Ask Lemmy

You will not be "too frail" to enjoy life at 65, or even older. Don't let that thought poison your present. I took up a competitive sport in my 60s, as well as beekeeping, and I'm not an outlier.

Two important lessons are opposite aspects of the same thing:

• You're not entitled to anyone giving a fuck 😞
• Nobody gives a fuck 😀

In other words: You're responsible for your own happiness. And whatever makes you happy, most people won't care, and fewer will think any less of you for it. Enjoy what you like, and don't worry too much about what others think.

medicare covers 80% of medical and the retiree pays 20% with no cap. so enjoy that reatirement.

Realized just how badly Christianity dropped the ball in helping people find meaning and connection to "something greater". Not only did it fail countless believers horribly, it also poisoned the well so that people can't imagine spirituality in general being anything but grifts, dogma and belief in supernatural beings arbitrarily screwing with people.

Thankfully I had enough open mindedness to actually try to understand what makes people religious, so I read some books on different traditions and Three Pillars of Zen hit on something in me I didn't know was there. And I got the answer to my question.

Depressing realisation about life: It ends.

Positive benefits about life: It ends.

I'm a happy enough guy, and I've been lucky with family in my life, so this comment, while it may sound negative , hopefully won't bring you down - it's just a general observation from 48 years on the planet.

Basically, I've noticed that most 'professional' folk - ie Doctors, lawyers etc these days are surprisingly mediocre people.

I always assumed, as a kid, that these people in lofty positions would be intelligent, eloquent, wise and charismatic. .

Perhaps it's because I was raised on TV and have unrealistic expectations, but the lawyers and doctors I've dealt with myself through work and in my personal are entirely unremarkable. I could forgive that if they were steadfast and competent, but instead I've found them to be mostly dull and poor at their jobs.

My superiors at work seems to be barely able to string a sentence together without ChatGPT, and our kids teachers are little better.

Anyway, rant over. Just generally fed up with how many, franky, inept people are in jobs that I once assumed were for exceptional individuals.

If you stay still, you get left behind. I don’t expect someone to hold my hand, maintaining a friendship. But man, it would be so nice for my “best friend” to reach out like she used to. I said I didn’t want to drink with her friends anymore, and apparently that meant I didn’t want to hang out with her anymore. I’ve tried a couple of times to initiate a meetup for us, she just does not seem interested in that anymore. Whatever.

The lesson is that people let you down. You listen and help them get through their difficult periods in life, but then can be forgotten when something better comes along.

I'm not the doer.

https://youtu.be/QojrXv5iVEM

As I’ve grown up, the most depressing realization I had is that adults are a myth. No one knows what the hell they’re doing. People can be good at doing their thing in a specialty but world leaders are mostly putting on a brave face.

There’s no real plan. No one’s on the same page. No one’s steering the ship. It’s just a whole lot of hemming and hawing, and a few idiots doing the bull in a china shop routine.

Everyone's probably already said this, and it counts as both good and bad.

Nobody else knows what they're doing, either. I think I learned this depressingly late in life. I had this idea that the movers and shakers of the world got there because they knew what they were doing. Their goals and mine may not align, but they know how to achieve them. It was probably when the Juicero came out and (Forbes?) had that video of someone just squeezing the bag into a glass, and then me subsequently learning how much VC funding that thing got. It made me realize that Silicon Valley tech bros and their investors live in a different world altogether.

That the most evil people who are willing to break laws and social norms at other's expense are the most likely to succeed

As I've gotten older, I've learned who I am, and become comfortable with that. And, I've also learned who I'm not. This has reduced stress for me.

Everything, even high end shit, is built to be the cheapest possible, generally with no regard to repair.

The world is a fucking scam.

We spend our formative years constructing a model of the world that makes sense, and the rest of our lives coming to terms with how wrong we were.

Somewhere in the middle: A dream job doesn't exist, but a dream life with a job can.

The walls seperating governments, corporations and organized crime are somewhere between transparently thin to non-existant.

You struggle to make new connections as you get older, and as old connections fall, you become more isolated and realize just how few people give a shit that you exist at all.

You can try to help your friends who have mental issues, but it comes with risks.You should know when to stop. I'm not telling you to abandon your friends who need help. Try to support them, but only within your limits.

You're (probably) not a professional therapist, so you don't really have the means to make the kind of impact you're hoping to make. Try to pay attention to the signs when the relationship is beginning to harm your well being. When you notice that, it's time to step back.

If you know someone who clearly needs help but refuses to seek it, you're in a tough spot. Realistically, there might not be much you can do to help. Coming to terms with that that is painful, but watching someone collapse and implode is even more agonizing.

Positive side: You've done what you can, but sometimes that just isn't enough. It's not your fault if someone gravitates towards an otherwise avoidable disaster, so don't blame yourself.

Once I let go of all the ideas about what I thought "should" be, I got a huge relief. Stopped arguing with reality and just live one day at a time, doing as I please with what is available to me.

Nothing is right, but nothing is wrong either. It just is.

For many people the only thing worse than having no family is having family.

When I figured out that a lot of people are going to spend their better years, wasting away, working jobs they hate every 40 hours of the week and 8 hours a day or longer.

Yep it's so grim

I was just thinking last night about life a bit. It's a bit of a tangent on how I got there if you'll allow me.

I was following this little thought experiment about consciousness and uploading your brain to a digital format (for later downloading into a new body, or whatever normally happens in sci-fi) and about teleportation (break down and reassemble in the new location style, or copy and destroy style). In either case, since this new consciousness is a "copy" of the original, rather than a continuing of the original consciousness it's not really YOU. If either of these technologies truly existed in those ways you're really killing your current self in order to create some copy that fully believes it's the original you.

In order to not do that thing, obviously for teleportation it'd need to be the bending space or worm hole type thing but for the brain you'd probably have to do some sort of gradual synthetic replacement while maintaining consciousness and even then there's no way to 100% prove that the person is still their original self. Nevermind that this all hinges on the idea that you're even yourself every morning when you wake up. Are you actually that same consciousness or just a new one that wakes up each morning. Either way, that thought took me down the road of how it would probably start which is in the medical field for repairing brain damage and whatnot. Rather than full brain replacement it'd be something like, oh the part of your brain that's responsible for memory is damaged, here's a surgery where we replace that part with some kind of synthetic neuron shenanigan which can restore your ability to create new memories or whatever. THAT thought took me to the idea that, sure for something like that you're still you, just maybe with better memory - but what if we're talking about the parts of your brain that are related to your emotions. Maybe you know, logically, that you love your wife (or whoever) but you don't FEEL that love anymore. Or maybe your joy and happiness and anger are all dulled. When does that stop being YOU. I also had the side tangent thought that when this technology does ever exist, it's probably going to be used to treat mental disorders and probably not be done very ethically, at least at first.

Either way, the point of that is this tangent eventually brought me to the idea that this technology is likely only going to be in it's infancy during my lifetime and that's with an optimistic projection. At my age, and frankly my lifestyle, I'm not likely to survive to the point where there's some runaway longevity, where each year we're extending our lifespan by more than that year. I'm also probably not going to survive to a time where we CAN upload a consciousness, or replace our meat brain with a long lasting synthetic brain. Meaning, I AM going to die. I probably have another 30-60 years if I'm lucky and then I'm returning to the nothingness that I came from. I've already missed out on a ton of life, things I won't be able to ever do (and I'm not even old). I may spend that time working jobs I hate, never getting to some point of "financial freedom" where I can finally do the things I never had the means to do. Hell, I may never find the love of my life, or raise children, or have anyone remember me after I'm gone. Eventually I'm just going to run up against the unbreakable, immovable wall that is my own mortality, and for what?

So then I thought about how people cope with this idea. Eventually a lot of your hopes kind of go away as each thing becomes impossible. Some people find meaning in the finite life, that if you were to live forever then every day becomes meaningless, but that thought just doesn't do it for me. Some people seem to find comfort in just being a ripple in the cosmic ocean. I guess that's the point of something like stoicism, you know you can't control that this happens, you only control your reaction to it. No wonder people have created religions since the dawn of our existence, it becomes quite a scary thought as you get older and start facing the reality of it and the idea that there is some eternal happiness in the afterlife could be comforting. Or, at the least, that you're facing this wall with a bunch of other people. Of course this has also been used to control people. Sure, you're spending your life toiling away now for me, but don't worry! after this lifetime it's eternal happiness!

Anyway, I think I'm coming around to the idea that I'll have to drop some expectations I had about my life and just focus on enjoying the time I have left.

(By the way, despite this sounding depressing, I'm doing fine mentally. It was just a coincidence I was thinking about this last night, at 3am of course lol, and then saw this post the next day.)

"Sir, this is a Wendy's"

Life is a bitch, and then you die. You have to get the good times while you can.

Don’t trust anyone — anyone can stab you in the back at any time.