catarina

At last, a truly unpopular opinion here.

I hear you OP, but in my region (northern Spain and Portugal) you would have to reeducate 99% of the population over 40. Especially in rural areas. It was freeing living abroad in Ireland because people would actually stare at me less, even though I was a foreigner. It’s a weird cultural thing 🤷‍♀️

What are they to do?
Shrinking discretionary budget, more and more responsibilities at work (multiple roles condensed into one), and a looming sense you are easily replaceable with layoffs and AI tools.
On the other, if you are taught your only worth is your job, there is no point in exploring outside of that, and spending your energy on things that won’t make you a good worker.

I get the argument for getting a job, though. Here is my perspective: I would find something I could do part te, and that I felt was really useful. I have consideredany times working in a nursing home with elderly people - being able to help them and hopefully even bring them some joy would benefit me, because my personal sense of purpose is tied to collaborating and giving back to the community around me. Plus, it’s the type of job no one wants to do; if money weren’t an issue, and I didn’t have to put in 40+ hours a week, I would be happy to pick it up.

I had been trying to go off my antidepressants for a while, and tapering it off is the recommended way to do it. However, there are still side effects, and dealing with the side effects while having to stay on my normal work routine and stress was too much for me.

I took one month off on unpaid leave. Not only did it confirm that I didn’t miss a thing from my bullshit software dev job, those were 4 busy and productive weeks, with many projects I had left on hold. Plus, I felt much better in terms of health. It allowed me to taper off an SSRI. And I lost weight too!

That’s one long ass strawman.

Downvoting not because it is unpopular - I actually agree with parts of it -, but because it’s an incoherent rant fueled by anger against some “undeveloped” country where magically everyone can fix engines with a piece of string. Big “hate the global south” vibes from this one.

I don’t know you or your mind, but from that, it sounds busy AF.
That’s not what a mindfulness practice is like at all. To be clear, I wasn’t referring to a dictionary definition of mindfulness, but to the Buddhist meditation kind. In mindfulness meditation you would be working to get to a completely different state, where you simply observe, instead of analyzing.
I could be projecting, and I apologize for that, but I see myself a little in what you described: I used to scan myself all the time, and think of things to fix and improve, dwell on what I did wrong and what I am going to do better tomorrow, think through many moral scenarios and arguments so I would act in a sound and correct way. That’s fine and very valuable.
It is also why mindfulness was hard for me to get into - because I couldn’t be inside my head like that all the time. It is almost the opposite of that. It’s hard to step aside from that torrent of thoughts, especially if you are an introvert and used to tapping into that rich inner world. Mindfulness meditation is training your mind to reach a sort of silent tranquility, a blank slate where you can draw your true intentions on and then maybe reach deeper insights. It helped a lot when I accepted that we are not entirely rational, even when we think we are acting purely on logical thoughts. We need to connect somehow to that latent emotional side, to recognize it more often. And this only clicked on my late twenties, until then I thought I could just think myself into any desired outcome (spoiler alert: it didn’t work).
I am sure there are many resources out there that explain this better than I can. My point is introspection != mindfulness.

That’s a common misconception about mindfulness that I fell - and sometimes still fall - for. It’s not about knowing a tool or framework, and using it when you think you need it. It is not debugging a one off. It is a practice. You do it as a routine, and it slowly shifts how you face the world and yourself. It’s not the answer we are looking for, especially in a crisis, it’s not a fix. It’s a change, it takes the rest of your life, and it’s not a linear system of inputs and outputs.

https://tenor.com/YqCL.gif

I love the sentiment: “just don’t die because it’s awkward AF”. If “joie de vivre” doesn’t make you cling to life, there’s always social anxiety even after death 🤣

Nice misogyny you got there

Exactly! Remote work available to more people would also help.
Cities are starting to feel all the same now, so I love staying rural, no food delivery, enjoying what each season brings, and buying less stuff. Cities are hot, full of cars and noise.

I don’t disagree with the sentiment of your comment, but I feel it lacks some nuance.
First of all, where are those empty houses located? A lot of the pressure is in larger urban areas: Lisboa, Porto, Braga, Coimbra. If the houses are away from an urban centre, they might as well not exist.
Portugal also has a huge emigrant community, and it’s common for emigrants to have a house back in the home country, usually in more rural areas, but not always. These houses are a little retirement plan, and tend to stay unoccupied for months or years, only used when that owner goes to Portugal on holidays, or when/if they decide to return.

Disgusting, they shot a kid and made sure he couldn’t be saved:

One Israeli soldier chased Rafat and shot him in the abdomen from a distance of 10 meters [33 feet],” DCIP said.

The Israeli forces shot at Rafat again when a Palestinian man came to his aid, said the group, the only rights organisation specifically focused on children in Palestine.

“The Palestinian man threw himself on top of Rafat and rolled him toward his house, less than five meters [16 feet] away. The man and his family sheltered Rafat for about an hour and a half as the Israeli military prevented ambulances from accessing Jenin refugee camp.

Pff, weak.

An Irish mad lad

From the article:

It is a temperature anomaly of almost 15 degrees above typical values.

37-15= 22ºC

Spotify pays very very little to artists per stream. Tidal is a better streaming platform to send money their way.