supertofu

Thank you for the recommendation. I worry about developing a dependency to ketamine, but in NY state where I live, it is legal for therapeutic purposes. I might consider it. I prefer microdoses of psilocybin, since I have a bias towards plant medicine, and I know exactly where the fungus came from :)

And just a funny note re: dancing -- part of my healing journey has been through ecstatic dance. It is a completely sober practice of dancing intuitively and freely with others. While I love ecstatic dance and can easily dance with no fear or anxiety, even in non-ecstatic spaces, I cannot actually speak to strangers or express my desire to become friends with someone.

It's easier for me to dance with complete strangers than it is to converse with them :) One of my most recent social struggles has been the discrepancy between intensely beautiful and intimate bonds formed with people while practicing ecstatic dance, and then finding myself completely unable bond with them via conversation after the dance is over.

I sometimes wish I lived in a world where no one knew my language and it was ok to have a partnership that relied only on body language. Relying on speech to bond with others has failed me for decades and I don't understand why.

Are you in contact with your family at all?

I resonate with this comment strongly. I have never been diagnosed, but I strongly suspect I am neurodivergent. My extreme social isolation/anxiety in my college years and twenties led me to dependency on alcohol and cannabis. I never tried hard drugs, but my life back then was just one tiny twist of fate away from me becoming an opioid addict.

I did manage to become sober, and a lot of social challenges have become more manageable now that I have a better framework for understanding my mind.

This is shocking. Where have you lived that this is so common for you?

There is a very famous American Buddhist monk called "Ajahn Geoff" who teaches this exact thing. Most people WILL commit heinous acts under the pressure of starvation. (And that's why he and other Buddhist monastics urge the taking of the Buddhist moral precepts).

There must have been, else I wouldn't be in this situation.

I'm pretty sure I don't have an alter ego who lives in the UK ;) The shipping address and accounts opened by this person are very obviously not mine.

I live in NY.

I frequently get emails intended for someone who has my same email handle, but with the extension "@googlemail.com" instead of "@gmail.com".

I know a lot about them. I know their shipping address in the UK. I know that they order inexpensive club attire, online Dominoe's delivery, and have a specific gym membership.

I am shocked that Google offers no way to disentangle my email address from this person's. A more malicious person than I could easily take advantage of all of this personal information.

The odds your son exists are about the same as the chance that the last extant turtle on Earth, swimming alone through the Earth's barren oceans, should happen to swim right through a particular wooden ring, tossed at random into the sea from some vessel a million years earlier.

I like the idea! I am studying math and interested in learning more about Finance. However, the categories seem a bit broad, and it is a bit too easy to select categories which are completely unrelated. As a total beginner, I would love pre-set learning tracks that link one topic to another in a progressive way.

"The good man plants a tree whose fruit will be tasted by his grandson" is a proverb I came across once about date trees. There are a few varieties of this for various precious trees which can take generations to bear reliable fruit.

Wow! Amazing to see that not much has changed in 2500 years with regard to the support of wandering ascetics. Culture can be very deeply rooted, especially in a civilization as old as India's.

I believe OP was an employing a rhetorical device called hyperbole to emphasize their disapproval of the situation.

I truly believe that most people who enforce Shakespeare in education without acknowledging the absolute bawdiness of his works are themselves barely literate or poorly educated, and could not think of anyone more suitable.

That said, a high school English curriculum could do with more scandalous writers simply because teenagers love that stuff. I loved Oscar Wilde back in 10th grade. Absolutely scandalous, scathing, and hilarious writing.

I remember reading an unabridged edition of Huck Finn in 7th grade that my mom had in her book collection. I was shocked at how different it read than our assigned copies. And no, I'm not talking about the racial slurs. The abridged version was in a simplified English, paragraphs and whole chapters had been edited out or reordered, whereas the unabridged version was a colorful and playful style of English such that I had never before encountered. I was a voracious reader and it still took me a month or so to get through the unabridged version of the book. I had to "translate" the witticisms and puns, but came to realize in time that Mark Twain was exceptionally clever, very funny, and not at all as racist as the volume of N-words would have it appear. (For the record, I'm Black).

Nowadays, I doubt any schoolchild gets exposure to unabridged anything unless they have a parent with archaic book collections.

I doubt any monk allows these images to affect their practice, but the sangha (community of ordained monastics) as a whole abides by hundreds of extremely strict rules which are designed to signal to the laity their virtue and comittment to practice. It is absolutely in the interest of the sangha to ensure that the reputation of monastics is protected.

That reputation has been building for thousands of years, and upholding that reputation -- carrying the very sacred teachings of the Buddha in a particularly strict and graceful way -- is very much part of the religious teachings.

Images like these certainly threaten to damage that reputation among less educated laity.

I myself, a convert western Buddhist no less, was surprised and a little disturbed to see these images. I imagine the shock that these images might generate for born-Buddhists and cultural Buddhists would be far stronger, and far more harmful.

Don't forget that monastics depend on the laity for alms -- their literal food, medicine, the material for their dwellings, and the cloth for their robes. The sangha was designed by the Buddha to remain interdependent with the laity. The sangha could literally die out if the laity developed distrust in it.

Practice!

I'm very glad that you experienced generosity! But I don't think your experience is the norm. One week of wandering is not exactly a lifetime. I also can't help but assume from your plucky, overconfident dissent that is based on a very short duration of experience that you are a white man.

India at the time of the Buddha was favorable to wandering ascetics. People were culturally conditioned to donate alms. And, indeed, alms-seeking is required by the vinaya for monks, so they can't live in complete seclusion from society.

Society today is very hostile to wandering folks. Many western monastics independent of monasteries (especially female monastics) have a hard time getting alms without a lot of organization.

Oh no!!

What you have realized is that attraction is more than just physical beauty. There are plenty of non-verbal and biochemical cues that generate attraction. That's why you find these women in real life more beautiful than women on screens.

It's why the article linked in the root of this thread was even written.

Human attraction happens best in person because there is more to it than just looks.

In-person interaction fulfills our innate biological desire for community.

Remote work is just a means of earning income.

You are comparing apples to oranges by assuming there is some relation between online chatting and remote working.

I've also had intense, beautiful relationships via chat that were completely flat IRL. A soul-crushing experience to my younger self.

I think the other commenter nailed it: in text-only chat, you end up projecting your own ideals upon the other person.

Human communication is full of nonverbal cues which do not translate at all over text. In absence of those nonverbal cues which our brains are (usually) wired to pick up on, we end up mining the text for semiotic constructs which conform to our ideals of the other person, rather than the reality of the other person.

This is done subconsciously, and doesn't become obvious until you meet the person in real life and they are completely different from what you imagined.

And if the "prototypical person" chosen were female, how would the data change? That's what I'd like to know.

It was required of my sister to participate in 23andMe for an anthropology class of hers in college. I cringe now at what a violation that was. Even if she had the option to decline (which I am not sure she did), it's hard to say no to your professor when you're 19.

I had no idea this fruit was Native to the US! I can't stop smiling at the idyll of the enchanted creek side pawpaw grove.

You could have just said "I don't know".

I'm also pursuing a BSc. My original degree is a BA and employers/recruiters see me as an "alternative" self-taught engineer, despite a decade of experience. I think a lack of STEM degree can really hurt a resume.

You do realize that people who WFH have friends and communities outside of work, right?

Imagine you were training for a marathon. There's a right way to do it and many wrong ways to do it. You could injure your body by training poorly.

Mindfulness is the same way. There are correct techniques and hundreds of very wrong ways to go about it.