It's just so much easier to stay and keep paying Microsoft than switching. But why hasn't any startup found a way yet to disrupt it by giving the users something they actually love more, so they can start lobbying businesses to switch to it, I wonder.
Excel is a behemoth of functionality which is constantly growing and improving. It's not as simple as building "just another spreadsheet"; and attempts are made, dozens of them. But it seems they all are either not really understand the strength of Excel, or simply admit defeat from the beginning and try to find a niche where they can compete, by looking at specific usecases and target groups. Kinda like all those companies who build hyper-specialized cooking-tools, but still can't beat the versatility of a good knife, so they mainly sell to normal people, not the real experts.
Because the power of Excel comes from the huge amount of features it has slowly accumulated over the decades of its lifetime. You can pretty easily make an Excel 97 replacement today, probably. But people won't be able to use that in these business contexts - they each need some of those obscure 1% features that got added.
I don't understand this view. I think most people would be happy to use the best models for free in exchange for seeing ads. That's basically what google and many others successfully do for decades.
Because it will degrade experience entirely, and companies always go too far with it. Advertisement online these days is so intrusive it's a slog to browse without some form of adblocker.
When the AI starts suggesting products or services without being straight up about it, it's not giving you 'knowledge' it's just feeding you whatever it's been paid to say. If that's what you want, power to you.
I neither like the taboo nor the opposite. Too much psychology talk in every day life, everyone is traumatised and has unresolved issues etc. That may be, but I wish we would handle it all more privately...
This is a valid take. But we need to apply it evenly on the entire society.
If we fill up the public discourse with the issues and wants of women and make the issues and wants of men a private matter this will skew the public understanding of the stance of women and men - we see this hardcore these days with boys and men being villainized, made invisible and made suspicious only due to their gender.
From here we have two ways forward: Either make sure that mens issues gain a proportionate part of the public discourse or argue that all issues are a private matter.
Not the commenter, and I 'm not a fan of how normal it has become to do one's dirty laundry in public. But I find it lamentable that the most popular takeaway from the internet's mainstreaming of feminist thought is that men’s issues are necessarily in competition with women's issues for representation.
It's ridiculous since women's issues are only being better represented recently while men have long dominated politics, religion, and pop culture. But more importantly, the social pressures giving men and boys mental health issues come from the very same patriarchal gender roles that women's rights movements are rebelling against. This nuance had been drowned out by all the noise in internet "discourse".
> It's ridiculous since women's issues are only being better represented recently while men have long dominated politics
This statement has more than one issue:
1. First and foremost, it is simply a rewrite of the history. There is a difference between descriptive and substantive representation. And it is true that men have been descriptively better represented. But the thoughtless implication that this leads to better substantive representation is simply wrong.
2. It justifies the idea of "reparations" for previous generations misdoing. Not only does this induce a high level if dissent, it is simply immoral. Even if we would accept reparations, it is still only justified by the rewrite of the history.
I appreciate the call for nuance, but I think the historical framing here deserves scrutiny.
You're right that men have dominated politicly, but it's worth distinguishing between who held power (descriptive representation) and whose interests were served (substantive representation). Most men throughout history had no political power - they were subjects of monarchies, excluded by property requirements, or conscripted into wars they didn't choose. The men making decisions were a tiny elite.
On "women's issues only recently being better represented" -this depends heavily on what we're measuring. If we look at something like life expectancy as a rough proxy for overall life quality (capturing war mortality, occupational deaths, access to resources, healthcare), historical data suggests men and women faced roughly equal burdens pre-industrialization, just distributed differently. Women faced maternal mortality and legal subordination; men faced conscription, dangerous labor, and social expendability. The female longevity advantage only emerges clearly in the modern era.
The point isn't to claim men had it worse - it's that "men have long dominated" obscures that most men were themselves dominated, and bore unique, severe costs within the same system.
I agree completely that rigid gender roles harm everyone. But framing current attention to men's issues as acceptable only because "patriarchal roles harm men too" still treats men's suffering as derivative of women's concerns, requiring feminist justification. Can't men's rising suicide rates, educational struggles, and social isolation warrant direct concern on their own terms?
The discourse does need less competition. But that requires actually taking men's issues seriously, not just when they can be reframed as collateral damage from patriarchy.
Honestly, I think that this delineation between descriptive vs. substantive representation is the more likely attempt at rewriting history. Even if you look only at political elites across time, you’ll easily see women disenfranchised from positions of power because of male lines of succession, or from certain lines of work (even knowledge work) because such activities were expected of and considered rightful for men. That’s not to say that women have it worse. While it’s true that men have been victims of conscription to wars and dangerous labor, by your own explanation, these forms of oppression would go away if only those men were rich—-but there wouldn’t be any respite for women even if they could change their socio-economic standing.
As regards generational blame, I disagree that it is immoral to place accountability (which is different from blame) on a people even across generations, and ergo, time. You might not have a hand at something that your ancestor did, but you could be reaping the benefits of it today. You don’t have to be sorry for it with your every breath, but since we’re already talking about morality, you do have the responsibility to recognize the past and where your current resources are from, and to make reparations towards people who are still suffering the consequences to the present.
And as a man, I would like for men’s issues to be more out there and recognized in its own right, but honestly, “men’s rights” is a very recent thing and only came about as a reaction against the rise of feminist discourse in social media. How could one not see that as a derivative of women’s issues? It’s not even talking about the things that really matter to me as a man, such as the discrimination of men against an “alpha” ideal which, I could argue from experience, is really what’s driving those mental health issues and suicidal thoughts. I’ve seen that men’s rights movements are actually trying to defend this ideal, and it doesn’t even seem to consider LGBT men in the picture.
First, we have only discussed equal representation of men's and women's issues with the argument that an imbalance in the public discourse leads to an imbalance in personal opinion. You are going of of slope to misrepresent this as a mens rights movement - that is not very polite.
You are completely right in your observations about women being disenfranchised from power and not hold the same rights. But this is just a minor aspect of life and invite you to reflect on whether this in its own right led to worse lifes as a whole for women - if you take all other obligations and privileges into consideration. I tried indicating that life expectancy could be a well understood proxy, but you are free to find other holistic proxies.
I do believe in full gender equality. and as while women has gained autonomy and agency men need to gain the same amount of protection of that of women. Men can not be the only ones conscripted for war. Men can not be the only ones taking dangerous and physical jobs.
I am also not here to push a zero sum view of these things - But to push a reasonable understanding of "sum" and be open for being taught something if it turns out that what we thought was not right.
Your comment about generational blame for entire groups of people is abhorrent and needs to be rejected. It leads to people "paying reparations" or "taking blame" for something they have not done just by being a part of that group. It is out of touch with societies based on rule of law. And it needs to be rejected.
You have absolutely no responsibility to accept or recognize anything you have not been a part of. This mere idea that you can force people to adapt (by accepting) a truth i borderline authoritarian. It is such an extreme form of mental coercion and needs to be rejected.
We're still working a lot of this out because it's actually a relatively new thing culturally - my grandfathers generation would never have talked about mental health at all - but what is pretty clear is that most people do not talk enough about this, and do not deal with mental health very well.
That does not mean we should all be talking to everybody about it all the time. I take stuff into a therapy session I'm not going to discuss anywhere else, because if I started talking about it at work, or even close relationships, I'm asking people without any ability to help me with it to just take it and work it out with me, and that's not helpful.
But at the same time, we do need to talk to people about it. And there are some toxic barriers we could do with addressing.
Men are not "meant" to cry or show vulnerability in almost all contexts in almost all cultures. That's sad, because while we don't all want men breaking down in tears when their coffee order isn't quite right, we also know it's healthy for men to acknowledge and process difficult feelings like grief and rejection.
While most people realise it's not OK to tell a woman she'd look prettier if she smiled more, few people see the hypocrisy in thinking it's OK to tell a man he'd be sexier if he was more confident. That causes problems I think we can all call out and name in modern dating culture.
According to some stats I just pulled up for the UK, surveys suggest that more than 75% of men report as having had mental health issues, but only 60% have ever spoken to another human being about it at all, with 40% of men stating it would have to be so bad that they are considering self-harm or suicide to talk to anyone, ever. This is horrible.
So, sure, perhaps we don't need to talk about Freudian analysis down the pub, and nobody at work wants to hear about you reconciling feelings about how you were treated as a child by members of your family, but please:
Most men need to talk to somebody about their mental health. And for many problems, that somebody needs to be somebody with the appropriate skills and abilities to help them with it.
If you're reading this, and think that might be you, please, for your own sake, go talk to a professional.
You might not gel with the first therapist, counsellor, psychiatrist or psychologist you speak to. That's OK, they won't mind if you say you want to try a few different people. You can find people who will help in your town, on video calls, on apps, all over. Just speak to someone.
I'd like to elaborate on something you touch on briefly:
> I'm asking people without any ability to help me with it to just take it and work it out with me, and that's not helpful.
> that somebody needs to be somebody with the appropriate skills and abilities to help them with it.
I think there's an important line to walk here. I think it's important everyone (men and women) are able to talk about their feelings and experiences with their friends - but I don't think the goal needs to be "helping work it out". Just sharing and listening can be liberating, can help ease the road to talking to a professional, and can help others see that others struggle too.
There is a tendency in conversations of any sort to be always searching for a "solution" or an "answer", instead of just listening.
(There's a lot of nuance here in choosing when to share, etc, but I just wanted to talk a bit about it)
Being frustrated with something at work and having somebody to rant about it with is one of the pillars of any friendship. Your friends can do the work of listening, empathising, reassuring and then helping you get past it and enjoying the beer, game or barbecue you're at. That's cool, I agree.
Having deep feelings of inadequacy and bringing that to the friendship at every opportunity is asking that friend to help you with those feelings, they probably aren't equipped to do that in all sorts of ways.
As with most things, it's a spectrum, not binary. Some friends would love to help you overcome childhood trauma, but most will not. Your partner may be able to help you deal with the way that family member behaves, but quite often, that's your thing, not theirs, deal with it. A work colleague might be able to support you when a co-worker is being a jerk, but might not have the skill or ability to help you manage your feelings or deal with that behaviour.
A therapist is trained to help you with those things your friends, family and colleagues can't. More specifically, they are trained to help you figure out what you are going to do about it.
Sometimes, when we talk to people about problems, we're "giving them the problem", as in, we want them to tell us what to do about it, or to actually do something about it. They often can't or won't do that - it's your thing. Therapists won't take it either, but they'll help you manage it as your thing.
A friend who is just there to listen, that's different, if the ask is just to listen and be somebody to talk to, sure, most friends have that ability and skill, and are happy to do so. But there's a lot of stuff people go through where that isn't enough, and asking those same people to do more is probably not going to work.
> Sometimes, when we talk to people about problems, we're "giving them the problem", as in, we want them to tell us what to do about it, or to actually do something about it. They often can't or won't do that - it's your thing. Therapists won't take it either, but they'll help you manage it as your thing.
I actually think that, most of the time, people just want someone to listen. But there's something in our culture that injects that need to "give advice" instead of "just listen."
> if the ask is just to listen
We need to swap this default around. People should need to request advice/help, not request that they listen.
> But there's a lot of stuff people go through where that isn't enough, and asking those same people to do more is probably not going to work.
Certainly - but in my experience just talking about those things can be hugely beneficial, and sure, it would be great if they'd go to a therapist for those things - but as discussed, therapy still has a ways to go toward being accessible to everyone. In the meantime, if someone needs to vent about something, we should be here to listen*
* - up to a point, of course. There's a lot of nuance and lines to walk here that I feel I'm not addressing properly, but
There was certainly quite a bit of deep talk about "integrity" and "character" in our grandfathers' generation, that was ultimately relating to issues we would now comprise under so-called 'mental health'. It's not clear to me that this medicalized framing ("...health") is necessarily and consistently better than a more traditional one focused on developing a well-adjusted character.
Integrity and character are about values and how you plan to behave and expect to have others behave towards you. They are not the same as your ability to process emotions that emerge as a result of that behaviour.
Having values is important. Integrity, humility, all of that, absolutely useful.
They are not in themselves sufficient to assure you of good mental health.
We care about the smooth processing of emotions, among other reasons, because when impeded it generally affects how we're going to plan and behave; especially when under some sort of stress. This is not something new to our generation; philosophers have had a clear undestanding of this for millennia, in both Western and Eastern philosophical traditions.
Some other old-fashioned-y terms in this context: "strength" and "fortitude".
Men generally process negative emotions in private so others don't worry about them. This has led to the incorrect common viewpoint that men don't process these emotions at all, and attempts to make men process them like women do.
"few people see the hypocrisy in thinking it's OK to tell a man he'd be sexier if he was more confident"
Is that really a thing?
I mean sure there might people doing this, but it is obvious that telling someone they have too little self esteem, that this is a personal and can very well be perceived as an attack (especially by someone with low self esteem).
(Also I think the distinction is a bit weird in general. Isn't confidence sexy in women, too?)
I have been told this. I know men who have been told this. It doesn't help when you have low self-esteem.
Confidence is sexy. Smiling faces are more attractive. That does not mean you have a right to say that to somebody as if they "owe you" sexiness or attractiveness. Negging somebody who is feeling crap about themselves is not going to make them want to be with you.
"Trauma" ultimately just means "severe injury" or something like that, doesn't it?
We take it for granted that virtually no one will make it through life without ever sustaining a serious or enduring physical injury. Why is it so implausible to say that practically everyone can expect to eventually have to deal with at least one significant mental injury, too?
I think the reason why mental health is more public these days is because it wasn't talked about and addressed.
To extend you physical injury analogy: yes, people get physically injured. People break legs, and because of the focus and progress on physical injuries, they wear a cast for a few weeks, and then - for all practical intents and purposes - the injury never happened.
Because the same attention wasn't applied to mental health, I think people realised they were surrounded by the equivalent of people dragging themselves around on the ground because of a broken leg a decade ago that never got fixed. Why would anyone do that? Either because they don't know about the treatment, or because they live in an environment where the idea of getting treatment is seen as a bad or weak or shameful thing.
> Why is it so implausible to say that practically everyone can expect to eventually have to deal with at least one significant mental injury, too?
Just like we expect to walk down the street and see the occasional person with a plaster or bandage to handle a physical injury, if you accept we all have mental injuries, why do you expect to see them handled any more privately than physical ones?
Because historically we haven't handled mental injuries as well as the physical ones. I don't completely disagree with your original points. I think depth, nuance, and accuracy of the conversation matters most of all. There is plenty of superficial, influencer-level chatter in both realms.
> Because historically we haven't handled mental injuries as well as the physical ones.
I think that's the crucial point: "because that's how we've always done it" is the only real justification I can think of for us not tackling mental struggles more head on. If we're brave enough to compassionately question the things we don't normally question, being more open about mental stuff is the right thing to do IMO.
I sometimes wonder if superficial, influencer-level chatter is an early part of the process of normalising tough conversation points. It can let people test the waters in a safe way, signalling they want to talk about this stuff without getting too deep or vulnerable, yet.
The word trauma is weighty but has a very broad application. I think most people learn about it in the context of e.g. post-traumatic stress disorder (formerly known as battle fatigue, formerly known as shellshock) and associate it with veterans coming back from the war, but it basically applies to anything that have a lasting effect on people. Could be something like parents being emotionally unavailable, childhood bullying, etc.
No, not at all, the word trauma is predominately used today as the name for a sort of "psychic damage", like that which sometimes occurs when one is severely injured but which can also occur in many other circumstances, often purely social or emotional.
> A more feminine point of view is that we should shield against experiences that lead to a trauma.
I think that's true both for physical and psychological trauma! We should generally avoid preventable injuries and try to live and work with safety in mind.
All I meant is that the phrase "[almost] everyone has experienced trauma" doesn't seem that radical or extreme to me. It seems like common sense. (And it's not the same thing as "everyone is falling apart" or something like that.)
There is something to be said for soldiering through a rough phase. It's not always the right thing to do but below a certain threshold, it's necessary to build some amount of resilience.
Collapsing at the slightest exposure to an uncomfortable situation and having to rely on an extensive support structure that includes a therapist, drugs and other things should not, in my opinion, be the default.
As for Holmes, I read, re-read and practically memorised most of the canon when I was in my late teens and early 20s. Mental health was never one of my take aways. I was fascinated by the intensity of the character and how his work meant so much to him. That the lack of it depressed him might have been something Doyle observed in his patients and decided to use as a foil but I don't think he was "exploring men's mental health" in the stories. He was merely trying to make a believable detective who explains his methods. My feeling is that this is overlaying a 2025 interpretation onto a Victorian tale.
Well, my nonprofessional opinion about those is, that no amount of therapy can help here, when their problem is isolation and the cure living close to people they like.
(But therapy might help them getting there again. True eremits by heart are rare)
I also spend what feels to me like a lot of time here. I like it, despite its problems. But HN isn't good enough to deserve to be 70% of anyone's life. :(
Have you tried tobacco, indoor firearms and cocaine?
Oh … never mind.
I have always worked remote and been hermitting recently on a difficult set of (work) challenges.
I don’t know what I would do without HN.
I read a lot of science, math and tech news, but am only aware of one place where the discourse around topics that interest me has the quality of HN, which is HN.
> Have you tried tobacco, indoor firearms and cocaine?
I don't do alcohol, drugs, et cetera, because I saw other people who did, and found them disgusting. I don't want to be like that. Though if I could easily get my hands on a weapon, I would have probably shot myself already.
> I read a lot of science, math and tech news, but am only aware of one place where the discourse around topics that interest me has the quality of HN, which is HN.
I used to think that therapists were ridiculous. But after having one for six or seven years now, I realize that it’s literally just someone you pay to help you be the happiest and best version of yourself. Maybe everyone doesn’t need that, but I don’t think anyone is inherently always the best version of themselves. What’s the point of not trying to be a little better?
I feel like the world would be a much better place if literally everyone did have a therapist. Having a neutral, trained professional you talk you for 45 minutes twice a month about things that are tough in your life is not something that should alarm people, but being vehemently against it honestly kind of is...
The main issue is that therapy is expensive, and it's very middle-class to have the money to afford one long-term like that. Working class people have had to suck it up, or (preferably) have a good support network themselves.
While I am inclined to agree that most people would benefit from having a professional to talk to, it'd need to be economically viable as well.
But we're seeing this happening in real time; on the one side there's lower cost online councelling available (but whether that's actually certified professionals is debatable), and on the other ChatGPT became the biggest and most popular therapist almost overnight. But again, not sure if it has the necessary certifications, I suppose it's believable enough. I also want to believe OpenAI and all the other AI suppliers have hired professionals to direct the "chatbot as therapist" AI persona, especially now that the lawsuits for people losing their sanity or life after talking to AI are gaining traction.
You are definitely right about the financial barriers. I’ve struggled to find one every time I have switched or lost a certain insurance coverage too so there is a shortage even if you can afford them.
I’m inclined to think chatGPT would probably be good enough for therapy basics and could help people that have never encountered them, but would probably become much worse after needing any specialized help. Online platforms like BetterHelp are complete trash and just make the therapist and the person feel hopeless.
I have been in therapy on and off through most of my life. There are parts of the process and the profession that are helpful. There are also parts that are paternalistic bordering on abusive. “Literally just someone you pay to the be happiest…” is a small part of the picture. I take issue with this view of therapy, and the idea that it is somehow a universal force for good that will benefit everyone.
I have met some pretty unhinged therapists - both as a client and socially. I won’t even go into the history of psychiatry and clinical care.
One of the questions I like to pose is, what are we doing as a society by sending so many people to therapy? What do these practices do at a large scale? And to all those who decry things like gun violence: if you think our current mental health system would somehow be able to address the larger ills of society if only they had more funding, I have some serious questions about your view of its overarching effectiveness, and the specific effects of these practices.
Oh I was oversimplifying for sure and like most things in life it is very dependent on who you are and what type of therapist you have(lcsw,psychiatrist,psychologist,practicing RN, etc), also just the views and opinions of the people involved will vary greatly on the outcome.
I’ve had plenty of bad experiences which exacerbated my hopelessness but overall I feel I’ve found help when I most needed it.
I think the introductory things in almost any form of therapy will help people, after that it gets much more complicated and it’s up to the individual to find something that fits or decide it’s not for them.
Do you mean therapy is designed to teach outcasts how to fit better into the machine? I would agree with that, and while I hate that it is partly true and reject anything like this for myself in general, individual happiness sometimes correlates with greasing your wheels to be a better subject.
In theory, at one point people will be done with therapy. I think a better analogy is a physical therapist; you go to one because of an injury.
A personal trainer is for boosting your physical health / performance. For mental health, you'd get a coach, training, or read one of many self-help books, not a therapist.
There are multiple kinds of psychological counseling. Some "supportive therapy" really is more of an ongoing thing, like having a personal trainer. Some kinds of psychological therapy always aim to have a terminus, like physical therapy.
Having a personal trainer for your physical fitness is something I'd expect a very low percentage of very wealthy individuals to have access to. Therapy appears to be more prevalent.
By "personal trainer" I just mean someone that you pay for a training session 1-3x per week. It's a comparable expense to therapy (depending on qualifications etc...).
I mean, that’s what they meant too. They’re expensive! Kinda a stereotypical rich thing to have, more so than therapy. One distinction that you might be thinking of without saying between individual sessions and group workouts which are cheaper.
Personal training sessions with experienced staff at my David Lloyds in London are around £50-60 for 45 minutes. That's entry-level cost for therapy, which can easily go north of £100 per hour around here.
I reckon the reason people use therapy is not because it's cheaper, but because they're less confident about how to do "mental exercise" than they are physical exercise.
What do you mean by “has a therapist”? Do they just mention it in passing, or do they bring up takeaways from their sessions in everyday conversation?
If it’s the latter, I’m not sure that’s really about mental-health openness. It feels more like a broader social habit, the need to present yourself as someone who’s constantly working on every aspect of your life. That’s a different modern-society quirk altogether.
Seems like we both agree that psychological language can be common in everyday offline life, such as at work for a large company. I don't have a problem with it, not sure where you got that from.
You're ignoring the subtext of the comment above yours.
> Too much psychology talk in every day life, everyone is traumatised and has unresolved issues etc. That may be, but I wish we would handle it all more privately...
Their problem isn't with the language itself, but how it is handled in public. That point doesn't really translate if you pivot to creating an environment conductive to mental health.
Probably not what the parent is referring to, but there is 'therapy speak' and similar phenomena where a pop-sci bowdlerisation of professional practices or scientific theories become absorbed into the culture and change the way we express ourselves.
There is pathologisation which can be whimsical e.g. tidying/organising becomes OCD, studying becomes autistic or exaggerative e.g. sadness becoming depression, a bad experience becoming trauma or in order condemn e.g a political policy becomes sociopathic.
There is the way 'therapy speak' spills over into daily life e.g. your use of the work-kitchen must respect boundaries, leaving the milk out is triggering, the biscuits are my self-care etc.
There is also 'neuroscience speak' where people express their emotions in terms of neurotransmitters e.g. motivation and stimulation becomes 'dopamine', happiness and love become 'serotonin', stress becomes 'cortisol' etc.
It's just the way language and culture works and it now pulls more from science than myth and religion. New language might just be replacing older bowdlerisations e.g. hysteria. In the 'therapy-speak' cases, it's interesting how it often replaces more moralistic language and assertions about values that used be described in terms of manners, civility, respectability etc.
Agree. Some people have legitimate issues. Many just grab at the easy excuse for not achieving anything. “Suck it up and do the work” is still good advice for them.
99% of public human interaction is battles for dominance (ego, status, politics...). Which is gross. When psychology enters the conversation it gets even grosser.
I deeply dislike the inherent ideology of psychology. Liberalism, the idea of a health individual does not pay any idea to the shared whole, suffering which may be "noble" for the common good and rights and privileges awarded for suffering in such. I find such a ideologically loaded construct and the inherent biases (idealizations and an inability to talk about the cultural framework and tradeoffs) quite unhelpful for understanding, helping and as a basis for societal meta-communications.
There is not an inherent ideology to psychology, and I'm not sure what you mean by statements such as "the idea of a health individual does not pay any idea to the shared whole" (not even judging; I actually don't know what you mean).
I think a story, maybe a video clip of a person talking about their struggle will also do.
I understand some people are less sensitive to such things than others, but let's say you watch, for example, a YouTube video, even just a Short, of a WW2 veteran, talking how they stormed a hill and his best friend died. It's touching and you can relate with how it must have been and how this man might have felt or still feels.
I actually think Microsoft is often ahead of it's time with it's consumer-facing products, but executes very poorly. So they have good foresight, but "very bad taste" when it comes to execution.
Microsoft was early to making tablets, smartphones, living room PCs, etc. They just royally screw up the execution of each product category every time.
Maybe it'd be a fun idea for to take some of Microsoft's failed consumer ideas, and revisit them 10-15 years later to see if some other company successfully executes on it.
"He wasted his life", sounds so dramatic, but what does it really mean. It's just an emotion like regret triggered by made up standards. If things were different and in the end they would have said "he lived his best life", what difference would it make except a few different words, differently arranged.
Not sure what my point is, but perhaps being too much into Buddhism and similar things made me lose touch with more normal human emotions.. or I live in regret myself and push it aside, ha.
There is some sociology/psychology research based on concepts like the Maslow's hierarchy of needs that motivate human behavior. There is also memoirs of Bonnie Ware, "Regrets of the Dying", where she as a nurse at an old folks home over several years interviewed people who are about to die and their regrets turn out to be:
not living a life true to oneself, working too hard, not having the courage to express feelings, losing touch with friends, and not allowing oneself to be happier.
With a heavy overweight on the first point.
I think that the comment "he wasted his life" is supposed to be in reference to this, that most people realize at the end that nothing really mattered, and that they chose to follow the structures of society by default instead of daring to do what they inherently wanted intrinsically. Then you can feel as your life was wasted, you got a single chance to play around and do what you like with your brief time in the universe and you chose to let someone else dictate how that was going to go, a waste.
The thing is, that This is speculation (with all respect).
I, on the other hand, do not lack courage to do hard things. But I have learned that it is a strawman - it does not make you happier to quite you job, leave your spouse, go for your passion in a startup, etc.
Luckily I fucked up everything in that fever dream early enough that it did not have substantiel impact on my life.
He wanted to have a different life, but he didn't embrace it. Instead he lied to his wife and lover. In a more recent update he was cheating on his way lover as well, so he comes out looking pretty bad. At the end of the story everyone in his family is hurt by his actions. Send like he wasted his life and hers if that was the best he could do
I read and enjoy content from people who want to share something.
There is no chance I'll read anything within 0.01s of it being posted, but there is a chance I'll find it eventually. So if the first thing to read the content is all that matters, or if having complete exclusive control so that only the people you like can read it, and importantly only in the way that you decided they should read it.
Then don't bother?
But if you want to create something of value for someone else, and the exact time it takes them to find it, or the browser they use isn't actually important. Seems like it's still a good time to write stuff. Maybe even better, to resist AI content drowning out new stuff.
reply