I notice this from time to time. That mailman? He probably is holding this job to feed his family. Same with the 40 year old man at your local grocery store. Its just mind boggling, the scale and scope of this world; we retreat into our own little world at times yet the world is not small, its huge.

also i spelled protagonist wrong oops

Most of you are probably used to reading short, decisive posts that provide instant gratification--I know I am. Websites like (but not limited to) Facebook, Reddit and Twitter have a focus on making content easily consumable so that they don't lose your attention. A consequence of this is that we sacrifice a lot of details to compress a bigger picture; it's easy to lose the plot when you only see half the story.

Personally, I've recently noticed that I have serious trouble internalizing more involved articles or textbooks and I'm hoping to get out of this academic funk. Reading was a huge passion of mine for years, but after I hit a rough spot in my life medically I stopped entirely. Now I have to make a conscious effort to remember key details. Bought the hard cover of Persepolis and its sequel and I've burned through the first pretty quickly, but picking it back up every day can be a struggle when YouTube is also an option.

Do you have a poor attention span? Do you know why, or have any ideas for fighting it?

Mockup - see the top item.

I would love to be notified when a comment which I had interacted with has been edited. I have seen it mentioned by others a while back as well. My suggested implementation is a pretty minor UI change.

On https://tildes.net/notifications/unread there would be an additional listing type which begins with "Comment was edited on "

Any comment which the current user has replied to, or has upvoted, and has been edited would appear here.

I am experimenting with a simple survey below using comments, please upvote the one that best reflects your view. Of course, also feel free to discuss anything further in a normal comment, just trying to keep things organized.

This is a tricky personal conundrum of mine. I'll try to articulate it clearly.

I believe in compassion, and I want to live in harmony with compassionate tendencies inside. But at the same time, in the act of extending compassion, there appears to be an in-built power gradient: the "giver" is somehow in an "advantaged" position, and the receiver a more disadvantaged one.

An example. I was once in a fast-food restaurant, waiting to order, and I saw the order-taker was obviously new and very nervous and skittish at her job. So after I placed my order I expressed how much I appreciate her service and that I thought she was doing a good job. It was truly what I wanted to say, and I thought she took this well, like, she looked more relaxed as she beamed.

But then there was a power gradient. I gave her something that she wouldn't/couldn't have given me. She was the more distressed one, and this power gradient emphasized that. I don't mean that bystanders were made more conscious of her distress. I mean, it had the potential to make me more conscious of my privilege and her her lack thereof.

And I'm aversive to power. I can be highly sceptical and critical of power. I don't feel easy to have power over someone else. I have had troubled relations with power figures in my life. I easily confuse the natural, benign activation of power with the reflexive, defensive, "shields-up" reaction that I often find myself in. To explain a bit, the latter is really a form of anxiety, perhaps a trauma from experiences of hypercompetition, isolation, and emotional neglect in the past.

In the end, I thirst after commonality, equality, brothersisterhood, close and meaningful contact with others as they are, as human beings, on level ground, side by side, sharing the common condition in our vulnerabilities... But there's this aspect of my character, i.e. the tendency to get tense and look for a "higher ground" and occupy there, just to be on the safe (more powerful!) side. There's this haughty, difficult-to-approach, high-brow me, that I feel get in the way.

I fee sad and somewhat confused about this. I think I'm partly venting, partly asking about your similar experiences. Please consider this topic fairly open-ended. If you have something to say about it, I'm eager to listen to you.

Thanks!

Hi!

Would you like to talk about something good that happened to you recently, or something you did, or something you witnessed, for which you felt good afterwards?

I'll begin with mine. First of all, I was happy to receive e-mails from friends. We're keeping long-distance friendships alive. I felt thankful to my friends.

Another things was this. Some time back, I tentatively ordered a book online for international shipping to my home address by plain mail. I then lost the hope of receiving it -- silly me, there were no mailboxes in the apartment building! But today I somehow found the mailboxes and I even re-discovered the key to mine, which I'd forgotten and left among my belongings. And I was really delighted to see the book was resting safely in my mailbox. I was happy to be proven wrong. :)

What about you?

Partially inspired by @Amarok's comment on culture specific to /r/listentothis and some thoughts I've been having: how can we make sure that each group (and sub-, and sub-sub-groups, etc) each have a sort of identity of their own? In my own experience and opinion having a cohesive identity as a subgroup helps the content quite a bit, as opposed to "just being a subgroup".

And I have a suggestion: If we scrap the front page as is, and we don't show all the subgroups' content mixed through each other, but stick to either a "classic" forum view, or like 4chan's view where you have to click through to a subforum, people would be forced to visit just that subgroup, and do so consciously. Thoughts?

Urgh, this is not amazing cricket so far. There's been some good play in parts but overall it feels fairly scrappy from both sides. How many catches have the English slips dropped so far? (mind you, the Indians dropped a few this afternoon too)

My cricket coach at school was a delightfully gnarly old Yorkshire dude who would repeatedly drill into us "catches win matches lads, catches win matches" before making us do more catching drills.

I feel like I've been defending Cooke's performance for too many years now, I can't believe we don't have someone else who can open the batting reliably. He doesn't need to hit out, just stay in. On the plus side, Sam Curran seems to be finding his feet. He's only 20 but I feel like he could go far. He might have saved this match for England today.

OK, so I started writing this post while watching the highlights, just as England's second innings finished and now, just a few minutes later India are down five wickets, 84 needed to win, and England's bowling attack are on fire. It's all got very interesting all of a sudden.

Non-cricket fans - the Test format is the one you guys generally seem to particularly baffling/frustrating. It's a five day match where nothing can happen for hours on end, and the game can end with no winner.

I'm going to be a little bit more broad on my response. It wasn't a matter of just a one-time thing or action, but a philosophy. I have a personal rule of mine to change something major about myself at least once a year, and that could range from a job or to taking up a new hobby.

Since taking up on this idea, this thought, I've felt better as I can see changes happening, and looking back from exactly a year ago to the date there's a lot to be impressed by. By following this new tradition I feel better as I can see constant improvement, and self-motivation to adapt, and evolve as a person.

What was the best change you ever made in your life?

It took me a while to find where to post a reply to a post, and it was a little annoying to scroll past all the comments to write my own.

On the other hand, it does encourage reading the other posts before replying, but I feel like that hopefully won't needed on this site.