I would also prefer that, so long as I'm allowed to delegate. Being president sounds hard and I wouldn't trust myself to do it alone, but I sure as hell could pick better people to help than Trump has.
Not that a week or two would really be enough time to accomplish anything, though.
Why three tiers? If fewer is better, why not two, or just one? If more is better, why not ten, or a hundred, or a thousand... which in the limit becomes what I was suggesting.
Unless someone can give a reason why some particular arbitrary number of tiers is best, it seems the obvious default is either no tiers (which is to say, one tier, everyone gets equal priority) or continuous ranking of prioritization like I suggested.
Why not just prioritize all traffic by previous traffic used per billing cycle? So light users generally get top prioritization and heavy users get gradually lower prioritization but nobody has to pick a number where it suddenly switches form one category to another.
Maybe because your source also claims "Cellulose is filler obtained from wood pulp and cotton, and is mainly used to make paper and paperboard", when in fact cellulose is the complex carbohydrate molecule that the cell walls of all plants are made out of and an important part of a healthy diet. I don't know how safe wood pulp and cotton are as a source of it (wood is largely cellulose and lignin, and I'm pretty sure lignin is not something we're really evolved to digest at least), so that particular case may be newsworthy (though from a site with auto-playing repositioning video ads about dating tips, I'm not going to take it's word for it), but "ooh cellulose!" is scientifically illiterate scaremongering.
Oh no, not cellulose! You know that's a fancy chemistry name for the thing usually listed on your nutrition label as "dietary fiber"? You know, that thing your doctor is probably telling you to get more of? (Or would be, if you could afford to see a doctor in this country).
I'm already tired of winning. Can we maybe let the loser step in for a while and give the winner a little break as thanks for all the winning he's been doing?
That's a reason people aren't having kids, but kids are no longer a necessary consequence of sex. My girlfriend and I don't want kids, but if we did we would get married first, and we do want to get married, but there's not much point in being married if you can't live together, and we can't afford to live together without sacrificing our entire futures (being "house poor" and unable to save for retirement), so even if we wanted kids we wouldn't be up for having them until probably after she's able to, thanks to stupidly ridiculous housing costs.
But that doesn't stop us from having plenty of sex in the meantime.
Publishing everyone's pay doesn't mean dictating a single pay for every job. It means you can see the distribution of pay for each job. If you're being paid less than average, you can then take those statistics to your boss and say "hey, why am I being paid less than average", and he can say "because you perform below average". I guess the obvious next step in negotiations there is to find some kind of performance metrics to compare to.
FWIW you can actually find average pay statistics for all kinds of jobs at the Bureau of Labor Statistics website (bls.gov), and I've used that extensively in pay negotiations in recent years to great effect. When the boss is always saying "you're the best person in this position we've ever had" and then you can show him government stats saying average people in this position get paid more than you, that really does something for negotiations.
Less skilled people also get paid less than skilled people, so why doesn't every business hire entirely unskilled people?
Because they're (rightly) biased on the issue of skill. They want to hire skilled people and not unskilled people. As a consequence of that, the skilled people get paid better to attract them. That pay difference doesn't then make the businesses switch to hiring only unskilled people, because the pay difference only exists because they prefer to hire skilled people.
Likewise, if we were to postulate the existence of a bias in favor of men, that is to say that businesses want to hire men over women (say, perhaps, that they assume men are better at the job), then we would expect to see both that more men get hired than women, and that men get paid more than women. And that pay difference wouldn't make the businesses then hire only women, because the pay difference only exists because they prefer to hire men.
Not to comment on the rest of your post, but about that suicide thing: men's rates of successful (if you can call it that) suicide are higher, but attempted suicide rates are another thing. Men tend to choose suicide methods that don't give much chance of survival, like guns to the head, whereas women choose methods like pill overdoses that they might live through after all. And it's the attempt rate, not the success rate, that reflects the respective rates of mental illness and unhappiness.
You know, this just gave me some insight into a change in my psychology over the course of my life.
When I was really young, like elementary school, I was socially awkward and people didn't like me much, so right off the bat I never had any friends. I easily found other things to make life worth living though, and fill myself with self-esteem, so the fact that other people didn't want to hang out with me said something bad about them, to me. I was obviously awesome, and they disagreed, which made them losers who can't tell what awesome is, so why would I want to hang out with them.
So for my whole childhood I basically was friends only with the odd person who came along that happened to like me for some reason, and basically didn't care about the rest of the morons filling the school yard so long as they left me alone. I didn't feel a lack of socialization, I didn't feel a need for it. I did feel a need to have a girlfriend; my self-esteem hinged tightly on my relationship status. But if I could just justify checking off that "has a girlfriend" checkbox on my mental character sheet, even if I barely got to interact with her, I was fine just doing things by myself, and I legitimately didn't care what anyone else thought.
In college, I decided that to get the full collegiate experience, I would build a social life. So I figured out how to socialize and then applied it hard. I had a huge circle of friends across like four counties with parties, shows, and group activities every day of every weekend. It was a high, to be so amazingly popular. But it also came with a lot of lows, whenever I could not win someone's esteem, whenever someone rejected me. In time, I started to care, in a way that I never had before, what other people thought of me -- rather than, as all my life before, whether there were good reasons I should feel one way or another about myself, besides just that other people felt that way.
Eventually that social scene proved more trouble than it was worth and I gave up on putting in the effort and now I pretty much do things by myself all the time now -- I live alone, work from home, exercise alone on mountain trails, spend my weeknights at home alone, don't do any social activities, and basically only interact on a professional level with coworkers mostly through email, brief formalities with store clerks et al, and then on the weekend with my girlfriend, who is more asocial than I am, and we basically just do the same things we'd be doing alone except with each other instead. And I am totally fine with that and actively do not want social obligations intruding on my already-too-limited time.
But (and this is the point I'm getting to) ever since the days that I was socializing and starting to care what other people think of me, my mind is constantly full of self-criticism to the effect that someone would -- not that anyone actively does, just that someone, somewhere, in theory, probably would -- think ill of me for this, that, or the other thing. Even if I think that people who would think that would be wrong, and I can explain to myself in thorough detail why it would be wrong of them to think that, and I would feel like a monster myself for saying the things to someone else that that part of my mind says to me.
It's like once I had a taste of other people's approval, suddenly I craved it, and even after breaking the habit of actively seeking it, realizing that that was bad for my mental health, some part of my mind that I know is dysfunctional is still nagging me all the time to be something other than I honestly think I should be so as to win the hypothetical approval of some hypothetical person somewhere who would disapprove of something about me.
What if most people just get hooked on that drug at a much younger age than I did, and don't remember what it's like to be truly free of the addiction?
As I said in reply to another, I'm treating "friends" as that category of non-familial, non-romantic, non-professional relationships. The girlfriend is definitely nice to have, but she's as asocial as I am (more so, really, she has a lot more social anxiety whereas I just have social apathy); like I said, together we don't socialize any more than we do apart, we're just doing the stuff we'd otherwise be doing alone, together. Which is nice yes, I'm not knocking it, but it doesn't really feel like socializing, like back when I made efforts to go to parties and shows and participate in group activities.
(And since you segue into talking about support, she's not able to give an awful lot of support herself, besides just being there and having pleasant times to take my mind off of bad things. She herself has both emotional and financial problems, and though she definitely contributes all I could reasonably ask for to the relationship without me even having to ask for it, which is great of her, I know that there's not a whole lot that I could reasonably ask of her, and I've just got to support myself and also help her where I can).
I also have no family support, for what it's worth. I have some family alive, but they're no support to me; they're actually one of the bigger problems in my life, dysfunctional wrecks running their own lives into the ground, and I've spent my whole life just trying not to get sucked down with them. I need support about them, never mind lacking it from them. My entire adult life.
I don't know about young being being excused for social things older people aren't. At least in my personal experience, I felt a lot more like people thought bad things about me for not being social when I was younger. Now that I'm a full grown adult, nobody seems to care, so long as I'm able to conduct professional interactions with the requisite decorum. I don't get any impression that anyone thinks I'm a loser for not playing sports or going to bars or anything like that, whereas when I was younger there was a definite "if you're not hanging out with us you're not cool and something's wrong with you" vibe off of other people. Which just made them even less worth hanging out with in the first place, but memories of that were what drove me to decide in college that maybe I should have a social life. So I did, and it was... meh. Some good times, some bad ones, not worth the emotional energy and time in the end. I could live without it. So now I do. Again. And now that I'm older nobody seems to care anymore.
I mentioned the girlfriend in my initial post so I don't see why that's surprising now. I wrote:
besides weekends with my girlfriend (where we still don't socialize with anyone besides each other)
By "friends" I mean the category of people who are not familial, romantic, or professional relationships. People you just hang out with just because.
And yeah I did have to do something back in the day to meet the girlfriend, but even that mostly consisted of making a profile on a dating site and waiting for her to message me, which she did. Even then, I wasn't really sure what I wanted a girlfriend for, I was just unhappy and looking for anything that might possibly make me less unhappy, and thought a girlfriend might help with that. Most of the ones I tried didn't really, just like most people I happen to meet non-romantically don't really. There are some rare gems of people who it's worth spending time with, but most people aren't worth the effort just to say that you did something with some people and "were social".
Yeah, from what I've heard psych majors (and psychologists and psychiatrists) often have major psych issues themselves, which is what drives them into it, a quest to understand themselves.
Be forewarned though (if you haven't already been) that there's a common trap psych majors fall into, I forget it's name now, of self-diagnosing yourself with every new condition you learn about.
I was a philosophy major myself, so some close overlap there.:-)
Thank you for sharing all that Tyrus. I can relate a lot, though it sounds like I haven't had things quite as hard as you have. I've also been struggling a long while with anxiety and depression, and it's felt like my life has been in a constant state of disorder for about a decade now; though it's certainly gotten a lot, lot better in the past few years, it's been a really long time since everything was just okay and there wasn't some big thing or another displacing everything else in life and a to-do list of less-urgent problems to solve receding into the distance beyond that. Too many times I've ramped up enough energy and confidence to start thinking I could just start churning through that list at full speed only to crash and burn a few steps into it, so now I'm slowly doing maybe one thing per month (if it's a month I'm not so crushed by whatever the current big problem in life is that I can do other things), pacing myself... and new things keep adding themselves to the list at a faster rate than that, so even as things get better and better in many ways it feels like making negative progress toward getting things just okay again.
I especially empathize with that feeling of "terminal uniqueness" as you put it, and how you "have so many things different than the normal person that it's hard to find common ground for conversation". When I was younger I used to get much intellectual stimulation from places like Slashdot here, engaging with other people in debates about every topic under the sun, seeing everyone's position as a unique new perspective to try on for size, and trying myself to find reasonable third ways between the usual two sides of whatever issue. Now it seems like almost everyone I meet falls into some group or another of "ugh I don't want to associate with that kind of person and their particular kind of cliched worldview" and there just aren't many people who see the world anything at all like the way that I do. I guess that feeling could be called lonely in a way, but it's more a feeling of... disappointment, or futility, about the state of the world. It's not that I'm sad that I don't have people to hang out with or that people don't like me, but more a sadness that engaging with people seems pointless because it's like talking to a wall, I neither expect to change its mind or to hear anything surprising from it. Though a wall that just echoes my own words at me wouldn't be much fun either so I guess it's not really an issue of having nobody "like me" in opinion, it's more a lack of people to actually engage in meaningful productive discourse with. I at least used to get something out of hearing all the different points of view and new things to think about in shaping my worldview, even if nobody else's opinions ever changed because of it, but now I never hear anything new from anyone. Just because I've heard it all by now, not because people have changed. Either way, it just makes it all feel kind of pointless to engage with anyone.
But for some reason I'm still here trying anyway. I guess maybe because every +1 Interesting or Insightful makes me feel like maybe I gave someone else more like I used to be some morsel of thought to chew up.
I kid, but I guess I can tell you sort of how I fill my time in general.
Weekdays: Sleep 8 hours -- 8/24ths of the day so far Work three hours (I work from home so no commute) -- 11/24ths of the day so far Exercise (driving a short way to a trail I hike for an hour), shower and lunch, for two hours total -- 13/24th of the day so far Work another five hours -- 18/24ths of the days so far Short drive to feel like I've "come home from work", make and eat dinner while reading internet forums/news/etc for about an hour -- 19/24ths of the day so far Depending on if there's any good shows airing, watch maybe 1hr average of TV to relax -- 20/24ths of the day so far If there are chores or errands that have to be done, do them, including responding to emails and such, and writing in my journal; otherwise if I have the mental energy after a day of work, try to do something creative with the rest of my evening (currently trying writing), if not, find more tv/internet/etc to distract me from whatever stressors are keeping me from being able to do anything creative in the three hours I have left -- 23/24ths of the day so far Wind down for bed, watching relaxing videos or listening to music, brushing my teeth and hair etc, about an hour -- 24/24ths of an hour
On weekends, I spend a few more hours a day sleeping, eat more slowly and leisurely (picnics, dining out, etc), take more and longer walks, watch TV or movies with the girlfriend, other more intimate things with the girlfriend (not just sex, massages and other stuff too).
I don't use social media and I have no friends. But that's because I put no effort into making any friends. A decade or two ago, after a mostly-friendless youth, I decided that I wanted to have a social life in my college years, and put effort into it. Then I had an enormous number of friends and social things to do every day of every weekend.
In time I realized I wasn't getting enough out of that to be worth the effort, so now I don't try, and besides weekends with my girlfriend (where we still don't socialize with anyone besides each other) the most socialization I get is saying "thank you" and "have a nice night" to the grocery store clerk.
But I'm not lonely. If I wanted to have more of a social life and couldn't, then I would be lonely. But just not having a social life because I can't be bothered isn't loneliness.
Maybe all the people on Facebook and Twitter see other people socializing and imagine that those people are happier than them and that it's because of the socialization, and that makes them want more social life than they have (whether because they're not good at making friends or just don't have the time for it), which makes them sad.
Like the Buddhists say, desire is the root of suffering. Stop wanting to be social, stop thinking it will make you happy, stop thinking those people on your FaceSpace pages are happier than you, because they're not, they're just trying to fill the void in themselves the same as you, but it doesn't really work. Stop wanting something that wouldn't make you happy anyway and you will stop suffering for the lack of it.
The whole point of robots is more bang for the servant buck than you get from organic meatbags, so in this robotic future meat servants will be obsolete.
Whether or not "literally" just means literally, it definitely does mean mean "figuratively" either, and I've seen some awful blunders from people trying to hypercorrect under that assumption, ala:
"...so since I was too drunk to study I ended up getting figuratively the lowest grade in the class!"
"Wait, what is 'lowest grade in the class' figurative of?"
"Oh you know, I just mean like, it wasn't like LITERALLY the lowest grade in the class, just, y'know, a pretty low grade."
Non-literal uses of "literal" may be figurative uses, but that doesn't make "literally" mean figuratively. If you had to give a one-word definition for the new figurative sense of the word literal, it would be something more like "hyperbolically".
This exactly. No matter what, unless we somehow wipe ourselves out completely in the process, if anyone survives full automation they will live in perpetual leisure for all eternity afterward. It's just a question of how many people alive today (or their descendants) will get to see it, and how many will die a horrible death on the way to that happening.
The good news is, once a subset of the population have full automation at their leisure, it only takes one charitable person with unlimited robot-provided resources to decide to give everyone else robots because why not, it's not like it costs them anything, since nothing costs them anything anymore.
Although the distribution of land, both for raw resources, sunlight for power, and merely space to exist, still remains a terrible problem even then. You could give everyone on Earth today a tricorder-sided Star Trek style replicator capable of making absolutely anything including fully functional androids like Data, so everyone gets unlimited free goods and services... and then nobody will buy goods and services from anyone, so everyone will be out of work, and suddenly the vast majority of people, who do not own land, are fucked when they can't make their next rent or mortgage payment. Even though everyone has equally unlimited goods and services for free, so it should be a utopia.
We still basically live under feudalism, and those who own the land effectively own us too.
Slashdot Mirror
I would also prefer that, so long as I'm allowed to delegate. Being president sounds hard and I wouldn't trust myself to do it alone, but I sure as hell could pick better people to help than Trump has.
Not that a week or two would really be enough time to accomplish anything, though.
Why three tiers? If fewer is better, why not two, or just one? If more is better, why not ten, or a hundred, or a thousand... which in the limit becomes what I was suggesting.
Unless someone can give a reason why some particular arbitrary number of tiers is best, it seems the obvious default is either no tiers (which is to say, one tier, everyone gets equal priority) or continuous ranking of prioritization like I suggested.
Why not just prioritize all traffic by previous traffic used per billing cycle? So light users generally get top prioritization and heavy users get gradually lower prioritization but nobody has to pick a number where it suddenly switches form one category to another.
Even through adblock somehow.
Maybe because your source also claims "Cellulose is filler obtained from wood pulp and cotton, and is mainly used to make paper and paperboard", when in fact cellulose is the complex carbohydrate molecule that the cell walls of all plants are made out of and an important part of a healthy diet. I don't know how safe wood pulp and cotton are as a source of it (wood is largely cellulose and lignin, and I'm pretty sure lignin is not something we're really evolved to digest at least), so that particular case may be newsworthy (though from a site with auto-playing repositioning video ads about dating tips, I'm not going to take it's word for it), but "ooh cellulose!" is scientifically illiterate scaremongering.
Oh no, not cellulose! You know that's a fancy chemistry name for the thing usually listed on your nutrition label as "dietary fiber"? You know, that thing your doctor is probably telling you to get more of? (Or would be, if you could afford to see a doctor in this country).
I'm already tired of winning. Can we maybe let the loser step in for a while and give the winner a little break as thanks for all the winning he's been doing?
That's a reason people aren't having kids, but kids are no longer a necessary consequence of sex. My girlfriend and I don't want kids, but if we did we would get married first, and we do want to get married, but there's not much point in being married if you can't live together, and we can't afford to live together without sacrificing our entire futures (being "house poor" and unable to save for retirement), so even if we wanted kids we wouldn't be up for having them until probably after she's able to, thanks to stupidly ridiculous housing costs.
But that doesn't stop us from having plenty of sex in the meantime.
Publishing everyone's pay doesn't mean dictating a single pay for every job. It means you can see the distribution of pay for each job. If you're being paid less than average, you can then take those statistics to your boss and say "hey, why am I being paid less than average", and he can say "because you perform below average". I guess the obvious next step in negotiations there is to find some kind of performance metrics to compare to.
FWIW you can actually find average pay statistics for all kinds of jobs at the Bureau of Labor Statistics website (bls.gov), and I've used that extensively in pay negotiations in recent years to great effect. When the boss is always saying "you're the best person in this position we've ever had" and then you can show him government stats saying average people in this position get paid more than you, that really does something for negotiations.
Less skilled people also get paid less than skilled people, so why doesn't every business hire entirely unskilled people?
Because they're (rightly) biased on the issue of skill. They want to hire skilled people and not unskilled people. As a consequence of that, the skilled people get paid better to attract them. That pay difference doesn't then make the businesses switch to hiring only unskilled people, because the pay difference only exists because they prefer to hire skilled people.
Likewise, if we were to postulate the existence of a bias in favor of men, that is to say that businesses want to hire men over women (say, perhaps, that they assume men are better at the job), then we would expect to see both that more men get hired than women, and that men get paid more than women. And that pay difference wouldn't make the businesses then hire only women, because the pay difference only exists because they prefer to hire men.
Not to comment on the rest of your post, but about that suicide thing: men's rates of successful (if you can call it that) suicide are higher, but attempted suicide rates are another thing. Men tend to choose suicide methods that don't give much chance of survival, like guns to the head, whereas women choose methods like pill overdoses that they might live through after all. And it's the attempt rate, not the success rate, that reflects the respective rates of mental illness and unhappiness.
No problem at all, thank you for responding first. :-)
So... usenet?
You know, this just gave me some insight into a change in my psychology over the course of my life.
When I was really young, like elementary school, I was socially awkward and people didn't like me much, so right off the bat I never had any friends. I easily found other things to make life worth living though, and fill myself with self-esteem, so the fact that other people didn't want to hang out with me said something bad about them, to me. I was obviously awesome, and they disagreed, which made them losers who can't tell what awesome is, so why would I want to hang out with them.
So for my whole childhood I basically was friends only with the odd person who came along that happened to like me for some reason, and basically didn't care about the rest of the morons filling the school yard so long as they left me alone. I didn't feel a lack of socialization, I didn't feel a need for it. I did feel a need to have a girlfriend; my self-esteem hinged tightly on my relationship status. But if I could just justify checking off that "has a girlfriend" checkbox on my mental character sheet, even if I barely got to interact with her, I was fine just doing things by myself, and I legitimately didn't care what anyone else thought.
In college, I decided that to get the full collegiate experience, I would build a social life. So I figured out how to socialize and then applied it hard. I had a huge circle of friends across like four counties with parties, shows, and group activities every day of every weekend. It was a high, to be so amazingly popular. But it also came with a lot of lows, whenever I could not win someone's esteem, whenever someone rejected me. In time, I started to care, in a way that I never had before, what other people thought of me -- rather than, as all my life before, whether there were good reasons I should feel one way or another about myself, besides just that other people felt that way.
Eventually that social scene proved more trouble than it was worth and I gave up on putting in the effort and now I pretty much do things by myself all the time now -- I live alone, work from home, exercise alone on mountain trails, spend my weeknights at home alone, don't do any social activities, and basically only interact on a professional level with coworkers mostly through email, brief formalities with store clerks et al, and then on the weekend with my girlfriend, who is more asocial than I am, and we basically just do the same things we'd be doing alone except with each other instead. And I am totally fine with that and actively do not want social obligations intruding on my already-too-limited time.
But (and this is the point I'm getting to) ever since the days that I was socializing and starting to care what other people think of me, my mind is constantly full of self-criticism to the effect that someone would -- not that anyone actively does, just that someone, somewhere, in theory, probably would -- think ill of me for this, that, or the other thing. Even if I think that people who would think that would be wrong, and I can explain to myself in thorough detail why it would be wrong of them to think that, and I would feel like a monster myself for saying the things to someone else that that part of my mind says to me.
It's like once I had a taste of other people's approval, suddenly I craved it, and even after breaking the habit of actively seeking it, realizing that that was bad for my mental health, some part of my mind that I know is dysfunctional is still nagging me all the time to be something other than I honestly think I should be so as to win the hypothetical approval of some hypothetical person somewhere who would disapprove of something about me.
What if most people just get hooked on that drug at a much younger age than I did, and don't remember what it's like to be truly free of the addiction?
As I said in reply to another, I'm treating "friends" as that category of non-familial, non-romantic, non-professional relationships. The girlfriend is definitely nice to have, but she's as asocial as I am (more so, really, she has a lot more social anxiety whereas I just have social apathy); like I said, together we don't socialize any more than we do apart, we're just doing the stuff we'd otherwise be doing alone, together. Which is nice yes, I'm not knocking it, but it doesn't really feel like socializing, like back when I made efforts to go to parties and shows and participate in group activities.
(And since you segue into talking about support, she's not able to give an awful lot of support herself, besides just being there and having pleasant times to take my mind off of bad things. She herself has both emotional and financial problems, and though she definitely contributes all I could reasonably ask for to the relationship without me even having to ask for it, which is great of her, I know that there's not a whole lot that I could reasonably ask of her, and I've just got to support myself and also help her where I can).
I also have no family support, for what it's worth. I have some family alive, but they're no support to me; they're actually one of the bigger problems in my life, dysfunctional wrecks running their own lives into the ground, and I've spent my whole life just trying not to get sucked down with them. I need support about them, never mind lacking it from them. My entire adult life.
I don't know about young being being excused for social things older people aren't. At least in my personal experience, I felt a lot more like people thought bad things about me for not being social when I was younger. Now that I'm a full grown adult, nobody seems to care, so long as I'm able to conduct professional interactions with the requisite decorum. I don't get any impression that anyone thinks I'm a loser for not playing sports or going to bars or anything like that, whereas when I was younger there was a definite "if you're not hanging out with us you're not cool and something's wrong with you" vibe off of other people. Which just made them even less worth hanging out with in the first place, but memories of that were what drove me to decide in college that maybe I should have a social life. So I did, and it was... meh. Some good times, some bad ones, not worth the emotional energy and time in the end. I could live without it. So now I do. Again. And now that I'm older nobody seems to care anymore.
I mentioned the girlfriend in my initial post so I don't see why that's surprising now. I wrote:
besides weekends with my girlfriend (where we still don't socialize with anyone besides each other)
By "friends" I mean the category of people who are not familial, romantic, or professional relationships. People you just hang out with just because.
And yeah I did have to do something back in the day to meet the girlfriend, but even that mostly consisted of making a profile on a dating site and waiting for her to message me, which she did. Even then, I wasn't really sure what I wanted a girlfriend for, I was just unhappy and looking for anything that might possibly make me less unhappy, and thought a girlfriend might help with that. Most of the ones I tried didn't really, just like most people I happen to meet non-romantically don't really. There are some rare gems of people who it's worth spending time with, but most people aren't worth the effort just to say that you did something with some people and "were social".
Yeah, from what I've heard psych majors (and psychologists and psychiatrists) often have major psych issues themselves, which is what drives them into it, a quest to understand themselves.
Be forewarned though (if you haven't already been) that there's a common trap psych majors fall into, I forget it's name now, of self-diagnosing yourself with every new condition you learn about.
I was a philosophy major myself, so some close overlap there. :-)
Thank you for sharing all that Tyrus. I can relate a lot, though it sounds like I haven't had things quite as hard as you have. I've also been struggling a long while with anxiety and depression, and it's felt like my life has been in a constant state of disorder for about a decade now; though it's certainly gotten a lot, lot better in the past few years, it's been a really long time since everything was just okay and there wasn't some big thing or another displacing everything else in life and a to-do list of less-urgent problems to solve receding into the distance beyond that. Too many times I've ramped up enough energy and confidence to start thinking I could just start churning through that list at full speed only to crash and burn a few steps into it, so now I'm slowly doing maybe one thing per month (if it's a month I'm not so crushed by whatever the current big problem in life is that I can do other things), pacing myself... and new things keep adding themselves to the list at a faster rate than that, so even as things get better and better in many ways it feels like making negative progress toward getting things just okay again.
I especially empathize with that feeling of "terminal uniqueness" as you put it, and how you "have so many things different than the normal person that it's hard to find common ground for conversation". When I was younger I used to get much intellectual stimulation from places like Slashdot here, engaging with other people in debates about every topic under the sun, seeing everyone's position as a unique new perspective to try on for size, and trying myself to find reasonable third ways between the usual two sides of whatever issue. Now it seems like almost everyone I meet falls into some group or another of "ugh I don't want to associate with that kind of person and their particular kind of cliched worldview" and there just aren't many people who see the world anything at all like the way that I do. I guess that feeling could be called lonely in a way, but it's more a feeling of... disappointment, or futility, about the state of the world. It's not that I'm sad that I don't have people to hang out with or that people don't like me, but more a sadness that engaging with people seems pointless because it's like talking to a wall, I neither expect to change its mind or to hear anything surprising from it. Though a wall that just echoes my own words at me wouldn't be much fun either so I guess it's not really an issue of having nobody "like me" in opinion, it's more a lack of people to actually engage in meaningful productive discourse with. I at least used to get something out of hearing all the different points of view and new things to think about in shaping my worldview, even if nobody else's opinions ever changed because of it, but now I never hear anything new from anyone. Just because I've heard it all by now, not because people have changed. Either way, it just makes it all feel kind of pointless to engage with anyone.
But for some reason I'm still here trying anyway. I guess maybe because every +1 Interesting or Insightful makes me feel like maybe I gave someone else more like I used to be some morsel of thought to chew up.
What's free time?
I kid, but I guess I can tell you sort of how I fill my time in general.
Weekdays:
Sleep 8 hours -- 8/24ths of the day so far
Work three hours (I work from home so no commute) -- 11/24ths of the day so far
Exercise (driving a short way to a trail I hike for an hour), shower and lunch, for two hours total -- 13/24th of the day so far
Work another five hours -- 18/24ths of the days so far
Short drive to feel like I've "come home from work", make and eat dinner while reading internet forums/news/etc for about an hour -- 19/24ths of the day so far
Depending on if there's any good shows airing, watch maybe 1hr average of TV to relax -- 20/24ths of the day so far
If there are chores or errands that have to be done, do them, including responding to emails and such, and writing in my journal; otherwise if I have the mental energy after a day of work, try to do something creative with the rest of my evening (currently trying writing), if not, find more tv/internet/etc to distract me from whatever stressors are keeping me from being able to do anything creative in the three hours I have left -- 23/24ths of the day so far
Wind down for bed, watching relaxing videos or listening to music, brushing my teeth and hair etc, about an hour -- 24/24ths of an hour
On weekends, I spend a few more hours a day sleeping, eat more slowly and leisurely (picnics, dining out, etc), take more and longer walks, watch TV or movies with the girlfriend, other more intimate things with the girlfriend (not just sex, massages and other stuff too).
I just now got this joke. Thank you, that's a good one.
I don't use social media and I have no friends. But that's because I put no effort into making any friends. A decade or two ago, after a mostly-friendless youth, I decided that I wanted to have a social life in my college years, and put effort into it. Then I had an enormous number of friends and social things to do every day of every weekend.
In time I realized I wasn't getting enough out of that to be worth the effort, so now I don't try, and besides weekends with my girlfriend (where we still don't socialize with anyone besides each other) the most socialization I get is saying "thank you" and "have a nice night" to the grocery store clerk.
But I'm not lonely. If I wanted to have more of a social life and couldn't, then I would be lonely. But just not having a social life because I can't be bothered isn't loneliness.
Maybe all the people on Facebook and Twitter see other people socializing and imagine that those people are happier than them and that it's because of the socialization, and that makes them want more social life than they have (whether because they're not good at making friends or just don't have the time for it), which makes them sad.
Like the Buddhists say, desire is the root of suffering. Stop wanting to be social, stop thinking it will make you happy, stop thinking those people on your FaceSpace pages are happier than you, because they're not, they're just trying to fill the void in themselves the same as you, but it doesn't really work. Stop wanting something that wouldn't make you happy anyway and you will stop suffering for the lack of it.
The whole point of robots is more bang for the servant buck than you get from organic meatbags, so in this robotic future meat servants will be obsolete.
it definitely does mean mean "figuratively" either
Should be:
it definitely does not mean "figuratively" either
Whether or not "literally" just means literally, it definitely does mean mean "figuratively" either, and I've seen some awful blunders from people trying to hypercorrect under that assumption, ala:
"...so since I was too drunk to study I ended up getting figuratively the lowest grade in the class!"
"Wait, what is 'lowest grade in the class' figurative of?"
"Oh you know, I just mean like, it wasn't like LITERALLY the lowest grade in the class, just, y'know, a pretty low grade."
Non-literal uses of "literal" may be figurative uses, but that doesn't make "literally" mean figuratively. If you had to give a one-word definition for the new figurative sense of the word literal, it would be something more like "hyperbolically".
This exactly. No matter what, unless we somehow wipe ourselves out completely in the process, if anyone survives full automation they will live in perpetual leisure for all eternity afterward. It's just a question of how many people alive today (or their descendants) will get to see it, and how many will die a horrible death on the way to that happening.
The good news is, once a subset of the population have full automation at their leisure, it only takes one charitable person with unlimited robot-provided resources to decide to give everyone else robots because why not, it's not like it costs them anything, since nothing costs them anything anymore.
Although the distribution of land, both for raw resources, sunlight for power, and merely space to exist, still remains a terrible problem even then. You could give everyone on Earth today a tricorder-sided Star Trek style replicator capable of making absolutely anything including fully functional androids like Data, so everyone gets unlimited free goods and services... and then nobody will buy goods and services from anyone, so everyone will be out of work, and suddenly the vast majority of people, who do not own land, are fucked when they can't make their next rent or mortgage payment. Even though everyone has equally unlimited goods and services for free, so it should be a utopia.
We still basically live under feudalism, and those who own the land effectively own us too.