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Cake day: March 8th, 2026

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  • It could be so many things, so hard to give advice. For me, a big part of it was sleep related, and I could only fix it with medication; if you have adhd it may be similar. The medical issues gave me the feeling of I’m painfully bored but my body refuses to do/enjoy anything, and I just want the sweet release of death deep sleep.

    On the other hand, I was also so used to delaying gratification for school/work that I literally didn’t know how to enjoy myself. I think finding the little things that bring you joy and incorporating it into your daily/ weekly/ monthly routine helps a lot. Something like: on Sundays I get to eat pizza or if I reach my short-term goal/milestone, I’ll take myself to the cool place I never get to go to. I started doing this after getting a dog. So literally train yourself to love life like a dog.







  • I just want to put this here for the defeatists who don’t even bother to read the article before commenting:

    “When I see people kidnapped by ICE, that affects me, because I know what it’s like to be kidnapped by federal agents,” he says. “It affects me physically, like a burning feeling in my stomach.” He worries about the potential impact on his family, but the price of inaction feels steeper. “My kids are teenagers now. I want to be that example to them that despite threats of retaliation and violence, you’ve still got to stand up and fight back.”

    Does Austin find it ironic that the scenarios he worries about so closely mirror what already sent him to federal prison? “Yeah, it brings back a lot of memories,” he says. “When I see them saying, ‘If you track or criticize ICE agents, you’re a domestic terrorist,’ that was the same sentiment when they came after me with RaisetheFist.”

    “I’m not looking to get arrested,” he says, nodding toward his front door. “I’m not looking for conflict, but I know conflict is inevitable. To me, what’s more important is being in a fight and using my skill set to contribute something to that fight. Then whatever is going to happen, it’s going to happen.”

    This man has been an activist since he was 18. He’s been shot by police, monitored, interrogated, put in solitary confinement by the FBI and ultimately thrown the book at for a bogus charge and served a year in jail. He has a family and things to lose, and he’s struggling financially to keep this site up. And he still fights.

    If you’re going to be sitting on your couch afraid to do anything, I’m not judging you, but don’t come here and try to persuade others that the fight is already over and we lost.





  • I think we agree for the most part. I also didn’t mean to imply reading literature = intelligent because I also don’t believe that. The people I described are people in my life who I believe are incredibly intelligent, just not academic.

    On my last point, it’s my realist take. I have EDS (excessive daytime sleepiness), so even if I really really believe I will enjoy a tougher read, sometimes I can’t stay awake long enough to get through a page. During those periods, I’ll take the easier self help or scifi book to keep me going. But yeah, challenging ourselves is part of the joy. When I was a struggling college student, I became very depressed for a while, and I distinctly remember picking up a philosophy book at the city library and reading an excerpt about hedonism and eudaimonism which changed my outlook for the better. The idea that we need both short term pleasures and long-term purpose to feel happy/fulfilled helped me work through the challenges, making sure I still went out and had fun in between, which now I look back on with some sense of fondness and pride. I see reading a tough book that interests me in the same way.

    for his essays, there is an excellent anthology available from Penguin, ‘The World-Ending Fire’.

    Awesome! I’ll add that to my reading list :)


  • I love this comment and I’ll look into Wendell Berry since I haven’t heard of him before.

    To add on, I’ve met a lot of otherwise smart people (smart as in curious and skeptical to not accept things at face value) who frustratingly have no interest in literature to flesh out their own philosophies about the world.

    They’ll go on a rant about this or that and I’ll chime in to say, for example, “oh are you talking about prisoners dilemma?” or “you’re basically describing nihilism” or “well, that person likely disagreed with you because you are using different definitions of the same word/concept” and they’ll look at me with an expression of ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about and I don’t care.’ I’d be so happy to explain things or recommend what to research to engage with topics they’re clearly passionate about, but it’s sad to see the curiosity end so soon when so many people have collectively devoted lifetimes on expanding the ideas they think they just invented.

    So I won’t comment on what makes someone intelligent (because you’ll never find me calling the people I described unintelligent), but if you want to improve your own, I emphatically agree on reading literature, even fantasy like Tolkien, whatever you enjoy.


  • This feels like the poison scene from the princess bride, so I’ll approach it with that level of intellectual derangement.

    Which means the obvious first step is to recognize that the house is a cheater who wants you to stay poor so your choice doesn’t matter. There is poison in both cups and I will lose either way. Money no longer influences my decision.

    Next, I flip a coin ten times and note my reaction to the choices. That’s my gut instinct and obviously what the model predicted unless it’s either not smart enough to know my gut or smart enough to predict my double bluff, therefore useless.

    Next, I decide which variables are most likely to influence the prediction (gender, age, education level, big 5 personality score) and realize this is the adult marshmallow test. I obviously think I’m smart and want the model to know that, so it obviously predicted that I would take one box because I’m a good little goodie two shoes who delays instant gratification for the potential bigger payoff. Therefore I choose two boxes because the model would never expect someone as smart as I to make such a dumb greedy move. Surely, I have outsmarted the supercomputer with my quadruple bluff and have won.

    And then I remember I am dumb and the model knows that, because in my excitement, I forgot that the house is a cheater who always wins (and there was likely never any money in the mystery box because researchers never get that kind of funding). I am forced to believe that the model accurately perceived me to be a greedy idiot who took two boxes against my better judgement, shattering my ego.

    But hey, I at least got $1k out of it.