jbrains

I see folks justify convenience purchases by quoting some savings per hour, but without a plan for how to generate revenue with the time they save. 🤷

I am the man I was. 😢

Weird? No. I might be missing something, but I probably won't know what I'm missing, except in the abstract.

Also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot

Should be "wið", no? 😉

"You can't control X" is not the same as "X is your fault". Earthquakes, for example, aren't your fault. I notice that people infer blame quite easily in response to statements such as these. I know I had to train myself out of this and in moments of stress, I fall back into it.

"Only you can choose to ignore what they say about you" is not the same as "It's your fault that you care about what they say about you". It's true it's up to you to learn how to ignore others' opinions of you, but that doesn't mean you deserve blame for the patterns in your mind. Maybe you are and maybe you aren't. Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe it only matters what you learn to do from here, which probably depends on finding adequate support. I hope you find it.

Your thoughts and feelings are not wrong by definition. Unhelpful, maybe. An obstacle, perhaps. But not wrong. They can't be wrong. They just are. They simply exist. The question becomes how to find the tools to make sense of your thoughts and feelings, as well as to let go of the unhelpful and pick up the helpful. That's what I'd expect from your therapist: to help you do that. I'm sorry that you haven't had that experience.

"You just have to deal with it" seems utterly unhelpful to me, but "You're ultimately the one who needs to find ways to deal with it" seems undeniably true to me. It's not easy, but nobody else can do it for you. And you're ultimately responsible for the determination it might take to get there.

Those are my thoughts. I hope you find something helpful in there somewhere. Best wishes. Peace.

Asshole? No. Even so, when receiving a gift, many of us have been conditioned to say something such as

• "You didn't need/have to do that."
• "You shouldn't have!"

As social tics, these are merely pointless performative politeness. At most, grating.

Taken literally, however, they sound like criticisms.

In particular, they imply that I am not capable of giving you a gift freely, but instead must be coerced (by who?) into doing it. Or maybe "You didn't have to" can be understood as "I wish you hadn't". In some languages, "You didn't have to" and "You were not supposed to" sound the same.

Now maybe it's a generational thing. Older folks like me were taught to perform politeness and might be prone to teach that nonsense to the next generation. To them, it's harmless politeness. But again, look at the words. Taken literally, they are a criticism.

I can't blame someone for taking those words literally, especially if they weren't taught to perform politeness in this particular way.

I think it's just better all around to express gratitude if you feel it without the performative politeness.

I teach programmers to say "Oops" when they make a mistake, rather than apologize. It's epidemic.

If "close enough" works, then it's nice to have the skill. Having the skill requires occasionally using it.

Where accuracy is important, since we almost always have a calculator with us now, that's a no-brainer.

Maybe more to the point, though, understanding how percentages work is wise. It's one of the few arithmetic topics that we encounter regularly in life.

In this case, 23% of 53 and 53% of 23 each have their own little trick, depending whether you'd rather overestimate a little with 1/4 of 52 or underestimate a little with half of 24. I find it handy to be able to think that way, especially for example when trying to get out of a taxi and paying cash.

Pretty close to 1/4 of 52, so like 13-ish, but maybe closer to 12.

(13 + 0.25 - 0.53 - 0.53, really. If I had to, I might be able to keep that in my head.)

You've already had several good suggestions here.

I learned that when rest no longer leads to recovery, that is burnout and maybe even depression. Pay attention to this feeling and take it seriously. Good luck.

If you're thinking about what you could be doing, you might have some unhelpful conditioning related to "being productive" and other such myths of how to live "correctly". You might be able to think your way out of that way of being and you might need to talk to someone to do this, such as a therapist.

If you're worried about forgetting something that you need to do later or about some deadline sneaking up on you, then writing things down and setting reminders could help. I did a lot of this and it trained me to literally forget things that I didn't yet need to start working on without risking missing deadlines. I found it very freeing. Something like that might help you.

I hope you find some peace from something in these replies.

I like our local shared ownership model: neighborhood cat visits, we chill on the deck, I offer him water, he doesn't seem to need it, he wanders off. Every so often, there's just this cat at the back door checking in.