orgrinrt

Ah, that old pattern. Damn. I recognize it and see it way too much around. Luckily not much in my inner circles, but spaces I can’t avoid like work for example. It’s starting to eat up on me.

This is one of those weirdly specific pet peeves I have. For the life of me I can not get into the headspace where that is the outcome of the whole chain of logic and intuition that goes into having that stance, and, more importantly, holding to it despite ample chances, throughout tens of years, to change your mind or act differently. At 50, I see you’re still lashing out in this pattern? But why, man, why?

Surely it ought to feel good to see others doing the right thing, so it wouldn’t feel as bad for yourself to do the wrong thing. Assuming you can’t just stop doing it (Many habits are extremely hard to kick, so that’s entirely human and understandable, not faulting anyone for that). But this way, the total amount of good is better when it’s only you doing the wrong thing, so you can just be the margin of error, sort of? Have less of a negative impact overall. Be implicitly slightly better yourself, by this grace of others. Or at least you should end up feeling that way, or something along those lines, right? Or at the very least, feel just nothing, be entirely oblivious to the whole thing. That’d be human and understandable too. It’s a habit. You don’t necessarily think about those. You just do them.

But to lash out for that? Be conscious enough to realize this all, but instead of any other kind of understandable human way, you, of all things, lash out to those doing the different thing. I just can’t figure it out. Why? I suppose it could be a subconscious coping mechanism to shield one’s self from the fact that they are not doing the right thing, but it feels off that it would come out aggressive or you know combative some way. At others, at least. I get that you might feel bad, and “guilty”, sort of, but surely nobody’s mind goes from “I feel guilty” to “it’s your fault I’m feeling guilty”? Ugh.

I find my lack of perspective often very anxiousness-inducing. I can emphatise with such a wide range of lives and beings and situations, but there are so many I simply can’t, often similar to this specific thing. Makes me nervous about me potentially being selfish or stubborn because I can’t see it. This is one of those things. Makes me sweat, almost. Always reminds me of the “are we the baddies?” meme. Am I partially some sort of a sociopath since I just can’t grasp that mindset? What if I don’t even really emphatise with anyone, I just think I do, but what if it feels different for those that really do it? What if I am a psychopath, goddamnit, this really gets me spiraling 🥲

It took me over ten years to realize this too, although I was young and stupid so it kind of follows. I started carrying a bag with a seal with me and if there wasn’t a public ash tray in view, I’d just drop them in there and I was so ashamed when I first started that, since it was so easy and all the things I thought would be problems, like the smell, just… literally never was. And how quickly the bag would fill up, ugh. All that used to go to the ground. Note however that I was conscious of littering and always if I knew there was an ash tray, say, no more than some 100m detour from my current path, I’d just take the extra steps to put it there. But they are surprisingly rare, especially towards the end of my smoking habit, when smoking started to really die out and be a lot less common. A lot of places, like bars for example, didn’t necessarily put ash trays by the door or terrace, which was how it used to be.

I’m lucky I got out of the habit. But I can sort of emphatise those who do it without thinking about it, especially if they are young.

Younger generations are also lucky, at least here, since smoking is so ludicrously expensive nowadays with the taxes and all, and add to that good education, I very rarely see young people smoking anymore. Seems to be mostly people in their 30s or 40s — my age group — and of us, mostly the “hillbilly” types.

I do use nicotine pouches though, to this day. Low nicotine ones, but anyway. Those are very natural for not trashing, like the Nordic snus, since the pucks/containers come with its own small compartment for the used pouches, that’s easy to clean up at home. And those pucks are very recyclable too (granted that the region has the sort of plastic sorting that differentiates washable/directly reusable containers like we do for glass) which at least from what I have seen, gets done properly a lot of the time.

In general, I think the newer generations are much more aware of all this and do a great job of being conscious of the environment, not only at the global scale, but also just the local environment and surroundings too.

Let’s just hope we didn’t fuck up bad enough so that they might have a chance at adulthood and actually transferring all that to more effective and serious politics and activism. We might just get saved ourselves, too, if they just learn to be decisive enough to push us fuckups out of the picture. God I hope enough of them have the dreams, passion and idealism to actually have that drive and fire.

This became a random tangent, sorry if you got this far!

My current and most of my more recent relationships started from tinder, which has been more or less the “default” at least here in my age group (back then, some 20-30). A few were from Jodel or such in between, but I’ve had most luck with the swipey app. Both poly and mono, depending on the phase I was going through at the time.

I think at least most of my friends have met their partners (most being long term by now, with children and such, like mine too currently) that way. But I live in a relatively small country, so maybe that affects the spread in the apps. When you are just a few million people in total speaking the language, there’s not much sense I suppose to spread thin between several apps.

I generally hate thinking like this, but ultimately, as with everything, there comes a point where it’s actually beneficial and probably the only healing move left, to admit that the problem might be in one’s self, not others (or the tools used, as in this case).

But that does not mean that the metaphorical finger is inherently fragile or unavoidably always broken. Just realizing this, as much as our psyche fights against it both to avoid admitting fault or conceding that there’s a lot of work to do, can start the processes to get the finger working and healthy.

I also don’t like how often this line of thought is turned around and used as a weapon, when it can actually be very hopeful and healing after the initial struggles trying to accept it (and failing to do so, defensively fighting against it with all your cells for a good while).

This sounds entirely strange to me. Im very likely out of the loop, or from a different culture, but I can’t understand how this could ever work, doesn’t seem like something people would consistently pay for, when it’s usually as easy as just existing normally to automatically and organically meet people and have relationships.

I get that it’s likely not as easy as that for everyone, and ymmv, but even then, there are free options. And options that have thousands and thousands of active users at any given time to match with. Of all the concepts fediverse could plausibly solve, I can’t see this doing that. But I’d love to hear how that’d work! Sounds curious.

I guess I can’t see the analogue, even, in the centralized world. Are there services like this that actually exist long term? Is this a cultural thing? I have never heard of matchmakers outside of rich people stereotypes, and those are few and far between.

I don’t mean to say it won’t work. This is my initial gut reaction and confusion. I suspect it’s a cultural thing, has to be, since you do speak of it as though it was something often done. I’d be curious to hear more about this kind of thing just for curiosity.

This is very well put.

Familiarity, I suppose.

Personally I map the game pad keys to keyboard keys and have some under chords, I.e press one button and all other buttons behave differently, so it’s basically just like using only keyboard and not mouse, but also having the convenience of a mouse for the rare situation where there isn’t a keyboard shortcut bound

Edit: chords are just the equivalent of pressing crtl/alt/shift+something but the modifier is just whatever game pad button is comfortable for the user (for me, the background finger buttons I.e R/L4 or for the deck, also 5 for some

It’s surprisingly easy and comfortable. Steam controller was a revolution on this regard, at least for me. It sounds wrong but feels just right.

Yup! When I announced I’d leave WhatsApp back in the day, even my (old) parents and some (even older) relatives proceeded to download signal just to stay in touch with me.

Sure, I miss some news or announcements that they share in the big WhatsApp groups, but mostly I’m as up to date as everyone.

Most of my friends did the same, but I noticed my age group (and younger) seem more adaptable here and very quickly figured everything out, and we got some groups entirely moved there. I suppose they feel okay having multiple apps for one thing, as opposed to the older gens, who struggle to learn one thing properly and try their best to just stick with it until eternity.

Haven’t missed WhatsApp a bit, it was the least impactful of all of the meta suite (and others) I left behind back in 2017(?) or so.

I remember back in 2017 or so when I left Facebook and did the same, only a handful arranged to keep contact otherwise. Ever since if I’ve met anyone from those years by accident, they’ve been very bitter that I just left them and didn’t stay in contact.

So just kind of a warning here, not everyone will be normal about it. It’s truly weird since I did the same; left a clear announcement I’d leave and hoped those interested would get in touch to figure out another way. Still so many, even after so many years, can feel betrayed and hurt because of that.

For someone who doesn’t have anything to discuss, you do have an awful lot to say and keep repeating. Suit yourself.