It takes practice, like anything else. Doing something makes you better at something and not doing something will make you worse at it. In this case you have been conditioning your brain to need ambient noise. There is a line between it being a small help on some days and it being a crutch you’ve built your life around. Sounds lile you are in the latter camp.

It wobbles a bit though

Industrialists have just countered work efficiency improvements with…more work.

Yes, exactly. Before industrialisation people worked on average less hours than we do now.

The modern hats look like a satirical version of the original.

I think that’s a disingenious estimate to say that food is far cheaper now than it was previously in human history. Before industrialization, growing food did take up a large portion of people’s time but their yearly work hours were much smaller.

It has improved massively, at least in the west. Saying “somewhat” is a massive underestimation and undermindes the fight of women for hundreds of years.

Any miltary strategist will say that you can’t bomb your way to a victory.

Yeah, people often forget that most regents were at least to some extent elected. If the nobility/rich landowners didn’t want a specific regent then they were thrown out and a new one was found. Usually within the same line, though. A regent rarely had absolute power. For example Denmark has had a monarchy for over 1000 years but less than 200 of those were an actual absolute monarchy. Most of the time the regent was put in check by the nobility/landowners and the church etc.

Not necessarily. Plenty of kings were elected by the nobility.

Nail on the head

What’s the selling point on CachyOS? I use Pop os right now but I’m looking to swap to something new and I was never all that fond of Pop os. Before that I used Fedora which had an awful time running stable on my machine. Mostly I’m considering Debian

Lmao. In Europe Mac is mainstream and most people think I have MacOS installed when it’s in fact gnome

98% of the time I wanted to do something, or had a problem I wanted to fix, the cause was Gnome. I hate Gnome. And coincidentally also feet.

Any tips for how to not end up doing this?

Its the principle for me