#fynndin rambles

[fynndin]

I often heard the word “self sabotage” and reckoned, it’s bad. I never actually knew what it is, so I thought about it for some time, observing me, past actions of mine and people around me.

Self sabotage is not starting, because certainly tomorrow the weather will be better, your mood will be better, your work partner will be nicer, that person who’s being an asshole will be little less of an asshole. Tomorrow you will feel more up to it. For sure.

Self sabotage is taking a break and wondering, the entire time, if that break is justified and if you can afford it. Sure, you considered it long and hard before and deemed it necessary, but you could be working right now.

Self sabotage is reckoning, that you have things you can change that would make things better, but first pointing to outside circumstances that you don’t control. What is the reason in putting any work in it before this is gone? God forbid, you could be ready to go before this minor obstacle that you can’t influence is gone.

Self sabotage is not taking the gadget, the help, the offering, because there is a hypothetical better thing to do the job. You just don’t have it, maybe you can’t afford it yet, maybe the thing this person offered you is only your second or third choice. You take it, because you’re polite, but you will never use it, because at some point you will have your first choice and it will all work out itself. Why bother with anything before?

Self sabotage is making priority lists and always using “but someone else expects me to” as the number one priority. Always. No matter how much you have to fix your own shit, others always come first and that’s how it has to be.

Self sabotage is looking at others surpassing you and throwing away your tools, because why even try? Somebody else is already better.

Self sabotage is always, always needing to be ready to take action, ready to go, ready to react, never idle. The option that you could not have everything at hand to do a thing is unforgivable. The option that you might have a spare minute and not have the tools around to work would be even worse.

Self sabotage is not trying, because you already thought this through and you don’t believe it could work. Others might have done it, but you don’t think you can do it, even though you would like to, but look at all these indicators that it will be hard!

As you see, there is self sabotage that keeps you from starting and self sabotage that keeps you from stopping when you should. If you’re really good at it, you can do both at the same time. The stars know, I did and probably still do sometimes.

If this resonates with you, maybe it’s time to sit down and think. People sometimes say something about “changing your life” and probably you hear that and think “yeah, you say that like it’s simple, but look at all these things stopping me!”

Are they stopping you? Or are they stopping you from trying, because you expect them to be in the way?

Let me rephrase that: Have you tried it? If no, will you literally die if it fails? No? Then why are you still here? Go ahead, give it a go. I’ll be here with tea and millimeter papers, pencils and a sword to replan with you if it fails.

[sleepyoceanprince]

Why Avangers Academy Is A Leech And A Plague

A lot of people around me play it and I just need to make a salty post because I’m getting angry and frustrated from just seeing them succumb to it.

I don’t even care what the in game plots are or if characters are portrayed falsely or what have you. AvAc just gets my goat, because it LITERALLY leeches on your life energy and this is THE INTENDED WAY OF THIS KIND OF GAME.

For all that psychology knows, the ability to withstand temptation, the amount of energy you can muster up for a task and the ability to just get up and do it are the very same resource - often referred to as spoons on tumblr so I’ll stick to that. If you want to read up on the whole thing in detail, I recommend this blog post that includes lots of infographics and source material.

So here is why AvAc is a demonic leech: It tempts you to pay money that you probably don’t want  to pay and every time you decide against it, you lose some of your spoons to it.

If you don’t pay, you may have to stick to a very tight schedule to get the chars/items you want and watch a lot of stupid ads as well. Every time you go online because your schedule says so, you’re reminded that you could also just pay money. Every. Time. Bye, bye, spoons.

And then sometimes you just don’t get the char in the end anyway cause maybe you didn’t manage to keep up or the game glitched. You put work into it and get exactly nothing for it. You’re upset. You know what eats spoons for breakfast? Being upset and frustrated with something you can’t change.

If it had any positive, lasting pay off, that could make it worth it, but “having” a digital character or item has only very low positive effect on your mood. Not nearly enough to cancel out, that the next event is only days away and will dangle the next piece of nigh-unreachable bait over your head.

AvAc is built to cause addiction.

And if your reaction now is to think “but I want that happy thing in my life, don’t turn it sour for me because you don’t like it”, yes. This. This is exactly the state they want you in. You’re in deep enough so that it feels painful to get rid of it. I have been there with other, similar games and it’s always the exact same feeling.

Think for five minutes: How often are you happy about what happens in that game vs. how often does it make you feel stressed? How often do you actively decide against paying for it or pay for it and ask yourself if that was a good way to spend money? How often do you not get what you want? What‘s the balance?

My two cents: Run while you still can.

There’s still fanart and fanfic about it. Nothing wrong with that. Just get rid of the effing game.

[fynndin]

So, after studying for 9 days straight and going throu 210 pages of psychology textbook I now discovered that i got the wrong book and already went through far more subtopics than required.

Not to mention last time I took this exam, I already studied for the wrong topic.

Is this shit cursed? Usually psychology is, like, the EASY part of my course of study?????

Welp, one weekend to get through three chapters of the correct book I GUESS

[fynndin]

can we just like... cancel today? pls? like srsly, i broke down in tears over having to stay with my parents this noon, then i went to a birthday that was actually nice and thought “wow, maybe that day wasn’t all that bad” just to completely put my foot in my mouth and probably make someone feel devastated (laire if you read this: i’m sorry, i was an inconsiderate asshole), then read that carrie fisher died and now i’m thinking about what a trainwreck my life is, because it is and i have no idea what to do.

on that note, i should probably drink a glass of water and sleep. i’m like 99% sure there isn’t anything good that can come out of staying awake any longer but at the same time, i’m so upset that i’ll probably toss and turn forever.

the end of this year is certainly looking up.

[fynndin]

I Am Allowed To Indulge In Things

Guess I should write that on my notebook, stitch it into my clothes, tattoo it onto my forearm or something.

I’m not even sure where the notion comes from that I am NOT allowed to indulge in things, but it’s definitely there. Constantly, in the back of my mind there is this voice telling me, that if I don’t contribute to a thing, there’s no point in being there at all.

Now for some part of life, that might be true. Trying to contribute is not a bad thing, but it slowly has gotten to the point where I don’t even consider just attending an event or being a guest somewhere.

If I’m a guest, I offer to bring food or drinks, as soon as someone starts cleaning anything I help out, if I promised to help I’ll be there 100% if not something really, really bad happens to prevent me from going. If I just said, I’d come over, no promise to help with anything, there’s a 50% chance I might bail on it, because it’s not that important that I’m there.

I organized a series of talks with some people lately and attended exactly those, which required my presence. On one occasion the others went out for dinner afterwards as a social thing. I went home, because having more sleep would be nice (I had to get up early next day) and I wasn’t really needed anymore. You better believe if they had needed me, I’d have stayed, lack of sleep be damned.

Sometimes I wonder if the complete lack of interest in sex I have going on for years now, but that definitely wasn’t there always, is a result of me feeling like I don’t have to be there. Like, people can have sex with someone else and get pleasure out of it without me and me liking it isn’t that important. Right?

No, of course that’s not right, but that I only seem to ever realize in a cognitive way. When I read “treat yourself”, all I can think of is hot chocolate, a bubble bath and binge watching stuff on netflix. As soon as someone else would have to do something for only me, even if I’d pay them for it, I don’t feel like I should have that.

And now that I wrote this down, it all seems to make sense under the premise, that I feel like I’m not worth anyone else’s effort, not even if I pay their effort, god forbid they did it simply because they like me.

Guess I’m kind of train wreck sometimes. But that’s why I need to work on myself. So if you resonated with what I just wrote and if this all feels exactly like you, repeat after me:

I’m worth other people’s effort. I am allowed to indulge in things.

[fynndin]

I guess due to noscript or something all these posts where people put picture emojis into their text just show text with little boxes containing numbers to me.

but they’re used a lot

so now i sometimes think about writing something where i’m REALLY excited about a thing

and think with little breaks in the speech in my head

where the boxes would be

i’m thinking boxes

the boxes are excite

what am i

[fynndin]

every time i hear people pull up the old “but self-driving car algorithms might have to decide whether to let you die or run over a vulnerable target if you were about to get into a crash with a pedestrian”-argument, i am tempted to shout at them: “if each time this ‘decision’ came up in a  world of self-driving cars, the car would deliberately try to kill as many people as possible in this very specific scenario, the death toll of traffic in that world would still be second to none compared to what we have now!”

people steering cars are fucking scary. if every car was driven by a mediocre trained computer program, the streets would be safer than while letting faulty, easily distracted, often sleepy, more often yet irresponsible human beings drive cars, while they are bothered by their emotions or maybe even tapping away on their phones or on drugs.

the fact that you HAVE this choice to make already is one wildcard less in traffic. of course it is uncomfortable, but if a human had steered that car, the situation would not have been avoidable per say, that human would just have been to slow to actually make a decision at all. it’s an accident in both scenarios.

if you want to make weird, actually relevant, scary estimations about self-driving cars, i give you this: how many hackers that were planning to go on a killing spree would have to successfully take control of a car per year to bring the death toll of traffic back to where it is now? how many cars would actually have to go full on rage-quit, by-passing all emergency shut offs to make things as dangerous as they are right now?

THAT is a question i’d like to have answered, cause with our current state of it-security, the average demographic of hackers and the average demographic of terrorists and school shooters (which look astonishingly similar), this seems quite relevant to me.

[fynndin]

Are You Wasting Your Time?

I’m currently considering a lot of ways I could turn my life around into something I really want to do and along the way I’m talking a lot to a very good friend who doesn’t always share my opinions, but often has some good input and often takes some good input from me.

Yesterday we talked about free time. He mentioned that he doesn’t really believe in the concept of “free time”, because it is mainly used as an excuse to waste time. I strongly disagreed. Still struggling with the aftermath of depression, some amount of free time to “waste” is very important for me to stay sane and functional.

Along the discussion we agreed upon a very different kind of categorization of time. Basically what you have in your life are three kinds of time. Maintenance time, well spent time and wasted time.

The original idea of wasted time upon my input turned into maintenance time. Actually, everyone needs it, some people need more of it than others, but everyone needs some time off to do whatever they feel like. And if you’re really down in the dumbs and what you need is staring at the sky for three hours, than maybe that is you maintenance. Find out what maintenance is for you, it’s important.

Well spent time is time that you spent on getting closer to your very own goals and making progress on what you set your life to. For me this goal is still very fuzzy, but I still have a very good idea of what part of my time is effectively getting me there and what not. Typing out this post here is most likely part of it.

So what is wasted time then? Wasted time is time you spent on furthering the progress of others because the structure of society forces you to. In most cases, that means working for a wage. There are lucky people for whom their job is exactly where and what they wanted to be. If you asked them what they’d do if they didn’t need money from now on until forever, they’d say, they’d keep doing just the same thing.

Most of us are not that lucky. And for us not-that-lucky people, time that we spent on getting food on the table and the bills paid is time that is effectively lost in every sense of the word. This is why you shouldn’t do shit for your work unless you’re paid for it. This thing you’re doing for money, it’s eating away from your time. Wasting it.

Now your goal might be to get paid for what is exactly the thing you want to do. It might as well be something else entirely. Whatever it is, keep in mind that unless you reach this point, working for your money is wasting your time. Make sure there is some not-wasted time in your schedule and make sure to get your maintenance done. And often there is a way to reduce the damage by getting a job that is at least some good for you.

And find a goal that drives you forward. Without that, all your time is just waiting for it to end, and you’re worth more than that.