of the game, I packed up my XBox and put it in a box box. The next semester I sold it to get money to buy climbing gear.

Now I just do the Wordle.

Of the 5 I currently have in my roster, 2 came from online, 2 were friends of friends, 1 I introduced myself to at a rock climbing crag.

I also seek out partners at my job, at the climbing gym, at various meetups like for acroyoga or fire spinning or pickup ultimate Frisbee, at social bars or concerts or festivals, or just when I’m walking around in the park near my house. Importantly, I’m not just going up to every attractive woman I see and saying “nice tits, wanna bang?” - even though this is my truth in my heart of hearts. Instead what I do is show up, have fun, meet people, joke around, and just be a normal person. But then if someone is cute, I’ll do a little eyebrow wiggle or some shit during a break in the conversation, and if she eyebrow wiggles back, I escalate - like by tickling the back of her elbow or telling her that she’s, like, literally the worst why am I even talking to her. And then at the end of the night I say “hey, I think you’re cute - wanna hang out alone sometime and maybe do some smoochin’?” And then she says yes or no, I give her a high five either way, and I’m on my merry way.

Edit: I’ll point out that the number of partners I have from online is mostly because I have a good profile, so getting matches is pretty easy for me. Most people don’t have as high of a sex drive as me, and so won’t want to put in the effort. Going through social networks (real life social networks) or social hobbies is far more likely to net you compatible partners, since the choices you make in these arenas are likely to attract people with similar values and dispositions.

Just make a new account

Humans simply are not wired for social media and the Internet. Seeing every single person you know posting themselves beautiful and dressed up doing the coolest things 24/7 will make anyone feel ugly and like they aren’t doing anything with their lives. It takes real focused effort to remember that people (generally) only post when they are doing something special and what you don’t see are the days or weeks between posts that show they live the same boring life you live.

I’ve never seen a friend post on social media about something and then felt sad. I’ve instead thought “That looks awesome! Good for them! I can’t wait to do something like that too, I’m inspired!”

I think when we lost in person social gatherings as the primary method of meeting new people

This is something only chronically online people say. Most people form almost all of their relationships offline. This is still extremely true of platonic relationships. Online dating has increased in popularity, but mostly this is among people with niche tastes or in remote locations, where finding a match is more difficult due to the rarity of finding potential partners in real life. Tons of people still date primarily via their social circle or community gatherings, and most people use a mix of all their options.

You would still be carrying the social constructs you have internalized throughout your life. You probably have the ability to think logically, and refer to things by their names, but logical thinking and language are also social constructs.

It’s because most people use their phones as their main computing device these days. The idea that the average person would give up the convenience, stability, and familiarity of something like windows because of “pure greed” and “loss of OS control” is a fantasy. The average person would buy a screwdriver with banner ads if it saved them $10.

Correct. Whenever you see a large chunk of the population making a change, first assume it is for mundane reasons like finances or convenience.

This sounds great!

However, I also had a job like this and hated it. The things I hated about it were:

1. Circumstances beyond my control made taking this job my best option, when I had really wanted to do something else.
2. The ultimate product of my work wasn’t emotionally resonant with me. I felt like I was doing nothing but working to maintain a system I didn’t believe in.
3. I felt like if I was going to have a job like this, I should be getting paid better and should be working on something more interesting. I thought the job was beneath me.
4. Seriously, aesthetics matter. Commuting through heavy traffic to reach a suburban office park, where I walk through the door and smell filtered air, looking at grey cubicals under florescent lighting… is pretty miserable. Much better if the office was in a walkable, nice-to-look-at neighborhood where I would want to spend my time outside of work, and if the office had hired an interior designer who could make it… just better in any way.

I mean, did they say they consumed a whole box of boxed wine? Or just that they bought one? Could have also been on of those cartons that is the equivalent of about 2 glasses.

My guess - somebody at coca-cola figured out the cap attachment system and they patented it, but had no real plan. Then someone had the idea to lobby the EU to make it a requirement. They can sell it because it will reduce litter to some extent and improve the beverage industry’s reputation. But more importantly, coca-cola not already has their manufacturing systems in place to produce these bottle caps. Other bottle manufacturers must now play catch up, constraining the supply of bottles available for EU beverage sales. Now their competitors are scrambling to update their own bottles, which will increase their costs and might delay shipments, lending coca-cola market share. And smaller competitors who outsource their bottling might be forced out of the market entirely if the company they contract with to manufacture their bottles can’t or won’t comply with this regulation.

I’m honestly confused how the algorithm works. “So you’ve been watching folk punk videos for the last hour and a half? I think you’d also be interested in watching JORDAN PETERSON dunk on THE ATHEISTS.”

All I can say to that is - can’t do attitudes can’t do anything. You created a list of problems, and are acting like they are unsolveable, instead of seeing them as a checklist of things to get done to obtain a better life.