Ill bite. I meditate fairly regularly (~1hour a day, spread across 3-4 little sessions throughout the day) It's my addiction, really.
meditation, when starting out, is largely about training your mind to concentrate intensely. people say it's 'relaxing', and it is, but it's about learning how to 'intensely relax', as paradoxical as that sounds. it's being mindful of your psychology's tendencies, noticing your mental patterns and over and over again returning to concentration on relaxation. your breath is perhaps the easiest thing to use as your 'concentration point', but some people use the ringing in their ears, or body scans (focus on how your skin feels, arms, legs chest etc) whatever works for you, it doesn't matter. as long as you can easily focus on it.
its practicing shifting your thoughts, essentially. training your mind to let go of an idea. over time, you get used to the feeling of shifting your thoughts, and the inner 'tools' you pick up along the way start to come in handy on the day-to-day. someone rude to me on the internet? instinct is to get mad, but I know I can make myself feel better by concentrating on something else, letting go of the anger. it's not fool proof, Im still human after all, but it helps deescalate emotions when they would normally get in the way.
also, it feels really good. I figured out how to relax some muscle (or something? idk) thats behind my eyes, feels almost like when you zoom out to your peripheral vision: from focusing in on a tiny point to seeing everything your eyes pick up. its a difficult experience to describe, but relaxing this 'muscle' for long periods of time makes be feel super calm.
hope thus helped. i didn't realize how much I needed to type, and it's still not enough!
I am that person you describe. Went to college in 07. I was told 'study whatever you want! the markets great!" so I went into poli sci. then 08 happened, millions of jobs disappeared, more than ever before in history. 'its ok!' they said. 'it'll bounce back!', but it hasn't, not really, not for me. I graduated with my degree, disillusioned with the world's institutions and my prospects working as a diplomat or for an ngo. unable to find a job I could apply my degree to, I was at least able to 'bridge the gap' waiting tables. I was so poor, my health plummeted. eating cheap food, unable to go to a doctor's office or dental office. this was exacerbated by a smoking addiction I picked in in college.
on a regular basis, I wonder what my life would be like had I gone to school a year or two later, where I'd be if I was aware of the housing/job crisis and not given the false promise of 'be whatever you want!'.
of course this paragraph is an oversimplification of a very long and grueling chapter of my life, and my attempt to distill it down for the sake of anecdote does not do it justice. Those lessons learned will stick with me for the remainder of my life: mistrust of private organizations (like banks), captured public organizations (like the american government).
whenever I see some bootstrapper huff and puff about how x demographic are lazy I can only roll my eyes. people live in their cushy little salary bubbles, blind to the outside world's struggles. they don't see how falling a little behind can set you so far back. Work a service job and you too can see how fucking dehumanizing wage slavery is.
because we realize that our health system will not be there for us if we don't take care of ourselves. Our healthcare is a massive joke, a sham, and basically an excuse to experiment on people with pharmaceuticals.
my 06 saturn ion has 130k miles on it. I've had very few problems with it, very minimal maintenance. It doesn't surprise me they went out of business. unfortunately it seems high quality goods are counter to a market obsessed with the bottom line.
thanks for sharing. I watched it, but remain unconvinced. I'm a little disappointed, because I was hoping for a compelling or novel take on the issue. That worldview just looks so narrow and reductive to me. The god of Abraham exists, but only because people think he does. He's real in the same way our thoughts are real. I see this as a far more profound position because god becomes a manifestation of his believers' collective consciousness (for better or worse).
The electrons bouncing between the neon molecules in a bar lamp and our electrochemical responses occurring in our neuron synapses orders of magnitude closer to the notion of god than than the rituals and ceremonies religions use to worship him, in my opinion.
This is why I see Christianity as hubris. to claim atheism requires faith is to say that religion asserts it has absolute knowledge (the doublespeak goes both ways). If god is this all powerful, omnipresent creator of all space and time, its overwhelmingly likely that we wouldn't be able to comprehend him. We barely comprehend the <literally anything> and I'm expected to believe ancient peoples could comprehend the nature of gods existence? Nay, instead they willed him into existence, their actions an expression of that will.
didn't mean for this post to be so long. I guess I'm just a little unimpressed by this preacher who states we're not trying hard enough to understand each other then strawman's the arguments for atheism.
that's what happens to people when they feel like they're competing in a closing-off market. want to see a similar level of people clawing at each other's throats, being petty & antagonistic, competing for scraps? look no further than the music industry, especially the amateur scenes. more beef than an industrial cattle farm.
you have a severe case of hindsight bias. nms has perhaps the most outspoken hatred of any game launch ever. heck how long ago did it come out? Year+? and you're still whining about it.
want a free market? move to Antarctica. you can be as free as you want. Here in society we'll keep building and cooperating. competition is for predators and chumps.