gross

By this logic you could say you empty your bladder for the purpose of avoiding the embarrasment of urinating on yourself in public, rather than the biological purpose of excreting waste products.

Ah, I see. My condolences, friend. Mental health struggles are real, but you’ll bounce back and grow from the experience. I know that seems trite, but I’m confident you’ll look back on the experience as something you learned from in the end.

Other comments have touched on the more personally important aspects, but I’d like to highlight:

No final paychecks or anything.

as some fuckin’ bullshit, yo. Are you quite sure that’s kosher? If you worked and aren’t paid for the time, your employer still owes you wages for that time worked regardless of if they’re satisfied with your performance or not.

shid, no way. I forgot about that. My bad.

Your body is made of matter, just like everything else. But the atoms you’re built from today won’t be the atoms you’re built from in a year.

My grandfather’s axe is a wonderful axe. It’s been in my family 3 generations now. It’s had the head replaced once and the handle three times, and it’s just as good today as it was in his day. Checkmate, reductionists.

Give me a simple cell from the early days of Earth’s history, and I could never predict that some 4 billion years later it would evolve into a giant rabbit that can punch you in the face. Kangaroos—like humans—are an unpredictable, emergent consequence of life’s evolution.

Appealing to the author’s own lack of imagination is a bold stroke…

The fundamental laws that govern matter and energy cannot predict another fundamental property of life: It is the only system in the universe that uses information for its own purposes. Plants grow toward light, microbes swim toward rich food sources, animals hide from predators, humans send giant metal contraptions into outer space. Although one can, say, program a robot to search for a wall plug when its battery gets low, a living thing (a human programmer, for example) must hard-code that need into the machine. Life, by contrast, is both agential and autonomous. From microbes to crabs to people, all living things have their own itches to scratch.

And since no reductionist description of these things exists yet (that the author knows of), therefore physics must be rewritten.

Very woo.

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I feel like you missed the “independent shops” part of the description entirely. And the “[amazon market is] fragmented but monopolized” part. And the “competitor to amazon” part. And, like, the entire gist of the post. And im wondering if you’ve used amazon recently, or perhaps have been living under a rock for a while to say you feel the payment system is the only centralized part of amazon.

Author rests the entire argument on ignoring the cumulative effects of individual use on a large scale. Whole lotta writing for such a small idea.

By the same logic, it follows:

IC engines are not bad for the environment.

Consuming meat is not bad for the environment.

A single vote has no effect on the outcome of an election.

One official taking a bribe isn’t a big deal.

pitiful, abject nonsense

It’s a bottleneck. If you are calculating faster than you can record the results, you have to wait for the write operation to complete before you can do the next calculation.

we need them for posterity.

by which you of course mean to wipe our posteriors

I look for competency first, not any specific methodology; A doctorate is a good sign but no guarantee. Published papers are even better, read through some if they have them, thought that might correspond to academic competency instead of clinical. I find that the specific method they employ has a lot less to do with success than the person administering it or their experience. Lots of diverse experience is good. Current shrink did some years working in prisons, some years working with disabled veterans, some years working with the blind, some years working with the elderly before she settled down to private practice. I find it allows her a much more open-minded and empathetic perspective just from having seen so much of humanity. Always send them an email before you propose to book their services, that will tend to give you a decent idea of their communication, especially if you can get a decent email chain going, though of course some people are terrible emailers or texters or phone callers but are great in person so don’t take any of these as gospel but as clues. I straight up would not consider seeing a shrink over telephone or televisual unless I’d already established an excellent rapport with them in-person.

One thing I always do now is, If I decide to book with them, intentionally find something to criticize. Was I made to wait 5 minutes past the appointed time? Is the chair in the room uncomfortable? Is there a distracting smell in the room? What you criticize doesn’t matter as long as it’s true and valid, falsity won’t do here, just be honest and kind. It should ideally be something they have control over, but I don’t nitpick. So, “I’d prefer the shades drawn” is probably a nitpick (unless you’re photosensitive or something) but the chair is something you’re gonna be sitting in for an hour. What you’re looking for is not the solution to the critique, but the response to the critique. Are they dismissive, apologetic, aware-but-there’s-nothing-they-can-do-about-it, do they accommodate you, etc. This will tell you a thousand times more than their website blurb about their style. It’s testing whether their ego can handle criticism, and whether/how far they’ll go to accommodate your needs. I test potential employers this way, too. You can tell a lot about a person by their reaction to honest, valid, kindly-expressed criticism. You’ll never be able to tell whether they will be a good fit for you from this, but you can tell from an bad reaction to criticism that they won’t be a good fit.

hope this helps

edit: Oh, and ironically I find that it helps to have someone who is different from you in important ways. With a friend, you want someone who you share a lot of common interests with and by extension probably think pretty similarly to. With a therapist it’s practically the opposite: you want someone who has Therapy in common with you, and can see things from a different perspective than you do. There’s such a thing as too much of this, but in general a perspective that significantly diverges from your own is a good thing.

There’s no magic moment when you Become You. It’s gradual and takes years and most of the time it’s effective it’s also apparently unrewarding, and there’s no way to tell the difference between “this is useless and i should move on” and “this isn’t immediately rewarding and i should be patient” except to experience the results. With experience it does get easier to tell the difference. At this point, I know within 3-4 sessions with a new shrink whether it’s a good fit or not, but I’ve been at this for decades by now.

I can say that the session ending 35 minutes early for any reason other than one you agreed upon ahead of time is extraordinary and almost certainly unprofessional.

It’s okay to say “You’re not helping me, I need X, Y, and Z from now on” and if they can’t provide that then just move on, or if you’re sure just say “You’re not giving me what I need, I’m moving on.”

I also dunno about all this workbook shit. At that point you might as well join a support group or get on an app or shudder talk to AI for a helluva lot cheaper. In fact, I’ve had several support groups that were leaps and bounds more helpful than the shrink I was seeing; more honest, more direct, more empathetic and experienced. If someone handed me a workbook and told me to do “therapy” out of it I’d drop it on the floor, never return, and refuse to pay for that session. Therapy is done with a therapist, afaic. They’re welcome to recommend reading or whatever (and often that helps), but therapy isn’t a fucking worksheet, it doesn’t follow a formula or a flowchart. I’m willing to bet $20 most of those zillion skills are just so many myriad reframings and permutations of the same two or three principles.

A good therapist doesn’t just ask you how you can deal with X (though that is in fact an important part of it), a good therapist works with you to help you figure out how you can deal with X, including making suggestions of their own. A good therapist doesn’t just watch you sputter and flounder on the high sea asking, “jeez looks like a tight spot you’re in there, how ya gonna get outta that?”, they throw the therapist’s metaphorical equivalent of a float and bring you aboard and place you (to the extent possible in the circumstances) in calmer, shallower water. Conversely, a good therapist also knows your strengths and will challenge you when they know you’re not living up to them, whether through laziness or mental block or you just hadn’t thought of it that way or whatever.

Fuck anyone who implies you’re not trying hard enough or that a mediocre therapist is good enough. You can tell good and well for your own damn self that it ain’t workin; TRUST YOURSELF. Yes, it’s important that you do most of the work and yes, some people or some issues can tolerate mediocrity, blah blah blah. Is that working for you? Seriously ask yourself. Keep trying 'til you find the right one. But don’t drop the one until you’ve picked up another, if possible. less-than-ideal therapy is usually better than no therapy at all.

Oh, and medicine. It’s very important that you get the right medicine. In my experience, I know within 2-3 weeks whether and how a medicine is working and when a psychiatrist tells me “lets check back in 2-3 months” It’s almost always more to do with their scheduling than anything of theraputic import.

Do I have to go through 30 different therapists before I can find one that can help me?

In my experience, pretty much, yup. Most of them suck for one reason or another, most of the ones that don’t suck aren’t a good fit for you specifically, and most of the ones that are a good fit for you specifically are already booked up.

I said wizard you be kind now

I’m in need of some advice

and talk no speak of majick blood

or good-son sacrifice

and I begged to know if justice

is a form far-out or in

he said son, there is no justice

there’s just what

and that just is

Glad to see Stoermer getting posted. I’ve wanted to post some of his stuff esp. recently but never figured the right community fit. This seems pretty good.

Hey yo, can someone with image editing skills turn that thumbnail of sad miller into a sad clown please?

how tf you gon talk about not litigating the politics in here and then turn around and criticize the political opinion expressed in terms of its political opposition in the very next sentence, like

Shocked?

I thought you did it intentionally like the photoshop request meme, it was a bit funny