Lately, I've been thinking about a framework I call scarcity vs abundance environments for us humans. In short, most of our lives (especially here in America) we are in scarcity mode and we usually have competition - to get into schools, in school itself, work life and so on. When we encounter people, we usually find them to be self-protective, closed. Many purely social social experiences can have this quality as well.

In contrast, we also find ourselves in environments - usually when we're part of some collective activity - where the scarcity starts to be forgotten/recedes into the background and a group shifts into abundance mode. What was zero sum becomes greater than the sum of the parts. My most recent experience with this was at a concert. Once everyone settled in, everyone's interests became 100% aligned on having as much fun as possible in order to vibe with the band (and inspire them). People became way more open. The more an individual contributed, the more everyone got out of it. I've noticed the same dynamics in other locales as well - group exercise for example.

The terminology I most used before would be something like "it had a good vibe" to refer to abundance and maybe "toxic" for scarcity. But I've realized that there's benefit to being more fine-grained than that. I really like abundance environments and I'd like to be able to seek out more of them. I'm highly conscious of when an environment has moved into an abundance mode, and I'm trying to be in abundance mode as much as I can.

I'm also interested in thinking about the nuances of this framework. One type of activity could just as easily be scarcity or abundance (think of an overcrowded concert) however certain things (music for example) have abundance properties. Being part of a group is a requirement, but not a guarantee. Candidly I wonder if part of this is awakening our dormant hunter-gatherer selves.

Hi, I'm writing a plot for my comic that touches that topic and I would really like to hear multiple opinions for inspiration.

The question is too abstract so I'm going to specify with the following questions:

Can a person committed a horrible act be redeemed? Can you call a person good if they are that way just for validation? What does 'good' actually mean?

I would like to hear your thoughts even if it might be controversial! This will help me a lot.

I don’t understand why I see so many taken or married women with personal male trainers. A lot of those trainers don’t even look like what they preach. How are they supposed to help you build muscle or improve your cardio when they don’t seem to have much muscle or fitness themselves? It makes me cringe. But the muscular ones are even more suspect because we know that if they are fit and muscular, whether naturally or through steroids, their testosterone could be higher than average, making them hornier and more likely to crash out. And honestly, it’s annoying because it always seems like those guys have hidden intentions. I feel like they just want to smash their female clients. This is why, if your girl has a personal male trainer, don’t date her—or just smash her and leave

Male user who normalize cheating. Need to get humbled

Sometimes I think about how expensive it actually is to be poor.

I know it sounds a little weird. Like, if you don't have much money, you're supposed to spend less, right? You buy cheaper stuff, try to save wherever you can, give up things you don't really need. But somehow, the less money you have, the more you end up paying in the long run.

For example, let's say you have a bad tooth. If you have money, you go to the dentist and get it fixed right away. If you don't, you wait, deal with the pain, take painkillers, tell yourself you'll get it treated later when you have some money. A year passes, and what could've been a simple filling now needs a root canal and a crown, or maybe the tooth can't be saved at all and you're looking at an extraction and an implant. You didn't choose the more expensive option, you just couldn't afford the cheaper one while it was still an option.

The same thing happens with shoes. You can buy a good pair that will last for years, or you can buy whatever you can actually afford right now. They fall apart after a season, so you buy another cheap pair, then another one, and after a few years you might have spent the same amount of money, maybe even more. You knew the expensive pair would probably be cheaper in the long run, you just never had enough money at once to buy it.

I think the same thing happens with time. If you have money, you can order food instead of spending time cooking, take a taxi, pay someone to repair something, buy appliances that make your life easier. When you don't have money, you spend your own time instead, you take a bus across town because something is cheaper there, fix things yourself, cook everything yourself, carry everything yourself, wait 40 minutes for a bus because a taxi costs too much. Then you go to work and sell the rest of your time anyway.

Personally, I don't even think the worst part of being poor is not being able to have nice things, because you can kind of get used to that. It's everything else: the extra money you end up paying because you couldn't pay earlier, the time you lose trying to save money, putting off medical treatment, the constant stress over some random expense that would be nothing to someone else but can completely fuck up your month.

That's why the whole "poor people just need to learn how to manage their money" thing annoys me sometimes. Obviously financial literacy matters, and yeah, people absolutely waste money on stupid shit sometimes, I'm not denying that. But there's only so much you can do with a budget when there simply isn't enough money to begin with.

Sometimes someone buys the $30 shoes instead of the $150 ones not because they're stupid or don't understand that the $150 pair will probably last longer. They understand that perfectly well, they just don't have $150.

I've been thinking lately about whether keeping up with the news constantly really does us any good. I get why we do it because staying informed matters and knowing what's happening around the world has real value. Plus the media does give us hopeful stories and political comedy that people from all sides can actually enjoy together even when there are serious worries about free speech.

That makes me wonder why we spend so much time getting so frustrated with each other over the headlines. Political coverage always feels like it's forcing us to pick a side. We want our team to win and we get stressed out when it doesn't, only for the whole cycle to reset the moment a new story breaks. It is easy to forget that the people we disagree with are living in the exact same world we are.

Maybe that is the part we lose sight of when we glue ourselves to the news cycle. We focus so hard on who is winning and losing that we forget we many of us are dealing with the same basic human experiences. No matter where someone stands politically we are all navigating life at the exact same time. We all have personal struggles and things we care about, meaning we can disagree on politics while still sharing the same fundamental reality.

So what are we really getting out of this constant consumption? Being informed is important but if taking in more news mostly just drives us to resent our neighbors then I don't see where the benefit lies. The real question probably isn't whether we should follow the news at all but rather how much of it we actually need before it stops being useful and just starts dragging us down.

Reddit opionion is always divided on almost anything and anyone ( prolly as it should be )

But over time I found that everyone here loved Dolly Parton. If not loved , seemed to say she was the ideal of good human .

Loved some of her country numbers, but honestly don know much about her . Asking what was it about her ?

Rest in power Reddit good human.

When I say one thing I mean it could be anything. Anything from quitting a bad habit to starting a new healthy habit, maybe finding a new job. Anything you’ve done that made you proud of yourself.

Or maybe something you’ve changed that you aren’t proud of and want to stop.

I'm a man in my 30s who's been out as gay for my entire adult life. I've been with men this entire time, yet despite finding some great guys, I failed to make a deep connections. Something honestly always felt off, like I was missing something.

Two years ago I kinda took a step back, wanted to really analyze my sexuality, and what I needed. What i think I'm discovering is this:

I have VERY deep, previously unrecognized romantic feelings for women. I have very little romantic feelings for men. I'm sexually attracted to both, but for different reasons and on different levels.

My attraction to men has really always revolved around having other guys validate me and want to be near me. I was sick a lot and isolated growing up and never really bonded with my male peers that much. Never felt like 'one of the guys' and it drove me nuts.

My journey with women is very new, but i think it already feels fuller. In a way my connection with guys simply wasn't.

So idk. I guess it's good to rethink things and allow yourself to grow. Just because you've labeled yourself, one way doesn't mean that is the only way you can exist.

I'm at least bi now, idk what identity necessarily.

My gayness, in a way, was a phase. That doesn't make the experience any less valid and it was a necessary part of my journey to get to where I am now. It looks different for everyone.

In the age of ai where everything is so easily available, ideas are everywhere, friends, followers, connections in 1000s but still why we feel so disconnected in real life? Why do people have to cry to chatgpt rather than their friends. Everyone is aware that social media overconsumption is bad it's continuously bringing constant comparisons, ai over consumption is making us dumber still why screen time of people of every age group is spiking.. what's needed to not let people in their 20s, youths waste 10+ hours in social media rather than making real life connections, memories, friends and actually living life..

Answerrr guysss.. pleasee.. what's really are we missing?

My father was in Easy Company, so I have watched it more times than is probably healthy and I have never been able to see it as a war story. To me it has always been about what happens to a group of men depending on who is put in charge of them.

What surprised me is how many other people came to it that way. A man told me last week he had to watch it in a leadership class. Another said they used it when he was an officer. I understand it is still shown at West Point.

That is unusual for a television series. Most things from 2001 are gone.

What I keep thinking about is that the show gives you the same company under four or five different men, so you get to watch what each kind of leadership actually does to people. Sobel breaks them in training and they hate him, but they survive Normandy partly because he broke them. Winters leads from the front and they follow him anywhere. Dike is absent when it matters and men die for it. Lipton holds the company together with no rank and no authority at all.

For anyone who has watched it, did any of that change how you think about leading people, or being led? And if you saw it through a class or the military rather than on your own, did that framing change what you took from it?

The days as a kid felt so long, i could do so much stuff back then. And now i blink and it's over. I am not sure if my memory deceives me or we start to experience time differently when we grow up?

Here's my story for that.

When I was in middle school back in 2011-2012, there was an old still-running Pepsi vending machine in my (very small) town that was owned by a local business. It sold pretty much all of the major soda varieties at 50 cents per can. They were ice cold, too. I happily used it like I was supposed to for quite some time, often stopping by it while walking home from school. But of course being a broke young teen who wasn't old enough for a job and whose parents weren't terribly well off themselves, I didn't always have change on me for the machine, so getting my 50 cent soda was still more a privilege than a daily thing.

Well, eventually, one of my more streetwise friends found that the machine could be easily opened up, and you could reach through the outside cage and take the sodas for free. And well, us being the roaming group of bored poor kids we were, once he told us, we all got in on nabbing sodas from that machine. Most of the time 1 or 2 of us would just swoop by and nab 1 or 2 sodas, but there were a handful of times where we came over as a group and made a whole organized heist out of it, with 1 or 2 kids working the machine and filling a backpack with sodas, and the rest of us posted up all over the area keeping watch in all directions, even using hand signals to warn each other if a car or person was coming nearby. There were no cameras nearby that we knew of, and we generally did this at night, but there were a couple more bold operations carried out in broad daylight.

This happened off and on for... I wanna say around 6 months before we realized hey, maybe some of us don't want to get in trouble. The business owner almost certainly knew what was up as well, as he installed a motion light over the machine and eventually fixed the lock that we kept prying open. But, he never confronted us, we were never caught, so, after growing out of it we sorta just forgot about it.

Until a few years later in High School, when the business owner came to the school to be one of those motivational guest speakers. Me and much of the old squad happened to be sitting together attending his speech, and towards the end of it while talking about how your actions can affect others and whatnot, he brought up how some years ago some kids were stealing sodas from his vending machine, forcing him to fix and secure it better which was very difficult for him. He was a disabled Veteran (ofc we didn't know this at the time of the soda stealing), and he kept repeatedly looking right at me and my buddies during that specific part of his speech.

We all agreed that the old man more than likely knew it was us, but for one reason or another, chose not to confront us, call the police, or say anything about it until that day years later. If his goal was simply to make us regret our past stupidity, well, it worked. We all felt terrible for the rest of the day.

TL;DR: Stupid Middle School Me and his equally stupid Middle Schooler friends stole cans of soda from an old vending machine repeatedly, came to deeply regret it years later when we found out the owner was an old disabled veteran who struggled to restock and repair it- something he seemed to directly tell us during a school speech.

It’s strange how easy it is to spend years working toward something because you assume it’ll make you happy, successful, or fulfilled. Then you finally get close to it—or actually get it—and realize it wasn’t what you wanted at all.

I'm not even sure that there's such a thing, but I feel like I'm not interested in life itself, it goes deeper than procrastination or fear of failure. I feel like nothing sparks my interest anymore, even when I play a game and it poses me against some kind of challenge, I just don't feel the desire to do the work to overcome that challenge. Now I must say I'm not sad, I don't hate existence, I just play along when it's necessary, but other than that every activity that people do just doesn't spark any joy (dating, hooking up, gaming, learning a skill.....), other than reddit and YouTube I don't have social media because it feels like social noise and emotional pollution.

One might ask: then what do you do all day? I just play Sims half mindedly and listen to podcasts without paying much attention, I'm not even sure what to call that.

We consciously and unconsciously generate good and bad deeds. Not being in a vacuum, these deeds branch out and present people with various moral choices as a result. There comes a point in which the initiator is free of moral responsibility regarding the outcome of their deeds' secondary effects. When do you think this break occurs?

Michael Crichton, in his book: Tineline

Is the first, that i know of, to show the audience how a wormhole would work by folding a piece of paper in half. This concept can be seen through many current age sci-fi movies that it's become a trope. I'm assuming during his research for his novel some scientist explained it to him that way, but he was the first to show the world this concept through a form of media.

Does anyone know any other media that influenced the zeitgeist in some way yet went unnoticed by many?

What are your personal, unique, mourning customs? Not the traditional stuff you were raised with, but things you have developed intuitively through your own experiences of loss.

I was journaling at a cafe recently while looking outside the window. The cars were honking at an intersection, windows rolled up, on the phone, rushing to work. I paused and reflected on how disconnected they felt in that moment. I decided to have a conversation with Chat GPT about it (I actually do this a lot ironically) - I typed 'Do you think AI will make us more connected or more disconnected?' - what followed was an interesting back and forth but the essence of it was that AI suggested that Humans will likely gradually choose more 'frictionless' interactions with AI over the messy human ones.

I felt it rang quite true but sad - I frequently feel I have to mask and be extra polite in talking to people so I don't offend their feelings, However with AI I can have a truly philosophical conversation and it will not be offended by any of my points. It also can break down my own thought patterns and offer me an understanding of other people's behavior as well as the legal system or any renovation problem I face the way other people would struggle to.

Yet when I think about the most beautiful moments of my life - they were shared with the people I loved or connected with (even briefly). So where does this leave us humans?

It is a real paradox that even though we are the same species we can somehow can get a better understanding from a machine.. What do you think about it? Does this ring true for you?

What is making us so disconnected from each other and how can we welcome friction back into our lives to embrace our messy human interactions and be there for one another?

---

A little anecdote from my life (for context).

I was at a BBQ recently, sitting in a circle by the fire with some mates. The conversation we were having was sheer nonsense - kind of like the daytime radio that you switch on and switch right off because it adds zero value to your life whatsoever.

I suggested us talking about something more interesting, philosophical or meaningful and offered the above reflection from AI.

As the conversation unfolded, part the group got very offended by some of my ideas / statements, part of the group became hostile choosing to actively avoid the topic and speak over the top. The conversation ended with the host actively drawing it to a close and escorting us back into the house which was very ironic given the topic of the conversation. I then told several of my friends about it and they, too (to my deep surprise) felt that BBQs are no place for deep conversation and it should be perhaps avoided in general. I, myself, felt quite offended and concerned that it is getting progressively more challenging to be honest with people and have deeper conversations (a gathering around a fire felt like an intimate enough place to discuss deeper topics).

I also feel that the world is moving so quickly that if we don't continuously voice our opinions on the recent technology or its impact on us and be part of the policy making conversation now, the bigger decisions will be made for us by the larger corporations, our governments etc erc

I've noticed that I'm repeatedly drawn toward conversations about the things people are trying to make sense of in their lives.

I'm not interested in advice, therapy, support, or motivation. I'm more interested in asking questions, examining ideas and assumptions, looking for underlying patterns, and sometimes offering a perspective you may not have considered.

Whether you have something you're wrestling with — a decision, a regret, an identity question, an existential crisis, something you're stuck on, or just something that doesn't quite sit right with you.

I don't have an answer to your life, nor will I pretend to. What I can offer is another mind to think with.

I'm less interested in solving the external problem itself — how to grow your career, what to do after getting fired, how to get a girl, what decision you should make, etc.

I'm more interested in what's underneath those questions.

What does the situation mean to you? What are you assuming? What are you afraid of? Why does it affect you the way it does? Is there a pattern you haven't noticed?

What matters to me is being willing to look at things honestly, including the uncomfortable parts. I'm not looking to convince you of anything or tell you what you should do. I'm interested in understanding why you think and feel the way you do, and seeing what we can uncover together.

I honestly don't know yet whether I'm particularly good at this. That's exactly what I'm trying to find out.

I'm curious whether this kind of conversation would actually be useful to people.

Has anyone else ever wished they could temporarily borrow another person's perspective when they're stuck inside their own?

I recently rewatched The Odyssey, and the Sirens scene hit harder than I expected.

In the movie, Odysseus describes the sirens as: “All the things you want it to be. Then, all the things you wish you never wished for. It was the delicious itch you go to scratch, but find it’s under the skin. You can’t reach it. So the delicious itch becomes unbearable. It told you what you most want is what you most can’t have. And what you most can’t have is what you already had—and lost. It was the song of all the promises I failed to keep. And it told me I don’t really want to go home.”

For me, I thought of life the way it used to be, when my family was close by, everybody was healthy, and I was in such a rush to grow up, only to find adulthood carried more weight than freedom.

What would the sirens sing to you?

My whole life, I've seen the same theme in films and books: people finding true happiness in relationships after (mistakenly) thinking that achievements and possessions matter the most. Uncle Scrooge, every Christmass movie, the materialistic antagonist in half of the books, religions preaching to respect the immaterial instead of the material etc.

However, I've always felt that this doesn't apply to me. Whenever I think about my happiest moments in life, they are related to professional, academic or personal achievements. Not to seeing a newborn family member, hugging family, hearing "I love you", laughing with friends and family or anything similar to this. Instead, I think of stuff like better numbers at work and recognition for them, academic achievements, improving my body, mastering foreign languages, all the books I've read in the past months etc. Family and friends still feel nice, but not nearly as good.

I can't imagine being 60 and thinking "oh, shit, I should have focused on friends/family". Even if I start needing them, logically, this wouldn't have been the thing that made me happy in the first 60 years of my life, so it wouldn't feel like a loss.

I'm still in my twenties, so you could say I might change. However, your personality remains pretty stable your whole life. I'm curious - are there other people who feel that way, or do you think this is a common source of fulfilment in life?

I've lived in a lot of different places in the past couple years, and while every place has had its ups and downs and I don't love where I grew up, my home base still feels like where my parents live.

It's really hard to imagine living or settling anywhere, I guess. Every time I go somewhere new, it feels temporary, even if there's no clear end date in sight.

Does this feeling ever go away? Is it just part of being in my twenties? People who move around a lot - where do you consider "home," and how do you make yourself feel at home wherever you are?

As title states. changing full name (first middle and last)

how difficult is it to do?

What all do I need to get after the name has been changed? A new drivers license and a new social security number?

Not looking for the usual motivational answers. What’s something life taught you that permanently changed the way you see people, relationships, or yourself?