I have a 4 year old and I'm looking for some video suggestions (ideally a series) that showcases cultures around the world. I have lots of options handy for seeing all sorts of animals from any corner of the globe that are all very kid-friendly if not kid-oriented, but not a lot comes to mind when I want to introduce her to human life around the world. Particularly in urban places. Her exposure to these other cultures is usually just as porters helping some white guys walk around a jungle looking for animals. I can also find lots of travel series, which go to different places, but they are all oriented to adults-- either talking about how to travel to these places as a tourist, or have more adult jokes or are too focused on the presenter.

Are there any well made series about life in other places? I'd like her to see life in Tokyo, Cairo, Mexico City, favelas of Brazil, Amsterdam, Mumbai, etc.

Here I am, late-30s languishing on a grey Sunday afternoon. After finishing my first real week-long vacation in 4ish years without even side-hussling, a thought is growing: I don't really want to go back, what's next?

I've browsed topics discussing career changes/pivots when the OP has a desired endpoint, but I could use help brainstorming one step earlier: how to figure out what jobs/career move I might like, might be feasible/pragmatic for me, and even just exist?

Meandering background
if tl/dr, skip to questions below
My current job (ux/comms) is objectively decent for pay, coworkers, work/life balance. I'm good at it, and have had some advancement in my 5+ years. So, not in a rush to jump ship. Unless the trend for in-office hits me, or ai tools kill my main job (like they have my side-hussle); tbh, these concerns are influencing my thought process to degrees.

I'm in Canada (Ontario), which likely needs to remain 'home base' for a while due to house, partner, aging family, though I could move/travel for short stints.

I hold a mouldering M.Sc. in biology/evironmental stuff. Work experience in academic writing + UX. It'd be neat to dust off my degrees in some manner, but I don't have a deep hidden passion for one particular job; all of my jobs I've half fell into as much as worked for. Could swing 1 maybe 2 years of retraining if the cost-benefit were worth it. I don't expect to become wealthy, but would like an at-least median earning potential.

Questions

• Any overall life advice or thoughts on that 'something new' itch? Maybe I shouldn't equate it with my career alone?
• Do you have general guidance/anecdotes on how to meaningfully explore job/career desires or options?
• Do you know of niche job opportunities/fields that might tie into skills in various combinations of ux, communication, biology, environmental sciences, possibly healthcare? Or, how to find them? Especially in the Canadian job market context?

Housekeeping: feel free to change group/tags if appropriate. This is also a lot more than I typically share online, I may remove some personal details later.

Recently there has been a discussion thread about how many people (myself included) are recently finding it difficult to find meaningful, lasting friendships. Let's change that. I don't know if we've ever had a thread like this, but if we did then it must have been a while ago (or my search juju failed me).

Normally, the "finding friends 101" involves finding a small community that revolves around one of your interests, then make friends within that community. Finding those kinds of small communities on the internet has become nigh-on impossible, at least for me. Discord is no substitute; most Discord servers revolving around a certain interest are massive in size, with text channels flying by faster than a popular streamer's Twitch chat.

So we're breaking the code. Instead of finding a specialized community for your interests, just type up a list of your interests, quirks, or whatever other things you'd like to lure new potential friends with as a response to this thread. Go into as much detail as you'd like. If anyone has mentioned an interest you share, send them a DM and start a conversation! (That goes for the lurkers too – if you are one, don't be shy; you play an essential part in making this thread work.)

Note: it may be helpful to add other details too, like your age (if you want friends in a similar age group) and what kind of friends you're looking for in your post. Some people may be looking for people to hang in voice chat and play games with; others may just look for people to discuss topics via Discord DM; and others still may not even necessarily be looking to take their new friendship outside of Tildes. All of these are completely valid.

I have been overly obsessing about getting a new backpack for the past week without any reasonable way to move forward. I came across this bag because I was searching for something that holds my lunch box and laptop in a tinier volume. Here is what I found from Decathlon UK which not only fits my needs but looks stylish as well! Now, although I can work around with other backpacks for my use case, I really want to get my hands on this one.

Although the same backpack is available in other countries like Ireland, Italy and other EU countries, I have been unable to obtain this on the US site. Writing to the customer care has not been helpful as they asked me to get it from a third-party forwarded from elsewhere.

While I have acquaintances in EU, I wouldn't consider them close enough to have it shipped to the US as a gift (de minimis rule is going away by 29th August, so there will be extra tariffs!). I looked into it getting from a forwarding service and eat the cost, but it is stupid expensive and overall I am looking at about 80-100€. As a student, that is not viable either.

I kinda grew too attached to the idea of using this for my everyday carry for college since I only carry a laptop, a notebook and a lunch box. And I love small backpacks. At this point, I am giving up on getting it :(

Do you have any suggestions on how to get this backpack to the States?

I have Tinnitus and I love the sound of crickets. Recordings are nice but they don't hit nearly as well. I have a hearing aid which is nice but real crickets are much better. They hit a whole bunch of frequencies that provide me with great relaxation.

Has anyone here raised crickets? I do not intend to eat them. Just hear some real crickets every night when I go to sleep. Perhaps on a small box near my bed.

I live in a house with some space I can use. I"m in Northeast Brazil (Salvador, Bahia).

Too crazy or actually possible?

You tell me!

Ive been losing friends over the years from moving away, settling down with my partner, and just being terrible at staying in touch. And i've realized i haven't been making any new ones either. So my social circle is shrinking. I meet people, but the social connections haven't really lasted.

I wonder how other folks are finding new friends that have been meaningful and lasted in adulthood.

The other day at the bus stop I overheard a mom saying how amazing it was that her husband not only cooked dinner - pasta - but also then put the kids to bed. The woman she was talking to nodded sagely in agreement: clearly this was laudable.

Is the bar for being a good father and husband so low? What the hell?

This isn't really new to me, I suppose. I've worked mainly with women my whole life and too often I hear that the bare minimum seems to be "they provide money" and occasionally throw down a meal and play with the kids. Sometimes, even that is expecting too much.

Can I get some perspective on this?

Since buying my house nearly two years ago, I have been working on various home improvement tasks. One of the first things I did when I moved in was to re-paint the walls in certain rooms because of ugly paint jobs from the past or visible damage that required me to fix cracks or other imperfections. The problem is that I don't really have an eye for color matching or designs so every room that I have painted, is just white. I want to make my home feel more cozy during the Michigan winters so I am thinking of getting some high-quality wallpaper to put up as opposed to painting. Especially because I did a complete remodel of my attic living space, replacing wood paneling with drywall, and I am soon approaching the beautification of the space.

So I am conflicted because it seems like there is many prevailing thoughts in the American design psyche:

1. Fuck wallpaper - this seems to be due to the difficulty of removing wallpapers from 60s to 80s, where the designs were also not very good and quality bad. I removed wallpaper when I moved into my home, and it really wasn't that bad. I did it all in a day, but I can relate to hating the patterns that former owners put up.

2. Accent wall only - put wallpaper just on a single wall in a room. Would still need to color match this to paint and kind of seems like the worst of both worlds. However, wallpaper can be expensive if you go the premium route so this could save money.

My wife is European, and while the attitudes towards wallpaper in various parts of the continent can vary, she is also very pro-wallpaper. She is thinking of doing whole room wallpapering.

So what are your thoughts, experiences, and opinions? If you have experience in America doing it, what vendors and advice do you have?

The Setting

For the past two months I've been dealing with a lot of stress because I've been trying to balance two extremely challenging remote university classes at the same time as my work has been asking more hours of me. More work hours are usually good for me because my job doesn't pay all that well, but they can be challenging because sometimes I'm asked to teach classes that are just outside my area of experience, so I need to spend more time learning the details so I can answer student questions.

This is the last week of classes, so right now I'm extra stressed because I'm trying to finish the last week's worth of classwork. I've still got one assignment to do which I haven't really started because I can't make much sense of this week's material; it's due on Wednesday evening. So my plan was to wake up early, go to the gym to get my workout out of the way, and then go to the library to study until my class in the afternoon.

Last night I discovered the mask for my CPAP unit is broken, so I tried to go to sleep without it.

The Day

If you have sleep apnea then you already know what trying to sleep without a CPAP machine is like; it's a miserable experience. I woke up five times last night, and when I woke up I felt miserable. I took so long to get up because of that, even though I couldn't sleep past 6:30 or so, I didn't actually get to the gym until around 9:00. Today was supposed to be a cardio day to give my muscles a bit more time to rest from my more heavy resistance workouts, but even then I only managed to do 20 minutes of fairly light intensity before I was exhausted.

After that I took a seat to cool down and get the sweat dry before I went to do a massage chair session. I pulled up Tildes and saw that one thread that's making the rounds about being attractive. And I'll be real, it came at just the wrong time. I was super angry about it and I spent more than half an hour writing and deleting all the things I wanted to say. I'm legitimately happy for the poster, but every single word they said made me hate them in that moment. My theme for the past year or so has been learning to love myself, but reading that post made me legitimately feeling like I wasn't just terrifyingly ugly and unloveable, but permanently so. To give you the context for why I felt like that would take a novel's worth of text, so I'll omit the majority of that and just tell you that in spite of losing a great amount of weight, I am still grossly obese, and having been so fat before means that my body is permanently deformed in an extremely unattractive way that cannot be fixed without a series of surgeries that are far more money than I will realistically have within my lifetime given my career; heck, I've already given up on the possibility of retiring. if I had the body of someone who was always at my current weight, it wouldn't be that bad, but as things are my body looks like one of those novelty inflatable "sumo wrestler" costumes that have been half-deflated.

While I was spending that time processing my feelings, I finally decided to not respond to that topic at all and simply click on ignore so that I could get it out of my head. Unfortunately, there is no ignore buton in my head. But at that time I was filled with so much nervous energy I needed to find a way to get rid of those thoughts. It turns out the gym is a pretty perfect place to do that; I skipped the massage chair, took a caffeine tablet, and got on the elliptical again. I pulled up a video workout and worked out all of my anger ("60 RPM is moderate? Fuck you!"). Every time I made a wrong move and my arm fat slapped against my side fat, It gave me more fuel for the fire. It got me fired enough to get through the whole workout, another 25 minutes at a much higher intensity than before.

After cooling down and doing my recovery, I went into the locker room, stripped, and took a shower. Taking a shower in the gym is something that I do partially because I sweat a lot and don't want to make my car stink too much, but on a more personal level it's something that I do as a kind of personal therapy. To do so requires me to lose my self-consciousness and body issues, at least up to an extent. It makes me feel just a bit more normal.

Today someone else was taking a shower at roughly the same time, and they just so happen to have chosen a locker just a few feet away from me. When they finished, they took their clothes out of the locker and moved over to a different bench to change. The obvious assumptions would be that they were doing it because they were trying to respect our space, or it was their modesty or body shame. But let's just say that in the moment it didn't help me feel like I was normal.

After I got out of the gym I got a message from my employer saying I've got a new class scheduled. A good thing, I guess, since many of my other classes have run their course. I could really use the money, and with any luck the classes I'm taking next term are not going to be nearly as challenging.

The Rest of the Day

It hasn't even happened yet. It's not even noon. The title was a lie, I guess.

The question is, then, was this partial day representative of my life? For the most part, yes, it is. I think these thoughts and feel these feelings every day, and I go through the same affirmations and rationalizations to deal with them every day. Today was just a little bit more emotionally intense than normal.

So why did I decide to post it? To be honest, I don't entirely know. Maybe I'm still processing some of those feelings from reading that post that set me off today. Or maybe I just want to say something for people who are dealing with the same feelings. Maybe I'm even feeling a little bit guilty from the impostor syndrome given previous comments I wrote about self-love. But I'm not posting this because I want people to feel sorry for me, or because I need help coping with it. I'm a strong person, and I actually do have a good sense of self-worth and self-love even if it's constantly under threat of the other thoughts in my head. Maybe I'm just selfishly using this public space to process some of my own feelings, or I'm engaging in some twisted form of narcissism. I just hope that you, the one reading this now, have taken something from what I had to say.

TL;DR: I’m interested in your thoughts about this the current problems in UK higher education, and how they can be fixed.

I recently read an opinion piece in the Guardian about the problems currently faced by UK universities and their students. These problems aren’t new, but they’re getting worse year by year, and Simon articulates them particularly well.

It seems to me that there are three main criticisms of our current university system: that it is too costly for students while failing to fund the universities adequately; that degrees do not provide enough value to students; and that there are too many students attending university, especially (so-called) “low value” degrees, but increasingly also “high value” areas such as STEM.

The main solutions being presented are replacing students loans with a “graduate tax”, shuttering low-quality institutions and degrees, and sending more students to apprenticeships or trade schools rather than universities.

My view on this, as someone who has recently graduated university, and will be returning next year to begin studying for a PhD, is conflicted. I can definitely see that these problems are real, but I’m not convinced by the solutions being offered.

Firstly, I don’t think most people discussing these issues and offering their solutions are addressing the most fundamental problem, which is that universities have forgotten how to, or simply stopped, actually teaching. Many degrees only teach you what you need to know to pass the exams and produce acceptable coursework, which is not the point of a university degree.

This is a very challenging issue, because obviously universities must assess their students. But the purpose of a degree, its value, lies not in the assessment, nor even in the certificate awarded upon its completion (despite what many people believe), but in how you can learn and grow to have a deeper and more rounded understanding of your degree area, and the world at large. A university degree should make you a more curious person and build your critical thinking, enabling you to think through and approach many problems intelligently. But instead universities are continuously lowering the bar necessary to pass, because failing students is too costly for them, and thus also lowering their teaching standards.

The problem, it seems to me, is that the purpose of university is to educate, yet many who graduate university do not display the level of education, understanding and intelligence we would expect them to have achieved after investing at least three years of their life and tens of thousands of pounds in their education. This is not a crisis of too many students, but of a lack of quality in teaching. It seems to me that this has been driven by the funding model, which incentivises universities to grow their cohort size in order to receive more funding. Of course, this makes it harder to teach them all, and thus promotes the lowering of assessment standards so that students of sub-par quality - whether it be their work ethic, prior education, or simply learning at university that lacks - can graduate successfully.

If this is our problem, then I don’t think any of the proposed solutions serve to ameliorate it. This problem is equally common to humanities as it is STEM subjects, so the issue is not in students studying in “low value” degree areas. Whilst an apprenticeship might provide better value to a student in terms of the skills they would acquire, it is addressing a different goal and need to a university education. And while a graduate tax might be fairer than our current loan system (which favour high earners who can pay the loan off faster), it would not solve the currently perverse financial incentives universities are subject to.

The solution to this is obvious, but a hard sell. It is necessary to remove the financial incentive for universities to grow their cohort sizes. It seems to me that we must either fix, or at least cap, the funding universities receive, such that it does not grow with larger student bodies. Perhaps it should instead be linked to some performance metric, or maybe the faculty size - the more lecturers and other teaching staff the university employs, the better its funding. Of course, a complete solution to this will require a lot of thought and nuance, but I think it’s clear that the basic issue is the funding model.

The value to be gained (as a society) from a well educated population is massive, but we are currently selling hopeful high school students up the river with underwhelming university degrees that don’t educate them properly. I believe it’s the wrong answer to say that these students should give up on their dreams of a university education. We need to fix the funding model so that universities are incentivised to provide as high quality teaching as possible, not to provide the lowest level acceptable to as many students as possible.

When I get overwhelming dream shit, so as not to fall back into the shit, I rotate on my bed, head to foot or sideways...found it out as a kid. I won't fall back in by rotating my physical position. Resets my dream mind.

So after moving, my new bathroom has some issues. Most pressing of all: my shower has ants. It started with a couple, but it feels like it's gotten progressively worse.

I researched this issue and have been spraying my shower with a vinegar/water mixture to kill and hopefully repel them, followed by my mom wiping them up to throw away because the scent of ant corpses will attract more ants. But so far, it hasn't really done anything but kept me from using that shower for a week because of the smell of vinegar.

I sprayed the shower today, when it had possibly the most ants to date, and mom wiped them all up... And then a few hours later I checked and more ants showed up. Actually I just checked again and there are now like, at LEAST fifteen ants in there. At LEAST. So, the vinegar solution obviously isn't repelling them.

We're at the end of our patience. Tomorrow we'll be sitting down to do some heavy-duty research together. The potential next step, based on the site where I got the vinegar solution, is to pour baking soda and vinegar into the drain to try to dislodge all the gunk, because I've washed ants down there and that can attract more ants. So, that might be why they won't freaking stay away.

Relevant vent: why does every single site about killing ants include tons of photos of ants!? I'd closed the site I used and I tried to find it again to link here, but had to stop because the first two sites I checked were full of ant pictures. And I freaking hate bugs and can't stand even looking at photos of them. Or at least, not in this context. I don't want to see MORE ants congregating in strangers' showers, knowing they're in mine already make my skin crawl without having an image of what they might look like at this very moment!!

So, yeah. Researching this has been very difficult for me, but I need those damn things out of my shower so we don't need to share my mom's. So, I'm open to any advice and solutions you all have!

Some other relevant information:

• Here's a photo of my bathroom and the shower. Warning: you might be able to see ants if you zoom in on the close-up of the shower, because they were mostly congregated in that area. Otherwise I would have gotten a better photo of the interior. I saw a lot of advice to touch up caulking, but with the type of shower this is, I'm not sure how relevant caulking really is? The shower is very smooth, almost like the rim of a bathtub.
• There's a skylight above the shower, which was replaced before we moved in. At the very least, it doesn't leak with water when it rains. So help me, if that's somehow the source of the ants........
• Related to above: there's no window I can open, and the room is quite small and narrow. So, humidity builds up FAST and I don't really have an effective way to vent it out or anything.
• I've seen a couple in my sink. Key word: a couple. I think the most I've seen there at one time is two, while the shower can have upwards of... I don't even want to try to guess, honestly.
• I've seen one or two ants crawling up the wall outside the shower, very low down around the moulding. So their nest may be outside the shower?
• At this point the number has me half-convinced there's a nest somewhere in the bathroom. Or maybe there's an entrance on the top of the white shower walls/rim where it meets the drywall?? Except I've only ever seen one ant relatively high up one of those walls, they seem to stick near the floor... Either way, the number feels extreme to me given there shouldn't be any real points of entrance besides the door and skylight.
• Given that articles love attaching revolting photos at multiple points, I'll just ask here if there's any chance they're climbing out of my shower head or the drain. One little fact that prematurely ended my first attempt to research solutions: apparently ants sometime come out of bath faucets. So, yeah.
• At this point, killing ants is secondary to getting them OUT. We've dealt with ant infestations before, we know how to kill them. But that doesn't help when more of them will show up!! I don't want to deal with this problem forever, or even just seasonally!!l

Please help, and thanks for taking time to read this!

I recently had an idea I wish I'd thought of a few years ago, but if you have severe difficulty* changing bed sheets, you can actually break the job up over a few days. This is what I've started doing, divided up to have roughly equal energy demands:

Day 1: Change duvet cover
Day 2: Change pillow cases and bed sheet
Day 3: Rest, if needed
Day 4: Wash removed bedding in washing machine

• if you have orthostatic intolerance, ME/CFS or long covid you might relate to this. It also helps mentally breaking down the tasks like this during periods of intense brain fog.

I don't have many friends who have dogs, so I thought I'd post here.

I like dog walks. It's a great daily activity for me that helps me decompress after work. A bit of "me time", outside, fresh air, mild exercise.

When I walk my dogs, I often listen to music using earbuds. Lately, I've been feeling like this is too distracting and transports me too much to my own imagination. I would then take out the earbuds and listen to the world around me. This is nice in the park where I hear birds, the wind, etc. Sometimes I will call a family member as the dog walk is long and I might not have time after or before. This also distracts me from "the now" so I try not to do it too often.

When I don't distract myself with these things, I do feel more at ease, more present, more mindful, and - most importantly - more connected with my dogs. I watch them closer, I interact with them more. It becomes less of a daily task, and more of an intentional meaningful activity. I'm thinking of just ditching the music altogether. I already do leave my phone at home most of the time (unless I plan to call a relative, as stated above).

Curious what other people do or think on this topic. What's your inner monologue during dog walks? Are they a chore to you, or do you love them?

This is going to sound conceited, and it is. But I thought I would share my experiences regarding this. For context, I'm in year two of being considered conventionally attractive. I used to be morbidly obese, and I spent the years 17 to 23 being really big. In high school, I was only briefly considered attractive, but considering how short that was, I generally say I wasn't attractive in high school. Which is to say that the idea that I am attractive is still relatively new, and I'm still learning the ropes of my different life. I won't be sharing any photos, but I'm often told that I look like a young Mark Ruffalo.

I'm going to split this into parts.

Everyone is nicer

As soon as I lost the weight, I was treated a lot better. To be clear, I wasn't treated that terribly when I was overweight. In my experience, people were generally nice. But there were some times when people would just ignore me or try not to look like me. I recall one moment, in college, while I was walking across campus, this one girl was in front of me. She kept giving me the over-the-shoulder look and then ran off since she detected danger.

Those moments existed, but they weren't my overwhelming experience. What shifted was that people became overly nice towards me. People go out of their way to talk to me, to help me, or to make sure I'm okay. I haven't encountered an incident where a girl thinks I'm a creep or anything like that since.

Women approach men

I think there's this idea in the dating world that women never approach men. I've seen a lot of TikTok videos and Reddit posts where the gist is "no matter how handsome you are, women DO NOT approach men." And they will give anecdotes of "good-looking" friends who have also not been approached by women.

That's not true at all. I have been approached quite a bit, especially in the nightclub and bar setting. There are women who are not shy at all, or they are shy but they're trying something different. The one thing I've noticed, and this is going to sound mean, the women most likely to approach a guy tend to not be very attractive. The most attractive woman who approached me (and she was very pretty) approached me with the help of a friend.

Even if women don't outright approach you, they give signals as their way of making the first move. Often at the bar or club, it's a lot of staring. They stare, look away, look back again to make sure you're staring.

I work in a predominantly female workplace. So the signals in this are a little different. A lot of my co-workers go out of their way to chat with me. They often look for excuses to touch me or to get closer to me. They'll look at me when they don't think I'm looking. Recently, I had a higher-up worker start messaging me through the work chat we use and inviting me to her office for treats that she makes. They don't say anything out loud, it's just sort of obvious that they find me attractive.

Rejection stings, especially when they're not used to it

Going back to the workplace. We have cops at my work as security. It's kind of well-known that the male cops sleep with the staff. But none of the female cops really do that. I would chat with this one cop, she's quite a bit older than me (actually, she has a daughter that's exactly my age). But she is gorgeous. It started off slow; we just looked at each other for a while before I started talking to her. But we built up enough of a rapport that one day she gave me a big opening for me to ask her out. I didn't. Someone that pretty is not used to not being pursued, so she became more guarded and avoidant of me.

That was kind of a somber example. A more aggressive example was at a dance club. This woman gave me the eye contact signal, but I did not approach her. Flash forward a bit, I'm on the dance floor, and she pushes me. It wasn't an accident; it was very aggressive, and she was obviously drunk.

There are more examples that I can give, but the reaction is never that great. And I've learned that I hate making people feel that way. It's what I imagine a woman feels like when they rejects men, it's so much pressure. Especially when the woman is attractive herself, there's a sadder response from them because they're not used to that.

I was not prepared to be in a situation where I could hurt someone's feelings. Not just that, but I can hurt someone's feelings by not doing anything. It used to be simple. I didn't really have options or anything like that, so when the opposite came true, where I had to pick and choose between people, it was daunting. Almost paralyzing. At one point, I had three women interested in me at the same time, and I could not figure out how to pick one to escalate things with. At the time, I was not in the mental space to be in that situation anyway, and I think I made the overall best decision I could have (which was to not do anything with any of them) since I think things wouldn't have ended well for any of them. Even if all three of them felt a sting from that sort of soft rejection.

People assume the best in you

I don't know how many times I've been told that I seem like a nice guy. And that goes even after I've done something bad, or say some off-color stuff. I don't think I would be given that grace if I were maybe a little bit uglier.

People just assume the best of me now; they assume good intentions. One time when I was out, I had danced with a woman who was part of a group. I sat at their table, and they asked me to look after their drinks as they went to the bathroom. In my head, I thought, "Okay, they're leaving, they're not coming back, because what woman is going to trust their drink with a stranger?" They came back.

Not that I was going to do anything, nor do I intentionally try to make people feel bad (barring one time where I was testing the waters).

At the same time, people think you're sleeping around

I was a virgin until last year; it seemed like a shock whenever I would say that. When I did manage to finally lose it, the person I lost it to always thought I was sleeping with a lot of people. I've had many people think that I'm sleeping around, that I've had multiple sex partners, and somehow don't seem convinced when I try to tell them I'm not, and I don't.

I've tried different styles. When I keep to myself and when I'm overly chatty. People think the same either way.

I've been on dates where the other person assumes I'm "talking" to someone else. Like, if I use my phone for a bit, the assumption is I'm texting someone.

Conclusion

I seem to have more eyes on me now. The invisibility cloak I once had is gone and now everything I do or say carries more weight. I'm more at risk of hurting someone's feelings just by not being attracted to them. And having someone that you find attractive finding you attractive is a scary thing.

I've spoken to a very attractive woman who told me about her experiences, and while there are some similarities it's basically tenfold for women. Attractive women get gifts, people offering to buy stuff for her, just a lot more intensity. Especially since it's more socially acceptable for men to do that for women. It's not something I envy, and it fills her with anxiety and rage with how often she has to reject men.

I would say overall it's a much more positive life I'm living now, but there are times when I miss being the one nobody looked at and nobody had expectations for. I'd just eat and watch movies all day. There was a comfort to that over the healthy eating and workout regimen I do now.

I think things are going to get a lot worse until they get better (if they do). I’m not talking about US politics (I dont live there), I’m thinking more about climate change: food and water might not be as readily available anymore, never mind other things we take for granted like medicine, transportation, communications, a retirement pension.

It’s hard to articulate but I feel like our future is bleaker than the previous generation’s for the first time in modern history because of factors beyond our control (i.e. neither geopolitical nor economic). Not sure how to prepare for it so I’m wondering how other Tilderinas and Tilderinos deal with it, especially if you have or are planning on having children?

This is a discussion on recreational substance use with illegal substances.

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Pre-college / independent living, I thought most people simply drank, and maybe did weed. No one smokes unless you're 'European' (to be broad about it). Pre-covid, I thought most (young, partying) people just did alcohol, cocaine, and maybe weed (plus, again, the Europeans with the cigarettes). Post-covid, it seems that everyone has a few drinks only, but does weed edibles, nicotine vapes, increasingly partial servings / 'tabs' of Molly, Ketamine. Every few months, someone will be doing mushrooms or LSD. We range from 29-40 in age.

(I know this isn't 'everyone' and also simply a sampling of the subculture near me.)

I was a social drinker, so I largely sobered up easily and quickly during COVID, and I also started to work out. Fast forward those trends five (five, can you believe it??) years, and I have maybe 5 drinks this whole calendar year. I've had probably 15mg of edibles this whole calendar year, and 1 mushroom microdose (I simultaneously felt and did not feel this). This wasn't without total cost; I don't socialize as easily and don't have a means for getting myself in the mood to be with people, the way being tipsy could ply you into a good time. People feel somewhat rejected, too, when I don't want to share a high together; to them, it's bonding when to me, I see it as a commitment to 4+ excruciating hours of my mind being annoyed that my body and impulses are trying to defy it, plus a hangover. (Additionally, I worry about the unknowns that come accompanied with unregulated substances and new substances, like contamination / inauthentic product or psychosis.)

Amidst this health kick, I find myself having become more conscious of the way my body feels. When I live really well, I feel fantastic. Sleeping well? Incredible. Eating healthily? Amazing. No strange substances for my liver to fight? Perfect. Toss in an inherently fulfilling routine, and I wake up every day with the capacity for happiness, clarity, and control over my life. Some people laud things like the 'death of the ego' you might get with psilobiclin, but I love my ego. I think it's pretty smart and thoughtful. I understand power over self can psychologically choke you out, but honestly, I like it? Disrupted sleep kills me for days. The 'microdose'? Feels like it left me flat and depressed after an initial peppy 1-2 days.

Mental health has been a struggle for me all my life. To be stable and content, if somewhat flat, is it's own happiness. I never learned how to be 'happy' in the way that you find joy in things your brain genuinely has no interest in even when 99% of people do; I gave up on mourning that. However, I have learned that my body is a temple to be maintained for my spirit / mind. When I neglect it a little too long or hard, it spirals, and my mind goes with it. But when I rake its leaves, neaten its shelves, and polish its statues, it can look so beautiful, that I feel beautiful just existing with it.

Last night, I felt incredibly pleased just feeling the fur of a dog on my lap as I ran my hands over him, not dissimilar to the same feeling on substances, but with the mental clarity to recall the way it felt to my hands. I never used to have the capacity to notice how wonderful these things are until this last year or so, and these moments of simple, pure joy are rare. But despite people and (liberal) society at large insisting that substances are how you gain clarity or essential perspective, I can't help but now feel skeptical that these substances are really doing anything of note. Most of my friend group is maintaining very functional lives despite substance use, which I credit to either me not knowing them well or responsible usage. A few seem to use them too frequently / heavily (e.g. molly, or mixing drugs) or for the 'wrong' reasons (e.g., "feeling off"), and I can't help but notice that either their behavior on substances leads to a major conflict or they get into major conflict within 2 weeks after. It is hard for me to not feel like these problems are created by drugs, or that the fallout hanging over their heads is worsened by how I imagine they feel emotionally but can no longer elucidate to themselves. A friend of mine was concerned that I started feeling sleepy at 8pm, when I had never felt better. I never realized not feeling like shit every day was an option until I got my lifestyle together, and I wonder if they can feel that in themselves.

This was mostly a ramble, on disrupted sleep from some surprise caffeine last night. I would be curious to hear if people have observed similar substance use in their social groups and whatever else.

A break up
A loss
A blindside
A disappointment
Or anything else that broke your heart

Tell us the story, and how you are doing with it.

Also, for anyone reading people’s comments, remember that these are difficult stories for people to share. Please be empathetic and kind in your responses. Treat these as opportunities to commiserate and support, rather than as problems to solve.

Most of my time in any given day is spent sleeping (eight hours), working (nine hours, plus another one or two for commuting), chores (maintaining the home, personal hygiene, etc.), and spending time with my wife (and occasionally with friends and family).

This means that I don’t have a lot of “spare time”. I maybe get one or two hours a day, and a few more on Saturdays and Sundays.

I often feel anxious and depressed about this inescapable reality. I have a lot of projects and hobbies that I would like to fill my spare time with, but not enough for all of them.

Years ago, I began to try to reframe the circumstances of my life in my mind in order to prevent a complete mental collapse. I tell myself that this life is finite, that I will never be able to have all the experiences that I would like to, and that’s OK. I can live with that reality. And I should instead, focus my energy on dedicating myself to the projects and hobbies that I absolutely do not want to miss out on.

I still struggle to stick to just a few of those, because there are so many (especially creative) activities that I enjoy. I regularly go through cycles of taking on too many of these, then becoming overwhelmed because I don’t have enough time for each, then cutting out most of them to focus on the ones that I want to prioritize, and repeating the cycle.

Today, I have reached the part of that cycle where I will cut some of them out.

Whenever I do that, it really helps me to take inventory of what those activities are, so that I can stay focused, and delay taking on more or new ones until I am satisfied with where I got with my current ones.

So, here are the projects and hobbies that I want to spend my spare time on, starting today:

• Reading one hour every morning (been diligently doing that since January 1). Two books I am reading through the year. A third book I read as much as I have time left (have read more than ten this year already). I also occasionally read some blogs on Bear Blog.
• Writing on two blogs (one daily, one occasionally), as well as writing my book.
• Occasionally chatting on a forum, Tildes, and four Discord guilds.
• Taking one daily walk while listening to a podcast.
• Occasionally watching YouTube videos (I am—coincidentally—subscribed to exactly 50 channels, almost all of which have an upload schedule of one video every other week or slower).

What are your activities?

Side notes: The list above is a summary. My list is a lot more precise, to help me focus. Also, I’m currently unemployed, but before I quit my last job, I had actually been working almost without interruption for several years. My day-to-day routine back then was exactly as I described it in the beginning of this post.

Just wanted to share an update on the stuff I overshared in this thread nearly a month ago.

It's been an incredibly long, frustrating, but successful month. Within a few days of writing that post, we took my son to the doctor and I just explained everything going on. The doctor seemed as unsure as we were whether my son was experiencing illness or anxiety, so she decided to tackle both. He got some medication for the stomach issues and we got the ball rolling on getting him into therapy.

The following few weeks were very hit-and-miss. I tried to get him to drive with me on little errands here and there throughout the week to get him out of the house, comfortable in the car, and to try to work through the fear he was experiencing. At first it would take quite a lot of convincing and sometimes I got frustrated and acted like an idiot. Eventually we got to a point where the convincing took less time and resulted in less tears (and frustration). But we are at a point where he's getting better at calming himself down and going in the car even if he's a little scared.

We still haven't made much progress with getting him in the car with his sister though. We've done a few trips to the nearby park all together, but my wife had to sit between them to calm him down. Likewise, he's still hesitant to sleep in the same room as her (they share a room for now). And again, it has nothing to do with her, aside from her overreacting to him being upset and him being upset by that. It's a vicious cycle. Honestly this is the most difficult part right now because it's making doing anything really complicated. We literally cannot do family trips anywhere without taking two vehicles. More on this later.

One of my biggest concerns in the other thread was that he was scheduled for eye surgery toward the end of the month and pre/post op appointments and the surgery itself would require a lot of driving. I'm happy to report that he handled every single car trip relating to it like a champ. And the surgery itself was a success, and recovery is going really well. Also apparently thanks to COVID, parents are no longer allowed to go back to the operating room until their child falls asleep, which we didn't realize until a few seconds before they took him back. Which was really difficult for us as parents and for him as well. He keep mentioning it and I try to talk him through and explain that we didn't know and that we're sorry, but wouldn't have let him go if we didn't know the doctor and nurses would be taking good care of him.

And he had his first therapy appointment this morning. It was just an intake appointment so the therapist could get a feel for what's going on and to get to know my son a little bit. But I feel a lot better about things than I did a month ago. I know we still have a lot of struggle and work ahead of us (he starts 1st grade next month...Getting him and his sister there is going to be interesting).

I think the next few weeks are going to be spent working on getting him and his sister together in the car more. We're already working on the bedtime issue. The last two nights we had them together in the same room to read a bedtime story together and then afterwards she slept elsewhere. Just trying to baby step our way toward solving that problem.

Lastly, I wanted to thank you all for your support and comments in the original thread. It was very helpful to be able to write everything out and get some validation, advice, etc.

When I was seven years old, my aunt gave me a dog. It was a toy poodle, the runt of the litter. She was from their first litter. They didn’t originally want to give me the dog since she was the prettiest. But I took her home. My aunt said she was expecting me to give her back after a few months. I didn’t.

I still remember holding her in my arms for the entire four-hour car ride back home. She didn’t like me at first. As it turns out, she didn’t like children much at all. As we grew older together, however, we formed a bond. Because of how young I was, I accidentally named her Doggie. She recognized several names afterward, including Baby, which is what we ultimately stuck with on documents. But she first knew herself as Doggie.

She had her favorites in the family. I remember her going crazy whenever my dad would come home from work. She always sat next to my mom when she was eating and watching TV. She’d come to our rooms and ask us to put her in our bed. I remember once, while I was in the middle of a stressful study session, she barked at me outside of my door because I wasn’t paying attention to her.

She was a very smart dog. There are many instances of her ability to problem-solve or think things through. She had this cough, and she recognized that whenever she coughed, I would look at her. So after failing to get my attention for a while, she faked a cough to get me to look.

She was, through and through, a member of the family.

I remember when I was almost 15, I did the math. At the time, my dog was seven years old, and I figured she would die by her 10th year, as that’s what I was told was the norm. She didn’t, obviously, but a year later on my 16th birthday, she almost died.

I awoke to my dog crying under my bed. She wouldn’t come out, so I checked, and she was covered in blood. We immediately took her to the emergency vet. As it turns out, she was attacked by a coyote. She somehow survived. She broke several of her teeth off attempting to fight the coyote. Like I said, my dog is a toy poodle, you could put her in your lap and still have a lot of room left over. This tiny dog successfully fended off a coyote attack. She made a full recovery.

She was a constant in my life. By 2020, I figured she was in her last days. She started losing her sight, her hearing, and her sense of smell. She was still functional, but it was clear she was starting to decline. Year after year, I would think, “This is probably her last year.” And year after year, she proved me wrong.

She gained more chronic health issues starting in 2022. What always worried us were her mammary gland tumors. They were benign for the most part. But one of them ruptured last week. A sign of cancer, sure, but frankly they only gave us two solutions: surgery or euthanasia. With her age, the outlook for post-surgery recovery was not great, if she even survived the surgery. She always hated doctors. I remember her recovery from the coyote attack was long and brutal on her, and she was half the age she is now.

After 18 years, I put her down. I don’t feel guilt in the sense that it wasn’t her time. It was. If I didn’t do it now, she’d get worse. She might not understand the concept of death, but the pain was very real to her. So I put an end to the pain.

I’m devastated. I, of course, knew this day would come and have been mentally preparing for years. But it’s odd that she’s not here anymore. In a way, she hadn’t been here for a long time. Her behavior radically changed over the past year, she was a shell of her former self. But now she’s not physically here anymore. I can’t grab her anymore. I can’t hear her cry. I can’t wake her up.

We grew up together, and I saw her get old. I saw her survive the unthinkable, I saw her outlive every single member of her family, including the one child she had.

I brought her to our home holding her in my arms. And I said goodbye to her the same way.

I have no idea if anyone else is into this, casually or just past experiences, can remove if inappropriate.

Haven’t seen anyone else talk about it here in Tildes, so, anyone else have any experience with any sort of psychedelic adventures?

I try to trip once every couple years because I feel like its easy for me to forget about myself and what I want and how that fits into what the world wants from me. I use the ‘me’ time to just sort myself out, get my priorities straight, and keep going.

Anyone else?

My sister and I were raised largely by our single mother, a passionate, fiery woman bordering on histrionic. I remember like it was yesterday how proudly she looked at my sister when she was crying or having a fit. My mother would later comment, multiple times, on how she admired my sister's ability to express her emotions in colorful ways, unimpeded by any constraints.

To my mother, my sister was "true" and "real". I was not. In my home, introversion was a crime. I was viewed as broken, and my lack of emotional display was something to correct. Throughout my life, different extroverts arrived at a similar opinion. Why aren't you crying? Why can't you be exactly like me? Are you a psychopath?. I am not. I experience the full range of emotions. I express them differently and at my leisure. But I feel them completely.

Sometimes, when I reveal that I do not cry, people assume that I am against emotion and against crying. I am not against crying or emotion. I understand that, to some, crying is important to emotional regulation. It can be uplifting and cathartic. Crying does not make someone weak -- much to the contrary. Men shouldn't be ashamed of crying, nor should they take any measures to avoid crying.

In the same way that no one should feel constrained in their crying, no one should feel oppressed into crying, or be made to feel ashamed of not crying. My emotional life is beautiful, deep, and intricate. I express it in a myriad of ways. The fact that I work through my emotions without the use of my lacrimal glands must not be viewed as a disease to correct. I have many problems. No crying is not one of them.

How long after someone giving you their number is considered too long to contact them?

This person gave me their number weeks ago, and I was thinking of asking them out to coffee, but I’m not sure if that might be considered rude due to the time lapse. I don’t think it would be, but what do I know — I haven’t had anything to do with the dating scene in many, many years…

So, I’m not really looking for advice, but rather perspective. What do other people consider normal in these sorts of situations?