Australia, eastern seaboard
Australia, eastern seaboard
My experience with cosmos is you’re going to have a lot of cosmos, in unexpected places, a lot of the time.
Diffuse can be used as a verb meaning “to spread out” or an adjective meaning “not concentrated.” It is often confused with defuse, which can only be a verb. The original meaning of defuse was “to take the fuse off a bomb,” but the word now usually means “to make less dangerous or tense.”
When you look for things to be angry about, when you look for things to be resentful about, you find them.
When you look for things to be satisfied with, when you look for things to be grateful for, you find them.
I found the opposite. I have achieved far, far more through practising gratitude, knowing my values and moving towards them rather than being pressure and goal oriented.
I went for a walk this morning, in a park near my house. It was cold and grey, so.i was grateful for my gloves and for the solitude. How good is it that I can go for a walk, in a park near my house? Hear birds, breathe air see trees, smell the frost? How good that there are parks, and birds, and it’s safe, and I can walk. I want to keep doing it. I’m grateful for that.
Like I said, gratitude is hard.
It is hard to have gratitude when there is inequality
It is hard to have gratitude when competition is encouraged and enshrined by people who benefit from it
It is hard to have gratitude when the constructs in which we live seem unjust
It is hard to wake up and look around and find something to be grateful for
It is hard to be grateful when all you can see is what you don’t have
Being genuinely appreciative of what you do have leads to a quieter mind and a happier life. We have one life.
It comes across as some stupid bullshit, I know. But the resentment and frustration aren’t useful. Clarity of mind and purpose is, and is more sustainable than passion and anger.
My 2c.
https://www.jamesmollison.com/where-children-sleep
We are privileged. Gratitude is hard.
Younger than 45
Oh OK that actually makes sense.
45 year olds and above are digital immigrants. In short, they had an off-line childhood and an online adulthood. They have different speech and writing patterns to you because they learnt and communicated in a different way to you.
Assuming you’re under 45, this won’t make sense, because you’ve never experienced a world which doesn’t have this sort of interaction. You’re a digital native, digital tech has always been there.
In twenty years time, children born or educated after the advent of chat gpt will have the same problem understanding you. The way you write, post and interact will seem clunky and old fashioned. It’s already happening - we’re having to adapt the way we interact, in order to be able to ‘be understood’ by AI.
The wonderful thing about humanity, tho, is that we do adapt and adopt! Consider this - everyone over the age of 50 had to learn something completely new to them in order to be able to communicate with you via email, sms or messaging app. They used to just talk, or write letters. Sharing media was a physical act. Yet here they are using the same texh as you. Awesome.
our parents felt the same thing
Your dad simultaneously saw you as the baby who slept securely in his arms, the child he saw through junior school, the teen who he tried to help steer past his own mistakes and the adult he wistfully spoke of with pride
Imagine how good he must feel to know that you remember him this way.
The reason I say in person is because if the amount of information which is transmitted via direct conversation is orders of magnitude higher than through eye contact, tone, language and body language.
If you and I were talking right now, I could maintain eye contact, rotate my shoulders so I face you, position my head in a way that says I’m listening, use my voice to indicate that I’m contrite, or uncomfortable, or supportive.
It can be excruciatingly uncomfortable for people who are used to having virtual tools abstract away the hard parts of interaction. But that’s exactly what (in this case) women are saying they feel. They feel, in the real world, they’re not safe. To me, the weight of that comes from a direct interaction rather than a news article or twitter post.
My opinion etc
Read their post history, it’s a troll
I think it has to happen in person.
At the heart of this is the unfortunate fact that nuance is lost in online discussion. The reason that the bear scenario is so notable is it is so polarising. “yes! That’s how I feel!” vs “you’re reducing me to a threat”
An honest and direct conversation between two peers is far more likely to have a lasting effect. Hearing what the lived experience is directly from the person who’s experiencing it is far, far more more compelling than the stark bear statement.
I don’t feel unsafe most of the time. But I have felt unsafe and vulnerable before. Thus when a female colleague told me about being followed by a guy in a park while walking her dog, and feeling torn between straight running away and keeping her pet safe, it resonated directly with me. I could see her reliving the experience and see her distress. She shouldn’t have to go through that. It’s not fair.
That conversation resonated far more completely than the bear tweet.
It’s a lot easier to identify with the bad guys if you’re assumed to be a bad guy.
“Women think I’m more dangerous than a bear? What the hell? I never did anything”
Followed by
“hey what this guy on YouTube says is true, women sexualise themselves, I mean look at instagram. This isn’t my problem,.”
I know this is a bit of an over simplification but thought 1 is what I thought.
I’m a bit older, tho and my second thought was - “but ive never felt unsafe alone with a woman, definitely have felt unsafe around some men.”
It’s missing a comma
Tldr “In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god’s blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence”
Yeah seconded… That worked for me.
I spent a bit of time going through your post history to get an understanding of your background
In short I think your life experiences mean you’ve lost all trust in men. Not just your direct experiences but what you’ve observed in others.
As a result you enter each interaction assuming the worst. Every male social worker you engage with will confirm this pattern because that’s what you’re looking for. The - ah fuck here we go again - feeling.
For them, and I don’t expect you to have empathy for them, this is what they live - the outcomes of other mens behaviours. But - they were there and they tried. That is something.
You have changed quite a lot of your original post.
Story time.
During a conversation amongst friends the topic of male on female violence came up. there was recently a stabbing attack in Australia where a schizophrenic man stabbed and killed multiple women in a Sydney shopping centre.
A female friend raised the statistic that 26 women had been killed in the first 114 days of 2024. She made a point of saying Every 4.38 days a woman is violently killed
I asked - because I didn’t know - Is that like heaps more than last year?how many people would normally die in the same period?
She said "that’s a pretty misogynistic thing to say”
So I googled it and I can’t even find the homicide rate in Australia for 2024.
I am really fucking irritated about this. I assume she had assumed from my question that I was waving off the importance of gender in gendered violence but how that translates into misogyny is beyond me
Yeah no. Performance, reliability, uptime are huge.