Many comments have alluded to this: people are contextual.

I’ll add to this that thoughts are very, very flexible.

In some contexts we learn to think one way and in other contexts we learn to think in other ways. Our thoughts always get activated by context, either external contexts or internal contexts. For example seeing an apple might have us think we’re hungry if we’re hungry. Or it may make us think we don’t even want to see it if we just ate a lot. Or we might think of our upcoming presentation and that may be the context for the thought “I’m not prepared enough”.

Not only are thoughts contextual, but they behave in interesting ways. Often, we transfer thoughts from one context to another context. If we think “I’m never prepared for presentations”, we might end up reinforcing ideas like “I’m never prepared [in general]”. We may end up thinking we’re never prepared for dinner with friends or for tough conversations with loved ones.

Another critical feature of thoughts is that we can even change the role thoughts have in our behavior. For example, the thought “I’m not prepared enough for my presentation” may be seen as a literal truth. Or it could be seen as a thought and just a thought. In other words, thoughts can sometimes be taken literally and we can be fused with them or we can look at them from a distance.

These three examples illustrate my point: thoughts are ridiculously flexible.

This flexibility is what explains the phenomena you notice. That is how we end up with a capitalist who may have strong thoughts about family and may stop focusing on profit-maximization when their employee’s daughter die. That is how we end up with a worker who could have strong thoughts about profits and may stop focusing on solidarity with his peers when a promotion is offered.

My perspective comes from contextual behavioral science and relational frame theory.

In your experience, does fighting the feelings help? Answer not using your logic, but your felt experience.

Odds are, fighting doesn’t help. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here asking for help.

You hurt because you care. You care about belonging, about contributing, about being open to others. And, since you care about this and you’ve experienced their opposites, you hurt.

We can’t get rid of this kind of hurt. Would you even want to? Would you want to be indifferent to other people?

I’m not trying to be mean or brutal. I’m just trying to get to a place where this hurt is a meaningful part of your life and not something you keep fighting (and failing to defeat).

So what can you do? You could notice your thoughts as thoughts. You can try giving your brain a name and thanking it for informing you about the things it informs you throughout the day. This doesn’t make thoughts disappear, but it helps seeing them as thoughts and not reality.

You can also imagine that you carry your sensations, memories, moods, thoughts, images, etc. in your hands, as if you were carrying a delicate flower. This is a way to honor your life without running a way from it and also without being entirely determined by it.

Finally, you can ask yourself what kind of person you want to be, what you stand for. What are the qualities of being that you would like to adopt in your life? You can discover this intuitively by wondering what you care for. If rejection hurts, you likely value inclusion. If abandonment hurts, you likely value consistency and kindness.

The task the becomes accepting our current reality (thanking our brain for its suggestions and holding our whole life experience preciously) and taking our next step with the qualities of being that we value.

If you’re curious about this perspective, let me know and I can tell you more about it :)

I’ve met Christians who have explained their train of thought.

Their strongest argument, in my mind, is that the Christian god created the universe for humans to choose to live well. This god is not intervening and simply created the universe’s initial conditions, much like a clock-maker. In this view, Christians simply choose what kind of life they want and they hope it will get them closer to their god.

It would seem that the choice of being progressive does not stop many Christians from meeting their god. In fact, I’ve met people who say that progressive causes are the way we build heaven on Earth.

Another argument I’ve heard is that the Christian god has said lots of things to lots of people over long spans of time. These utterings have not always been exactly the same. Sometimes the Christian god says some things to some people and some other things to other people. Therefore it is a good Christian’s duty to dutifully reinterpret the Christian god’s words.

I don’t particularly like this second argument because it seems unnecessarily complicated.

But the first one seems more coherent and with less moving pieces.

Depression has lots of ways of manifesting.

One way of describing depression is an unwillingness to engage with life and to feel, because the person has learned that engaging or feeling will lead to pain. This is the functional contextual definition.

Another one comes from Martin Seligman, who defines it as an unwillingness to try things because the person has learned that engaging in something will lead to failure.

In either definition, the unwillingness is contextual. In other words, someone might be depressed regarding work but not their partner. Or someone might be depressed regarding their family but not their partner.

Not ruminating about it + time + having stuff to look forward to in life + paying attention to my present

This is a matter of defining words. It’s fine to play the game of “which word best corresponds to the phenomena”, but I prefer playing another game: what function or what purpose is this word or this definition serving in context?

It would be sad to see “racism is structural” as an excuse for people to be cynical assholes (as opposed to tactical protesters). It’s much better when it’s used to achieve an equitable and fair world.

Beyond function, there’s also another framework that could help you: complexity dynamics. Racism happens within a complex system. Within that system, there are powerful actors, constraints, and constructors. Understanding this makes it clearer why, even if polite society is polite to marginal groups, systematic discrimination in schooling, credit, and incarceration are still structural racism.

If this clicks with you and you wanna learn more, let me know and I can recommend some stuff :)

I was working temporarily at a place with a cafeteria. I was having lunch and a guy sat with me and we talked for a while. It was obvious he wasn’t brainwashed by neoliberalism or neoconservatism. I mentioned it and he said “I’m an anarchist”.

“Check out Lemmy.” He loved how it sounded. Idk. Maybe he’s here.

Also, I get that, arguably, anarchists aren’t normies, but you defined normies in a computer-literacy way and he wasn’t a techie.

Just so you know, you’re not alone. When avocados are introduced to new markets (this happened a long time ago in the USA), people need to learn how to engage with it. People need to learn how to buy it, how to open it, how to include it in foods.

And, as you’ve heard, indeed it’s not meant to be sweet and instead it’s just like fat. And it’s very healthy fat.

I agree with what someone else said: I’d try making a simple guacamole recipe and eating the guacamole with nachos or tortillas or something like that!

Also, as someone else said, it’s totally fair if you don’t like guacamole. Some people don’t and it’s alright :)

I remember reading that commute time is the number one predictor for leaving a job. I wonder what the evidence would show if I properly looked it up.

I agree that doing less can achieve certain goals.

I guess it depends on what your goal is.

If you want to avoid getting glued to the screen and being influenced by advertisements, your recommendations are spot on.

However, if you want to make it costlier for surveillance capitalism to entrance everyone, then other options might make more sense.

I agree with you! There’s a layer of irony.

A response is in! :)

Thanks for the link. Unfortunately, in that video it’s not clear to me that those are boos. Maybe I’m missing something.

Dropout uses Vimeo?

Some recommendations that have changed my life and many others’:

• Learn to WOOP, by Gabrielle Oettingen. If that fails,
• Learn about the Procrastination Equation and CSI-Approach, by Piers Steel. If that fails,
• Read and internalize A Liberated Mind by Steven C. Hayes. I’d recommend this even if the above don’t fail.

Please let me know if you have questions :)

Ah. Thanks for the target audience explanation.

What I mean with Mastodon is that, immediately after “Social networking that’s not for sale”, you see more sentences: “Your home feed should be filled with what matters to you most, not what a corporation thinks you should see. Radically different social media, back in the hands of the people.”

I think the technical details, such as open source and federation are not going to click with people who don’t know those ideas. However, open source and federation can create something that, for those people, is valuable.

So the question is: what does Lemmy offer that clicks with people who don’t know technical details?

This is up for discussion, of course. But I’d argue there’s “freedom”, “choice”, “human (and not corporate) communities”, “made for people, not for profits”…

That leads me to my suggestion:

A discussion platform that is truly free. You choose your feed, not a corporation. You choose where to set up your account, not a corporation. You choose what communities to be a part of, not a corporation.

or

A discussion platform that is truly free. You choose your feed. You choose where to set up your account. You choose what communities to be a part of. You choose, not a corporation

The bolded text is like Mastodon’s first sentence. The rest of the text is like Mastodon’s other sentences.

The technical details can be explained later in the page, just like Mastodon does it.

A cute squirrel that seems all innocent but actually is also a bottle opener

Static is your friend.

Buy microfiber dusters and mops.

Buy a couple and see if it’s enough. You want to always have clean ones available. So buy more than what you need for a single cleaning session. At my place we always have a bit more than double what we need for a single cleaning session.

For carpets, you can get a sweeper. They also use static and they’re fantastic.

How to use them? As others in this thread have said: from high areas to low areas.

Should you get the microfiber wet? I’m not sure. Try out both and see what works! I personally don’t like wet microfiber because it adds friction and makes me go over areas slower. But be aware that this could be a me thing. Wet microfiber still picks up dust, so do whatever works for you!

I haven’t read your blog post, but I agree with your comment.

Unfortunately, Scrum is often misused. Why? Often, I think people don’t understand the problems that Scrum is trying to solve. So people implement Scrum poorly. And, when evaluation time comes, they blame everything but their lack of knowledge and skill regarding Scrum.

But Scrum is actually a framework to help you solve very common problems.

If you understand that, then Scrum becomes useful.

There’s a set of problems that teams will always have to deal with: how to choose what to work on, how to coordinate, how to know when something is done, how to see if your work actually solves the problems you’re trying to solve, how to deal with task-switching costs, how to deal with cognitive load, how to deal with complexity…

And those problems can be solved with Scrum. Or Kanban. Or any other Agile way of working.

What’s important is that it works.

I’d love to edit my previous post but I don’t wanna spam you.

As to target audiences, I think it could be helpful to specify the personas that we’re building the sentences for. Does the persona know what the Fediverse is? Do they know what enshittification is? Do they know what open source is? Do they have strong opinions about surveillance capitalism (even if they don’t know the word for it)? Or are they clueless regarding all of these topics?

My suggestion assumes some knowledge of these topics. To be clear, if I’d single out a suggestion of mine, it’d be:

A discussion platform that can’t enshittify. You choose your feed. You choose where to host your account.