You hurt because you care. You care because you hurt.
You care about your cat, about your partner, and about your relationship. This is important to recognize. It's important to give this its proper space, not minimizing it but also not making it define your life.
What I mean is that sometimes, our brain tells us things that are helpful and sometimes it tells us things that are unhelpful. Sometimes, our brain becomes a dictator. This dictator avoids pain at all costs. It looks at pain as something that needs to be solved.
Here's the thing: emotional pain cannot be solved in the same way that physical pain can sometimes be solved. We can fix broken bones. We can heal skin wounds. But we cannot magically solve emotional pain. Why? Because we hurt where we care.
Here's a way to look at emotional pain: would you want to be the kind of person that doesn't feel pain when their loved ones die? I bet you wouldn't. And that is human. It is a way of looking at emotional pain with dignity.
Here's another way of giving some dignity to the pain of losing someone: humans hurt when loved ones leave because we have a yearning to belong. This is not even a cultural thing or otherwise a learned thing. It is pre-verbal. Grab a baby and look at its eyes, and its brain will be flooded with endorphins. We are wired for connection. Most mammals are too. And some mammals have specifically evolved to live with us. An example of this is your cat: it comes from a lineage that has learned to live with people.
So what can we do about this emotional pain? For one, being open to it and being aware of it. It is a part of your life and it is worth holding with dignity. You can look at this pain as if you were holding a delicate flower. What's its shape? What's its color? Its texture? Its inner consistency? Its power? This exercise helps with coming to terms with tough experiences. It helps us accept problems that can't be solved.
You can also choose to actively engage with your life in a way that you find meaningful. What kind of person do you want to be? What do you want to stand for? How would you like to approach life? This puts you in the driver's seat. And you will feel your emotions pulling you aside. They will tell you that you have to stop driving, that you have to solve problems that can't be solved. Your dictator will not like the pain. And yet you can listen to your dictator talk in the copilot seat and choose to drive.
This is what grief sometimes looks like: emotions that come and sometimes overwhelm you. What I'm suggesting is that you can be open to them, be aware of them, and choose how you want to engage with life.
If you do this, your partner will notice. There are wild studies that show that psychologically flexible people are able to make others around them more psychologically flexible. It's been measured in the context of traumatic experiences like pediatric surgery and natural disasters: parents who are psychologically flexible are a safety net for their children, and those kids are less likely to be traumatized and more likely to be psychologically flexible later in life.
What I'm saying is that you can model psychological flexibility and that will probably have an impact.
I hope this helps. Let me know if you're interested in where my thinking comes from and I can point to some resources.
I'm sorry for the tough situation you're in. Best of luck.
If you do, I think you’d benefit from Starting With Heart and Mastering Your Stories. If you do choose to reply, you could Create Safety by creating a common purpose.
You can also learn to notice your thoughts and impulses so that you can choose more freely.
Mindfulness can help. Defusion exercises can help. Acceptance exercises can help.
I have an uncle who designed his signature before he learned to write in cursive. When he was a child he just practiced until he found a scribble that looked nice and chose it. That’s what he uses even today, decades later.
His signature doesn’t resemble his printed or cursive name at all. However, if you look at it it fits right in with the weird signatures that people choose to do.
I suppose the benefits don’t seem that great. Though I wonder…
Implementing dates in software is not trivial. A more sane calendar system would reduce production costs in the long run.
Heck, even increasing predictability by having the same weekdays for the same dates would reduce human mistakes of all kinds! I say that because in Lean and Agile, one of the consistent findings is that reducing variability in production processes of all kinds reduces mistakes and increases efficiency.
Imagine not having to take out your calendar every time you’re planning dates. Amazing.
Finally, imagine the greatest benefit of them all: calling September the seventh month, October the eighth, November the ninth, and December the tenth. I always say that if my job was designing a calendar and I showed my boss a calendar where “September is the ninth month”, I wouldn’t last long in that job.
Another comment said you can safely assume he’s your boyfriend. Before I did that, I’d want to have a clear and explicit conversation about exclusivity (do you two want to have it or not?).
As to your broader question, sure the label to the relationship might help in clarifying expectations.
But more important is what kind of person you want to be to him and vice versa. Years from now, if you were to look back on what kind of person you were in this period, what would you like to see? Kindness? Exploration? Consistency? Honesty? Playfulness?
I’ve been having caffeine for about a decade, around 400mg a day. It has changed my brain, so tapering slowly seems like the only sustainable solution.
If I go cold turkey I’m just too miserable and cognitively incapable. I think my sweet spot is around 5% reductions every 4-7 days.
Just wanted to let you know that maybe your target reductions could be even smaller.
If 5% every couple of days is too slow, I’ve heard people doing up to 15% every couple of days. Of course, the only way for you to know what works for you is testing it.
I remember some years ago I was traveling in a city that I didn’t know and I heard two people in front of me talking passionately about Game of Thrones. We happened to be on the same path, so I just heard the conversation for a bit before I decided to join or not.
They sounded like good friends who hadn’t seen each other in years. They’d jump back and forth from GoT to very basic questions like “Hey, speaking of brothers, is your brother still dating her?”
Who would wanna spoil that beautiful moment by interrupting it? Moi ✌️😎 Why? I was alone in the city, they seemed cool, and I’d leave them alone if it felt awkward.
It turned out to be alright, because I had GoT fresh in my mind and because my very basic questions about them were also a way for them to catch up.
We walked and talked for hours, before I decided I’d leave them to do their thing.
When I look back to that memory, I’m glad I decided to join them.
I agree that sometimes "everything is politics" might lead to unsavory conversations. My goal is not to defend that.
I think our goal in places like Lemmy is to communicate and understand each other, and, because of it (in the best of cases), live better lives.
How could "everything is politics" possibly lead to better lives? We may learn how our everyday actions —so-called "apolitical" actions— actually ripple out in ways that we actually care about.
For example, we may stop buying Awful Corp.'s bread and instead buy from our local bakery. We may stop assuming protein in our diet means misery-filled and climate-unfriendly meat and instead eat more healthy lentils, beans, and pea protein. We may stop buying purebred dogs from suffering-inducing puppy mills and instead adopt dogs. We may stop being brutal with ourselves because we didn't turn out as the media says we should've turned out and instead hold ourselves wholly and kindly while we ourselves choose what kind of life we want.
Saying "everything is politics" opens up a door. We walk into a room in which we can choose. We can choose what kinds of stories we want more of and what kinds of stories we want less of.
Sometimes we cannot do anything about the things that hurt, but we can hold them in our hands as precious, fully aware of what it means to be human. Other times we can indeed get closer to the things we care about, and we can take steps toward it, confident that we are living lives worth living.
To understand why there’s so much politics, it’s worth taking a step back. Lots of people in Lemmy understand that politics is simply how political goods are distributed.
What are political goods? Anything that people value: material resources, labor, ideas, attention, significance, etc..
So, if attention and significance are political goods, can you come up with a single thing that is not a political good and therefore isn’t political?
I had the opposite of you: I went from believing in mysticism and magic to being a materialist. All it took was talking to a friend and exploring our views.
Another one is believing in linear causality. I used to have hard stances on all kinds of subjects, but then I learned about Cynefin and functional contextualism. Now I am pragmatic.
Edit: I thought about this a bit more and realized that maybe this isn't such a good idea. This is basically security by obscurity, isn't it? And, if so, it has all the problems of security by obscurity, doesn't it?
A lot of comments here assume the research is to scam people. But if we want to understand Adobe’s research, I think it’s important to keep some things in mind.
If you’re an expert in the field of computer graphics, you probably find it thrilling to be surrounded by like-minded people, surrounded by people as skilled as you or even more skilled. This is something that Adobe understands. That is why Adobe invests in hiring bright minds to do research.
Is Adobe going to use this research to create extractive products? You bet! But the research itself is open to anyone.
This is similar to how Bell Labs is a corporation and yet it gave us innovations like transistors, Unix, and languages like C and S.
In general, if you’re at the bleeding edge of your field, it's harder to find places and communities that are enabling and motivating for your work. That is why scientists like Galileo or Kepler would work for rich patrons: the patrons would give them access to money and connections that enabled the scientific work. This is not to say that this arrangement is perfect, but it reflects the historically-grounded decisions that people often choose to take.
Whether we like it or not, today’s rich patrons are corporations (and nation states). And those are the places that today’s bright minds often choose to go to so that these bright minds stay in the bleeding edge.
Of course, I don't want to minimize the fact that Adobe is scummy and scammy. I just want to distinguish between patrons/capitalists and bright minds. They are motivated by different things. Basically, one wants profits and the other wants to advance their field.
I think the challenge ahead of us is how to minimize things like scummy corporate behavior and how to maximize bleeding edge research. Here are some potential solutions that I like: open source and libre software, open-access scientific journals, the entrepreneurial state, and mission economies.
You hurt because you care. You care because you hurt.
You care about your cat, about your partner, and about your relationship. This is important to recognize. It's important to give this its proper space, not minimizing it but also not making it define your life.
What I mean is that sometimes, our brain tells us things that are helpful and sometimes it tells us things that are unhelpful. Sometimes, our brain becomes a dictator. This dictator avoids pain at all costs. It looks at pain as something that needs to be solved.
Here's the thing: emotional pain cannot be solved in the same way that physical pain can sometimes be solved. We can fix broken bones. We can heal skin wounds. But we cannot magically solve emotional pain. Why? Because we hurt where we care.
Here's a way to look at emotional pain: would you want to be the kind of person that doesn't feel pain when their loved ones die? I bet you wouldn't. And that is human. It is a way of looking at emotional pain with dignity.
Here's another way of giving some dignity to the pain of losing someone: humans hurt when loved ones leave because we have a yearning to belong. This is not even a cultural thing or otherwise a learned thing. It is pre-verbal. Grab a baby and look at its eyes, and its brain will be flooded with endorphins. We are wired for connection. Most mammals are too. And some mammals have specifically evolved to live with us. An example of this is your cat: it comes from a lineage that has learned to live with people.
So what can we do about this emotional pain? For one, being open to it and being aware of it. It is a part of your life and it is worth holding with dignity. You can look at this pain as if you were holding a delicate flower. What's its shape? What's its color? Its texture? Its inner consistency? Its power? This exercise helps with coming to terms with tough experiences. It helps us accept problems that can't be solved.
You can also choose to actively engage with your life in a way that you find meaningful. What kind of person do you want to be? What do you want to stand for? How would you like to approach life? This puts you in the driver's seat. And you will feel your emotions pulling you aside. They will tell you that you have to stop driving, that you have to solve problems that can't be solved. Your dictator will not like the pain. And yet you can listen to your dictator talk in the copilot seat and choose to drive.
This is what grief sometimes looks like: emotions that come and sometimes overwhelm you. What I'm suggesting is that you can be open to them, be aware of them, and choose how you want to engage with life.
If you do this, your partner will notice. There are wild studies that show that psychologically flexible people are able to make others around them more psychologically flexible. It's been measured in the context of traumatic experiences like pediatric surgery and natural disasters: parents who are psychologically flexible are a safety net for their children, and those kids are less likely to be traumatized and more likely to be psychologically flexible later in life.
What I'm saying is that you can model psychological flexibility and that will probably have an impact.
I hope this helps. Let me know if you're interested in where my thinking comes from and I can point to some resources.
I'm sorry for the tough situation you're in. Best of luck.