**Official** Physicists are freaks and very weird dudes LC Thread

https://twitter.com/mariebardi/status/1331079667504312321

wat

Slept fine, I havenā€™t drunk any alcohol in like 5 years and Iā€™m walking more than ever up to 7 miles a night. Think Iā€™ve possibly been trying to stave off this feeling through walking but it hasnā€™t worked.

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You should really consider seeing a therapist, if you arenā€™t already.

Itā€™s been done.

I feel like the benefit of a therapist is they allow you to see clearly. But seeing clearly is my problem I donā€™t have the blinders of most people which allow them to ignore the obvious. Like the system is locked into an eternal death spiral where the worst people succeed and never face consequences while anyone without power is unpersoned and turned into grist for the machine. Iā€™m tapdancing on the edge of precarity with just enough to lose that falling off that edge will hurt terribly. Sure, but why not enjoy a sunset.

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Interesting short documentary that just came out. Scary what you can do with a 3D printer

https://twitter.com/jake_hanrahan/status/1331082056525369348?s=21

https://twitter.com/jake_hanrahan/status/1331104301008171008?s=21

You have to let go of it a little and accept the changes that are coming, even when theyā€™re almost certainly for the worse. Thereā€™s nothing you can do about it really; itā€™s just how human societies are evolving, unfortunately.

One of the insidious aspects of depression is that it distorts a personā€™s perception, so itā€™s difficult to self-evaluate and know if you actually are seeing things clearly. On more than one occasion I have come to the rational conclusion that my life wasnā€™t worth living, and that the most reasonable thing to do would be to kill myself. That is to say, I donā€™t doubt things seem clear and your reasoning appears sound from your perspective, but if youā€™re suffering from depression you by definition arenā€™t reasoning clearly, and the best thing you can do is to find a therapist that you like and feel comfortable talking to, so they can help assess your state of mind.

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This.

@geewhysee I know exactly the ā€œseeing clearlyā€ feeling you describe. Youā€™re seeing one future. But your brain is assuming daily life will always feel like it does now - which absolutely is not the case.

I strongly recommend at least trying a therapist. It did me a world of good. If your instinct is to be honest in this thread and reach out to us at least, then maybe thatā€™s something inside you realizing that you need some help in this thing.

Iā€™ve always valued your posting - from back when you were the ā€œsmart libertarian with a conscienceā€ (you were tomdemaine right?). Youā€™ve contributed a ton to this community over the years. You can let us contribute back by just humoring us and talking to a therapist ;)

If youā€™re perpetually in a state like this these days, medication might help. Maybe you can even hook up with a psilocybin or ketamine treatment - which seem to be really promising. MDMA did wonders for my state of mind in my early 20s. But Iā€™m not recommending you go out and do something off the street.

I got diagnosed with ADHD through my therapist. Ritalin helps me focus and get through tasks, which definitely helps my overall mood. Each day goes from feeling like a mountain to climb to feeling like a flat walk. YMMV obviously but just giving an example of how medication helped me in a way I didnā€™t expect.

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RIP My laptop

Hereā€™s hoping that data can be recovered. Sucks since a lot of teaching material is on there.

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Iā€™m getting PTSD from my parents. Did you not back anything up?

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https://twitter.com/mariebardi/status/1331079667504312321?s=21

when exactly was new york great? i have a suspicion that always glosses over some extremely shady shit thatā€™s bound to happen with a few million people living in close proximity.

https://timeline.com/photos-real-get-down-147da4097450

https://www.businessnarts.com/blog/gf0ukitun12ug35ajmw0mxvhx1z01i


I love these dudes

NYC in the 70s and 80s - the ā€œcrime-ridden hellholeā€ Rudy cleaned up to replace with the M&M store and Bubba Gumpā€™s on Times Square - looked pretty awesome.

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Iā€™ve found a couple things that have helped.
Watching a sad movie, tv show, or even listening to songs. Then having a good cry. 5 minutes or an hour. A release.
A good hug. One of the dogs just wandered past and got a solid minute of happy.

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I like hot baths, but Iā€™m also mindful to not excessively roast the troops in hot water. Are scuba shorts a solution? Or surely the sauna/hot tub peoples of the world have invented something. ā€œPut them in a thermosā€ is not a practical or comfortable plan.

Watch The Deuce for some sweet 70s NYC action

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I understand how we had the exact same idea for a joke, you just have a time machine and stole my idea from the future. But how did you make the text grey?

This discussion is better suited to the Mental Health thread, butā€¦

I think itā€™s certainly not true that depression is generally a failure to see or reason clearly, research shows that depressed people frequently perceive the world more accurately than non-depressed people. In fact thatā€™s often a source of depression for people who rely heavily on their faculty of reason to navigate the world, like it is for geewhysee there:

The mistake is to believe that oneā€™s state of mind is necessarily dependent on this. Research also shows that major life events which people believe would have major impacts on their happiness (winning the lottery, becoming paraplegic) in fact have little to no impact long term. So while a depressed person might more accurately perceive the factual impacts on their life and what they are able to do from becoming paraplegic, what they are wrong about is what the consequences of that are going to be, in terms of happiness.

In terms of world events, few people are depressed about the suffering of people in the face of the Mongol conquests of the 1200s. Those were real people who suffered unimaginable things, but of course peopleā€™s answer is ā€œwell I canā€™t do anything about that, it already happenedā€. For some reason ā€œI canā€™t do anything about thatā€ doesnā€™t work as well for present and future tense events, even though itā€™s equally true. People tend to imagine that changing the relationship between their own mental states and world events will involve going into denial about whatā€™s going on, like stopping caring about other people, but thatā€™s not the deal, any more than paraplegics regaining their happiness involves going into denial about paraplegia. This idea that our internal state depends on external events is an illusion created by our minds as a survival mechanism. Itā€™s simply not true, but it is a very persistent illusion.

The other thing, as regards world events, is that the only rule is that things always change. In the past, when people have expected some state of affairs to just continue, they have always been wrong. Itā€™s the same in the present. ā€œThings will just keep getting worseā€ is also not expecting things to change, because then itā€™s the trajectory of human affairs which you expect to hold constant and that has also never been true. Itā€™s delusional to think any of us can predict where the world is going. Who remembers the ā€œTragic Death of the Republican Partyā€ thread? That was like a decade ago and already looks like the purest delusion.

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I donā€™t know if you are a professional mental health counselor or psychiatrist, but my point was that it is very difficult to know just how clearly you perceive any given situation when youā€™re depressed, because your emotional state is significantly altered. Perhaps I worded it wrong because Iā€™m not a professional, but our emotions affect our perception of the world and our ability to evaluate our own circumstances. Maybe Tom is seeing things clearly, but based on what heā€™s saying, he could have clinical depression, and itā€™s not for you or I to say, itā€™s for a professional to determine. Thatā€™s why he should go talk to one.

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