suicide cw

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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aa49d59ecd971a3ba9bdd142e45b94af69c121f2

twitblr:

Definitely masking up post-COVID (x) {{the original link didn’t actually lead anywhere; I have replaced it with a genuine source link}}

 

juliainfinland:

Also, let’s keep having soap and disinfectant dispensers everywhere.

 

derinthescarletpescatarian:

By contrast, I’ve been getting the same number of sniffles that I do every year even though there’s no one to catch them from, which is how I learned this year that I’m not prone to minor colds; I’m prone to hayfever.

 

brin-bellway:

Huh, you’re still getting hayfever with a mask? I started wearing a mask in 2017 *specifically* to avoid pollen, and it’s been working wonderfully for me.

Have you been keeping the mask on outside, and when near front doors that people are opening a lot? Does it have a well-fitted nosepiece?

—

I also had no colds in the calendar year 2020. It used to be fairly normal for me to go entire years without getting sick (after I adjusted to my current microbial milieu, that is; I got sick a *lot* the first couple years I lived in Canada), but then I started working a customer-facing job where nobody else ever took sick leave and staff members were forbidden from wearing masks, and I went from a cold every 1 – 2 years to a cold every few months. Getting rid of that damned fast-food cold rate wasn’t worth what it’s cost, but it’s a very nice silver lining.

(for anyone who finds my rate of colds bogglingly low: I’m guessing the two big components are “trained myself out of touching my face in public when I was a pre-teen, and always wash my hands upon returning home” and “rarely travel”, in that order)

I didn’t even used to do any anti-airborne measures†, just anti-fomite. I plan to start wearing a mask in indoor public spaces from October – March or so each year and on public transit year-round, and it’ll be very interesting to see what that does to my baseline cold rate.

(also, on a broader scale, it will be interesting to see if COVID-19 vaccines grant any cross-protection against cold-type coronaviruses)

—

†Except in extreme situations like “on an airplane two seats away from a coughing dude”. Guess who didn’t get sick until an incubation period *after* the rest of her family? (unfortunately there’s only so much you can isolate from people you’re sharing a hotel room with)

 

derinthescarletpescatarian:

I very rarely wear a mask. I hardly leave the house and when I do, almost nobody wears masks here because there’s no covid in my state outside of the quarantined medi-hotels for infected international arrivals; we just sanitise, social distance, keep records of where we go and get tested any time symptoms show up so that when it does show up, we can respond before it’s got more than a couple of people. The distancing and group size limits are enough that basically nobody’s getting colds.

My probably-hayfever is very mild and isn’t debilitating at all (which is probably why it took me so long to notice); I just get a sniffly, runny nose so I haven’t bothered with any pollen precautions. They’d be more annoying than just living with it.

 

brin-bellway:

Fair enough, I suppose.

When I started wearing pollen masks, my only symptom was mild sore throats. The main problem I was having was that pollen attacks felt exactly like…well, the onset of a cold. *Physically* the sore throats per se weren’t a big deal, but I hated never being sure whether or not I was coming down with something.

I’ve started getting runny noses too now, which I found even worse in that they’re impairing in their own right. Maybe I’m just more bothered by having a runny nose than you are.

 

alarajrogers:

My allergies are for animals and dust. I have pets and am far too disorganized to dust. So yeah, I’m actually just as miserable this year as I am every year, but I definitely have noticed, no colds. Runny nose and sneezing and occasional sore throat and cough… but at my age, the biggest symptom of a cold is a draining and horrible fatigue. All my fatigue this year comes from diabetes and depression.

I do think I’m going to keep using masks during the winter every year.

 

brin-bellway:

At your age? Are you implying you *didn’t* get horrible draining fatigue from colds when you were younger?

When I saw that one of the DSM rules is that in order to qualify as having clinical depression it has to be at least two weeks, I thought “ah, of course, they’re thinking of self-limiting diseases”. The last week of December, 2017, I had a cold that *didn’t* come with a transient depressive episode, and it was amazing how much less it sucked. Turns out that while sore throats and stuffy noses and coughing fits *are* pretty annoying, *most* of the badness of colds is from direct inducement of misery.

…if there are people who *normally* don’t get depression from colds, that would explain a lot about how blase they are about disease prevention.

(…“people with enough depression at baseline that colds are just background noise” would also explain a lot but in a much more horrifying way. you indicate that in at least some cases they can be distinguished, though.)

 

brin-bellway:

@rustingbridges replied: “no, I don’t feel that way. identifying a cold mostly consists of ruling out allergies and guessing”

holy fuck

 

gasmaskaesthetic:

fwiw I don’t tend to get depressed when I’m sick with a cold either. A bit grumpy and tired at worst.

even having the flu isn’t depressing as such, it’s sucky and miserable but doesn’t cause a depressive episode.

(I wrote most of the following before seeing this branch, but putting it as a response to your post seemed reasonably fitting)

I would like to be clear here that I am not talking about feeling mildly down. If I were going to be stuck feeling the-way-I-feel-when-I-have-a-cold forever, I would seriously consider suicide, and if you know me you know that I do not say that lightly.

no fucking wonder that one Girl Guide casually mentioned to me after breathing on me for like an hour that she had a cold like it wasn’t a big deal, she probably didn’t *know* she was risking condemning me to 3 – 5 days of *life not being worth living*

Come to think of it, this also explains a lot about people failing to grok depression. Like, yeah, quantity has a quality all its own, but maybe when I saw that one chronically-depressed person explain what “having so little executive function that it takes hours to summon the will to get off the couch and go to the bathroom” is like as if it *wasn’t* a universally relatable experience, she wasn’t just doing whatever-the-opposite-of-projecting is.

(I would also like to be clear that I am not otherwise prone to depression. There have been some instances of experiences that *maybe* qualified, but that kind of deep shit where you can barely even exist let alone do anything else, I haven’t been anywhere near that *except* when I’m sick.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #illness tw #suicide cw #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #depression

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

maryellencarter:

thoughts on Justice League Animated, part two of god knows what:

* The Brave and the Bold: Story by Paul Dini, script by Dwayne McDuffie, who are both fucking great, but this one doesn’t really stand up for me. It’s the one where Gorilla Grodd, a telepathic talking gorilla mad scientist supervillain, attempts to nuke Gorilla City, the hidden African city of hyperintelligent talking gorillas. I think part of my distaste for this episode – it’s not strong enough to be dislike, it’s just not one of the ones I bother with – is just the fact that, you know, over in Marvel the hidden hyper-advanced society in Africa is Wakanda, home of never-conquered black people, and here it’s fucking *gorillas* and that has a very racist smell to me.

* Fury: In which an adopted Amazon tries to kill all the men on Earth with a biowarfare deal. Somehow this works on Superman and J’onn also, despite alien physiology stuff. Also literally no one including Batman wears any PPE despite a worldwide pandemic raging, which hits different these days for sure. Script is again by Dwayne McDuffie, who was one of the greats, and it tries to point out that excluding men completely is not so very far from getting rid of the men, but it also tries to pull the #notallmen thing where one man’s good action in the past is supposed to redeem the whole category, and it’s just… many kinds of not great. One redeeming feature is that at least it does make Hawkgirl the one to set foot on Themiscyra, while in the previous Themiscyra episode Hawkgirl was *completely absent* so the heroes Wonder Woman brought to help were *all* male (for which she got banished).

Now I apparently have a therapy appointment, so more later.

>>Also literally no one including Batman wears any PPE despite a worldwide pandemic raging, which hits different these days for sure.

I watch CinemaSins videos while I’m jogging, because they’re reasonably entertaining and they have subtitles (I can’t hear the video very clearly over the sound of the treadmill). A few weeks ago I saw the one they did on The Happening.

I don’t think he even sinned it (the video was done in the 2010s), but it struck *me*, watching these clips, that I didn’t see *anybody* attempting any kind of air filtration in the face of this incredibly-deadly probably-airborne poison.

Nobody had a surgical mask. The Crazy Prepper People™ getting out their guns didn’t have respirators. Nobody so much as tied a fucking bandana around their face on the grounds that they had nothing to lose by trying.

It’s all-too-realistic, it seems, that *most* people wouldn’t. But there would be exceptions! And the thing is, you could write some really good, really horrifying horror about the exceptions!

Consider this alternate backbone plot for The Happening:

There’s a family. They live far enough from the epicentre to hear about the Happening before it reaches them, but near enough to be in acute danger.

They have one child. Let’s say she’s twelve. Old enough to comprehend the situation about as well as the adults do, old enough to wear PPE sized for adults, young enough to ping people’s Bad Things That Happen to Children Are Extra Bad wiring.

The dad’s a construction worker. He owns a respirator for work. As they’re preparing to evacuate, he gives it to his daughter. He figures, they say whatever this thing is seems to be airborne, maybe the respirator will protect her.

It *does* protect her. But the family only had one.

She watches her parents die by their own hands. She has to find a way to evacuate on her own, without being overwhelmed by the incredibly traumatic experience she just went through, while knowing that if she takes her respirator (Dad’s respirator) off for any reason–eating, drinking, blowing her nose after crying–she’ll die just like they did.

She takes a breath, acutely aware that two inches ago the air she’s breathing in was deadly. The filtered air is like a desert. The clock on dying of thirst is ticking.

Tags:

#I don’t like horror but I also don’t like missed opportunities #The Happening #reply via reblog #reactionblogging #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #illness tw #poison cw #death tw #suicide cw #covid19 #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #sexism cw #racism cw? #Justice League

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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mugasofer:

brin-bellway:

justice-turtle:

this is me thinking out loud some more, not exactly replying, but.

“kindness costs nothing” is a popular saying for why you should be nice. but if you give what costs you nothing, what merit is there in that? if you give only kindness and empathy without material, measurable help, are you giving anything at all?

it comes back to christianity, again. it always does for me. talk about brainwashing.

specifically: the widow’s mite. (a coin, like a farthing or a centime, not a bug.) the story goes – jesus was chilling near the donations box at the temple, and these rich holier-than-thou people came and put big bags of money into the box and made a big deal about how much they donated. and then this poor widow woman came and put in two halfpennies, or mites as some version of the Bible translated it.

and jesus said “see you should be like her. those other people all gave money they didn’t need, and they made a big deal about it so people would think they were holy. she gave god all the money she had, and she didn’t make any fuss about it, because she loves and trusts god That Much. y’all do that too k?”

so, yanno, i mean, brainstuff. giving more than you can afford is How To Be Good. give money, time, gifts, food, but always give what you need for yourself, not just the stuff you could spare or didn’t want anyway; that stuff is no good cos you’re not giving it From The Heart. this is the mindset.

“faith without works is dead.” i think that’s from the book of st james. it’s a Really Big Thing in the catholics vs protestants headbutting match, bc if you boil them both down to a reductio ad absurdam in the bottom of the stockpot (i might be getting sleepy and overextending my metaphors), protestants say “if you have faith you are saved! doesn’t matter what you do!” and catholics say “if you do good things you are saved! doesn’t matter what you believe! although you should still be catholic cos of reasons.” ^_^ so – like brin said, we have no concept of supererogation (i.e. where is the mark that when you go above and beyond that you are going Above and Beyond), you have to do all the good things. and if you catholic this thing in your brain, you cannot be a good unless you are always doing the good things. (idk how that psychological part works if you are protestant. i never really talked religion with any observant mainstream protestants.)

so but like. there’s a line from hamilton the musical, i see it on gifsets. “(death) takes and it takes and it takes”. and i feel like… you give and you give and you give, and there’s a void out there of infinite… it’s like an infinite sponge. it can soak up everything you give it, your whole existence, and you won’t have even made a tiny little difference to the infinity of need. you give and you give and you give, and when you’ve given everything you are, it’s just like you never existed at all.

i know it’s late and i’m getting morose. i had thoughts about dying for a cause too but i’m not sure what they were yet. and what stuntmuppet said about revolutionary selfishness, ethan would like to expand on that at GREAT LENGTH. not tonight tho.

i will mention though cos i think it fits here. i keep feeling like a good way to do assisted suicide, like officially incorporated into society and everything, would be to drain out the person’s blood, put it all in those donation bags like the red cross uses, and then you could give the blood to other people who actually wanted to stay alive. it would be nice. if that was available i would probably do it. and i suspect part of why it seems so appealing is that you can literally give your life helping others live. (also it wouldn’t hurt much and you could just quietly slip off and stop caring.)

The thing is, food still has nutrition regardless of whether you gave it From The Heart. A dollar buys a dollar’s worth of stuff, no matter how small a percentage it is of the donator’s net worth*. And someone who gives a smaller, sustainable portion of their wealth can end up donating more over the long run than someone who goes out in a blaze of glory.

Blood donation is actually a very good example of that. An adult human body contains somewhere around 10 pints of blood, depending on the individual. The regulation quantity and frequency of blood donation is 1 pint every 8 weeks. Someone who donates every 2 months for 2 years has donated more blood than someone who gave every drop in their body, and can still donate again in another 2 months. (And, you know, they’re alive, for whatever that’s worth.) (Some people take longer to recover and can’t sustainably/safely donate every 2 months, but even if you can only do every 4 months, or every 6, all you have to do is live 6 years to outproduce a one-time 10-pint donation.)

I’ve never met a cause worth dying for, but some causes are better served by living, anyway.

(This argument does assume a basically consequentialist mindset, that the amount of help you provide is more important than how you felt while you were doing it. As you described above, there are moral systems that don’t accept this assumption. That’s something fundamental enough that I don’t think I could really talk you in or out of it: if you think “things would go better if you became a consequentialist” is a good reason to become a consequentialist, you already are one.)

I swear I have seen writings from charity nerds about how (and why) to avoid burning yourself out, but I’m having some trouble finding them. Perhaps the charity nerds among my followers know of some?

*Although sometimes a dollar can buy more than a dollar’s worth of stuff if you have enough of them, because of bulk discounts. This is why–though food donations are certainly better than nothing–food banks generally prefer monetary donations: they get excellent discounts and can stretch your dollar farther than you can.

It’s worth noting that, in both Mark and Luke, the story of the Widow’s Mite (from the KJV, which translated the relevant copper coin into the then-contemporary mite) is immediately preceded by a passage condemning … well:

45 While all the people were listening, Jesus said to his disciples,46 “Beware of the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets.47 They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. These men will be punished most severely.”

These are clearly part of the same anecdote, and some commentators argue they should be interpreted as the same passage – rich people take from the poor, then laud themselves for being generous with their money. The widow hasn’t helped more than anyone else; she’s been cost more than anyone else.

Of course, Jesus was famously in favor of people selling their possessions and becoming wandering monks who may or may not get murdered for their troubles – it was, after all, his own career path – so maybe this theory is wrong, and it’s just a feel-good message.

Still, I think it’s important that Jesus never advocates starving. Letting people stab you in the face, sure, but not starving. Wandering preachers get fed. (And there’s a limited market for them, and it’s hard to build a movement entirely out of penniless wandering preachers; which is one reason I tend to lean toward interpretations where it’s decidedly not meant as a universal calling.)

The Widow is merely cutting things rather close, not sacrificing her life, even in the standard interpretation. 

No, I think the closest thing to the standard interpretation would be the also currency-nicknamed Parable of the Talents.

In the parable, with which I daresay most readers are familiar, different servants are given different amounts of money to look after. Two servants invest them and make good returns, and thus are rewarded; one merely holds onto it and then gives it back, and is punished.

If you just give what was given to you, then what’s the point? You’re supposed to invest it, to make more.

One person can’t save the world. Ten pints of blood is nothing against the darkness. But invest it? Use that life wisely? And that can become a whole flood of blood in what is an increasingly sticky metaphor.

Of course, even that probably isn’t enough. A servant given two talents isn’t going to make the same amount of money as one given five. But it’s better than handing back your seed money with nothing to show for it.

catholics say “if you do good things you are saved! doesn’t matter what you believe! although you should still be catholic cos of reasons.” ^_^ so – like brin said, we have no concept of supererogation (i.e. where is the mark that when you go above and beyond that you are going Above and Beyond), you have to do all the good things. and if you catholic this thing in your brain, you cannot be a good unless you are always doing the good things. (idk how that psychological part works if you are protestant. i never really talked religion with any observant mainstream protestants.) 

Many but not all Protestant denominations regard supererogation as a Catholic heresy.

Focusing on the bottom line is important. But there are two opposite, but related, mistakes in effective altruism that stem from focusing on it too much.

One is, of course, the rich person who goes “oh I saved fifty lives this year, why not buy another yacht?” TBH I have never encountered this mistake, but it definitely happens with non-EA charitable movements, and I don’t know a lot of rich people, it probably happens. 

But the other mistake is the opposite. 

Most people aren’t rich. It’s easy to look at your bottom line and say this is too small, I’m not doing enough because you don’t have very much to give.

But this misses the entire point. 

Utilitarianism not about getting the bigger number. It’s about getting the biggest number. Whether this is larger or smaller than the other guy’s number, whether it’s large or small on an absolute scale (probably small), is not a concern.

If you only have two pennies, and you invest them wisely, then you are a better investor than the rich guy who has an enormous amount of money and spends half of it on a yacht. Simultaneously, he has more money. But you’re still better.

Tithing is a good idea, and I’m glad EA has adopted it. 

But you have to apply that to other things too. Giving more than 10% of your blood, of your life, is definitely supererogatory.

I’m not saying that sacrifice is bad, but for most people, you run into diminishing returns after the first few sacrifices. Being smart about what you do with that sacrifice is far more effective.

And yeah, sometimes that involves “wasting” time making yourself better; using the perfume instead of selling it, being Mary instead of Martha.

Tags:

#(October 2016) #(I have decided to queue aglet posts; queue is currently set to four times per day) #conversational aglets #death tw #suicide cw #scrupulosity cw

GleasSpty/MATH-104—–Introduction-to-Analysis

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Title link: https://github.com/GleasSpty/MATH-104—–Introduction-to-Analysis/blob/master/Gleason%2C%20Jonathan%20-%20Introduction%20to%20Analysis.pdf

the-axiom-of-choice:

the-axiom-of-choice:

the-axiom-of-choice:

Jonathan Gleason was my friend who committed suicide just over a month ago… and I just found out that he wrote this 800+ page analysis textbook. By himself. Because he was teaching analysis and he was dissatisfied with the textbook he was assigned so he just…. wrote his own.

Even if you haven’t done any math… please just take a look at this. Scroll through it as fast as you like. It’s incredible that he put so much work and so much free time into this… I’m still in awe and I really want everyone to see it. In particular, if you want a good laugh, look at chapter 5 of the analysis textbook. The opening paragraph is SO Johnny.

He also wrote a linear algebra textbook, here. 

I really want to thank everyone who has reblogged/liked this, and even anyone who just clicked on the link to check it out. I wasn’t expecting more than a handful of notes on this, so knowing that his hard work gets shared and even appreciated by a few strangers really means a lot.

I’ve taken some of the best/easiest to follow snippets and provide them here, I hope you enjoy them as much as I have:

“Da fuq”.

Oh thank god.

At least he admits when he’s being sloppy.

God, I wish more math textbooks read like this.

And last but not least, my absolute favorite part, the opening to the chapter on integration.

There are so many more tidbits like this and I wish literally all of my textbooks could be written like this.

Jonothan Gleason died Jan 16th, 2018 and it means so much to me that so many people got a kick out of the little pieces of him that are in this book. Thanks for all of the rb’s and likes, I’m so happy that even just a few hundred people got to enjoy his writing and hard work.

Tags:

#math #suicide cw #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog

~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

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deductioneers:

Amass Fuck-You Money

 

thejochiang:

Goals: amass fuckyou money

Forever reblog the mother goddess

 

brin-bellway:

(status: I acknowledge that this is psychological damage from an extended period of financial hardship during formative years, but I nonetheless mostly endorse it)

Hmm. I seem to be having a bunch of thoughts and feelings about this.

There seems to be a…maybe “divide” is too strong a word, I don’t know. But…like, I called it “fuck-you money vs fuck-me money” in a post a while back. Even when the actions are the same, there’s this psychological difference in how people can approach it.

When I see FIRE people, they always frame it in terms of *freedom*. (It’s right there in the acronym: Financially *Independent*, Retiring Early.) But to me, it strikes me as being a thing about *safety*. “Enough money that you can run your household solely off the interest from your investments” can protect you from a lot of different problems, and *that’s* why the idea appeals to me.

A few weeks ago I saw some distant acquaintance-of-an-acquaintance on Tumblr (I don’t recall who) advising a young person with a high-paying job and relatively low expenses (Silicon Valley programmer, I think, or something like that) to go on some trips and enjoy themself, because they weren’t going to have this much disposable income again until their forties if not later. And it felt like a very weird framing to me, because…the way I see it, if future-me doesn’t have money to spare, then neither do I. I don’t have spare money unless I can afford to feed myself, and I can’t truly afford to feed myself unless I can afford to feed *all* of my selves.

16-year-old me got to eat because 7-year-old me’s dad put away some ““extra””, and eventually that ““extra”” was all he had left. Where is 33-year-old me getting *her* food from?

Because if the source isn’t me, then I don’t trust it to come through for her. I want to do all I can to make sure that, no matter who is or is not willing to employ her or for how much, 33-year-old me (and 44-year-old me, and 55-year-old me…) is fed and housed and so forth.

—

(This was going to be a tag ramble, but then I thought it should probably stay with the post if somebody reblogs it to respond or something. I’m just going to leave it in tag format.)

#this post probably partly inspired by my first anniversary of non-freelance employment   #which is coming up soon   #I think I will celebrate by scheduling the dental checkup I have been putting off for ~3 years because I didn’t feel I could afford it   #(yes government healthcare does not cover dental)   #(OHIP has some very weird-looking exceptions)   #(this is probably the result of some kind of complicated political negotiation that I’m not sure I want to know the details of)   #anyway a dental checkup seems like a good compromise between celebratory and practical   #(and [practical celebrations are easier to enjoy]/[I find myself drawn to practical gifts these days anyway including gifts I buy for myself])   #((that safety thing manifests here especially))   #((the things I dream of buying these days are always things that protect you from something))   #((checkups that protect you from tooth damage and electric cars that protect you from rising oil prices and solar-powered phone chargers that protect you from power outages))   #((this I am much less sure I endorse))   #((I mean I think it is good to want practical things but it would also probably be good if I felt safe enough to want a few non-practical things too))   #(((sometimes on especially bad brain days I can’t even bring myself to play Flight Rising)))   #(((that is currently the most common cause of my FR hiatuses)))   #(((it used to be the most common cause was that I felt like playing some other game instead)))

 

maryellencarter:

This is really interesting and I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I’m still not sure I actually have the brain to word everything I’m thinking/feeling about it, but here’s one bit, at least:

“the way I see it, if future-me doesn’t have money to spare, then neither do I. I don’t have spare money unless I can afford to feed myself, and I can’t truly afford to feed myself unless I can afford to feed *all* of my selves.”

I think… there are two things I’m thinking here. One is, I don’t think I believe, subconsciously, that it’s *possible* to have enough money to feed all of my future selves. This is almost certainly trauma-based – having enough money to eat has been a recurring theme in my life from the time I was very young, always coupled with inability to actually earn any money myself to buy any food. I’ve almost always been, and was *meant* to always be, dependent on somebody else to provide for me, and that has done Things to my wiring, which I don’t think I’m articulate enough to parse out right now.

(I think, at least partly… I’m not sure this even comes out in words, but I think there’s a thing I need to think at when I have words, which is that I – I don’t think I see working as me *earning money*. I think I see it as me doing what is incomprehensibly required by the eldritch deities that control whether I get to live. Like there’s a… you see posts about “you have rights as a worker, the company needs you, you have some control here”, etc etc, and I… can’t parse that? It fritzes me out. I can’t process the idea of me having any power in that equation. I’m supposed to only take what I get and be thankful they allow me to serve them. I think I see it as even more dysfunctional and abusive than how most workers in late-stage capitalism see it, and that makes it harder for me to deal with long-term. But that probably needs to be a post when I have slept recently.)

Where was I? Right. Tied into the same traumas is the – well, the brainwashing, that I eat Too Much. That no matter how little I eat, I have to eat less, because I am the Fat. (I’ve said this before, but my skeleton alone is probably hefty enough to play high school football. I’m never gonna be acceptably skinny, even if I literally starve to death.) So the… concept of feeding all my future selves, ties into that irrational belief – the idea that not only is it impossible to amass that much money under late-stage capitalism because the elder gods will not give it to me, but it’s impossible for there to *exist* enough money to feed all my future selves, because I’m like one of those entities in the one Norse myth. You know, the one where the cat was Jormungandr. Words aren’t wording and I can’t identify *which* entity; I feel like the logical one would be fire, the one that eats everything faster than anyone, but I keep thinking of the cup tied to the sea. But, I mean – am I making any sense? This irrational belief that no matter how much money I ever have, I will eat it all. (And that there will be other disasters, that I’ll always have to fix my car or buy new shoes or whatever, but fundamentally: that my needs are too much, that I’m too greedy, that no matter how much money there is, I will use it all up, because I am Bad and demanding and selfish and I take and take and take and never give. But also specifically that if I could eat, and I wasn’t forced to pinch pennies or count calories or be *controlled* somehow by people or circumstances, that I would literally never stop eating and I would eat and eat and eat all the food and all the money and use up all the resources and devour the world. Maybe *I’m* Jormungandr. ;P)

Uh. That… that turned into a thing. I really hope Tumblr doesn’t eat this. It hasn’t eaten any reblog posts I tried to make on my laptop *yet*, but I’m gonna copy it first anyway.

Anyway. All of that was approximately the first of the two things that I was trying to say here. The other one is, of course, that I also don’t actually believe in my future self existing. Any of my future selves. Again, it’s a trauma thing (obviously), but it doesn’t make it any less… convincing. It’s hard to feel like saving up to support my future self has any validity when I’m quite certain – not at all rationally, but still quite certain – that I’m gonna either keel over or kill myself sometime in the next few years. Or that somebody else will kill me. Something along those lines. “Sense of foreshortened future”, that one post called it. I died too young and now my brain can’t stop thinking I’m going to keep dying.

*sigh* I don’t even know if any of that made any sense. Basically I think it’s just a lot of irrational beliefs that I know are irrational but I can’t seem to uninstall them. But maybe writing them down will… help, at some point? Possibly?

>>One is, I don’t think I believe, subconsciously, that it’s *possible* to have enough money to feed all of my future selves.<<

Sometimes I try running some calculations regarding how much money my household would need in order to live off the interest, and depending on what assumptions I feed into the model I tend to get results in the 1 – 2 million USD range.

And on the one hand that’s a lot of money, but at the same time it’s not nearly as much money as I might have guessed off the top of my head. *And* that’s assuming the goal is to not–in an average year–have to touch the money originally invested at all, rather than merely having funds that aren’t due to run out until after dying of old age. (Brain: “The point is to *not* die; why would I make Plan A’s that rely on me dying at some point?”)

(Not to mention the various in-between consolation-prize states, in which one can cover a significant chunk of one’s expenses with interest and only needs to find a *little* work to cover the rest, which is not entirely safe but still quite an improvement.)

You might not find that sort of thing helpful yourself, but personally I find it reassuring to have a sense of the end goal. Even if I have a hard time believing I’ll ever actually have that kind of money, I like having an idea of what Enough money would look like, to help me know where I stand.

—

I was mostly using food as a metonym for necessities, but yeah, it does sound like you’ve got some food-specific brain issues.

(I have fairly low food needs myself, but that’s really just luck. Luck that I have a low metabolism, luck that when a nasty stomach bug in 2012 gave my gut flora a hard whack I found that afterwards my appetite now matched said metabolism rather than being slightly higher, luck that I live in a place where drinking water is extremely easy to source so that needing an extra 2 – 3 litres of water a day doesn’t cause more problems than needing less food prevents. (I don’t expect those things are *directly* related, but all bodies have their own quirks, and some circumstances are more amenable to some quirks than others.))

—

>>I don’t think I see working as me *earning money*. I think I see it as me doing what is incomprehensibly required by the eldritch deities that control whether I get to live.<<

I wonder if something like that isn’t more common than one might think, though maybe not to the same severity and…I think it’s particularly expected of *higher*-tier workers? Like, cubicle farmers and stuff. There is *some* room in the cultural consciousness for people scraping by on minimum wage to be displeased by having their hours cut, but people with a generally comfortable-in-the-medium-term paycheck are expected to have that mental disconnect between work and money, expected to desire to work as little as possible even when their pay is directly tied to how much they work. One is supposed to respond to the prospect of an additional day off with “Sweet, vacation!”, not “Damn, I wanted some more metaphorical acorns to squirrel away for later.”

(and even with low-tier stuff, I *still* sometimes get people expecting me to be pleased if one of my shifts gets removed from the schedule. even my own mother does this sometimes, and she *really* should know better.)

(And yeah, this is another financial aspect where I have the opposite psychological issues to you: I’m *acutely* aware of the connection between work and money. I still have a hard time believing that anyone is willing to pay me $14/hour just to do *this*, and I feel like I have to constantly justify my wage.

On the bright side, I think that *has* gotten me a niche in the employee schedule: slow times and times when he’s not *entirely* sure he needs an extra person on but the risk of being understaffed if he doesn’t is too great. My *top* speed is not very good, but my *average* speed can be quite competitive, because I keep looking for things to do long after everyone else has given up and started looking at stuff on their smartphones (or chatting to each other, or showing each other stuff on their smartphones). And if he puts me on and then finds out too late he didn’t need me after all, he gets a consolation prize of cleaner walls.)

—

>>“Sense of foreshortened future”, that one post called it. I died too young and now my brain can’t stop thinking I’m going to keep dying.<<

Reminds me of a conversation we had a while back regarding nausea, where the same basic impulse manifests in *your* brain as “I want to die” and in *my* brain as “I want to be temporarily unconscious; please wake me when this is over”.

Tags:

#…and now I’m late for bed #oops #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #disordered eating #abuse cw #suicide cw #death tw #long post #(the following category tags were added retroactively:) #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

Anonymous asked: Reasons to live: consider! Medical science has advanced far enough to !clean reds!!! if we can do that, then maybe one day soon, medical science will advance to the point where you can do that intercourse with stab wound thing, without it resulting in your death or permanent maiming! A thing to look forward to! :D

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

industrialbruise:

this is cute as fuck

Tags:

#Amenta RP #Amenta #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #nsfw text #injury cw #death mention #suicide cw? #I feel like this probably deserves some additional warning tag but I’m not sure what #(they do say @industrialbruise is his own content warning but probably a lot of my followers would not know that) #high context jokes

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{post I was replying to}}

justice-turtle:

this is me thinking out loud some more, not exactly replying, but.

“kindness costs nothing” is a popular saying for why you should be nice. but if you give what costs you nothing, what merit is there in that? if you give only kindness and empathy without material, measurable help, are you giving anything at all?

it comes back to christianity, again. it always does for me. talk about brainwashing.

specifically: the widow’s mite. (a coin, like a farthing or a centime, not a bug.) the story goes – jesus was chilling near the donations box at the temple, and these rich holier-than-thou people came and put big bags of money into the box and made a big deal about how much they donated. and then this poor widow woman came and put in two halfpennies, or mites as some version of the Bible translated it.

and jesus said “see you should be like her. those other people all gave money they didn’t need, and they made a big deal about it so people would think they were holy. she gave god all the money she had, and she didn’t make any fuss about it, because she loves and trusts god That Much. y’all do that too k?”

so, yanno, i mean, brainstuff. giving more than you can afford is How To Be Good. give money, time, gifts, food, but always give what you need for yourself, not just the stuff you could spare or didn’t want anyway; that stuff is no good cos you’re not giving it From The Heart. this is the mindset.

“faith without works is dead.” i think that’s from the book of st james. it’s a Really Big Thing in the catholics vs protestants headbutting match, bc if you boil them both down to a reductio ad absurdam in the bottom of the stockpot (i might be getting sleepy and overextending my metaphors), protestants say “if you have faith you are saved! doesn’t matter what you do!” and catholics say “if you do good things you are saved! doesn’t matter what you believe! although you should still be catholic cos of reasons.” ^_^ so – like brin said, we have no concept of supererogation (i.e. where is the mark that when you go above and beyond that you are going Above and Beyond), you have to do all the good things. and if you catholic this thing in your brain, you cannot be a good unless you are always doing the good things. (idk how that psychological part works if you are protestant. i never really talked religion with any observant mainstream protestants.)

so but like. there’s a line from hamilton the musical, i see it on gifsets. “(death) takes and it takes and it takes”. and i feel like… you give and you give and you give, and there’s a void out there of infinite… it’s like an infinite sponge. it can soak up everything you give it, your whole existence, and you won’t have even made a tiny little difference to the infinity of need. you give and you give and you give, and when you’ve given everything you are, it’s just like you never existed at all.

i know it’s late and i’m getting morose. i had thoughts about dying for a cause too but i’m not sure what they were yet. and what stuntmuppet said about revolutionary selfishness, ethan would like to expand on that at GREAT LENGTH. not tonight tho.

i will mention though cos i think it fits here. i keep feeling like a good way to do assisted suicide, like officially incorporated into society and everything, would be to drain out the person’s blood, put it all in those donation bags like the red cross uses, and then you could give the blood to other people who actually wanted to stay alive. it would be nice. if that was available i would probably do it. and i suspect part of why it seems so appealing is that you can literally give your life helping others live. (also it wouldn’t hurt much and you could just quietly slip off and stop caring.)

The thing is, food still has nutrition regardless of whether you gave it From The Heart. A dollar buys a dollar’s worth of stuff, no matter how small a percentage it is of the donator’s net worth*. And someone who gives a smaller, sustainable portion of their wealth can end up donating more over the long run than someone who goes out in a blaze of glory.

Blood donation is actually a very good example of that. An adult human body contains somewhere around 10 pints of blood, depending on the individual. The regulation quantity and frequency of blood donation is 1 pint every 8 weeks. Someone who donates every 2 months for 2 years has donated more blood than someone who gave every drop in their body, and can still donate again in another 2 months. (And, you know, they’re alive, for whatever that’s worth.) (Some people take longer to recover and can’t sustainably/safely donate every 2 months, but even if you can only do every 4 months, or every 6, all you have to do is live 6 years to outproduce a one-time 10-pint donation.)

I’ve never met a cause worth dying for, but some causes are better served by living, anyway.

(This argument does assume a basically consequentialist mindset, that the amount of help you provide is more important than how you felt while you were doing it. As you described above, there are moral systems that don’t accept this assumption. That’s something fundamental enough that I don’t think I could really talk you in or out of it: if you think “things would go better if you became a consequentialist” is a good reason to become a consequentialist, you already are one.)

I swear I have seen writings from charity nerds about how (and why) to avoid burning yourself out, but I’m having some trouble finding them. Perhaps the charity nerds among my followers know of some?

*Although sometimes a dollar can buy more than a dollar’s worth of stuff if you have enough of them, because of bulk discounts. This is why–though food donations are certainly better than nothing–food banks generally prefer monetary donations: they get excellent discounts and can stretch your dollar farther than you can.

Tags:

#in which Brin attempts to use her cultural osmosis from hanging out with philosophy nerds #(charity nerds are often also philosophy nerds) #death tw #suicide tw #scrupulosity tw #reply via reblog #this feels a little rambly and not-entirely-coherent and feeling-things-out #but so is the OP so I guess it fits

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

nenya-kanadka:

brin-bellway:

justice-turtle:

jadesabre301:

robin williams say it ain’t so

WHAT NOOOOOO

My first thought was “Oh god, what terrible thing did he say?”.

Then I saw that the next post on my dash was also about Robin Williams, and while the main body of that post was even less informative, it was tagged “death tw”.

And I was like, “Oh”.

I checked Google News to make sure I’d understood it right. Here’s what I found.

Same here. And this is the article I found in the National Post (pretty good I thought, though scads of pictures if that’s a bandwidth problem  for you).

I think I did know he’d dealt with depression over the years, so on that level I had context for it. But still. :-(

#watched a lot of his movies with my parents when we were first exploring popular culture #after living under a fundie Christian rock for years #fuck now I’ve gotta tell my mom #:( (nenya-kanadka)

After posting it, I went upstairs to tell my own mom. She’d already heard. When I went back to the living room, I tried telling my brother and found that he’d already heard too. Word gets around fast.

Mom and I have decided that we are going to watch Jumanji in his honour tomorrow, assuming we can figure out how to re-arrange the wires to get our currently unplugged VHS player hooked up again.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #Robin Williams #death #suicide

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

justice-turtle:

jadesabre301:

robin williams say it ain’t so

WHAT NOOOOOO

My first thought was “Oh god, what terrible thing did he say?”.

Then I saw that the next post on my dash was also about Robin Williams, and while the main body of that post was even less informative, it was tagged “death tw”.

And I was like, “Oh”.

I checked Google News to make sure I’d understood it right. Here’s what I found.

Tags:

#Robin Williams #death #suicide #I haven’t seen that much of his stuff #but I did love Jumanji #*sigh*

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