My girlfriend has a hobby of growing/propagating/selling desert plants. The grow lights fill her living room, and they are intense. 😭

Thankfully, she knows me, and she turns them off whenever I come over.

I work from home 10-20 hours a day.

That’s fair. Drinking at one’s workplace is usually frowned upon.

This is the way. To cycle through several times may take years, but over time all the bits of practice add up. Until one day, you look at what you’ve created, and realize that you’ve actually gotten quite skilled.

When I started using a camera as a teen, I didn’t let people call me a “photographer.” I was just “a person who likes taking pictures.” To me, being a “photographer” implied possessing skills and purpose beyond what I’d had.

A few years later, I came across some blog about various artistic principles, including ratios and framing. I went back through some of my favorite shots and was surprised to realize they already followed those rules. Apparently, over the years, I’d picked up a bunch of photography skills that people take classes to learn. It just took tons of practice and experimentation, which I returned to in cycles.

Haha, this is what I say, too! “My hobby is collecting new hobbies.” There are supplies for no fewer than five types of crafts on my living room table right now. (Also water bottles, several video game controllers, a solved Rubik’s cube, my medications, and some cannabis paraphernalia.)

USA users are also aggressive when you complain

It’s another effect of the last few generations being raised on authoritarian teat. They’re always right, and all dissenting opinions aren’t just wrong, they’re personal attacks.

I saw this shit in adults when I was growing up, in the US in the 90s. People here are straight-up brainwashed. I became a skeptic by age 12, and boy oh boy, did my teachers have a problem with it. I’d debunk myths and “old wives tales,” especially when teachers spread them. I’d research and bring in evidence to support my points. Sounds like a great teaching opportunity, right? Not when the teachers lean authoritarian.

Even the best science teacher in my middle school couldn’t admit to the class that he lied about swallowed gum staying in your stomach for seven years. He told me I was right in private, after I brought in two books and a magazine explaining that it was a myth. But the other kids? They didn’t believe me, because teacher said it’s true, so it must be true. As to the teacher, I guess it’s just easier to control kids with a lie than to have a little humility, stand up for truth and science, and accept whatever happens after. It spoke volumes to me about where the adults around me stood. I already knew the kids were swallowing the propaganda, but seeing the adults have so little backbone angered me.

So yeah, we’re pretty fucked as a culture. Needless to say, I stopped being surprised by the acceptance of fascism long ago. Too many people here like the idea of just being told things by someone speaking with confidence. To question that is to be a shit-stirrer and there will be consequences for it. This also explains why we accept terrible bosses and working conditions - it’s all part of the same big picture.

Wait, what? Where’d you hear that from? I’m on .world and my home internet is hard wired to a VPN. I’ve never had a problem.

Or a song repeats on full-blast inside your head, drowning out your own thoughts, all because a car drove by an hour ago with the windows down and that song was on their radio. Now your brain won’t turn it off.

My brain also does this neat/annoying trick where it connects details I see or experience with details from song lyrics. Like, I could have to stand on a corner waiting to cross a street, and my brain will decide to start playing, Take it Easy by The Eagles for the rest of the day… just because I was “standing on a corner” (though not in Winslow, Arizona.)

Some people think I have an irrationally strong negative reaction to catchy “ear worm” songs… but I figure it’s because such songs aren’t as debilitating to most people. For me, when songs take over my brain like this, I can’t think a single sentence straight through. They legit hijack my brain and I’ve never learned a way to make it stop.* It’s as distressing as it is distracting.

* I haven’t learned a way to make it stop in the moment. However, I have found that anti-depressants help prevent this from happening overall. Just as negative thoughts stop looping through my mind when I maintain my Lexapro, songs are less likely to get stuck in my head. Just an interesting sidenote.

AuDHD here. I also have very little filter for incoming noises. I suspect it’s an auditory processing issue.

My “cocktail party” effect is weak, I sometimes struggle to hear words properly through phone calls (which is a big part of why I don’t like making them), and if a show or movie doesn’t have captions on I’ll probably miss a lot of dialogue. I’ve had plenty of people ask, “Are you deaf?” or tell me to get my hearing checked when I ask them to repeat themselves, despite every hearing test I’ve ever taken showing that my hearing is better than average. It’s not my ears that struggle, it’s my brain’s ability to filter/process/prioritize sounds that’s unusual.

At the same time, I’m distracted by all sorts of details. I had an ex once remark that when people spoke a language he didn’t understand, he found it easier to tune out. I thought that absurd; if anything my brain becomes even more distracted by foreign languages. I still detect (and can recreate) novel language sounds, even though linguists and brain-researchers claim I should’ve lost the ability to do that decades ago.

I wish I could get a brain scan when listening to sounds and compare the results to scans of other people. I can’t help but think it would shed light on a lot of life-long issues and peculiarities.

How do they do it?

I assume they just don’t. For my mom at least, she absolutely will not apply mental effort to anything that doesn’t strictly require it. If a mental task can be offloaded to someone or something else, she’ll do that instead, every time.

Oh snap, you’re me.

As an agendered pansexual, the wildest thing to me about the trans/cis divide is actually feeling that strongly about having a preferred gender. I simply can’t fathom caring hard enough to put up a fight about it. I default to “female” because I was AFAB, but if someone calls me by a different pronoun, it’s whatever to me.

Now let me be clear - just because I don’t feel gender for myself, doesn’t mean I can’t respect and support those who do feel strongly about their genders.

And as a reference to this comment, this post was fueled by unmedicated ADHD, autism, and cannabis (and a bit of frustration, since I accidentally closed the window after the first time I wrote it, so I had to write it twice.)

Brand new sentence

A politician with a proven track record of actually cleaning shit up?

They’ve got my vote.

Bruh, it sounds like you and OP are both on the same side. Like the point of this post is to kind of -nudge nudge- that “disobedient” thought that’s teetering on the edge of realization, without making a direct call for action. You call for it one way, they call for it another way, but both of you seem to be attempting to conjure the same idea.

Why in the world waste time complaining that your teammate isn’t using the same tactics as you? We have to stop letting arbitrary shit divide us. If we all have the same goal, we should be aiming toward it together.

It’s like needing to know the password before being let into the treehouse.

(I want to preface this by saying that I agree with you and am not attempting an argument - I just got on a tangent at one point. Any emotion conveyed in this post isn’t due to/directed toward you or your post, but is a function of how reflecting on the subjects at hand makes me feel.)

As a kid, I wanted to argue even more with authority figures who lacked a clear reason for having authority. An expert on a matter? That makes sense, I’d listen to them. A teacher that actually guides students and respects them? That also makes sense.

But somebody “in charge,” making decisions that seem completely arbitrary or straight-up nonsensical? That didn’t listen or care what others thought, and who demanded respect without ever returning it? We had a mutual hate for each other. The fact they were given authority pissed me off and I saw zero reason to comply with anything they demanded.

… I didn’t get along with most of my school administrators.

Most people shy away from conflict, from what I’ve seen. My fire has been dampened so many times from all different sides and now I’m a tired, 30-something-year-old that wishes she could be as fired-up as she used to be. Because now, we have fascists taking over (or attempting to) all around the world. People here on Lemmy keep insulting Americans for not “fighting back” enough, but they have no idea how bad the compliance conditioning is here.

I refuse to teach blind obedience. I’d rather see kids that question everything and get in trouble for it than ones that will just accept whatever authority tells them. It’s not the kids’ fault the world doesn’t make sense, but teaching them to just accept it as “the way it is” (as the adults in my life always said) does nothing but perpetuate this cycle.

We need more skeptics. We need more action-takers. Those that believe they just “deserve” to have authority need to be challenged, now more than ever (I picked this username for a reason.) To be clear - I say this as an autistic teacher of autistic kids. I understand the risks from both sides, and I know raising autistic kids isn’t easy. But the world doesn’t need more people who give up the good fight just because it’s hard; the world needs more people who point out hypocrisy and injustice, including children who will blithely point out that the emperor has no clothes.

It was weird sometimes. Say you uploaded an image as a visual aid to a point being made on Reddit. It would make no sense without context, but you put it on Imgur because that’s what Imgur was made for. Shared on Reddit, the image successfully aided whatever you were trying to communicate. Mission accomplished!

But later you’d look back at the Imgur link, and find a bunch of annoyed Imgur-users complaining that your post made no sense.

I left Imgur when I left Reddit, since the only thing I ever used it for was hosting things to post on Reddit. Funny, I must have gotten spoiled to Lemmy instances self-hosting images, because I forgot Imgur even existed until I saw this post today.

Thank you for speaking up. I’m going to share a bit of my experience (unrelated to you, OP.)

I suspect (from my experience dating men) that the desensitivity issue is more common than most people will admit. Few men want to admit that their dick doesn’t work properly, and a subset of those men will attempt to frame this problem as a benefit instead (“I can keep going for so long without cumming, it’s my super power!”) I don’t expect most men will talk with each other like this, but it’s one of the justifications such men tell their partners.

From the partner’s perspective, I hate to have to say this, but… no, it’s not a power. It’s a weakness. A desensitized dick turns sex into a frustrating act that only ends when I get physically sore. If he doesn’t have that “natural stopping point” that usually signals an end to penetration, and the act still feels good to him - he doesn’t want to stop, so why would he? But it’s a very different experience from the “receiving” partner’s perspective. Most people who “receive” in sex don’t want to keep going until they end up in pain. We don’t want to always be the buzz-kill whose role is to decide, “Okay, sex time is over!” I want to have fun, too; not be the playground monitor that has to announce when recess is finished. Going on and on is a porn fantasy, and just like many porn fantasies, it’s not that fun in real life.

The issue of porn-induced desensitivity is absolutely real. However, taking away people’s privacy online is not the solution. These laws are absolutely absurd and a terrifying glimpse of the future the fascists in power are aiming toward. (And for anyone overly-concerned about my sex life that feels the need to chime in with advice - I learned from the lessons of my past, and I share those lessons in hopes that others can learn from it too.)

I’m gonna need more information about this “hoop.” Do you have any pictures or drawings that can show the size of it? Was it like a giant hula hoop and everyone “spun” inside it while standing? Or was it more like a hamster wheel and kids smooshed along the edge as it rolled? I have no idea what I’m supposed to imagine here.

The key is timing. If you time your anxiety for when you’re supposed to be asleep, you get to be too anxious to sleep and be unable to do the thing that alleviates said-anxiety! (Like completing a work task, or running a noisy appliance like a vacuum cleaner or washing machine, or making a phone call that can only be made between certain hours, etc.)

Then when morning arrives, and you’re finally in a position to do the thing that was bothering you all night, you’ll either be too exhausted to start the task, or be so mentally-overwhelmed that you completely forget the thing even exists.

Until the next night, that is. Then the cycle repeats.