The question is open to anyone attending any level of school in any capacity.

How are you feeling?
What are you excited about?
What are you nervous about?
What are your goals?
What are you hoping to get out of your education?

I've written about my living situation previously but am curious as to whether there are any other tilderinos living off grid. What sort of accommodation do you live in? What do you do for a living (if anything)? Are you self sufficient to done extent? How do you use technology to improve your lifestyle?

It can be specific or broad, and it can be aimed at a particular type of person based on your experiences (e.g. people in my city, people with fibromyalgia, etc.) or just people at large.

Also, given that age is a very identifying piece of information, feel free to give a range if you're not comfortable sharing your exact age (e.g. "I'm in my 40s" rather than "I'm 42").

• What advice or wisdom would you give to someone 10 years younger than you?
• What would you have wanted to know 10 years ago that someone older could have shared with you?
• If you'd heard the kind of advice you're giving, would you have listened to it 10 years ago?

Consider the life you want to live, from the essentials to the luxuries. House, car, food, tech, kids, etc. Furthermore, consider where you want to live. Rural France? Downtown Tokyo?

For the purposes of the question I don't want you to think of the life of your wildest dreams (e.g. private jet, personal island, etc.), but I don't want you to think bare minimum either. Focus instead on "comfortable and fulfilling" according entirely to your own standards--a life that lets you live well and follow your aspirations with a sense of financial safety. Do not feel obligated to give a low, reasonable answer if your aspirations are higher, and don't feel obligated to shoot high if you're fine with a lower-cost lifestyle. Set your number entirely based around the desired archetypal life you want, rather than what you think is necessarily achievable based on your current financial situation.

Furthermore, don't anchor your hypothetical income to real-world standards. If you want to, for example, teach kindergarteners for a living and live in downtown San Francisco, and your desired income is $200,000 USD a year, that's perfectly fine for the purposes of this discussion despite the fact that you would be hard pressed to find a school there in real life that pays that much. I'm much more interested in the hypotheticals of the costs in your life rather than the feasibility of the income. Think of this less as a real-world budget and more of a thought experiment/personal reflection.

With all that in mind:

• What are the details of the life you want to live?
• Where do you want to live it?
• How much money would you need each year to make that feasible for you, and why?

I'm not interested in anything exact--just a ballpark estimate. And you don't need to give a full budget or anything. This should loose napkin math at best.

Also, to make things easier for everyone:

• Give your money as an amount per year.
• Give the currency you're using.
• Use combined income if your desired life involves multiple people.
• Do not judge someone else's desired life nor income.

Also, please specify which currency you are reporting in so that people can convert it to their local currency if needed to get a better sense of it.

There are, sadly, far too many people and companies out there more than willing to take advantage of people. Fortunately, awareness is usually a good defense. What are some scams that we should all know about so that we don't fall for them?

Working and studying from home, it's hard not to acquire bad habits. Most of the time I follow the Pomodoro Technique, so I have constant small breaks instead of large ones. But sometimes I just stay on the computer looking at different things such as Reddit and Tildes, and it doesn't feel very restful. At the same time, if I change the context too much, it's easy to lose track of time (yes, even with apps), and I have trouble refocusing on my work, study etc.

This may seem like a trivial problem for some, but not for me!

Summing up: what can I do on my breaks (4 x 5 minutes followed by 1 x 25 minutes) that is both restful and pleasurable, but not excessively engaging?

A bit of a darker or at least more introspective question than I usually ask, but I think it's a valid one and something worth considering. It's something I've been grappling with recently myself.

As you reflect on your life, is there something which makes its absence known? Something you wish you had, but don't? Do you think you'll ever be able to change, fill, fix, or work around it? Do you think it'll change with time or remain permanent? How does the missing whatever-it-is impact your life?

A final note: given that people are likely going to be sharing some difficult stuff, it's important to remember that empathic listening, particularly online, isn't usually about offering solutions. Questions are often better than answers in conversations of this type.

After watching Office Space for the first time a few weeks ago, I was struck by the scene where Peter is talking about his average working day, and it got me to wondering about how much actual work I do at my job. I'm pretty sure that even on a good day, I put in less than 2 hours of actual graft. The rest is just mindless internetting, chatting with my colleagues, and wishing I was elsewhere.
So I'm curious how much work other people actually do in a day, and how you pass the time when you're not doing anything at all?

By “happiness” I don't mean “the place where happy people are happy all the time”, but rather “the absence of persisting suffering”.

For some context, I've been suffering from clinical depression for over nine years now. Maybe more. I've been hurt by other people many times in my life, especially in childhood and during school. I have almost never felt connected to another human being, and the older I get, the harder it gets to get any kind of intimacy. I feel like “I'm a creep and I'm a weirdo” regularly, as if my teen angst has never left me. On a good day I will merely be tired, and I think I don't need to describe a bad day.

Recently I've been discovering interesting approaches to therapy and using awareness to “pull yourself by the boot straps”, but whenever the time comes to actually use them in practice, a very real question: “Why should I do it? Happiness is impossible, I will always be what I am, so why go through additional pain of trying to change anything when the result isn't guaranteed?”.

So the question is: how do you answer this (loaded) question? How do you get back your faith in better future for yourself when you have so little experience actually being better? Can you actually do that?

Whether you will start it on January 1st or already doing it, what is it that is going to make you a better person?

For me, I decided to limit my two biggest timesinks, namely, Youtube and Reddit. I started several days ago and won't wisit them at all before I pass all the exams. Before, they were often an excuse for me to spend time basically doing nothing. Time to change that. (And yet, I'm doing the dame thing right now with ~, but oh well, it doesn't have content anyway)

I find myself on a bit of an unending quest to organize my own thoughts, especially since my work evolved into multiple streams on different projects.

I have been looking for a tool to help me organize myself and focus on the things I want to do. More specifically, I keep wanting to improve my ability to remember things: Be able to remember faster, longer, recall more reliably, categorize, filter and export those things, etc.
Links, reading material, "watch later" material, todo lists, contacts, phone numbers/emails, identities, what I know about people, reminders, highlights, emails to respond to, work logging, etc. The more I think about it, the more I have this need for a tool that essentially acts as a permanent second brain.

I feel like I've tried everything. Note-taking apps like Keep, orgmode, wikis, journals, disorganized text files, issue trackers, Pocket, gmail itself, calendar reminders, even Magic. Nothing quite works. The issues I most consistently hit are:

• The method is not good enough at ingesting abstract data. Examples: Anything calendar-bound is not good at storing anything that isn't related to a point in time. Pocket cannot store things that aren't links to web pages.
• The method is far too cumbersome to be able to braindump into it or too impractical to retrieve data from. Examples: Wikis, Keep and other object-based note-taking systems are unfilterable unless you take a ton of time to attach a lot of metadata to each note. Magic is too asynchronous as you sometimes wait several minutes for responses (and it also gets far too expensive to use at the level I'd like).

Despite trying everything, I don't know if I want to build that tool myself, because I think it probably already exists somewhere (and it might be down to me not knowing how to use the things that are already out there). Although if someone does feel inspired to build that, hit me up. :)

My current flow looks like a frankenstein mix of Keep/Gmail/Calendar, which at least integrate with one another, and a ton of proprietary or dissociated methods (including Pocket, Discord, Spreadsheets/Drive, Magic, Kayak, 1Password and a ton of duplicate files and documents). Then it just becomes a matter of remembering what type of information is where, and how to best find it.

So Tildes, what do you use?

Basically the title. Looking online you see stuff like "get sleep!" "eat healthy!" but that's just like general health stuff and yeah unhealthiness is stressful but it doesn't really reduce stress much.

So what do you guys do when you want to depressurize and relax a little bit? I haven't ever actually tried it but I hea want to try meditation, just need to set aside a chunk of time for it.

There are so many variants of beards, stubble, mustache, etc. around, and also clean shaven style. It's interesting why people prefer their particular facial hair styles, kinda the ideas behind them. Maybe depending on how it grows, and to feel confident, to be liked by others, or it feels nice, or something else. What's your story?

I was having a conversation with one of my coworkers who mentioned that her child showed a fascination with scary, Halloween-type stuff starting around age 6. She and her husband had a hard time with whether they should let him enjoy it or limit it. They weren't sure whether to let him read scary books or watch spooky stuff on YouTube, particularly because it's the type of content that can very easily be age-inappropriate--especially for a 6 year old. Nevertheless, it was relatively easy for them to keep it to stuff like Jack-o-Lanterns and black cats since he was so young.

The boy is now older but has retained his interest, and the parents are still struggling with decisions about allowable content, especially because he is starting to age into books and movies that deal with much darker stuff, particularly ideas about death/violence.

I'm not a parent, but I am a teacher, and I have to admit that I'm uncomfortable with some of the stuff my students are exposed to. Over the years I've heard students as young as twelve discuss horror movies like the Saw series or The Human Centipede. I've had middle school students bring books like Gone Girl and 50 Shades of Gray to class. On one hand, I think kids are resilient, and I think a lot of the more difficult or disturbing stuff doesn't quite land for them because they don't really have a context into which to put it yet. I also believe that fictional media is a mostly safe way for us to explore troubling or disturbing ideas.

On the other hand, I think the internet has caused our children to grow up a lot faster than they used to, as they are exposed to mature content (whether intentionally or accidentally) from a very early age. When I was growing up the worst I could do was check out a slightly-risqué book from the school library and hope my parents never found it in my backpack. Now kids are watching violent (often real-world) and pornographic content starting as young as elementary school. Nothing can make your heart sink quite like sixth graders talking excitedly over lunch about a video of a real person getting crushed to death.

What I genuinely don't know is if this has any negative developmental effect. Am I just clutching my pearls here? I'd love to hear some parents talk about how they've handled the decision of what's right for their kids and whether they've had fallout from their kids consuming content that's not appropriate for them.

I'm interested in all responses, but if the answer is "well" or better and the following are factors that contributed to that sense of well-being, could you divulge your job industry, if applicable, and/or the Canadian city where you currently reside? (If privacy-minded or jealously guarding a secret utopia, province would suffice. Thank you.)

About me: besides the current political and lazy-to-anti-intellectual climate of the US, I'm pressingly concerned about global warming; after a dozen years of living in and around refreshing Seattle (compared to southern California), I had to give in and buy an air conditioner this summer. Anecdotally, it seems to be a trend.

Hey everyone. I'm a Brazilian polyamorous bisexual man, in a loving relationship with a polyamorous bisexual woman.

I'm uncertain if polyamory is usually covered by LGBT groups, but I think it's the closest here in tildes!
I just wanted to see if there are more poly people around here, get the ball rolling about the subject in this forum and all.

So, some questions to make some conversation happen:

Are you poly?

What does your family/friends think about it?

Are you in a relationship right now? Is that relationship open/poly? Tell us about your polycule, gush about your partner(s) a bit ;)

If you're not poly, what do you know and what do you think about polyamory?

I’ll go first. Back in the late 1990s I worked at a startup out of Seattle. The founders had a previous exit and had a winery in Sonoma. They flew us all down there and things started out fun. We had a scavenger hunt in San Francisco, we all picked grapes at their winery, and saw how the wine was made. The third day got weird. We were all supposed slaughter a goat and eat it. No one wanted to kill the poor thing, so a farm hand did it, and we all ate the terrible meat.

On the final evening we were all sat down in a barn with lots of candles. We did some semi-normal stuff like write down everything we have been avoiding in our lives, then we burned the lists.

Next, the person running the thing thought it would be a good idea to reenact the biblical thing where Jesus washes poor peoples’ feet. But she got it backwards, and some of the VPs were supposed to wash the CEO’s feet.

A couple of us vocally freaked out, then the whole thing fell apart and we all went home early.

I know my story may be extreme, but does anyone else have any misguided or just strange team building events like this in their work history?

I'm a civil litigator in Texas, just curious if anyone else on here practices law! When the site opens up, I see value in creating something akin to the /r/lawyers subreddit where access is restricted to licensed attorneys, and I'd be happy to jump in on setting that up when it does.