Idk if “little experience” means something in English, but what I meant is non-life changing/threatening. Things that would otherwise go unnoticed.
For me, it was when I stopped drinking acoholic beverages because… I ended up finding it boring, I guess.
I started noticing how low key hostile my environment is towards people who dont drink. People started thinking I was sick, depressed, converted to islam, being snob, etc.
Bartenders started to openly mock me when I asked for a lemonade (they still do) : “We dont do that here”, “Go to a physician if you need that”, “you’re in a bar you know ?”.
I started realizing how hostile my country/region/groups can be to people who dont drink. Never realized that before.
Edit : typo
When we started wearing masks at work, I started to get called ma’am a lot.
I started hormones the next year.
Talk about a ripple effect :) Even though I suppose you were already considering this at that time, no ? Anyway, that’s very nice, thanks for sharing !
20-something years ago, I was a struggling student with a shit side-job and a so-so relationship with my family. Life felt like being a hamster running in a wheel, it felt like there was nowhere to go.
I had dinner with a friend of mine, who announced that he was leaving for a study-abroad year for our last year of masters degree. I was glad for him, but definitely envious, and he told me: “well, do it too then”.
I spent the next 30 minutes trying to explain the myriad of things that were keeping me down in my life, but he dismantled them one by one.
Like:
• “But packing my studio apartment will be tedious…” - “So you’ll live the rest of your life in that apartment?”
• “But money…” - “You know you can take a reasonable loan for this and that it will pay off in opportunities.”
• “But I’m the one keeping everything together at work.” - “And they know it, it’s not in their interest for you to be find a job in your degree’s career. They’ll ask you for favors forever. You should look out for yourself there. It’s probably a good thing to make it stop now and have you be unreachable a while so they can figure it out.” (This was before smartphones.)
• “But my family will hate it.” - “Because they also don’t want to let you go, you should look out for yourself there too.”
He was spot on about everything, and eventually, I had run out of excuses. That night I ended it with a non-committal “I’ll think about it”, but that small conversation started a big train of thoughts that changed everything about how I made decisions. Basically, it turned me from being someone quite risk-averse and shying away from things, to becoming someone unusually risk-seeking and ready to take on opportunities that would present to me as much as I could without letting anything keep me down.
I wasn’t able to join the program he joined because the deadline had passed, so I had to carve out my own study-abroad opportunity, so I did. It was scary and tedious, but it paid off. Interestingly, I now live halfway across the world from where I grew up, and he is back in our hometown. We lost touch over time, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t realize how this small conversation that day changed everything of the path I was on.
Taking anthropology courses in college made a significant change to the way I view the world. I don’t necessarily know or understand anyone else’s way of thinking about things, but I am always aware that alternatives exist. It made me more accepting of differences and more open to new ideas. There are an infinite number of “right ways” to do things. (Although there are still wrong ways too.)
Living in different countries made me realize how little people usually know about others. I like to remind people that calling things “strange”, “weird” or saying “Nobody would do xyz” is often wrong and people just a flight away actually find this normal
Still in that country I worked for a company made of 100% foreigners. When I joined the boss took me under his wing and try teaching me the ways in this country and how to get sh*t done. It took a disagreement on product roadmap for me to realize that he was not technically good, he was actually racist and I definitely didn’t want him as a role model. Now I’m extra careful on seeing the signs early
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When I was a kid my dad was a contractor. He worked hard, always doing the most possible to make sure my mom and siblings were taken care of.
When I got older, I started going to work with him. I realized how hard it was, how everything he did was extremely physically taxing. It was after moving his ladder for the 12th time I realized this is why he’s so tired all the time. He’s working his ASS off for us, trading his physical health for us to have a good childhood.
It was my time with him that A) opened my eyes and respect to the thousands of trades folks on the market and B) without them, this whole operation we call modern society falls apart.
So the “little” thing that changed my life was seeing my dad provide the way he did. I chose to continue in the same field as my dad, but now I’m the designer that makes the plans, instead of installs them. He would always tell me “Use your brain if your have one. Otherwise, you can use your body”.
I forgot the details, but I remember vividly the strong feeling of being right about something. And then I learned I was wrong.
This was when I started to distrust that feeling. It is comforting, but not a trustworthy guide to truth.
Yes! For me that has happened a few major times i can remember. I used to be a huge apple fanboy, until i learned i prefer android and linux way more. i know that’s kind of a lame example but it was the first time i became aware of what you’re talking about and opened the door to me thinking critically about other things - namely religion and ethics. The other two major times i’ve had this feeling was with religion, realizing it’s not true and leaving the church, and then after that having to think about ethics for myself and realizing there’s no good reason to exclude nonhuman animals from moral consideration. That exploiting and abusing them for taste pleasure and fashion and tools was totally unjustifiable.
It’s definitely a bizarre feeling, but it’s very important to be open to it and stay on the lookout for other things one could be wrong about
As a regular victim to this feeling, that’s something I needed to read. Thank you :)
For me, it was the combination of two Linguistic tidbits of info, from uni classes:
- verb modality being split between epistemic and deontic
- Linguistics itself being descriptive, while normative grammar being prescriptive.
I won’t go further on what those posh words mean because they were just the “trigger”. What changed the way that I perceive things was that, by their powers combined, I realised that there’s a deep distinction between
- what we know, what we don’t know, what’s true or false
- what we want, what we don’t want, what we consider good or bad
and that we should never mix both things inside our heads.
I love this ! I sont exactly know the meaning of these words, but the idea itself is crystal clear !
Reading about stoicism. It’s like an ethical anchor in my life now, a guide to be happy. It’s like the upgraded version of religious belief, perfectly fitting in the 21st century (even though it’s thousands of years old).
Hello, I’m only 22 years old but I want to learn more about this. Will I be able to grasp the depth of the concept at my age or is it inherently for people who have already gained experience in life?
Everyone can understand the basic concepts of stoicism. Most of them are easy to understand, but hard to apply.
Unfortunately I can not recommend any English literature, but I see Deren Browns “Happy” getting recommended a lot. The books I read all had a practical focus, trying to apply stoic ideas to day-to-day life. Most stoics will recommend to also read historical literature, like Marcus Aurelius “Meditations” - this might be a bit too much for beginners.
For me personally, the most helpful stoic idea is the “dichotomy of control”. It basically says that you shouldn’t worry about things or facts you can’t change (“externalities”) and instead focus on the things that actually are under your control. And those are VERY few things.
A trivial example: Why should I worry about the “bad” weather during my holidays? I certainly can not control the weather and by nature, the weather is neither good or bad. It’s my brain that gives a sunny day more value than a thunderstorm. So instead of complaining about the weather, I should try to make the best out of it and maybe even appreciate it.
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France (north). I’m now deserting bars too, yes. There’s just some times I can’t avoid them, i.e. meeting people during a train stop, at the bar near the train station. If it’s not too late, I’m ordering coffee now.
I’m from France too and always disliked the taste of alcohol. Being young in France, it was frustrating the amount of time I had to fend off people who were trying to make me drink. And like you, sometimes they’d make stupid guesses about why, sometimes getting intentionally insulting.
Eventually, I got used to telling people that I was “trying to stop drinking”, implying that I was struggling to, because that people were actually respectful of and they’d leave me alone.
Eventually I went to live a year abroad (see my other comment), and realized people never reacted even once when I’d tell them I didn’t drink. French culture is great in a lot of ways, but there’s really something wrong with this.
I still live abroad today, and no one bothers me about it. Obviously it’s not the reason I live where I live, but damn I don’t miss the snarky booze-related remarks.
The peer pressure is pretty similar here in germany: “You can have a beer and still drive” - Yeah, but I don’t want to “Beer is not even ‘real’ alcohol”, “You can have a Radler it only has 2% alcohol”, “real germans don’t drink non-alcoholic beer”.
I have to say that I did not always dislike alcohol. It was actually the other way around and I consumed far too much. Not that I needed it to survive throughout the day, but I had hangovers pretty much every weekend. So, by now I only drink 2-3 times a year, because also it does interfere with my sports activity a lot. But it hate it if peole are pulling up answers and excuses like the above.
But what I also noticed when I was in france is, that for many people wine is also like a normal drink and it’s perfectly fine to have 1-2 glasses of red wine for lunch. Also something, thats the same in germany, especially bavaria, but with another drink. If you have a glass of wine for lunch you’re considered an alcoholic, if you have a beer it’s normal since you’re in germany.
head shaking
I was doing two master’s degrees and I was active in student union. It was impossible to be in three places at the same time. After the first week, I realised people don’t really care if you are late or not and if you come or not. Before this I was always minimum 5 minutes early before the starting time. After that I’ve been late almost always. And not just by few minutes…
People do care if you are late though. Friends and co-workers wait for you to arrive before starting a meeting or activity, but you are now always the very late one. You are tolerated, but will be kept at arm’s-length because they know you are inconsiderate. You can be 5 minutes late to some meetings in order to feign that you are really important and your previous meetings went over because people wanted more of your time, but if you go much more than that frequently, you are just unreliable.
