meatball times
@meatballtimes
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ferret on a quest to learn about people. DM me to make a new friend!
Joined November 2022
When my parents divorced and remarried they continued to jointly raise us with their new partners. I had 4 parents, and they ominously referred to themselves as "The Parent Council". In hindsight I'm incredibly grateful for it. 1/.
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has anyone stopped to ask WHY students cheat? would a buddhist monk "cheat" at meditation? would an artist "cheat" at painting? no. when process and outcomes are aligned, there's no incentive to cheat. so what's happening differently at colleges? the answer is in the article:
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At different times in my life I have needed each of my 4 parent's strengths, and without their support I have no idea what I would have done instead. It literally takes a village - or a council - to raise a child, and it's tragic that we have lost sight of that.
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The Parent Council was like a supreme court. You were raised primarily by whichever parent was in the house, but big decisions or problems got escalated. They met ~weekly. "Mom I want to have a car"."Hmm ok, let me ask The Council" 😅.2/.
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fucking insane. some fish use electrical signals to navigate; if two fish on the same frequency encounter each other, they automatically switch frequencies to avoid "signal jamming" each other. exactly like how your wifi router does at home. wow.
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They covered each other's strengths and weaknesses, and when my family had mental or physical health crises all 4 of them worked together, and it was *still* hard to support all 5 kids. I cannot imagine doing it with 1 or 2 parents!.4/.
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Each of my 4 parents has a very different style;.My dad is playful and supportive but not super emotional,.My stepmom is caring and emotionally intelligent but not practical,.My mom is intellectual and kind but very soft,.My stepdad is strong and grounded.3/.
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@OGTaylorB Oh I didn't even mention the adopted sibling . or my dad being best friends with his ex's sister's husband . or my cousins being like de-facto siblings. Or how half my siblings are furries. Or constantly arguing about corn subsides at dinner. My family is weird as hell.
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"Lmao they reinvented the bus". Ok but consider if they can profitably run this route that means *buses are failing to serve a brain dead obvious route that everyone uses* and something has gone horribly wrong with bus transit.
Uber's launching shuttles in NYC to take people from Manhattan to LaGuardia. • 14-passenger vans.• Trips every 30 minutes.• $18 to and from the airport.• Three pick up/drop off locations (Port Authority, Grand Central, Penn Station). It makes a lot of sense, 15% of bookings
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I've been feeling very under-nourished in my male friendships recently. I think there is something just kind of wrong with the default mode of male socialization/communication, something men aren't taught about relating to people. for instance --.
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one skill that massively improved my career: discovering The Game. after failling promotion despite excellent reviews, I became a friendly but totally cynical opportunist, doing only what would look good. strangely, certain people started totally opening up to me:.
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my male friend's response to me crying on his sofa? "dude, I'm sorry, that's crazy. What topping do you want on your pizza?". what the fuck? friends for 15 years, this is his response? not all guys are like this, but could you imagine literally any woman doing this?.
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being in a relationship is like building an enormous imaginary castle together. it starts as sketches and blueprints, but over time you will inevitably create a shared, beautiful monument to the life you'll have growing old. but tragically:.
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by revealed preference, students must think the work they do in class is a waste of time. fake bonding activities and "hippie gardening" clearly aren't worth their time, so they outsource to AI. anything "fun" or interesting, they still do by hand.
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I mostly just pity men at "not sure how I feel about my divorce" levels of emotional intelligence. they're not dumb, they're confused. they lack the tools to introspect. they were never taught. the emotions are just gonna sit in the pressure cooker in their heart, maybe forever.
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I realized several years ago that I could spend hours talking to my male friends and not learn a single thing about them. I always am the one that has to ask personal q's. and when I ask guys about their divorce or whatever, a solid 1/3 of them, like, shrug??? hello???.
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this student wants to write by hand, but is "forced" to use AI to get good grades! we cram for tests. we copy from wikipedia. we distort our learning to match the legible, regimented evaluation metrics. getting good grades and learning are constantly at odds in modern education.
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college kids *want* to get a job. why do they pay $10k+ and 4 years to get a degree, but then they skip or cheat on all the learning? ask a student, they'll tell you: most of that learning doesn't translate to job performance. the degree matters more than the learning.
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a stranger in Bushwick saw me wearing these, immediately hung up his phone call, and shouted "THOSE ARE THE COOLEST PANTS IVE EVER SEEN. IM GONNA TACKLE YOU TO THE GROUND AND STEAL THEM OFF YOU IF YOU DONT GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE".
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the author mistakenly believes the ivies are about education. Lee understands the ivies are about elite production and networking. For ivies, *all* schoolwork is a distraction. Zuckerberg learned a lot from Harvard, but never in a class. He got what he needed and dropped out.
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the people are STUNNED that a white boy can pull these off
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in summary:.1. college-as-liberal-arts-education and college-as-jobs-program are fundamentally incompatible goals.2. the way we evaluate students has terrible incentives and isn't predictive anyway.3. the learning done on colleges has a very weak relationship to real world goals.
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men unable to feel their feelings live confused lives, inflicting others, *especially women*, with the burden of feeling things *for* them or compensating for their total lack of self-awareness. we need dedicated spaces for men to build emotional intelligence. where are they?.
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I've known this guy for 15 years. I was his best man at his wedding. I told him recently about a suicidal episode of someone I love recently, and also a close family friend *lying about having cancer for two years*, and how it was killing me. crying.
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people kept shouting "LISAN AL GAIB" at this guy at union square eating an entire bucket of cheese balls
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our society should care about more than just job skills. but when you force chemical engineers to study Descartes, or high-minded philosophers to learn Excel -- yeah, they're gonna cheat. you're wasting their time. maybe they should want to be more well rounded! but they don't.
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society tells men to suppress their feelings. women demand "go to therapy" but female modes of expression are alienating to men. all the other men in your life are just as confused cuz if talking about the NBA isn't helping, they are out of ideas. no wonder guys feel nothing.
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fix the teachers, the grades, the curriculum, teach more practical skills, and let them use AI, and people won't cheat. but after you've done all that, what is left of universities? very possibly, nothing, and THAT's the real reason educators are freaking out.
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where can men go to learn how to feel things and support each other?. fraternal orders like the Masons or Elks? dead.church/religion? dead.strong, vulnerable men don't exist in media.clubs, third spaces, military, dead, dead, dead.
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want to rise fast in an organization? find people who think about orgs at a meta level and leverage key pressure points. they aren't evil or smarter or even working harder. they've just discovered the real rules to The Game we're all actually playing.
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I am lucky to be 90th percentile intelligence, agency and income. and yet living a life I'm happy with is taking every bit of strength I have. how the fuck do people less lucky than me manage this???.
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ok fuck yall, i'm writing a meta-contrarian pro-therapy thread. yes 90% of therapists suck. the other 10% are life-changing and most of you need one tbh. you people aren't special. most of you have straightforward emotional issues. some common objections:.
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they started including me in their efforts and plans. they dropped work talk for corporate politics. they managed their managers. they ignored email announcements and stated rules/policies. and they NEVER admitted to this, except to other Game players.
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for promotion, competent employees make decent allies. but they're clueless about the actual game being played. they get exploited for their work or hit glass ceilings for being too valuable to Game players where they currently are.
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@jadrobe Having a unified front was very important to them. Behind closed doors they argued *a lot* but it never came up when we were being raised, especially when we were young.
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One of the things that sucks about entering your first long term relationship at 28 is you have to speed run through all the stupid high schooler feelings you never got to have at the right developmental stage.
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each commitment makes the castle a bit more real, but no matter how much of it is built, there's always risk that it is abandoned and destroyed. you two may not even have the same blueprints! you want 2 more bedrooms than I do. uh oh. no monument lasts forever.
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I am begging everyone to stop citing water usage facts. The hamburger thing is fake. The LLM water thing is fake. Every water usage factoid ever is fake because water is a renewable resource and these facts count shit like "rain that landed in the area" and "moisture in the air"
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y'all know that bachelors degrees taking 4 years is entirely made up, right? there's no reason every single bachelors program takes exactly that long. it's total historical accident.
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I had no idea that having a spare bedroom would be such a hugely influential way to support my community. In the month my apartment has hosted 4 people dealing with breakups and enabled several people to visit NYC when they wouldn't otherwise. Huge alpha in spare beds.
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every breakup leaves two copies of the ruins; 8 billion people, so 16 billion unfinished castles, trapped in our collective unconscious, floating around, invisible, like ghosts. an endless sea of crumbling towers, bridges to nowhere, invisible stumbling blocks of the mind.
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they're nice ruins though. the foyer looks good covered in vines. her decor is immaculate even when in rubble. I'll sometimes visit this place, full of empty juice bottles and printed airplane tickets. then I will sigh, smile, and wander away to find another castle to build.
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@lilastories 1) they would never marry anyone who didn't prioritize their children as much as they did.2) no other children - my dad and stepmom had the 5th but she's not raised by council really.3) mom and dad married, divorced, then both remarried to other ppl.
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everyone's all boo hoo loneliness crisis COVID no friends blah blah blah. ok then why the fuck YOU NEVER TEXT BACK BITCH. it takes 10 seconds bro THE TOOLS OF SALVATION ARE IN YOUR VERY OWN HANDS AS YOU READ THIS. TEXT YOUR FRIENDS BACK. MAKE PLANS. FIND GOD.
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once I met this girl at a bar who exclusively ranted about freud. I just nodded and said "interesting!" for 20min straight. she never asked me about myself. later, she told everyone at the bar I was "insanely hot". is the bar for male emotional availability really that low? 😅.
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once I was wandering in our castle and stumbled across a grand bedroom that nobody ever slept in. oh. she was building a big one here. the carpets aren't her color, the moldings aren't her style. who built this with her?.
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now our castle is in ruins too. its no wonder why. we built the foundation in the middle of a swamp. the struts would never have held the roof. we used hubris instead of plaster for the walls. im a novice architect and it shows.
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Ok I figured it out. you have to try your hardest and then become detached from the outcome. now it's over for you fuckers.
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stop refusing to sell yourself because it's "dishonest". in job interviews, dating, etc. people *want* to see your best side. they already know that everyone has flaws, you don't need to tell them. be enthusiastic about who you are and what you stand for!.
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@ThomasA25514390 I have another more controversial rant about how the nuclear family is a huge mistake and we need to bring back broad kinship relationships.
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I told a guy it would be nice to finish reading this book about the byzantine empire with her. it was our thing, part of our castle. he said: "better bury that book in the ruins, man.". i suppose the byzantines would understand some beautiful works of art deserve to be destroyed.
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playing The Game means often doing the OPPOSITE of "what the company wants". E.g. HR told my team to run more interviews. But everyone knew doing this meant doing less real, promotable work. The constant HR emails to do it was a signal that you *shouldn't*, if you wanted promo.
One skill that improved my basketball career: discovering the scoreboard. (Do What The Org Wants. Your value is not in being admired for your skills, your value is in getting the thing the business wants done, done.).
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I was once at Yellowstone marvelling at an enormous jet of water shooting into the sky and a girl behind me angrily mumbled "what a waste of energy 🙄". This girl wanted to build a hydrothermal plant on top of Yellowstone????.
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@HainesParrotGuy Well said. When education is "load bearing", students want to learn. They recognize cheating is a huge self-own! Good education can't really be cheated. It's learning relevant skills and then testing them in real-world scenarios.
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"I'm too smart, or my trauma is too esoteric, for a therapist to help". respectfully, you're wrong, most of you are broken in ways that therapists would find pretty mundane. everyone is unique but the human psyche has common types of dysfunctions.
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Japan has an insanely hardcore work culture and extremely efficient govt/infra and their gdp is nearly flat for 40 years. very little exported innovation. America has none of those things and .our economy is incredible and literally everything is invented here. How??.
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@Candelarius2400 AI artists and artists often have different goals. AI artists care only about the outcome (pretty picture). artists usually care about the craft and the process, and the piece itself is merely the final product. neither is "cheating" at what they're trying to do.
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@paulg Is there any company where you aren't, to some extent, playing The Game? . No company runs on pure merits alone. You're always having to think about organizational dynamics, right?.
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People don't appreciate enough the crushing demoralization that comes from TWENTY EIGHT YEARS of being unhappily single . How it tears at your soul and makes your insecurities fester. And how hard it was to get out of that.1/.
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first of all: .the first step of therapy is finding a good therapist. like finding friends or partners this is *really hard*, actually probably the hardest part. consultations are free. be very quick to "fire" your therapist if it's not working.
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honestly long distance relationships are even riskier commitments than marriage. "Let's tie each other up and waste precious youth trying to get 10% of a real relationship over video calls, awaiting the day we *might* be able move together to see if this will actually work".
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Oh cool. Android detects if someone planted an air tag on you to secretly track your location
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@michaelcurzi I absolutely need this too! There's a time for feeling and a time to stop circling . But I was pretty explicitly making a bid for "please, as my oldest friend, help me process this" and he either didn't care or immediately went into "stop circling" mode when I needed him.
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"therapy is just life coaching or a gateway to pills". no. therapy is not (directly) outcome-oriented. therapy is pulling out the big tangled ball of yarn in your heart, putting it down on the table, detangling a knot or two with some help, then putting it back inside.
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I'm going to get cancelled for this but I think we should get rid of "autism" as a diagnosis. The diagnostic criteria is a mess, it ranges from "likes trains" to "60 IQ nonverbal" -- it just doesn't feel helpful to lump such diversity into a single bucket. Split up the word.
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@ricardoalatorre yes 100%. I get the impression women have no trouble finding hot, charismatic, cool guys who are nevertheless totally emotionally unavailable and that's the big filter for lasting relationships.
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"my friends or my own introspection is just as good as a therapist". bro you have mommy issues!!! you can only see your own mommy issues. your therapist has seen thousands of mommy issues. they are an expert in mommy issues. use their metis!.
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@MemoryM49176 @Foiblaet hmm yes kind of. i would split hairs and say they don't want to be buddhist monks. they want to be *seen as* high status enlightened monks. they clearly don't care about the activities that centrally define a monk and so they are mostly larping.
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starting to suspect the average life coach is worse off than their clients at the skills they claim to preach. they spend so much time dealing with crisis in their personal life they think they're experts when really the crisis is evidence that they're failing at it.
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in short: none of you have found an actually good therapist and you all think you're too smart/clever to benefit from one. and frankly having met a lot of you IRL, I can say many are emphatically wrong and broken in typical ways that any good therapist would be able to help.
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"therapy exists to perpetuate itself, it never ends". my brother in christ you are the one who started therapy! have some goals for your therapy. when you accomplish them, stop going. self realization is a lifelong, unfinishable project anyway.
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dude, i'm not a psychopath for playing The Game. you're choosing to lose. case in point: Robert Moses. a bureaucrat who mastered The Game so completely he overpowered NYC's mayor and built half the city. he created both great good and evil:.
this is evil and it's making all products worse and you obviously shouldn't do it if you care even a little bit about people other than yourself.
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"90% of therapists suck" yeah. so do 90% of doctors. but we all have to go anyway. that's where all the therapy horror stories come from, the (unfortuntately common) bottom 90%. dont let the shitty ones cloud out the (rare 🫤) good ones.
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@samswoora Imo that is an absolutely amazing tradeoff and literally everyone should take it.You can always do the fulfilling startup thing after you retire at 36 or some shit.
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"therapy medicalizes my issues and thus reifies them". you are having Problems. when Problems cluster together, sometimes we invent a new word to describe them because that's helpful. if it's not, just stop using the word or get a new therapist with a different lens.
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9yo sister: so are you going to get another girlfriend?.Me: I hope so! finding girlfriends is hard. 9yo: maybe you should just marry an otter since you love them so much. me: . I have considered it, yes. 9yo: you can just kiss them all day. I saw a video.
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man poverty is so pernicious . at critical moments you're forced to make a 0.8x instant-payoff decision over a 1.2x long-payoff one. for instance, marriages of convenience:.
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@absenteewarlord Moral mazes is great, The Dictators Handbook is kind of about this, The Gervais Principle has some insights about this although I disagree with lots of it.
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@ruth_hook_ it's culturally mediated? E.g. I'm left handed but in early elementary my teacher insisted I use my right. Some cultures push on conformity more than others and handedness is somewhat plastic, so.
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@octopichael I learned to program at 12 in this extremely esoteric branch of Assembly for the Super Nintendo. As a kid I didn't know that would be hard! You have a healthy disregard for the impossible.
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@zermelian In practice it seems the frequencies are rarely identical, and each fish shifts more up or more down, whichever one is further away from the other fishes frequency. Like being offset slightly to the left of someone in a hallway, and thus preferring to always dodge left.
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@pragueyerrr Similar with tolerance. True tolerance means peacefully coexisting with things and people you deeply deeply hate. That is extremely difficult to do! If it's easy it's not tolerance.
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@irohsharpeniroh I've been wasting my life on a "career" or "relationships" when I could have just been building enclosures for my pet otters. a whole life wasted.
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@instance_11 The Game is universal. It is the result of humans organizing into hierarchies. You literally cannot avoid playing it. In healthy orgs, playing The Game helps the orgs goals (early stage Google, the Roman Republic, etc). In unhealthy ones it ruins them, and definitely GTFO then.
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The dream of the french revolution has been realized. The age of Reason is upon us. Actually good plane boarding methods
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I guess what I'm saying is that finding a partner is perhaps a person's most sacred journey and I have felt supported exactly zero by society. and I'm not the only one. We need to build a society that helps people find love.
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@GirardHolistic I think there's no major downside towards people other than bio parents taking a vested interest in the raising of a child. Could they fuck up? Definitely! But that's just the current state of affairs but with less alternatives 😢.
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lmao this prompted a contingent of haters to go through my account looking for evidence I'm secretly a woman or a trans man, because there's no way a man could write this.
I've been feeling very under-nourished in my male friendships recently. I think there is something just kind of wrong with the default mode of male socialization/communication, something men aren't taught about relating to people. for instance --.
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@hawk_n_fox Having a crush while in a relationship tells you either . A) it's passing, ignorable, no need to talk.B) not passing: it represents something you're lacking in your relationship, need to talk about it.C) you have monog problems and need to either lock in or become poly.
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Swiping through a sea of women who "love a glass of wine 🤪" is not just a chore, it actively sabotaged my faith in humanity. It was the most demoralizing thing I've ever done. I had to take monthly breaks because I could tell it was turning me into a misogynist.
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@JohnnyBlack_HS I used my increased influence to achieve more of my teams and the company's goals actually. I got promoted, company was more successful. Win/win.
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@michaelcurzi you're absolutely right I won't get that from him, and I don't expect it. I love him anyway. but it's frustrating that it's such a common situation for men. after 15 years you'd think some sort of emotional rapport would form, right? I'm his closest friend!.
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somebody who is having several life-changing insights about their personal growth every week is probably *actually* having zero.
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