It’s very depressing to ask someone about their weekend and the answer is always nothing more than TV and sleep.
I know somebody who maintains a gas powered go kart that his son races with. I don’t know much about it, and I’d never be into it, but at least hearing about what he is up to is interesting.
What’s ironic is that so many are doing TV and sleep on their weekends because they are depressed and exhausted from the week, with only two days before starting it over, less in many cases
This was me for a while. I’ve found that when I’m depressed, taking the first step out the door can feel like an insurmountable task.
Also related, I’m actually in a conversation with a discord friend right now about how hard it is to feel connected to something as we get older. It’s still possible, but it takes a concerted effort. Add things like depression and exhaustion to the mix, and you’ve got the ingredients for a downward spiral.
There are so many people out there who I’d love to give a big mental hug. So many people hurting.
Right on the nose with the insurmountable task.
The thing is, is that if somehow you get the energy to get out the door, whatever you have planned is (nearly) always a good time. It’s just so hard to remember that when depression takes hold.
I can definitely relate, then my dog has to stay on routine …. I love her almost like another kid and am so happy she can share our family. I’ll spend as much time as I can, etc, etc. but there are weekend days when I. Just. Need. Sleep. but she has to make sure we all get up in time as if it were work/school
To be fair, sleeping is awesome and TV shows have had 100 years of continuous improvement.
We’re in a golden age of TV. Film level production and writing quality. A list actors. Planned story arcs instead of serial garbage.
I have been lucky enough to watch every season of the Simpsons since 1989 as it increased and slowly decreased in quality. I have seen Seinfeld, The Office, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Friends, Anime like Neon Genesis Evangelion/Berserk,One Punch Man/Death Note, countless documentaries featuring David Attenborough. Top Gear, The IT Crowd, Mr Robot, The Walking Dead and even all six seasons of Game of Thrones.
You’re right, we are very fortunate and it is a golden age.
That’s the unfortunate part of modern society. Many people are barely able to make a living to get by that when they do have time off, all they want to do is sleep and do nothing. It’s not that they are necessarily lazy or unmotivated, it’s that they are tired and need the rest.
People don’t create, or get into a hobby unless they have enough free time and money.
If all your free time is spent on trying to get a bit more money to live … any bit of time you have to just sit will be spent either sleeping or watching TV.
I don’t have any energy to do anything else. I hate being asked about my weekend. Why do I have to entertain? They can just tell me about their own weekend instead and I’ll offer my own information if I have something to tell.
I don’t assume people are asking for their own entertainment. I think they are trying to connect. Conversation is one of the way people connect to each other. If it’s just for entertainment It’s so much easier to just get entertainment from a phone rather than go the effort to interact with people.
All the coal in the ground was made in one specific period of history when trees were “new” and there was nothing that broke down dead trees for food. Trees that die now do not become coal. No new coal is being made.
That whole story about how long it took for fungus or anything to evolve to the point it could break down trees was a fascinating surprise to me, that also highlighted how evolution works.
However nowadays, I see it mostly as important to share from the perspective of both climate change and cultural resilience. We all know the connection to climate change, but ….
I love watching apocalypse movies, but an op Ed I read really struck home. The premise was that if there were enough of a disaster to knock humanity back a century or more, we would never be able to recover. So many easy sources of energy through fossil fuels have been picked clean to where they are no longer recoverable without modern technology, and we can’t get back to modern technology without Easy sources of energy. Fossil fuels in general were created once. There are no new ones created. But there are no substitutes that would let a re-building society pass that level of development.
That’s a very interesting story if you think about it. I would say that it is possible to reach our technology level again without fossil fuels. It just takes a lot longer. The biggest issue for this is getting materials as steel or copper. Wind turbines are relatively simple and don’t need that much technology. As a more stable form of energy production we have trees and bio mass. It would cost a lot of our trees to get back to our current state, but I think it’s possible. You just have to remember to not make the same mistakes again.
Wind turbines are certainly doable at be lower technology levels, but how do you scale that up to enough power density for things like refining metals? How could you even have enough of an iron or steel industry to build things, including tools? Concrete? Glass? Chemicals? How would appliances ever be cheap enough for home/personal use?
Maybe you and I are open to hearing about new and interesting things. Great!
But thanks to ADHD, I am prone to acting a little too excited and can sometimes overshare.
Then, when I finally notice the discomfort of my interlocutor, I feel acute embarrassment for being such a weirdo. And that is just no fun at all, ya know?
Far better to keep the ol’ mask on and say as little as possible until I get to know someone better.
I can always find people into whatever specific hobby I am into if I want to geek out so it’s all good.
Far better to keep the ol’ mask on and say as little as possible until I get to know someone better
I’ve done this as well, but it did lead to more of a solo type of life for me (something that I personally want). I’m not saying that it’ll work for everyone like that, but just to keep an eye out for it if you’re someone who needs companionship.
The solution is to find another ADHDer and overshare together! Autistic people might work too! It’s certainly one of the major reasons why I vibe well with other people who have autism or ADHD.
Reading this thread reminded me of my mother often ignoring what I said as a child. And one specific time when she said she didn’t want to hear about a video game I was excited about.
Not huge injuries, there is certainly far worse that can happen. But it does shape who you are to be shut down like that. Shit parenting, as gen x is used to.
I hope I have never done that to anyone. Just listening without criticizing is not difficult.
Those injuries are worse than many people realize, I think. Dismissing your kid’s enthusiasm basically sucks the joy out of their life. Kids literally need recognition and validation from parents. Encouragement is a big deal. When you share exciting things and get shot down, you either stop sharing with anyone, stop being excited, or both.
If we can’t ever be enthusiastic about anything what’s supposed to be the offset to all the misery life throws at us, periods of numb ennui? Lol
My parents often responded to any enthusiasm with some kind of negativity. I don’t recall any shared excitement. I’m also gen x, if you couldn’t guess lol.
When you were a child did you only ever talk about video games? Just curious.
Here’s a summary of a few passion project research holes I went down over the past few years (citations available):
- It’s very likely that the Gospel of Thomas was related to the writings of Lucretius, there’s a high chance the historical Jesus was talking about indivisible parts of matter (atomism) and a decent chance he was talking about natural selection, both ideas extensively found in Lucretius in some cases with near identical language to what’s both canonical and apocryphal
- Nefertiti (“beautiful woman who arrived”) and the story of Helen of Troy have some remarkable overlaps, particularly given Herodotus’s account of Helen ending up in Egypt the whole time - and the two datable parts of Herodotus’s version both line up with the 18th dynasty, which was parallel to the Mycenaean conquest of Anatolia
- Ramses II was described as appearing to be a Lybian Berber in his forensic examination, and had around 50 sons, which makes the ancient claims the story of Danaus (the Lybian ruler who was brother to a Pharoh with 50 sons) occurred in the 19th dynasty a bit more intriguing
- There may have been some truth to a Moses/Mopsus narrative at the tail end of the 19th dynasty, but it would have related to the twelve groups of tribes of Anatolian peoples captured by Ramses II at Kadesh and some of their later actions as part of the confederation referred to as “the sea peoples” - this lines up more closely with Greek and Egyptian accounts of the Exodus tale as multiethnic or including Greek ancestors too. Some of those sea peoples were later forcibly relocated to the Southern Levant where there was cohabitation near the local Israelites who later on have stories about these events, talk about Dan “staying on their ships” or trading with Tyre alongside the Greeks, and recent archeology has found Aegean style pottery made with local clay in Tel Dan or the only apiary in the “land of milk and honey” importing Anatolian bees in Tel Rehov, which starts to cast a very different picture of some old stories
What’s on your research agenda now? Like, what is an unanswered question (with respect to your own knowledge) that you’re curious about?
Most of my attention has shifted over to following emerging research on large language models. Right now my key focus there is relating to alignment strategies. I’ve had a strong suspicion since GPT-4 released that the way in which the most recent models are being fine tuned throws away a lot of valuable skills outside what we measure for, and that instead an alignment strategy more similar to the interplay between intrusive thoughts and the prefrontal cortex would achieve more consistent alignment results without sacrificing capabilities. There’s been a few papers over the last year (and even just the last few weeks) that are starting to support similar findings.
In terms of history stuff, there’s still a few odd details I might circle back to, but it mostly feels like I hit diminishing returns unless we see significant new discoveries in materials (which I actually hope we will as LLMs become capable enough to translate into English the extensive bodies of untranslated but discovered works like the Oxy papyri).
One is to follow up on a line of inquiry I’d find relating to grammatical fingerprinting of Paul’s epistles. There was a 2017 psych study that found vulnerable narcissists have a greater degree of personal reference in their writing, and he’s always struck me a bit of that type (“I’m the least of the apostles” fluctuating with “I’m not less than the greatest of the apostles”). When I analyzed the letters in English, there’s significantly more personal reference in the undisputed Pauline letters than non-Pauline Epistles. But the really interesting part is the disputed letters. Only one falls within the range of the undisputed letters in its frequency of personal reference, and it’s one that most scholars have historically thought was forged (2 Timothy). At some point I’ll come back around to doing a similar analysis on the original Greek.
Another recent thread I may look more into would be the Mediterranean parallels for terms translating as “Great Lady” in the LBA and early Iron Age. There’s some weird nuances to a term like that being applied in the Bible to various women, particularly alleged around women connected to the Egyptian pharoh’s household - but when I cross referenced Egyptian records around the relevant time I only see a similar translated term being applied to a Hittite queen who was co-signing the world’s first extant treaty. So now I’m wondering if either (a) the association with Egypt in the OT was an anachronistic rationalization for a foreign concept that was actually originating from Anatolia (like the bees and potentially the tribe of Dan) or (b) if it really did relate to Egypt but because of one or more queens coming from Anatolia marrying into the Pharoh’s household. If the latter, it might help narrow down specifically which dynasties a few alleged events were supposed to have been occurring.
