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by Henrik Edberg
I am 28 now. I don’t think about the past or regret things much these days.
But sometimes I wish that I had known some of things I have learned over the last few years a bit earlier. That perhaps there had been a self-improvement class in school. And in some ways there probably was.
Because some of these 16 things in this article a teacher probably spoke about in class. But I forgot about them or didn’t pay attention.
Some of it would probably not have stuck in my mind anyway. Or just been too far outside my reality at the time for me to accept and use.
But I still think that taking a few hours from all those German language classes and use them for some personal development classes would have been a good idea. Perhaps for just an hour a week in high school. It would probably be useful for many students and on a larger scale quite helpful for society in general.
So here are 16 things I wish they had taught me in school (or I just would like to have known about earlier).
1. The 80/20 rule.
This is one of the best ways to make better use of your time. The 80/20 rule – also known as The Pareto Principle – basically says that 80 percent of the value you will receive will come from 20 percent of your activities.
So a lot of what you do is probably not as useful or even necessary to do as you may think.
You can just drop – or vastly decrease the time you spend on – a whole bunch of things.
And if you do that you will have more time and energy to spend on those things that really brings your value, happiness, fulfilment and so on.
2. Parkinson’s Law.
You can do things quicker than you think. This law says that a task will expand in time and seeming complexity depending on the time you set aside for it. For instance, if you say to yourself that you’ll come up with a solution within a week then the problem will seem to grow more difficult and you’ll spend more and more time trying to come up with a solution.
So focus your time on finding solutions. Then just give yourself an hour (instead of the whole day) or the day (instead of the whole week) to solve the problem. This will force your mind to focus on solutions and action.
The result may not be exactly as perfect as if you had spent a week on the task, but as mentioned in the previous point, 80 percent of the value will come from 20 percent of the activities anyway. Or you may wind up with a better result because you haven’t overcomplicated or overpolished things. This will help you to get things done faster, to improve your ability to focus and give you more free time where you can totally focus on what’s in front of you instead of having some looming task creating stress in the back of your mind.
3. Batching.
Boring or routine tasks can create a lot of procrastination and low-level anxiety. One good way to get these things done quickly is to batch them. This means that you do them all in row. You will be able to do them quicker because there is less start-up time compared to if you spread them out. And when you are batching you become fully engaged in the tasks and more focused.
A batch of things to do in an hour today may look like this: Clean your desk / answer today’s emails / do the dishes / make three calls / write a grocery shopping list for tomorrow.
4. First, give value. Then, get value. Not the other way around.
This is a bit of a counter-intuitive thing. There is often an idea that someone should give us something or do something for us before we give back. The problem is just that a lot of people think that way. And so far less than possible is given either way.
If you want to increase the value you receive (money, love, kindness, opportunities etc.) you have to increase the value you give. Because over time you pretty much get what you give. It would perhaps be nice to get something for nothing. But that seldom happens.
5. Be proactive. Not reactive.
This one ties into the last point. If everyone is reactive then very little will get done. You could sit and wait and hope for someone else to do something. And that happens pretty often, but it can take a lot of time before it happens.
A more useful and beneficial way is to be proactive, to simply be the one to take the first practical action and get the ball rolling. This not only saves you a lot of waiting, but is also more pleasurable since you feel like you have the power over your life. Instead of feeling like you are run by a bunch of random outside forces.
6. Mistakes and failures are good.
When you are young you just try things and fail until you learn. As you grow a bit older, you learn from – for example – school to not make mistakes. And you try less and less things.
This may cause you to stop being proactive and to fall into a habit of being reactive, of waiting for someone else to do something. I mean, what if you actually tried something and failed? Perhaps people would laugh at you?
Perhaps they would. But when you experience that you soon realize that it is seldom the end of the world. And a lot of the time people don’t care that much. They have their own challenges and lives to worry about.
And success in life often comes from not giving up despite mistakes and failure. It comes from being persistent.
When you first learn to ride your bike you may fall over and over. Bruise a knee and cry a bit. But you get up, brush yourself off and get on the saddle again. And eventually you learn how to ride a bike. If you can just reconnect to your 5 year old self and do things that way – instead of giving up after a try/failure or two as grown-ups often do -you would probably experience a lot more interesting things, learn valuable lessons and have quite a bit more success.
7. Don’t beat yourself up.
Why do people give up after just few mistakes or failures? Well, I think one big reason is because they beat themselves up way too much. But it’s a kinda pointless habit. It only creates additional and unnecessary pain inside you and wastes your precious time. It’s best to try to drop this habit as much as you can.
8. Assume rapport.
Meeting new people is fun. But it can also induce nervousness. We all want to make a good first impression and not get stuck in an awkward conversation.
The best way to do this that I have found so far is to assume rapport. This means that you simply pretend that you are meeting one of your best friends. Then you start the interaction in that frame of mind instead of the nervous one.
This works surprisingly well. You can read more about it in How to Have Less Awkward Conversations: Assuming Rapport.
9. Use your reticular activation system to your advantage.
I learned about the organs and the inner workings of the body in class but nobody told me about the reticular activation system. And that’s a shame, because this is one of the most powerful things you can learn about. What this focus system, this R.A.S, in your mind does is to allow you to see in your surroundings what you focus your thoughts on. It pretty much always helps you to find what you are looking for.
So you really need to focus on what you want, not on what you don’t want. And keep that focus steady.
Setting goals and reviewing them frequently is one way to keep your focus on what’s important and to help you take action that will move your closer to toward where you want to go. Another way is just to use external reminders such as pieces of paper where you can, for instance, write down a few things from this post like “Give value” or “Assume rapport”. And then you can put those pieces of paper on your fridge, bathroom mirror etc.
10. Your attitude changes your reality.
We have all heard that you should keep a positive attitude or perhaps that “you need to change your attitude!”. That is a nice piece of advice I suppose, but without any more reasons to do it is very easy to just brush such suggestions off and continue using your old attitude.
But the thing that I’ve discovered the last few years is that if you change your attitude, you actually change your reality. When you for instance use a positive attitude instead of a negative one you start to see things and viewpoints that were invisible to you before. You may think to yourself “why haven’t I thought about things this way before?”.
When you change your attitude you change what you focus on. And all things in your world can now be seen in a different light.
This is of course very similar to the previous tip but I wanted to give this one some space. Because changing your attitude can create an insane change in your world. It might not look like it if you just think about it though. Pessimism might seem like realism. But that is mostly because your R.A.S is tuned into seeing all the negative things you want to see. And that makes you “right” a lot of the time. And perhaps that is what you want. On the other hand, there are more fun things than being right all the time.
If you try changing your attitude for real – instead of analysing such a concept in your mind – you’ll be surprised.
11. Gratitude is a simple way to make yourself feel happy.
Sure, I was probably told that I should be grateful. Perhaps because it was the right thing to do or just something I should do. But if someone had said that feeling grateful about things for minute or two is a great way to turn a negative mood into a happy one I would probably have practised gratitude more. It is also a good tool for keeping your attitude up and focusing on the right things. And to make other people happy. Which tends to make you even happier, since emotions are contagious.
12. Don’t compare yourself to others.
The ego wants to compare. It wants to find reasons for you to feel good about yourself (“I’ve got a new bike!”). But by doing that it also becomes very hard to not compare yourself to others who have more than you (“Oh no, Bill has bought an even nicer bike!”). And so you don’t feel so good about yourself once again. If you compare yourself to others you let the world around control how you feel about yourself. It always becomes a rollercoaster of emotions.
A more useful way is to compare yourself to yourself. To look at how far you have come, what you have accomplished and how you have grown. It may not sound like that much fun but in the long run it brings a lot more inner stillness, personal power and positive feelings.
13. 80-90% of what you fear will happen never really come into reality.
This is a big one. Most things you fear will happen never happen. They are just monsters in your own mind. And if they happen then they will most often not be as painful or bad as you expected. Worrying is most often just a waste of time.
This is of course easy to say. But if you remind yourself of how little of what you feared throughout your life that has actually happened you can start to release more and more of that worry from your thoughts.
14. Don’t take things too seriously.
It’s very easy to get wrapped up in things. But most of the things you worry about never come into reality. And what may seem like a big problem right now you may not even remember in three years.
Taking yourself, your thoughts and your emotions too seriously often just seems to lead to more unnecessary suffering. So relax a little more andlighten up a bit. It can do wonders for your mood and as an extension of that; your life.
15. Write everything down.
If your memory is anything like mine then it’s like a leaking bucket. Many of your good or great ideas may be lost forever if you don’t make a habit of writing things down. This is also a good way to keep your focus on what you want. Read more about it in Why You Should Write Things Down.
16. There are opportunities in just about every experience.
In pretty much any experience there are always things that you can learn from it and things within the experience that can help you to grow. Negative experiences, mistakes and failure can sometimes be even better than a success because it teaches you something totally new, something that another success could never teach you.
Whenever you have a “negative experience” ask yourself: where is the opportunity in this? What is good about this situation? One negative experience can – with time – help you create many very positive experiences.
What do you wish someone had told you in school or you had just learned earlier in life?
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You are stuck out on a park bench in the middle of December. You have no place to go, no family or friends, you’ve gotten all the money, and stolen items out of them that you can. You’re cold, alone, you stink, but you don’t have the energy or means to take a shower. Then somehow you procure enough money to buy a bag (generally by hooking other people up and ripping them off a bit, overcharging, etc.) So you go to your dealers, buy a bag, find some spot that is relatively closed off. (There have been exceptions to this, one time on a side walk I threw my coat over my upper body and did it with people a few feet from me.) You go through your ritual, get the shot prepared, spend 20 mins to an hour to find a vein that hasn’t collapsed or shrunken from the cold, on once you register, and see that blood come back into the brownish tube, you push the plunger in and hope beyond hope you didn’t miss. Then it happens. You start feeling warm, not actually warm but the kind of warm where you’re cold and someone gives you the most comfortable blanket you’ve ever felt, and inside, underneath that brown blanket you realize “Hey, my life’s not so bad.” Every worry you’ve ever had is gone, seemingly never to return. “Ahh, this is nice.” You think to yourself. “I’m just going to take a quick nap, then get up and go shower at the Y.M.C.A, and then go apply at that job downtown I used to go to college for, what was that? Civil engineering maybe? Alright, twenty minutes then I’ll get up.”
8 HOURS LATER:
You are stuck out on a park bench in the middle of December. You have no place to go, no family or friends…
Rinse and repeat. Everyday, for the rest of your life. That is what heroin is like.
Drugs create highs by manipulating chemicals our bodies produce normally. Frequent drug use can change the way our bodies produce and utilize these chemicals, causing our bodies to produce too much or too little. There is no perfect drug because any substance usage takes our bodies out of chemical equilibrium, causing adverse effects.
Think of your body as a fortress. Your immune system is the security staff that guards the fortress. AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) is the result of HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) taking out your security team like a spy in a movie.
Except, the spy in a movie just wants to get in. HIV would be a bloodthirsty psychopath spy that seeks out every member of the security team and takes them out. They don’t care about the fortress, they just want to kill your security team.
Everything else that wanted in the fortress (your body) now has free reign, with your security team dead. This is what kills you.
– Suh_90
Oil companies don’t charge what’s “fair,” as if they do the work on a calculator and determine the price that way. They charge what they can get. They determine the price based on how high they can make it before returns start to taper off. Because of government and market controls, there isn’t always a lot of wiggle room there… but you need to know that part of the reason prices don’t go down when oil costs do is because they know consumers will keep paying the higher price. And while there are many factors at play, that’s really the bottom line.
First off, you have the Dungeon Master. He’s the person who creates the world and makes all the big decisions. Everybody else creates a character.
The Dungeon Master begins weaving the story, explaining to the characters where they are and what their goal is- a good DM will do this with lots of enthusiasm and flair!
The characters then make their own choices based on their religion, their background, and their skills. For example- a Human who hates Orcs would never say, “I love Orcs! Let’s be friends with this Orc!” Instead, they’d be more likely to say, “Kill the Orc!! I hate that guy!”
Apart from the storytelling and role playing, there is combat. Whenever you come across a bad guy on your journey, the DM has created a character for him and will control him. If you decide to attack the bad guy, you must roll the dice a few times.
The first time is to figure out who gets to attack first- this can be a big factor in who wins a battle.
The second dice roll is to determine whether you hit him or not- if you roll below a certain number (which the DM knows but you do not), then you miss. If you roll a 1, that is a critical failure and commonly ends with you breaking your weapon or hurting yourself. Conversely, if you roll a 20, that’s a critical hit and you get to do extra damage!
Damage is the third roll. That’s how you figure out how much health he loses when you attack him.
Now, battles aren’t the only place you get to show off your talents and skills! Often, throughout the story, you will have to do a skill check. These are used to figure out if you can complete a certain task and how well you do it.
For example- you need to lie to a bartender so he doesn’t know you’re looking for the treasure! If you roll a high speech skill check, you might say- “We’re not searching for treasure- we’re just in town to sell our wares and buy new armor.” If you roll low, you might say- “We… uh… treasure? I never met the guy! Ahaha… we’re definitely not treasure hunting. Nope. Not us. I don’t even know what treasure is!”
There are other skill checks, too- such as climbing, riding horses, swimming, and lots more!
Two (or more) players face off against each other with their decks. A standard deck is 60 cards (can be more but not less) and the various types of cards are: Sorcery, Creatures, Instant, Enchantment and Land cards. There are a few more types then that, but we’re keeping it simple. You draw seven cards to start and one card at the start of your turn. At the end of your turn, if you ever have more than seven cards you have to discard cards until you have seven.
Lands are the most basic card. It usually makes up about 1/3 of your deck and its used to power your spells. You can only put one land card into play each turn. Lands are “tapped” to draw the power from them and each color of magic has its own kind of land. Forrest, Mountain, Swamp, Plains and Island. Respectively that’s Green, Red, Black, White and Blue.
Sorcery cards are big spells, they can only be played during your turn and they have big effects like player takes XZY amount of damage.
Instants are small but fast spells, you can cast these whenever you want IF you have enough power to do it, even interrupting your opponent. Counter-spell is a famous instant card.
Creatures are straight-forward. Summon a creature to fight for you.
Enchantments offer lingering effects. They effectively add a new rule to the game, like any creature weaker than XZY dies.
Players, or Planeswalkers as they are known in the lore, each start with 20 health. Through a combination of attacking with creatures and flinging spells you wear each other down to 0 and the last man standing wins. Each of the colors of magic is also famous for its theme. White magic has lots of healing and holy stuff. Black magic is really fucking cool and has lots of evil stuff. Red magic has lots of direct damage abilities. Green magic is famous for massively powerful creatures. Blue magic is famous for MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF DICKERY.
They did this on an episode of Sport Science once, with competitive eater Joey Chestnut:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QW_ve1TlmI Basically, they train their stomach to stretch and expand by either drinking lots of water or eating lots of foods such as lettuce. They also train their jaw muscles to chew faster and harder, and use their entire body to give the food momentum to get down their throat.
Transgender person here, and your question is a good one (or at least, a common one that really isn’t answered clearly very often)
The short answer is: yes, Trans people are considered to have a disorder. Gender Identity Disorder and Gender Dysphoria are disorders recognized in the DSM.
There have been a few studies establishing certain evidence to support the idea that this is inherent (a few having to do with brain mapping/MRIs pop up now and again) but the funding and interest for serious, driven research into the field just hasn’t been there until recently. A lot of existing studies are either too old to be taken seriously or flawed due to lack of funding or existing bias. The best guess right now is that the brain is just wired to expect a different set of physical characteristics than it has, and thus causes dysphoria as a way of expressing that it thinks there is something wrong with ones body.
Your question seems to be more “Why don’t we get these transgender people mental help instead of physical modifications to their body” and the answer is:
Trans people already have to have years of therapy from multiple doctors and therapists to get the required letters of recommendation (verification that therapists and doctors have confidence that the person does experience Gender Dysphoria and that they believe that sexual transition would be beneficial to the patient’s mental health) needed to get hormones and SRS (sexual reassignment surgery) and no form of conversion therapy has worked anywhere near consistently.
It is just easier (at this point in time, at least) to modify the body to reduce dysphoria than it is to modify the brain to stop dysphoria altogether.
As far as what I can describe to you from personal experience, I am not in denial about the fact that I have a penis and that I grow facial hair and that my body produces testosterone. I can tell you that the physical presence of these things causes constant distress, feelings of depression and self hate, the whole nine yards. When I wear female clothes, ask you to call me by a different name or use different pronouns, wear makeup, etc., it is more to fool my unconscious self and distract it from the fact that certain parts of my body just feel wrong.
Plenty of other similar conditions, like Body Dysmorphic Disorder, have long been recognized and accepted by the medical community. Sometimes the brain expects your body to be different than it is.
It’s like if you were to take the hard drive out of one computer and into a different computer. You’ll probably be able to boot and do most things, but you’ll occasionally get some errors because that hard drive and the Operating System inside has been set up to expect a certain hardware configuration in the computer, and has problems when what hardware it thinks you have differs from the hardware you actually hook up to it. We (the medical community) don’t know how to reprogram the computer yet, so switching out hardware is the next easiest thing.
Trust me, if there was a pill that got rid of my dysphoria so that I felt content with my male sex characteristics, I would imagine that would be far easier and pain free to take than years of hormone therapy and multiple, very expensive surgeries. Such a thing doesn’t exist yet, so I only have one other choice.
This study from the 80s has something to say on the subject. Mostly that reading actually interferes with our ability to visualise when compared to listening to the same descriptive sentence.
This could be interpreted as reading being more stimulating for the brain though. It has to decode the text and grammar before building the image described whereas spoken word seems to be more closely integrated to the mind’s eye allowing faster understanding with less work.
That’s what I took from this anyway. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022537181904837
Variable-Ratio Schedule rewards are a stronger enforcer of a behavior than fixed-ratio schedule rewards to animals.
For example, if you teach the dog when he stands on his hind legs he gets a cookie, he’ll do that. However when he does it and doesn’t get a cookie, he goes, fuck this, and goes into a behavioral status called extinction, which is to say there is no longer an association with the cookie and standing up.
HOWEVER
If doggie stands up and SOMETIMES he gets a cookie, he will keep doing it even if you stop giving him a cookie.
Without throwing around unnecessary jargon (more than I already have)
Doggy learns if you KEEP standing on hind legs, eventually you get the cookie.
It’s a much stronger reinforcer.
Gambling does the exact same thing.
Doggy goes up to slot machine pulls handle.
If it gives him a cookie every time, doggy keeps pulling handle. WHen it stops giving cookies, doggy says, I guess the cookie machine is broken now, and goes to do something else.
Sometimes he gets a cookie, sometimes not. When he pulls a few times and then gets the cookie, his body makes all the feel good doggy chemicals and he feels good and he gets a cookie.
That way when doggy is on a losing streak at the slots, instead of thinking “the machine is broken” he thinks, “I’ll bet I just need to pull it one more time”
Then he starts really really wanting the cookie and the feel good doggy chemicals that his body makes when he wins. He starts wanting them so badly he starts feeling like something bad will happen if he doesn’t place one more bet. He might even have knots in his stomach.
And that’s how it works.
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Awkward ending to a date
1 year ago today, Germany beat Brazil 7-1 in the World cup Semi Final
DJ trolls entire crowd waiting for that molly surging drop
Rap battle only using compliments
11 year old reads comments about him and it’s heart breaking
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28 Hilarious Photos Of Pets That Just Want To Come Back Inside – Ned Hardy
Awesome collection of rumps for hump day – Bro My God
25 Hottest Hollywood Daughters – Hexagram
10 High Paying Jobs That Are In Demand Right Now – Worthly
Paulina Gretzky Puts Her Good Looks to Use – Crowd Ignite
15+ Hilariously Honest Answers From Siri To Uncomfortable Questions You Can Ask, Too – Linkiest
50+ Amazing Behind the Scenes Photos from Iconic TV Shows – Ranker
Easiest Way To Ruin A Motorcycle When Loading It (video) – Leenks
Harvard Grad: Find Me a Girlfriend, I’ll Give You $10K – Newser
J-Lo’s Leopard Print Booty – G-Celeb
Just Take My Money (38 Photos) – Radass
Pedophile who never touched kids explains his story – This American Life
Dumb Things You Only Read In Women’s Magazines – Regretful Morning
10 WWE Stars Who Shockingly Assaulted Their Fans – The Richest
Subway just shitcanned Jared – Celeb Slam
15 Best Films Of 2015 (So Far) – What Culture
Cosplayers on a tight budget – World Wide Interweb
How to Have Sex With Her for the First Time – Nick Notas
Top notch self shooters (40 Photos) – Bad Sentinel
The Cosby Revelation: How A Decade-Old Deposition Came To Light – NPR
Babe of the Day – Shannon St. Clair from ASU (Photos) – College Envy
Father Shoots and Kills Sons Kidnapper In Airport For Revenge – Youtube
Turns Out UFC Ring Girl Brittney Palmer’s Husband Wants to Murder People – The Blemish
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Hey guys, my names Riley Breedlove or the girl in the video haha. I train out of Tulsa Oklahoma at RyanBJJ. I’ve been training for 9 years. I just received my blue belt a few months ago and yes I’m 16 haha. If anyone has questions I’d be happy to answer them
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You already know I’m a big proponent of Jiu-Jitsu and I’ll say it again, Jiu-Jitsu will absolutely change your life for the better! Now find a legitimate school and get on the mats!
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Disney: The 90’s Supercut
One-Minute Time Machine
Woman on Hong Kong subway melts down when her phone battery dies.
The Utterly Demonic Sound of the ‘World’s First’ Corvette C7 Stingray Turbo!
Howard Stern interviews Jonah Falcon…dude with one of the largest penis in the world
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What’s in a Prison Meal? – The Marshall Project
Woman Adopts Dying Dog To Give Him The Happiest Final Days Ever – Ned Hardy
Technology And The Future Of Immersive Gaming – Hexagram
25 Common Misconceptions about the Middle Ages – Crowd Ignite
A little cleavage never hurt anyone – Bro My God
36 Movie Theater Secrets They Don’t Want You to Know – Ranker
A Look At The 488 GTB And The Future of Ferrari – Worthly
Filipino Boy Shields Birthing Cat From Raging Typhoon In Touching Moment Of Kindness – Pulptastic
This Is Why You Stick Your Foot Outside Your Blanket When You Sleep – Linkiest
21 Images That Perfectly Depict a Normal Day in Japan – Pleated Jeans
How To Drink Whiskey Like a Sir (video) – Leenks
Victoria Justice Is Hot in NYC! – G-Celeb
Caitlyn Jenner’s Deadly Malibu Car Crash Captured on Bus Security Video – Gawker
Exxon Knew of Climate Change in 1981, Lied – Newser
Fill My Cup and Start the Weekend Early (47 Photos) – Radass
The 100 Dirtiest Moments In Comic Book History – World Wide Interweb
Man Drugged His Girlfriend so He Could Play Video Games in Peace – Complex
Beautiful and Busty Girls (44 Pics) – Regretful Morning
5 Ideas The US Needs To Steal From The Rest Of The World – Distractify
Wouldn’t mind coming home to this everday – Double Viking
Watch everyone’s favorite weather girl play Volleball in tight shorts – Playboy
Eva Longoria is still in a bikini – Celeb Slam
Inside Amazon’s Warehouse, Human-Robot Symbiosis – Technology Review
Don’t act like you’re not impressed (27 Photos) – Bad Sentinel
Make It Reign: How An Atlanta Strip Club Runs The Music Industry – GQ
Irene Verasio Owning the Volleyball Booty Rankings (Video) – The Rackup
Bill Cosby fired by agent, dropped by talent agency – Death And Taxes
The Lotus C-01 HyperBike – The Gentleman’s Garage
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1. It’s hard to explain, but for me it’s that the sense of being part of some story where you are the protagonist kind of fizzles out unceremoniously and leaves you drifting for the rest of forever.
As a kid, you’re on a path, there’s a plan laid out for you, and whether you intentionally break from the plan or follow it to the letter, there’s this linear progression of growth, and an ultimate goal to strive for. You have allies, you have enemies, you have trials that you pass or fail, you have moments of catharsis, etc. You feel like part of a beautiful narrative, like the heroes in movies and books and tv shows and stories. You feel like there’s a right and a wrong way to go, and some ultimate fate waiting for you at the end that will sum up what all of it meant.
When you get to be an adult, that illusion crumbles away as you realize that you don’t have a narrative, there is no path or plan, things aren’t always linear, and you’re nobody’s hero. There are no allies, because friends can be both good and bad for you simultaneously. There are no enemies, because frankly no one cares enough to wage a personal war for long. You don’t have a destiny. You make choices that are more a product of random chance than you want to admit, and sometimes the consequences make sense, sometimes they don’t. You may flounder around in a bunch of different directions for many years, ultimately not making any progress, and having nothing of import to show for it. You’re not a good person or an evil person – you’re just an ant wandering around looking for crumbs. No, worse than an ant, because an ant has a purpose in life, to serve its queen and colony. You can choose to align yourself with a purpose, but it may never fulfill you or reward you. And nobody will be waiting with a shiny gold medal for you if you stick to it.
Life as an adult seems less and less like an exciting adventure story and more and more like a delerious, confusing fog of random developments and passing phases that raise more questions than they answer.
Edit: I somehow put my first edit in the middle of the text, which made it weird. But it said thank you very much for the gold and comments. I appreciate all the insights and solidarity, and the disagreement too.
I haven’t always felt this way about adulthood, and I probably won’t always feel exactly this way. It’s not as if everything’s hopeless, or that I’ll never try to find a direction for my life. It’s just that the realization of how small your impact actually is, and that you are not destined for anything great, and how subject you are to forces bigger than yourself – that’s a tough pill to swallow
2. No one wants to go out and play. Your friends arent hanging around the neighborhood waiting for you to get out of work. You cant call anyone spur of the moment and say “Hey lets go loiter in a gas station and break glass bottles”. Every social event is planned begrudgingly around everyone’s schedules and usually aren’t as fun as they used to be.
3. That feeling that you spent your whole life tapping the world on the shoulder and when it finally turned around you forgot what you had to say.
4. When you fail, you fail. The world is content to let you die in a gutter. As a child you (hopefully) have parents who are looking out for you and will help you if you need it. As an adult you’re on your own.
5. Ive started to notice the fucking repetition of it all. EVERYONE doesnt like being at work (Case of the Mondays eh? FML) EVERYONE starts having kids. EVERYONE says sugar is bad for you Its almost like life becomes a bad movie that you can predict the lines to and all the plot points. And for that matter a lot of movies become so much less interesting because all the themes and mores’ have been beaten to death Its at this point that you MUST inject chaos and humor into this sad fucking state of affairs or you will die slowly on the inside. Seriously.
6. Resilience slipping away. I’m 28. I once could sleep on a floor with a rolled up towel as a pillow. Now I have a pillow top bed and need several pillows to sleep well. I could eat pizza all day. Now if I eat it at night, heartburn for hours. If I hurt myself, it doesn’t heal over night. If I get hungover, it takes all day, not just 1/4 of it, to recover.
7. I am now completely in charge of buying my own toilet paper. Any day could be the day that i turn to that unforgiving, empty roll.
8. Honestly, I think it’s the realisation that it’s all now your responsibility. There is so much freedom and awesomeness that’s yours for the taking, but there’s nobody else there to back you up anymore. You have to make your own decisions and then stand by them.
But the thing that I personally really struggled with was that there’s nobody there to cheer you up, or tell you off. When you’re a kid and you feel bad, you might get a hug or a pep talk from a parent. When you’re on your own, you have to learn to look after your own mental well-being. You have to learn to take the knocks and learn from them.
And also, nobody will say “Hey man, that’s a lot of dirty laundry there, you’re not gonna have any pants left the day after tomorrow – do some washing” or “It’s 2am, turn off the TV or you’re gonna be tired all day at work tomorrow and it’ll really suck”. You really have to learn how to run a house, and run a life on your own.
It took me a while to realise that this isn’t something that just happens to people when they hit 18 or 21. It’s learned, and it needs practice and it takes some work. Looking after your home, and your mind isn’t easy, but it makes all the fun things about adulthood 400% better once you start getting the hang of it.
9. I think for me the simplest summary is the lack of time.
Oh you want to have food and shelter, here let me take over a third of your usable time.
Want food, its not stocked for you, you need to spend 40minutes to get what you want.
Need to do home repairs? Well say goodbye to your weekend, youre going to be spending some time at the local electrical/plumbing/lumber shop.
Want to cook dinner for yourself, oh crap, I just finished cooking and now its 8PM.
Want to get a good nights sleep, oh wait heres an emergency phone call at 3AM, better take it you need the extra $ to pay for the house repairs, save for retirement, or go on a much needed vacation.
Want to take a day off to get things done, well nows the perfect opportunity for your body to remind you about all those hours of sleep you missed this week.
10. just hit 60….
the adults were right… they said I’d never have as much free time as i had in college. word.
nature does not give a damn if you are happy or not. pretty much up to you and completely under your control. how YOU accept the world presented is all that counts.
life is short. another place the adults were right. when i was a kid, the ancients were 35 years old and so powerful and wise. i’d never get there. except that was a quarter century ago now. zooooooom.
a good life plan (for a guy) is to have adventure, make a buck, kiss girls as often and deeply as possible, love life, dance, protect the weak, learn every day, keep a journal, laugh, sing, create, listen to old people, try and make peace, forgive, be generous with what you have, spend time enjoying what you encounter. decide on a mission at some point… an expedition or a goal and move a little bit in that direction every day and before long…bingo!
taxes, bills, death, sickness, loss, injury, misfortune happen. accept it.
love, fun, beauty, goodness, kindness, growth, happiness, comaradarie…. these things happen to. pay more attention to these.
take care of the most important old person in your life when you are young.. that would be YOU when you are old. save some, be healthy, build a loving community around yourself. you are responsible for your happiness and security as an old person. get cracking!
did i mention the girl kissing part? all the magic in the world comes from love, i think. don’t lose sight of the magic.
11. As a 27 going on 28 year old who now has a career away from where I grew up, I would definitely say it’s slowly losing touch with 90% of the people you care about. A friend gets married here, a friend moves there, a family member passes here, another there. Every time I get a chance to visit home I can’t help but notice that the list of people I want to visit, and the people that want me to visit gets a little shorter each time. Life doesn’t wait for us, and it seems like every day one good friend or another is slowly drifting towards being just an acquaintance. It really sucks.
12. Realizing how often important results can ride on chance, not effort, lack thereof or what is inherently fair or not fair. But you have to let that go. Don’t let it make you bitter or give you a reason to stop trying.
13. Bills everywhere, insurance, rent, taxes, car payments, the costs of living never stop. This means you have to keep working just to maintain the status quo.
14. How quickly physical fitness can slip away from you and how much harder it is to get it back.
15. Nobody remembers how to have fun without getting drunk/high.
exploring the woods, playing in the snow, going on hikes, wandering through your city, trying to get on rooftops, chillin at restaurants, jumping in the lake, floating down the river on an innertube, trying to build a fort– nope! all gone. never going to do it again.
i miss exploring. i miss taking walks. i miss swinging on swing sets. i miss having FUN. everyone just wants to drink. this starts at 14 and it never returned. legos? they must be constructed EXACTLY like the star wars box says. then it sits on a shelf. no more wild creation for crazy worlds. coloring? NOPE everybody chuckles “oh i can’t draw” then pours another glass of wine.
hell, even fairs or midnight showings are a bust. people just play on their phones :((( (or head to the beer garden)
i remember when everybody in the neighborhood would jsut be outside for hours. sometimes we’d draw with chalk, maybe a hopscotch snail thing, maybe a kickball diamond. sometimes we’d form clubs and fight over who’d be the leader. sometimes we’d pull out our military-type walkie talkies that had over a 3 mile range, and try to pick up a stranger. (it could interfere with phone calls, which was awesome. met some other kids this way)
other times we’d wander around the neighborhood, befriending the cats along the way. sometimes we’d ding dong ditch and pretend the people were chasing us.
hide and seek. tag. red rover….all that’s gone. once you hit 14 people start to realize gender and then nobody has any fun anymore. trying to get laid, trying to get high, trying to get wasted….. nothing else. that’s all.
i hate being a grown up
16. You realize just how alone you can be. When you are dating someone, it is amazing, but then you kind of still realize how alone the two of you are as a unit compared to others. At the end of the night, everyone goes home and you might not see them again for a few weeks.
The only thing I think is worse is when you realize you basically go home from work, eat/gym/go to bed, and then you wake up and go back to work. Half of your day centers around something pretty meh.
17. Routine, you do the same damn thing day in day out because you have to. No more spontaneous adventures, you want to do something?? Better plan it for a weekend or your vacation.
The post 17 People Describe The Crappiest Part Of Being An Adult appeared first on Caveman Circus.
The ropes are lookin’ a little frayed…
BBC Reporter Gets High Next to Heroin Weed & Opium
240 years of Army uniforms in 2 minutes
How To Make The Meat Lover’s Roll
Drunk girl leaves a fantastic voicemail to her new crush.
Why You Shouldn’t Provoke A Bull In Spain!
The post The Dumping Grounds appeared first on Caveman Circus.
15 Photos Guaranteed To Put A Smile On Your Face – Ned Hardy
20 Awesome Natural Phenomena That Actually Exist – Hexagram
How To Date When You’re Poor: A Woman’s Guide For Men – Linkiest
15 Dating Tips That Will Strengthen Your Relationship – Ranker
Gigi Hadid Unleashes Her Bikini-Busting Sexiness – Crowd Ignite
Hot girls rocking yoga pants…nuff said – Bro My God
Who are The Real Life “Skynets” of The World? – Worthly
Hulk Hogan, All American Liar – VICE Sports
Suspects Jump Off 25 Foot Wall To Escape Police (video) – Leenks
This Chicago Burger Is Apparently America’s Best – Newser
Nina Agdal in a hot bikini photoshoot – G-Celeb
How to cook the perfect steak – Tasting Table
Luisa D’Oliveira is a Cutie (21 Photos) – Radass
7-Foot-6 UCF Recruit Tacko Fall’s Diet Is Amazing and Slightly Nauseating – Complex
50 Funniest Double Take Photos Of All Time – World Wide Interweb
Can You Guess The Most Popular Porn Search In Each Country? – Distractify
Kelly Monaco is fun – Celeb Slam
Student shares sexts and snaps from the teacher he hooked up with – Playboy
Is Jessica Alba The Hottest Woman On Earth? (30 Pics) – Regretful Morning
Another Teacher Caught Having Sex with an Ungrateful Student – The Blemish
Tbe 21 Most Secret Bars In America – Thrillist
This girl fills out these pants so damn nicely! – Double Viking
College Babe of the Day – Katerina Dagher from University of Maine (Photos) – College Envy
Cool online game of the week – Bad Ice-Cream
The post Awesome Stuff Around The Internet appeared first on Caveman Circus.
Worst Moshpit Ever
Matt Stonie eats massive 12 pound burrito
And I think I just found the most intense woman ever!
The Sushi Chef: Shark Hearts & Fish Sperm with Yoya Takahashi
Woman on Hong Kong subway melts down when her phone battery dies.
The Utterly Demonic Sound of the ‘World’s First’ Corvette C7 Stingray Turbo!
Drunk girl leaves a fantastic voicemail to her new crush.
Why You Shouldn’t Provoke A Bull In Spain!
https://youtu.be/RqQVNK2HVsA
A day in the life of someone taking care of someone with Alzheimer’s
I am uploading this to help dispel the notion that Alzheimer’s disease just makes you forgetful. It is a Fatal disease that slowly kills your brain over the course of years. There is no cure or even any treatment to slow the progression of the disease. My father clings to some the sense of doing chores, but just wanders around the house constantly doing things like this. I lost my mother to cancer nearly twenty years ago, and I think this disease is far far worse. My dad served his country as a An infantryman in Vietnam and then served as a police officer in the city of Detroit for 15 years before having to retire on medical disability after his patrol car was hit by a drunk driver. He does not deserve to spend his retirement like this.
The post The Recap appeared first on Caveman Circus.
