Not me, but a friend believed Obama was not American. Conversations over time (couple of months) changed them.

Not a proper conspiracy theory, but I used to be a dualist, thinking that souls exist and they’re separate from bodies. All of this changed with a long conversation with a materialist. He helped me see how my beliefs were historically determined, socially programmed, and not based on atemporal scientific principles. Overnight change to materialism.

The answer is contextual, just like people are contextual. Sometimes, my circles are all busy or stressed out and we can’t really be there for each other. Other times, strangers have saved me, like the couple that took me in when lockdowns started and I was far from home.

Have you heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment? Or the Princeton Seminarian experiment? Or the Milgram Experiment? All of them confirm that people are contextual. That’s lesson 1 in psychology, but we humans easily forget it. We focus on the person and forget the context. That folly of ours even has a name: Fundamental Attribution Error.

Thanks for the suggestions. Had time to try to print it. Didn’t work. I’ll try the other options later.

I’ve always poured it out, but I’ve never really sat and thought why…

Please mark it as NSFW :)

Not a troll post.

Fair enough. I’ll take your question seriously.

Without any context, it sounds as if everything that you’re perceiving right now is shit. Maybe your relationships are strained and you feel lonely or guilty. Maybe the news hits you harder every day. Maybe money is tight. Maybe you’ve suffered a great loss. Maybe nothing has happened at all and you’re sitting there, contemplating whether life is worth it. I don’t know your situation.

And whatever it is, it’s valid. Heck, I sometimes feel like life is shit.

Now, I’m not here to say we should look at reality with rose-colored glasses or to look at reality with naive optimism. No. I’m here to say that we have a choice. We can choose what to focus on and how to respond to reality.

Is it really true that “everything is shit”? Is the fact that your body has managed, against all odds, to sustain your life shit? Is the fact that humans can grow and change shit? Is the fact that we can be better as people shit?

Still, shit happens. And we have to be ready to accept that. Regardless of how much shit there is, we can always choose how to respond to it.

For one, we play a massive role in our interpretation of shit. There’s solid science behind this. You could look at theories of cognition such as the Theory of Constructed Emotion, Relational Frame Theory, or even the shallow but effective Cognitive Behavioral Therapy frameworks. All of those theories think it’s crucial to notice the lens that you and I are looking at the world through. Not only should we notice the lens, but sometimes we should clean it or direct it elsewhere. Otherwise we spend our whole lives stooped over a pile of crap, when we could stand, look around, and notice the world around us from a different perspective.

But that’s not the only thing that matters. We don’t just want to see the world differently. We also want to live valued lives. Once again, this is possible regardless of how much shit there is. How so? Well, what kind of person do you want to be? A kind person? A person that is reflexive and open minded? A person that notices and appreciates beauty when it appears? A person who is proactive about their future and that of others? A person who is compassionate towards others? A person that’s curious about the world and how to improve it?

It’s not easy, being kind, appreciative, and proactive when you’re bogged down by shit. But you’re not alone. There’s brilliant and insightful people who have dedicated their lives to finding out how to do it. If you’re interested, I’m happy to talk about empirical ways of doing it. For now, it’s more important to ask what the alternative is. Is a life spent stooping over shit a good life?

Something similar happens to me. I get shocked every time I meet someone who was born in the USSR.

Europe isn’t a brand, it’s a life/style.

Yes. I suppose I’d like to try it. Maybe the cost is worth the benefits.

This gave me chills and teared me up. A friend is paralyzed from the waist down. I really hope I can see them walk again with something like this.

That’s alright 🙂

No login at all. You just open the URL and there’s a text box waiting for you to send a message to me.

Oh wow. That’s a pleasantly surprising code of conduct. If the code of conduct is consequential, I stand corrected about my view of Graphene OS.

• “Respectful and kind”. Amazing.
• “Harassment is not tolerated”. Hell yeah.
• “Be respectful and constructive.” Brilliant.

You’re bringing up a fair point, similar to “can you separate the art from the artist”? I think it’s possible; I’ve seen mean and disparaging people do amazing work. Heck, at times I’ve been a cranky worker cranking out good work.

However, I also know that toxic people are hard to work with and limit their own potential and that of others. A quick look at the ACT literature, the intrinsic motivation literature, the learned-helplessness literature, and the Lybomirsky et al. meta-analyses from 2008 and 2018 all point to the same idea: psychologically flexible people are happier and that leads to better work and more productivity, but not the other way around.

Ah. I searched for it and found that guest mode was disabled on Matrix.org’s servers. I wonder if making it work in another server is easy, either with or without GrapheneOS…

https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/v5n1yv/whats_your_opinion_on_graphene_os_community/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30929526

A quick search lead to these links. They’re 3 years old. Maybe the community has changed since then.

This sounds amazing. It’s unfortunate that Graphene OS has so much toxicity around it, but this design decision is amazing. Love it.

I tried quickly looking for the feature, but I couldn’t find it. I searched for “Graphene OS Matrix chat homepage guest user”, “Graphene OS chat homepage guest user”, “Graphene OS chat homepage”, and “Graphene OS homepage QR” but didn’t find what you mentioned.

This ticks all the boxes! Thanks! I suppose something I didn’t contemplate is that I would like to close the chat and still be able to get notifications on my phone. I don’t want to always have a dozen chats open, ready for the other party to send me a message. Regardless, I’m glad this project exists!

Oh no. What have I done?

Depends on whether the team I am in uses Scrum or not.

If the team uses Scrum, everything is on the backlog, so rarely do I need personal lists.

If the team doesn’t use Scrum, then I set up my own personal Scrum board. That way, I can deal better with people coming in and saying “hey, snek_boi, this task that I just thought of is urgent and I need you to drop everything you’re doing and do this now”. With the Scrum board, I can then ask them if what they need me to do is more important than whatever’s on top of my personal backlog, and often they themselves realize their ‘urgent’ task is actually not that urgent.

Since you asked about software, I’ve used Taiga and Notion.

Also, I used to do GTD religiously, but now I mainly use Scrum because it forces me to ruthlessly prioritize. Since you asked about apps, I’ll tell you that when I did GTD, I used Joplin with Syncthing (or some combination of Syncthing and a local notes app). I switched to StandardNotes before stopping doing GTD altogether. Maybe I’ll come back to GTD in the future.

I also almost started Bullet Journaling, buying the journal and all, but a friend of mine was quite depressed and seemed to need it more so I gave it all to him.