InsurgentRat

My one resolve, as I enter my greying, is to never become one of those dipshits.

The kids are alright, a little straight edge for my tastes but they’re alright.

Everyone is getting stupider except you right? Like you’re not one of the dumbed down lazy people are you? or your loved ones?

People have said this shit since we have written records.The whole idea of fallen man is the foundation of the Abrahamic religions, probably others I don’t know of too.

People are doing alright, actually go talk to some. Yeah yeah a lot aren’t crazy educated but even the most educated intellectual titans of our age are uneducated in the overwhelming majority of things.

We do alright, there are many problems but they’re not because people are getting less intelligent. We are no smarter or stupider than the first humans, or at least we have no reason to believe otherwise. We have better access to information and we’re also facing some very large problems, but so did bronze age people.

Read the epic of Gilgamesh, it’ll chill you out some.

Smoking: easy way to quit smoking plus weed during the worst withdrawal to avoid snapping at everyone

Weed (earlier lmao, I still use sometimes but less than a gram a year really): having other things to do that require concentration and memory I enjoy. Weed is easy as it’s mostly habitual. The sleeplessness is the worst and it’s only a couple of days

Opiates: Exercise, avoiding boredom (v hard! video games, gardening, easy books, podcasts etc), lots of walking those restless nights, preparing easy food for the worst few days, counting days to know it was going to end. Be careful after surgery kids that shit sucks to come off.

I don’t think that’s likely, we are apes not angels.

Sometimes we have conflicts, some are probably resolvable, some represent fundamentally opposed interests.

We can try to make society different, so there are fewer situations that lead to irresolvable conflicts. That project will never end.

Whether this gives you hope or grief is largely up to you.

Find a sense engaging ritual and do it regularly.

For me it was having elaborate spice teas or herbal teas. I’d mix up batches and keep it in the office, when I needed some sanity taking the time to just focus on a damn good cup of tea helped me relax some.

A treat you enjoy, a stretching routine whatever you can do that is highly engaging would be a good choice. Force work out of your head even for 5 minutes. We aren’t meant to work like a steam engine.

Ok so we can take that stance. I would disagree that these are useful semantics because of the case I mentioned where I feel like adding a turret to a sandcaste is something meaningfully distinct from reducing a sandcastle to a pile of sand, walking 100 meters down the beach, and making a new one with the turret.

Do you disagree that this is meaningfully distinct? If you do would you feel that it’s equivalent to do those two things? That you feel the same way about them?

If you agree that it’s meaningfully distinct then why insist on framing it in the same concepts instead of using the concept of change?

You’re gonna have to start by pinning down terminology a bit.

Change is a term often used which I think most people would feel is a usefully distinct word for example if I said: said:

• “I created a sandcastle”
• “I changed a sandcastle”
• “I destroyed a sandcastle”

I think those would mean something different to most people despite all reductively applying to the literal rearrangement of a pile of sand.

So the obvious potential confusion here is in the case where I changed a sandcastle how would you decribe it? adding a turret could be taken as destroying the old one and creating a new one but it seems strange to me to argue for the throwing out of change as a concept since what I did seems meaningfully different from smashing a sandcastle, walking 100 meters, and building a new one.

So could you elaborate on what you take creation and destruction to entail?

The definition privileges action, which is why vegan philosophy is generally fine with stuff like foxes hunting birds but not humans hunting foxes to save birds.

Taking action to depress ants to save others would go against the ethos as defined:

“Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.”

definitionally you aren’t vegan if environmental impact is your terminal goal. It would be like saying you’re Christian for the cathedrals or something.

Veganism is a philosophy and life practice of trying to minimise harm to other earthlings. It can involve environmentalism as an instrumental goal, that is protecting the environment to avoid mass suffering, but a world of perfect environmental preservation where all ants have depression would be unacceptable to a vegan but not to an environmentalist.

Many people with environmental goals adopt a plant based diet and/or lifestyle.

the smell of frying onions