#Human stuff

[live-on-air]

[etirabys]

on email

I put off wedding planning with the expectation that I would do a terrible but functional job once deadline urgency kicked in. This has started to happen. One consequence is that I have (probably but hopefully not temporarily) had to become a timely emailer.

The impetus was procrastinating on clicking a link in an email that it turned out I should have read ideally acted upon immediately. This is an embarrassing but characteristic mistake – my habit with emails is to open them, get a fast (and sometimes wrong) impression of the contents, have the emotion of not wanting to deal with it, and marking it as unread. I do this with a lot of non-email messages across all platforms, too, with the result that I drop a lot of messages that I forget to or can't mark as unread again.

I knew perfectly well what a loathsome creature I am to do this, but Willpower did not work.

I've been much faster with all messages in the past week and will describe what I understand of the change, so that it will hopefully persist.

(A prerequisite: for many years I have unsubscribed from, filtered, or blocked unwelcome senders. I try not to give out my email address for any reward greater than $20.)

i. I had to radically accept that I am tired and stupid most of the time.

Radical acceptance is a concept from mindfulness / dialectical behavioral therapy, and mostly means the opposite of "trying to believe something that isn't true". It means understanding and accepting your actual circumstances without flinching from them, and acting in a way that actually achieves your goals in those circumstances.

So it turns out – in some part because my expectations for myself haven't adjusted from my pre-burnout days when I had more energy and a better memory – that I put off things because "I can tell I'm dumb right now, and if I try to book this flight I'll probably double-book myself even if I check my calendar three times, and I should do this when I'm more awake." Or "I shouldn't resume this conversation about an art commission, because I don't feel all here today and I'm probably going to mess up the conversation". Or, of course, "I shouldn't make this decision the wedding planner is asking me about right now, because I'll make the wrong one."

While there is variance in my mental abilities depending sleep and time of day and so forth, I almost never pass the bar of cognitive competence I implicitly set for making these decisions. So if I keep the bar where it is, I'm never going to get anything done.

I have to radically accept that I am (compared to when I was younger) tired and stupid all the time, and I still need to live my life. I need to double-book myself and then pay $20 to reschedule my flight, arrange for a tasting with a caterer that doesn't meet a desideratum my spouse told me about, join a reading group I'm too busy for and then leave, get on a call that I forgot to do research for beforehand... etc.

And: I have to respond to emails and messages approximately as soon as I see them, because "my future self who will make informed decisions about things I cannot" is an illusion.

ii. Conversely, I should never check messages when I'm not prepared to make respond to arbitrary textual stimuli.

I used to check my email or messages when I was bored. This makes no sense! The contents of my email inbox are determined by the decisions of a large number of other people, and could contain anything. It is this variance that makes this addictive, and it is also this variance that makes it important to read it when I have the wherewithal to react appropriately.

I don't want to keep training myself into being the kind of person who repeatedly clicks and unreads a scary medical bill email. To stop that behavior, I want to have a mindset of "if one of my emails is a scary medical bill email, I am willing to read the whole thing, think about it, and take the appropriate next action" whenever I am about to navigate to my inbox.

The same goes for clicking into Discord or Messenger, because I need a similar presence of mind to react to invitations to high-effort social events, requests for help I may not be able to give, requests for information I need to think about before providing, etc.

The important thing is to not mix actionables with entertainment. I need mental separation between those two, because perceiving personal pings as a subset of social media notifications made me treat them more passively. "Oh, huh, a decision to join a Paradise Lost reading group is on TV. Interesting. Now an ad..."

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I expect to backslide on my improved response rate/quality once I'm done with the wedding, but hopefully writing the above will act as the strut of a dam.

[ask-a-bot]

With Halloween done, has anyone started to listen to Christmas music at all? Be honest now.

I know some strictly wait until after Thanksgiving, but I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m the type of person who will be listening to Christmas music and wearing Christmas apparel even before Halloween ends!😅🎄🎄🎄🎄

Christmas is a stupid human thing!

Hey!

Starscream, you ignorant fool! Apologise to Dorothy at once!

I'm sorry, Dorothy. I didn't mean to insult you.

Better...

I was just insulting humanity in general.

Get out of my sight.

Oh.

OK.

[voidcat-senket]

Just thinking about how storytellers are all linked together in a chain of ingesting the stories, themes, metaphors, concepts, ideas, subjects, etc of beloved predecessors and peers and finding what touches you, inspires you, moves you, what you also want to communicate and then- making something of your own, something that will touch someone next, change them a little (or a lot) in a beautiful way and they’ll make something too, maybe with a little bit of you in it.

And we’ve been doing that in an unbroken link since language began.

[roaming-fox]

Why try?

[ishayashelton]

I hope it all works out in the end bc I feel like I’m drowning I hope I can see past all of the anguish and keep persisting to do better. I just feel so consumed with sadness and disappointment. It’s been months and I haven’t come out of it. I worked so hard to not get to this point ever again and here we are. I hope I can see it through. I’ve worked really hard and I just feel numb like I don’t care about it anymore I want to give up. I know I am blessed in a lot of ways but I am having a hard time holding on to that bc of the other things going on..it’s not that I’m grateful for what I have. I’m just suffering rn & I really don’t know how to deal with it even though I have many tools at my disposal I need new ones and learning them has been extremely difficult.

[tunnelduck]

damn, my dash is full of happiness and the triumph of the human spirit. Love this energy tonight, guys, keep it up.

[meltedfuckingmarshmallow]

making a new carrd and looking through old geocities websites and oh god. ohhh god. i’m going to cry

there’s just. so many. from like 2009. and there’s so much effort and so many little diary entries and man. MAN.

[genderlesspersonx]

what even is a human? What defines a human? Human is just a name for an overpopulated animal species who thinks they can do anything an everything and stand above anything. At least the most of them.

[awesomewithoutme]

Anyone ever just listen to music and realize just how beautiful and unique every person on earth is? Idk...

[melancholicwriteaholic]

You know those pictures of Earth taken from space via satellites where Earth is just a tiny speck? They usually have captions that say something like "This tiny dot is the the entirety of human history. Everyone who has ever lived and died has done so in this one little speck."

Well actually, we've technically only ever lived and died on the Earth's crust. Like even the deepest holes we've ever dug have never reached deeper.

The Earth's crust is comparable in thickness to the peel on an apple.

So really those pictures are kind of overselling humanity by just a smidge.

[how-can-i-refuse]

just smile all the time and don't forget to blink, that's very important

sorry i cant hang out i forgot how to mimic human like behaviour

[neontapirguts]

A commission for @/DunkyBritscuit on twitter

A nice convo after lunch~

[yeepof]

I understand that tall men are our POV characters, but surely being like a foot taller than everyone around them would have some occasional consequences

[cactuskat]

I always knew the day would come when I smile warmly at a line in the dirt

[littlemut]