Saw cut marks on one of my student’s hands. An X cut by a swiss army knife onto a few of her knuckles and a vertical cut along the side of one of her fingers.
She didn’t try to hide it or deny that she’s the one who cut them. She told me exactly what she did. Her claim was she “wanted to see if it would cut”.
I’m not sure how she could be so blase about self-harm. Was she aware of the danger of what she was doing? This was the first time I saw any evidence of any sign of potential mental issues from her.
Anyway, I notified her homeroom teacher who is more familiar with her than I am and can contact the required people if necessary. I suspect that she already knows about it but I still felt the need to notify somebody.
But yeah, it does fuck with me. If this is the first time, she’ll almost certainly know that I reported it. At the same time, it’s not like self-harm gets better if it never gets reported at all. But what if it gets worse because I reported it? My mind is racing about this.
Yeah I suppose I did. I do wonder if I could/should have done more. I’m not a psychologist and didn’t want to fuck things up by unknowingly giving shitty advice. So I did essentially the minimum.
I have a feeling like im in the beginning of a mid-life crisis and Im not sure what to do.
Went to my parents house for the first time since last March. Had bbq, pool time, etc, everyone vaxxed, maskless. Went great.
During the course of dinner, we got to talking about an old friend of my sisters who is very successful now. Multiple executive positions at multiple start ups over hia years. This is great, I love the guy and he deserves all his success. He works really hard. I was convinced while my sister was in high school (a few years older than me) that he would be president some day, which I guess is still totally possible.
In the course of talking about him we talked about how happy we are for his success yadda yadda. My mom says something like “unlike some people.” I asked her what she meant, and she said “Ya know, like Zanzibar X (Name changed to protect the innocent)” and I said “No, what about Zanzibar?” And she said "You havent heard? Zanzibar got in on the ground floor of Zoom after college and is worth hundreds of millions, at least.
Zanzibar is… Have you ever known someone that when somebody says their name, everyone in the room rolls their eyes and says “Uggggh, that fucking guy?”
Thats Zanzibar. And he is worth more than I will ever see in a thousand lifetimes… and I just kinda drifted off the entire ride home and I couldnt stop thinking about it.
THIS FUCKING GUY ya know?
When I was at the end of high school, instead of staying in the seat of silicon valley, going to college there amd learning something useful like engineering or coding, I followed a girl (who I didnt even end up with 5 years later) to the fucking hickstans of Tennessee and dug myself into collegiate debt for a FUCKING COMMUNICATIONS DEGREE and the entire course of my life changed and I could have been the motherfucker in on the ground floor of Zoom or Youtube or Google or fucking whatever with 9 figures in the bank and a goddamn yacht, amd instead after 15 years I FINALLY got out of debt (except for the student loans) and I have fucking nothing to show for it. Ive got a college aged stepkid and a high school aged kid and we still FUCKING RENT and my mind is just fucking destroyed bu this revelation that FUCKING ZANZIBAR has FUCKING EVERYTHING AND I HAVE FUCKING NOTHING and I want nothing more than to just scream into the void and never ever ever ever ever fucking stop.
On top of that, I had asked my boss about possibly remaining remote full time (Ya know, the thing we’ve been doing for over a year and has led to faster closes and less mistakes than the company has ever had before) so that my wife could persue jobs in a coding field where coding actually exists instead of in the middle of nowhere where we are now where the fastest internet is run by a fucking donkey on a treadmill, and of course he said the uppers said no because HoWCoUlDwEeVeRtElLiFpEoPlEaReWoRkInGiFwEcAnTsEeThEm
Sorry man that sucks, I know a guy that’s a real clown too and is now rich off of Bitcoin and also does some like Crypto consulting of some kind, surely fleecing people but probably pulling 6 figures a month plus whatever he’s made in Bitcoin and stuff. He’s a moron and my friends use it as a running joke now about how he’s rich and rest of us are all hating our jobs.
It is what it is, some people get lucky. Just gotta keep being you and doing the best you can. I’ve certainly made poor choices that I wish I could change but I try to just not worry about past mistakes these days
IME, there’s always people making way more money than you that you think don’t deserve it or were shitty people in high school etc. I try not to compare myself to others like that. If it were all my classmates doing that, then it might bother me but there’s all kinds of luck box rich people. The way she goes, sometimes. The wealthiest person I know is my sister in law’s father. We went to his cabin on the lake one summer, which my father estimated at least 2 million. And he was all modest about it and saying the ones on the other side of the lake are like 40 million and owned by this or that person. It made me laugh that the wealthiest person I know was still comparing himself to people richer than him. When is it ever enough? I prefer to compare myself to the people I know that work as bartenders/servers and other manual laborer jobs and think what a lucky life I have.
I have it on good authority that Zeljko Ranogajec, the de facto leader of the stratospherically successful Australian gambling syndicate Punter’s Club, still beats himself up on a daily basis about not accepting an offer he was made of 20% of Betfair, back in its infancy. This is a guy who lives at 1 Hyde Park London.
I don’t really have anything helpful or profound to say, except that you’re not alone in having these kind of thoughts and feelings. (That’s for sure.)
I know it’s easier said than done but comparing yourself to others, particularly in regards to wealth, is just a pathway to unhappiness. Also people on social media often only show the good things happening in their lives so we get bombarded with this false imagery of others lives. If I get envious of other people’s wealth etc I try to remind myself that I am in a great relationship with a very good man and I have a great dog. Bottom line for me is that we’re all together and safe. Feeling safe is the one thing I have worked hard at achieving.
This isn’t really the place for this convo but if you believe the social science research on this, then after about 80k more money has no impact on happiness.
That seems a tad low, but maybe add and extra 20K (?inflation adjustment), then I’ll buy it.
Based on the description, it sounds like Zanzibar easily could have been sub 100K and he just got massively lucky on the Zoom thing. But maybe I’m not interpreting it correctly.
In America, there’s an idiom we use called “keeping up with the Joneses”. It means that some people have the tendency to use their neighbors (whether literal or their peers) as a barometer for their own success rather than defining it for themselves. If someone has a Mercedes, we want that. If somebody has a yacht, we want one too.
It’s quite common in America to attach our self-worth to what we possess. The more you have, the more American society values you. It tends to be less so in much of Europe
Over the course of this thread there have been some conversations about antidepressant meds, and going on and off them, so I thought this article might be of interest to some.
Thanks everybody for their thoughts on my post earlier this week. I took them to heart and reflected upon them.
Ive never pictured myself as a covetous type, or someone who needs to keep up with the Joneses. I am that guy who always reminds people that the posts of those succesful and bragging on Facebook are only skin deep and we have no idea what their lives are truly like.
I think what scared me the other day was that the revelation of Zanzibar made me question whether my choices in the past have led me to being happy today, and I couldnt honestly provide to myself that the answer was yes.
It filled me with regret for some of my past decisions and I am very concious about trying not to regret decisions in my life because regret is a terribly painful emotion and I hate feeling it.
One thing that these revelations did spark though is that im not willing to be complacent about my circumstances. If I am most comfortable and most productive working remotely, then it is up to me to find a company willing to nurture and accept that, and not the other way around.
If I feel that I want to be on the ground floor of the next big thing, then I need to seek it out and be willing to accept the risk of a company’s failure, and I intend to do both. This weekend im going to modernize my resume and start putting it at angel.co.
If I want things, from being the fit person I desire to working the type of job I want, its up to me. The universe will not bend to me on its own, I must be willing to put in the work to make it bend.
While this is cool and all, your motivation for doing this stuff shouldn’t be fear of regret, or hope that accomplishing these things will necessarily make you feel good about yourself. As you know, the case that bolstering your social or economic status will make you feel better about yourself is not very good. Look at Trump. Billions of dollars, the adulation of millions, and he’s miserable every second of every day.
In Tibetan, the words for hope (rewa) and fear (dokpa) are frequently combined into the portmanteau redok in recognition of the fact that they are two sides of the same coin. In Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart she writes:
In a nontheistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning. You could even put “Abandon hope” on your refrigerator door instead of more conventional aspirations like “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.”
Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can’t simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment. We feel that someone else knows what’s going on, but that there’s something missing in us, and therefore something is lacking in our world.
Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look. That’s the compassionate thing to do. That’s the brave thing to do. We could smell that piece of shit. We could feel it; what is its texture, color, and shape?
We can explore the nature of that piece of shit. We can know the nature of dislike, shame, and embarrassment and not believe there’s something wrong with that. We can drop the fundamental hope that there is a better “me” who one day will emerge. We can’t just jump over ourselves as if we were not there. It’s better to take a straight look at all our hopes and fears. Then some kind of confidence in our basic sanity arises.
This is where renunciation enters the picture— renunciation of the hope that our experience could be different, renunciation of the hope that we could be better. The Buddhist monastic rules that advise renouncing liquor, renouncing sex, and so on are not pointing out that those things are inherently bad or immoral, but that we use them as babysitters. We use them as a way to escape; we use them to try to get comfort and to distract ourselves. The real thing that we renounce is the tenacious hope that we could be saved from being who we are. Renunciation is a teaching to inspire us to investigate what’s happening every time we grab something because we can’t stand to face what’s coming.
This is not to say don’t seek self improvement, but do it for its own sake. Do it because you feel like that’s the right direction to go in. Don’t do it because you hope that a sense of achievement will help banish regret. Firstly, that doesn’t work, not in the long term. As evidence see basically all high-achievers in the world and their plainly evident feelings of dissatisfaction. Secondly, the flipside of “I hope doing this will fix my feelings of regret” is “I fear that I will be doomed to regret”. It’s better to try to see the emptiness and impotence of these emotions. The only power regret has over you is that you have decided that it’s intolerable for you to feel it.
My therapist doubled the cost of my sessions to $180. How out of line am I for being pissed when she starts our sessions 5-10 mins late? Should I say something? I am paying for an hour but only getting 50 mins.