Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)E

exasperation

@ exasperation @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Posts
3
Comments
454
Joined
1 yr. ago

  • Removed

    Besides bars and clubs, how does a guy put himself around more women?

    Jump

  • I agree with the others who say to get in the mode of making new friends through hobbies and other activities. Not every friend you meet will be dateable (a woman you find attractive who is available and attracted to you too), but the act of being social and making new connections does a few things specific to dating:

    • It helps you build your social skills for when you are talking directly to potential dates
    • It gives you new leads on friends of friends who may be interested in dating
    • It gives you a solid social circle, which makes you more attractive

    Plus, like, the actual benefits of friendships with other people, and having people to pursue your hobbies with, will just be great to have even without dating.

    Some concrete examples of how I've made friends (I've moved cities a lot so I had to do this like 7 or 8 times in my adult life):

    • Pickup basketball at a gym where this happens on a regular basis (even if not formally scheduled). Not a lot of women, but a handful of women might participate. But I've made lifelong friends this way, and have met some friends of friends through this.
    • Other social gym settings: scheduled classes with opportunities to work with or talk to others. I've made friends in CrossFit style gyms, and my wife has made friends through yoga and spin. Now I'm a regular at a serious lifting gym (and I drop into powerlifting gyms in other cities while I'm traveling), and there's often enough rest between sets to just talk to people and get to know others.
    • Being a regular somewhere, including places that don't cost money, like parks and libraries. I've made a ton of friends at dog parks, and have dated a few women I've met at dog parks. When you see the same people a few times a week, that familiarity gives you an opportunity to build up a real connection over time.
    • In a similar vein, recurring volunteer opportunities. In one city I lived in, I was a regular volunteer at a kitchen for feeding the homeless and elderly, and would strike up conversations with people while chopping vegetables or whatever. I got to know some, and ended up exchanging phone numbers at some point. I'm now on the board of a nonprofit and occasionally hang out with some of the other board members.
    • Socializing with neighbors. I take regular walks so I see a lot of the same neighbors around. Sometimes we strike up conversations, and sometimes we invite each other to events we host in our homes.
    • Work and career events. I did happy hours with coworkers, entered recreational sports leagues, participated in the occasional professional development type organization, and have made friends that way.

    I'm still a social guy. I'm happily married, but I still make new friends through many of these avenues, plus through my kids and socializing with other parents at their activities. You do it enough and you learn what type of people you vibe with, and who you enjoy being around. With that baseline/foundation, it's much easier to engage with potentially available women, too.

  • Rage jello

    Jump

  • Speaking as a working parent (married to another working parent), it's worth pointing out that this dichotomy isn't mutually exclusive:

    raising children is far more self-fulfilling than working a job could ever be for most people.

    I agree with this! But I also would note that of the 168 hours in a week, being away from them for 50 of them (especially if they're at school anyway for 30 of them) doesn't really detract from my ability to do both big picture parenting (teaching life skills, moral values, building memories, being a role model) or even the small stuff that adds up (cooking meals, helping with homework, listening to them, talking to them, taking them to and from extracurricular activities, pursuing hobbies together, etc.).

    So it's not an all or nothing thing. Most working parents can still raise children in an immensely fulfilling way, so the fulfilling part of a stay at home parent isn't actually exclusive to the stay at home parents.

  • Rage jello

    Jump

  • I loved cooking in a professional kitchen. The job itself was great. Some of the coworkers were all over the place, but I fucking loved the good ones.

    And there's something immensely satisfying about the teamwork behind turning a bunch of raw ingredients into multiple delicious meals, perfectly timed out with each dish hitting the table at the right moment. (The frustration of a kitchen that isn't doing this is a separate story.)

    But the industry itself has so much toxicity. Bad managers, bad owners. Substance abuse problems. And the real reason I left wasn't actually the bad pay. It was the miserable hours. I was always a night owl but I couldn't deal with the isolating separation from my family and non-industry friends from working nights, weekends, and holidays when everyone else was building memories and reinforcing bonds.

  • Rage jello

    Jump

  • I think that's true of many people.

    But I suspect that the numbers are pretty evenly split between "would thrive in either role," "would be miserable in either role," "would much prefer being in the paid workforce," and "would much prefer being a stay at home parent."

    My wife and I are squarely in the "would much prefer being in the paid workforce," because we like our jobs, and because we want our children in an organized school environment (and paying for after care is fine for them and for us). Most of our social circle are in the same boat. But most of us are mid-career white collar professionals and have better than average flexibility over work hours and location (at perhaps the cost of a blurred boundary between work and home). So our jobs are easier to balance with parenting.

    On the flip side, home situation matters a lot, too. How much you enjoy different types of household work (cooking, cleaning, home improvement/maintenance), different functions of a caretaker (feeding kids, scheduling out activities, being that first line as an educator or first aid or driver, etc.), how well your hobbies and interests fit into a lifestyle as a full time caretaker, etc.

    One of my friends gave up his main career to take care of his kids, but now that they're in school he went back to personal training at a gym. He lines up clients and is only available for sessions between school dropoff and pickup (10am to 2pm). It's a good intermediate holding pattern for him, and he'll likely go back to his main white collar career once his kids are old enough to be latchkey kids. That being said, I know he wasn't super happy not working outside of the home, and this personal trainer thing has him in a much better spot than when his kids were too young for school.

  • Rage jello

    Jump

  • The exclamation marks in "Surprise!" evoke the same energy as "Oops! All Berries," like you're biting into a "salad" and discovering it's Oops! All Mayonnaise.

  • Rage jello

    Jump

  • Pretty much nobody in my friend group (and we're all parents) would prefer to be a stay at home parent. Personally, that's a bad fit for me, my skill sets, and my preferences. I'd be miserable and bored, and feel that it would be a waste of the things I'm good at. My wife would feel the same way in that kind of caretaker role.

    Like, I think if we won the lottery and didn't have to work to maintain our lifestyles, we'd still send our kids to school and camps and things like that to get them out of the house and socializing with other people, while we'd probably still choose to work in some capacity, for some kind of public interest or passion project we'd do for reasons other than the money.

    Staying at home with kids just doesn't sound appealing as a day to day routine. I like my weekends with them, but I also like that we use the time to catch up, too.

  • Long Island man wearing 9kg-metal necklace dies after being sucked into MRI machine

    Jump

  • The US is an outlier in how it charges prices for healthcare services.

    But every country in the world has prices charged for cold liquid helium. It's very expensive to gather, process, store, and ship, regardless of what kind of health care economics apply in your country.

  • Aging 🫠

    Jump

  • I'm still active in my 40's and I have a bunch of nagging sports injuries, some of which trace back 20+ years. Overuse injuries are common, too. Ask pretty much any serious runner or lifter or full time athlete, and they'll all have things that they just live with.

  • Aging 🫠

    Jump

  • the kid is gonna die after it wears off

    Ah yes, the SUV is basically the bride from Kill Bill, doing the five point palm exploding heart technique.

  • I really did

    Jump

  • That JNCO era was really something.

  • I just spent four months in hospital in the UK. How screwed (financially) would I be in the US?

    Jump

  • I think you've hit perfectly why I don't like the "unalive" and related euphemisms for death. Death, especially violent death, is a big fucking deal, and trying to obscure that impact behind vague or even cutesy words, makes it seem mundane or routine and accessible.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • Every plant named in this meme, not just the ones on the girl, is a nightshade.

  • Cha-ching!

    Jump

  • I do live in an expensive area, but didn't mean to imply that the prices I'm describing are the lowest available. Some people choose to go to more expensive places, or order a more expensive option.

  • Cha-ching!

    Jump

  • Most people I know don’t go to bars for an efficient alcoholic experience.

    To reinforce what you're saying, bartenders I know tend to only have stories about one-off degeneracy that happens over the course of one night. But liquor store cashiers have stories about their regulars destroying their own lives over the course of months or years.

  • Cha-ching!

    Jump

  • Some of us might be drinking more than 6 pints (6 UK pints is about 7.2 US pints). That's one way.

    Another way is paying more than $15 per drink, yes, after including tax and tip in the US. That's somewhat common in some places, especially if cocktails are involved. Or higher end wine or spirits. Or even certain craft beers.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • Except maybe Electrical engineers.

    Yup, I can count just fine to the 10th number in a zero-indexed counting system: black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, gray, white.

  • Does anyone truly think times are better now than 30 years ago? (US)

    Jump

  • Yup, 100%. Gotta acknowledge the mixed bag.

    It's almost certainly better today for anyone who is gay or trans than 30 years ago. We have a long way to go, and there may have been some backsliding in the last 5 years, but things are undeniably better today than in the 90's.

    Certain aspects of race are better today. As recently as 1993, a majority of Americans still believed that interracial marriage should be illegal.

    Food is way better. Back in the 90's, there wasn't a ton of variety in restaurants available in all except the biggest cities, and a lot of food trends were still boring with flavor (plus we were still in the low fat craze that made things taste worse). Even groceries were pathetic in comparison: fresh produce didn't have nearly as many choices, and was expensive, so most people were eating canned and frozen produce by default. Little things like being able to choose apples that weren't red delicious, or potatoes that weren't russets, tend to be taken for granted today.

    Health and safety are better in most ways, but worse in some others. Obviously obesity and related diseases are worse today. So are some conditions like allergies, certain autoimmune disorders, certain cancers. But most cancers are less deadly today than 30 years ago. Traumatic injuries from workplaces and car accidents are down, and are better treated. And the huge diversity in the population for health means that a lot of people are living healthier than ever, even while a lot of people are less healthy than before. Life expectancy keeps creeping up in the cities, health expectancy seems to be up, too.

    Air quality seems way better, with smog and acid rain pushed down with successful regulations. And people don't smoke as much anymore, especially indoors.

    We can pursue our diverse interests from anywhere. If you drill down on pretty much any hobby, people who are really into that hobby have way more opportunities to share in that interest with people worldwide.

    There's a bunch of bad stuff, too. But we should also appreciate the good things that have improved in recent times.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • I appreciate the message, but I find this presentation style to be unbearable, like a shitty clickbait version of a TED talk: fast cuts with exaggerated audience reactions, playing hide the ball with the actual information being presented. And then they took what I imagine is a normal studio production designed for normal TV screens and cropped it into vertical video, published on Youtube as a short. Gross.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • Plastics are a broad category. But specific plasticizers, like BPA, have been demonstrated to cause specific endocrine issues, up to and including a causal link to certain cancers, miscarriages, and other reproductive/immune issues. And it's not just correlations being found, as the research is showing the mechanism of action by actually inducing the effects in vitro.

    And so when a particular plasticizer has been shown to be harmful, the research goes into other chemically similar plasticizers to see whether they have biological effects, as well. BPS is another plasticizer that is being studied, as it is chemically similar to BPA.

    So we haven't shown that all microplastics are bad. I'm skeptical that these effects would extend to all plastics. But some common compounds that are present in many plastics are a cause for concern, and the difficulty in treating water or waste for microplastics in general means that some of those harmful compounds are present in lots of places where we'd rather not.

    We moved from leaded gasoline to unleaded gasoline based on the specific dangers attributable to lead itself. We can do the same for the specific compounds in our plastics shown to be harmful. Maybe the end result is that we have a lot of safer plastics remaining. But your comment seems to suggest that we not even try.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • The brushes and loofas also contribute to micro plastic pollution.