In The Netherlands, within my social circles, it’s mostly seen as overly informal and quite intimate to take off your shoes.

You can do it at friends, but certainly not by default at acquaintances (unless they ask), as it might even be a little disrespectful considering taking off your shoes could smell a bit after some hours. Like you force your bodily odours or sweaty feet on to someone’s house.

I totally get the opposite and am noticing a slow shift (also in my own house) to dropping the shoes. But it’s interesting to see that both stances are based on some form of respect, and perhaps also some pragmatism on our side.

But you get rusty in moist environments; when you urinate you slowly rot away your urethra.

It’s tough, respect for holding on as you do.

Life’s not fair, not everyone has the mental stability that is required for a happy life. But we can hope to lessen the pain a bit.

Headspace is indeed an app, with a subscription (not sure what the free plan is, but it helped me so I didn’t care). You can also meditate yourself or with free YT videos of course, but this app worked better for me.

Take care, hope you find some relief.

ERASED is about a guy reliving his life as a young school kid, with awkward moments around romantic feelings. While I do think it kind of fits the story, I think it does not go well with the requirements.

With this classy response of his it’s almost better for his perceived character than when he didn’t say it.

After 25 years of suicidal thoughts I’ve finally taken antidepressants, Zoloft was what worked for me.

In a couple of months the black thoughts became more rare and now in a year or so they are almost gone. I don’t feel the active need to kill myself any longer. Which feels… a bit uncanny almost. Not all in life is good, but this specific lack of despair is nice; still really bizarre to not have this endless dread any longer. I try to enjoy that while it lasts.

I did a lot of meditation as well with Headspace, can recommend that too.

Hope you find your way.

It depends, I believe actual tape keeps data usable way longer than CDs.

No need to attack me like that when I’m just sharing my viewpoint.

I’m not that outspoken about whether it is fair or not to train on publicly visible data. As that is like having a set of brains look at the same data, but on steroids.

I do feel, however, that large companies making money off that inspiration input seems skewed. But that comes down to the question, can you look at public work and then ask for money for the work you create yourself afterwards. As you surely build on inspiration.

Well, in many other systems you have an overarching ruling layer that sets laws and is able to enforce them from a top level.

That is precisely the reason why those systems can be relatively stable. As you just have a very large group of people following the same set of rules.

In a sense everything every artist makes is inspired by other people’s art and general life experiences. We humans only have some extra sensory channels and brain paths to map that inspiration through, so it “feels” more original.

I’d argue our creation of art is just a couple of levels more complex. But at its core its just external stimuli followed by some internalisation that enables us to create art. But we needed the aggregated input.

Which does not mean that we can’t disapprove of literal copies of other people’s work. But I think we should be very aware of the fact that it’s more or less a complexity scale.

I like the idea of anarchism, but I see it as more of an ideal world view than an actual stable reality.

To support this, every group member of every group must almost unanimously support the concept. When resources or safety in an area become scarce, it’s easy for some groups to evolve back into another power structure to take care of their own people.

It’s really difficult for me to imagine everybody on this planet getting along with this. But I’m certainly interested in other viewpoints.

There have been studies that claim there is a max on what money can buy you in terms of happiness. Before it was said to be 70k (of course depends on the country), now it might be 500k.

Well, not that I approve of the practice, but you could find site logins that the email is used in, breaches that it’s been in (potentially finding (old) passwords).

With that info, if not for identity theft directly, can be used for fishing and profiling.

Maybe he is over a thousand years old, don’t you see the wrinkles?

This is a brilliant description; the feeling OP has is probably on a way more abstract level than most of the comments here are thinking of.

If you have a whiteboard marker, you can draw over it and then erase it. Works wonders.

Interesting video, thanks. I think the main point is that most (historical) data has a lot of gaps and wrong interpretations / extrapolation. People like Pinker seem to (perhaps just ignorantly) somewhat cherry pick data and use it as an argument for their optimistic statement.

It depends on what you mean by “ugly”. Seeing so many people worldwide vote for harsh xenophobic policies made me realize that I consider most people sort of ugly.

Perhaps they are just afraid, but it paints the real world picture. I don’t think people are good or bad inside, just egoistic. Me included.

Still I try to see the good in people and I tend not to whine, but I do understand the pessimistic views.

Congratulations! Same here!

Interestingly I can agree on the grossness of it, only when “the mood”™ arises a kind of nasty turns into attractively naughty. It’s a strange alteration. Like the new texture of a food you might find somewhat repulsive at first suddenly becomes highly addictive or desirable when you give in to it. The sleazy feeling of wanting to keep popping bubble wrap plastic without stopping.

This differs based on time, context (persons) and general mood.

I wonder if at a base level we have kind of the same attitude, but the hormonal alteration or lack thereof is what creates the differences and clouds my mind while yours stay sharp.