Could be as trivial as a type of food, a TV show, or something more serious.
Social interaction. It would be nice to not just be so exhausted talking to people. It would be nice to not dread the idea of sending someone a text, like it’s some insane mental effort and not the smallest thing. It would be nice to not be lonely but totally unwilling to do what it takes to correct it.
I’m totally the same. Last night a coworker text me to let me know they would be back in the office tomorrow after taking a couple days off. It took me almost 10 minutes to come up with “ok, see you tomorrow then”. I rewrote that text at least a dozen times. Why the hell is something so simple a monumental effort for me?
The key difference between introverts and extroverts is that for introverts social interactions drain our mental energy while extroverts are energized by interactions.
One key thing to remember here is introvert/extrovert isn’t about the level of shyness or anxiety though. You could be an extremely outgoing introvert or a shy extrovert. It truly is only about the relationship between your mental energy and social interaction. The comment above sounds more like social anxiety than introversion, though could be both.
Often. But more often not. It’s nice to be alone, because a lot of human interaction involves unnecessary drama. Maybe it’s just our brains protecting us.
I like that idea. Currently at a coffee shop alone. No panicking brain trying to keep up with the processing right or wrong actions.
Running. It’s the cheapest, easiest form of exercise, but it absolutely bores me to death and i just can’t deal with it after 5 minutes.
I don’t mind most other forms of exercise, it’s just that they all require more time, effort or resources. Going to the gym requires a gym membership, basketball requires friends, etc.
hiking is basically running but better
You’ve gotta do it for even longer to burn the same amount of calories though!
just do a more difficult hike at a faster pace, you can burn A LOT of calories climbing hills and navigating underbrush
try roller skates. saves your knees and not boring.
I’ll admit running is difficult at first because it requires your active thoughts to keep going. Depending on fitness level (mainly regarding weight, not musculature or cardiovascular), after a month or so of a 3xWk plan, you can start to get into a point where it starts getting more sexond nature and you get more of your mind to yourself and the distraction from running becomes more related to your ability to regularly distract yourself with just your thoughts and/or audio (music, books, podcasts, etc).
But yeah, the beginning is really hard. I used to run, got pretty good at it (would go on 8mi runs with a sub-9 minute pace on the weekend) but then stopped for like… 7 years. Just started again a month or two ago. I can only run for about 25 minutes at like a 12 minute pace. I’m also overweight and over 40 which isn’t helping anything. But when I started (or restarted as it were) I couldn’t run for 5 minutes straight. I do get shin splints, I was getting sore muscles all over, but slowly I’m getting better at it. At even just the 20ish minute mark though, I need something to distract me. Right now it’s music, but I’ve been considering podcasts as I feel they generally get me more distracted.
Same for swimming. I don’t actually dislike the activity itself, but I’m not at ease in the sea and I despise the swimming pool.
River/lake swimming is so the way to go
Do you like audioboks or podcasts? Listening to something while running really helped me to find more interest in running/walking more. You do need a good pair of headphones so that they don’t fall out of your ears, though.
Try low intensity while listening to a podcast. 80% of runs are best done at a pace where you can easily hold a conversation and breath through your nose (5/10 effort).
I’m listening to history podcasts now and it feels incredibly relaxing and makes my whole day better. Now I don’t even like rest days anymore. 🙃
@eyy @MisterHavoc as someone who might be mistaken as being active, I loathe running and wish I didn’t. Every other exercise (most of which I love) is just less convenient. Biking, swimming, hiking, sports - all require extra steps (equipment or environment or other people). If I liked running even a little more it would be so practical to just throw on shoes and go whenever.
But the moment my legs are pumping and my lungs are aching there’s nothing to distract me from feeling like I’m DYING.
this is exactly how I feel! I don’t get any sense of achievement from running a certain distance or running faster than I did before, and it feels terrible (and I know I can stop that feeling if i just stop running). Almost every other sport gets me that sense of achievement but requires more time, money or effort in some form.
It’s all about the activity. My younger kid is extremely athletic: he did a 5k on a whim and kept up with the runners club without preparation. However he hates running, and gives similar reasons. His activity is soccer. Soccer gives a point to running. That kid will run the entire game if he’s playing soccer, but even he can’t stand running
Socializing. There are lots of benefits to being connected, but I just can’t stand people. People are the worst, and yeah, that includes me.
Gym exercise.
For most of my life I always hated the idea of exercise just for the sake of exercise. I would try to find activities where exercise was an associated benefit. Hiking, skateboarding, rock climbing etc. Eventually being an adult slowly killed all of my recreational fitness outlets and I ended up teetering on the edge of overweight.
With the goal of getting back in shape, I tried a few gyms but I never got into it. It always felt like a chore. Turns out the problem for me was that I am a cheap bastard, and I was only considering the least expensive discount shitty gyms. One of my friends convinced me to try out a pricier more fully featured gym and it made a huge difference. Well maintained equipment, group classes, child care while you work out, showers that didn’t scare me. It was a lot less intimidating, and it switched the gym experience from feeling like a chore to feeling like a break.
It’s been a couple years now, and I’ll say, having once thought I’d never be a gym person, I’m now definitely a gym person.
Not saying it’d be the same for everyone, just what ended up working for me.
I’m the same and as someone who’s worked remotely for 10 years, my life was way too sedentary. I got a dog which helped as the guilt of not walking her is plenty of motivation to get out daily, but whilst it helps, it wasn’t exactly making me fit and healthy, just a bit LESS unhealthy.
I discovered rock climbing 3 months ago though and my life is completely changed, all exercise and diet is done with my current project route in mind and after 3 months I’m already far healthier and stronger than I’ve ever been before.
Phenomenal sport, as someone who HATES the gym I really recommend everyone tries it at least once. It’s as intense as any workout and 100x more fun.
You know, an irrational fear of heights stopped me when I tried it with a friend some years back. But since getting really into hiking, and doing so on some pretty steep trails, it was pointed out to me that my fear of heights is less acute than before we started.
I’ll give it another shot. Maybe I can do it now.
Awesome, if heights are still an issue you could go bouldering instead, it’s just climbing with no ropes and only up to 4ish metres off the ground (above soft mats for landing on if you fall).
It’s probably more popular than toprope (higher) climbing these days as its more accessible and can easily be done in groups of friends. Requires more strength and less endurance, but equally fun (more so for some people) as top roping.
It’s probably a very good way to get over your fear though, just having to jump from 12m with a rope does take some willpower initially but I don’t even think about it anymore.
For most of my life I always hated the idea of exercise just for the sake of exercise. I would try to find activities where exercise was an associated benefit. Hiking, skateboarding, rock climbing etc. Eventually being an adult slowly killed all of my recreational fitness outlets and I ended up teetering on the edge of overweight.
With the goal of getting back in shape, I tried a few gyms but I never got into it. It always felt like a chore. Turns out the problem for me was that I am a cheap bastard, and I was only considering the least expensive discount shitty gyms. One of my friends convinced me to try out a pricier more fully featured gym and it made a huge difference. Well maintained equipment, group classes, child care while you work out, showers that didn’t scare me. It was a lot less intimidating, and it switched the gym experience from feeling like a chore to feeling like a break.
Not saying it’d be the same for everyone, just what ended up working for me.
The trick is to do it regularly and develop an addiction. I worked in an care home one summer and after that I promised myself to exercise until I die.
Cilantro. Fucking soapy-assed tasting bullshit. I want to like you, but genetics won’t let me.
If like me you also didn’t know what “Cilantro” is, it’s Coriander.
Yeah, cilantro is the culinary term, where coriander is the botanical.
TBH, this doesn’t make any sense, you can buy both cilantro and coriander for cooking. They’re both regular ingredients, so they’re both culinary terms.
Normally cilantro is the leafy part and coriander is the seeds (you can get whole or crushed).
That’s at least true for American English. I’m unclear if it holds true in British, Australian, etc. Or if it works in other languages that use these words.
Never got a soapy taste from cilantro, but as a kid, a suicidal stink bug landed on a PB&J I was eating.
At first I was pissed off at my brother, cuz that bastard put cilantro on a fucking PB&J!!! I spit the bite out. Wad of partially chewed sandwich, mixed with insect legs and broken shell lands on my plate: no cilantro. Brother is now looking up at me with a genuine expression of concern: not a prank.
Lesson 1: look before you bite.
Lesson 2: Stink bugs taste exactly like cilantro.
Lesson 3: …cilantro tastes exactly like stink bugs.
The tiniest little flek of that shit can ruin an otherwise delicious bite of food.
@Sterile_Technique @PunnyName in some dystopian future where cilantro has gone extinct, stinkbugs get crushed up and dyed green as fake cilantro powder, much like horseradish pretends to be wasabi… What a dark place that must be
The only difference would be a bit of crunch :P
@Sterile_Technique more protein! 😎😏
Wait until you hear about red food colouring
@Infernal_pizza !?! What about red food coloring? Is it made from bugs too???
Yes, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this:
@Infernal_pizza 😳 #TIL bugs called cochineal are almost 1/4 carminic acid! The main component used in red dye. That’s nuts!
This for sure. I have the soap gene as well. I love Mexican food, and it’s nigh impossible to find much traditional Mexican without cilantro.
Heads up: cooking cilantro should eliminate the soapy flavor.
Also be aware many indian dishes contain cilantro/coriander
Oh yes I forgot about Indian. I have to be picky about where I go so I can avoid cilantro. Cooking does help a little bit the soap is still there for me. It’s really overwhelming in dishes to me.
That’s really unfortunate- it’s such a great taste
Is parsley related to Cilantro?
I really really cannot stand parsley in anything, it is bitter and disgusting and mu workplace puts it in everything.
I’m the opposite. I pretty much sub out cilantro for parsley in every dish.
Maybe I need to try some cilantro to see if I am some sort of rare mutant.
You have probably had it. It’s in tons of food. If you’ve ever had coriander, that is another name for cilantro.
If you like cilantro, you’re normal. The soap gene is the mutant gene. Like blue eyes, or being able to process lactose (I have both).
Embarrassment humor. It’s always sunny. How I met your mother. Arrested development. I think you should leave. I can’t stand cringe.
I’m the same way. It usually makes me uncomfortable and I don’t want to watch it.
Something similar with reality TV. I start to get irritated. I know the situations are fabricated and edited but it gets me worked up and I hate it.
I tend to just feel bad for the characters involved, I don’t understand the appeal.
I was the same way and then I found American Family. I also only started watching it to have something on in the background which is actually probably the reason why I “adapted” to embarrassment humor.
I looked up from the computer/phone/chores to appreciate funny moments bit by bit, started appreciating the characters in wholesome moments, tune out when cringy things were going on… Eventually I got invested into the story of some of the episodes to the point where I started to tolerate cringe and even laugh at it.
God I’m so glad I’m not the only one. I thought everyone likes embarrassment humor and maybe I was getting a little cynical about “how bad taste is getting” or something. So good to know that others call it “cringe” (in one way, not in the other) and can’t watch it either.
“I Think You Should Leave” is like if 8 year olds are suddenly thrust into adulthood but didn’t mature on the short trip there.
Exercise.
Very few people love exercise at first. It is a learned hobby. I recommend trying out different sports instead of just going to the gym, competition makes exercising a lot more rewarding.
The sound of dogs barking. If I liked that, I‘d be so happy every single day. I‘d wake up and go to sleep to a sound I enjoy. As it is, I will have to move and rent is even more expensive now, just depressing.
I adore dogs but no one really loves dogs barking. Even dogs with a relatively discrete or non-annoying bark pitch will tire any ear if they go into a barking ceremony.
It did make me suffer a lot of nights. I’m new stepmother of 7 dogs. They bark and sing a lot. After a while of suffering I just tried to learn to understand what they are saying, and how their music works. As I gradually get better at that I have now many situations where I immediately know if something’s wrong on the farm, or a neighbors dog has come for a visit. But if they are not your dogs the noise can be awful. Especially poor dogs locked up in city apartments or tied to chains as many people do here can be tough to listen to.
My next door neighbour has a dog that just screams and wails all day. It sounds horiffic, but because it’s got food water and shelter and doing it in the day time when his owners are at work it’s ok (says the local authority).
Keeping a dog on its own is absolutely cruel. Of course he’s out of his mind.
Yeah, but what can you do? My ex got a dog, over my objections because since we were split, no one would be home for it. However my vote no longer matters.
Somehow I’m stuck with the cruelty part because the dog just can’t stay home alone but she’s in a townhouse with neighbors. At this point, either the dog is alone in my house suffering, or she gives it back — and my kids have long since bonded. It was a middle aged rescue, so some behavioral issues are more ingrained, and she’s a breed who would certainly not get re-adopted. What can you do?
Every time I look over, I see a total sweetheart cuddling with my kid, not the desperate lonely pooch stuck home alone.
I’m not looking for suggestions: I think we have a good handle on the options, but sometimes those options are not enough
Seafood. So many people love it, so many cultures’ cuisine centers around it, but OMFG I can’t stand the taste.
god same, everyone else loves stuff like salmon and shrimp and it just makes me vomit, it’s absolutely terrible.
the only things i can eat are smoked roe paste (kaviar), and fish sauce.
Life.
Sorry if it got too serious. But I used to be chillin’ and then I have depression.
But on the more trivial side of things, there are often TV shows or Movies people really like for some reason and upvoted to top of a reddit post asking “what’s your favorite movie of all time”, but I never seem to be able to enjoy some of those (even before I had depression). Like I don’t get what’s so good about them. I read though the plot and it just seem so boring.
Like out of a list of 50 movies people claim to be their favorite, I might only wanna watch like 5 of those.
I feel you. I have persistent depression and it’s such a struggle to just enjoy life most days. Neal Brennan said it best IMO. He says he is unable to feel joy. I have happy moments, but they are fleeting. I enjoy some things and I have fun doing my hobbies, but it never feels fulfilling. Like, I’m just always looking for something to fulfill me, and nothing ever gets there.
People, cause love and friendship.
I feel this. This probably stems from childhood issues and a string of failed relationships but I just can’t be comfortable around really any social groups I’ve had for very long. Functionally I’m great, people seem to like talking to me and want my company. So we’ll do a few get together sessions and then my fatigue will make me slowly fizzle out. It really sucks.
On the brightside though, I do love my own company and have made peace with having a lot of holidays and special occasions on my own or with the cat.
Kodemystic
I’m comfortable too with being by myself. I just think it would improve my life if I felt I could trust people more. Or at least let go of some unarmed something in me that just gets hurt or disappointed by people. I’d like to connect more and not give a fuck when people disappoint me, and just forgive and let go.
Programming. I have a bunch of ideas that are actually useful for my job, but I can’t seem to keep track of the necessary steps to write the code. ChatGPT has helped me create a couple of programs: a discord bot and a very complex (for me) application that brings in NASA data that automatically runs through Stable Diffusion. The code interpreter is amazing… but there’s too much context I’m missing for these things to be truly fun the way I imagine them to be.
Look up UC Berkeley’s CS61A, B, and C, then start looking deeper into the CS curriculum to find the pieces you are missing. For me, it took trying to optimise the CPU scheduler for single threaded processes in Linux, specifically complex assemblies in FreeCAD. That lead me to a few lectures about the scheduler in the OS principals course. I’ve done a bunch of little embedded projects but struggle with complexity. The concepts around a scheduler are what I was missing. There are a lot of things like this that are readily available for free online if you just go searching for them specifically.
If you want to really free yourself, I run a offline Llama2 70B with GGML 4bit to code. It works well for snippets and can do better than 3 tokens a second on a 12th gen i7/64GB and 16GBV 3080Ti. It can run at around 2 tokens a second on just the CPU, but you’ll need a Linux machine with an additional 8GB swap partition just to initially load the model. It takes around 43GB to run after init.
Depending on what your level of experience is, it might just take more time and practice. When I was doing my degree, it took two years, an internship, and multiple serious programming courses before I truly felt comfortable programming.
Career growth. Works keeps telling me for years about how they want to promote me into a new role, but I keep turning them down. Like bruh yeah it’s more pay but it’s more hours ya know.
I’d rather finish work 5pm everyday then stay back till 8pm for a few grand more which is even worse after tax.
That’s completely normal, and a large portion of people here in Europe would do the same as you do. There is this saying where “people in North America life to work, people in Europe work to life”. Because who cares if you make more money if you barely have the time to actually enjoy it?
Not trying to say one continent is better than the other, but it is a very clear difference in work-life balance mentality.
Nothing wrong with that
I see people I’ve known that are in higher roles and they’re overworked and put in like 50% more hours than I do. They probably make 20% more but I make enough to be very happy. So what’s the point?
If you have enough money, you don’t need 2x enough money.
You can negotiate your hours, just like you can negotiate the pay.
Lots of people do that.
Maybe find a way to define “career growth” for you, instead of the company’s version? I’ve been pretty happy with increased freedom, increased decision-making, without the extra hours and without having to deal with people.
Getting up early. Ideally even exercising before breakfast.
Social connection. It would be nice if I could be confident and good at making friends with strangers. I have no idea why I feel so lonely when in the crowd and even more lonely when I’m alone.
Trust me, it’s overrated. Besides, you’re avoiding COVID naturally. That’s a perk.
