Today on the way to the Kindergarten we saw a squirrel! We live the middle of the city but where we saw it there is a small forest close by and many trees by the road.

Seems like fertile ground for coming up with something fun and interesting ... a whole shadow universe that barely touches ours ... but I don't think I've ever seen it.

Man I dunno what is going on lately. Sure I searched for a few things on "purpose of life" and those kind of things which might be the reason I am getting these recommendations.

It's weird though that millions of people are struggling with the same things I am currently struggling with. I'm at a point inbetween I shouldn't be depressive. I shouldn't feel bad at all. My job is great, have a wife and now my house is almost "done". I don't have kids (yet). Life couldn't be better... but now there is this "but".

I have absolutely zero energy. Even if I love climbing and would like to start again, I rather just scroll through youtube or stare at a wall. I noticed that I personally have zero problems in my life but all the people around me have problems that I feel like those are my problems too.

Best friend of mine is alcoholic. Because of him I search so much shi.t about how to deal with alcohol problems. My wife somehow can't get shi.t done either. She failed her exams after 4 years studying and now is jobless but starting a new job next month. My brother is a leech. He doesn't care about my mom and our grandma but now that my mom is getting the "house" he is asking to help her with fixing it up etc... he just wants the house one day. That is going to be a huge fight in 20 years already. My coworkers keep crying about how stressful work is. I love my job and I have no stress because the tasks are easy and dunno all I do is drink coffee at work cause I am bored after 4 hours while my coworkers struggle to get done in 8 hours. My mom and uncle aren't talking with each other anymore - he was an a*shole the whole life towards her. I only know what I have seen and it was bad. I can't confirm her stories, but I assume they gotta be true from what I have already seen myself happen.

TLDR: So much drama around me that it is eating me up and if I wouldn't have contact with other people I would be so happy.

Really I think the best thing in life is try to avoid people and be on your own. They only cause drama. Imagine if I had just bought a van and drove up to sweden 10 years ago instead of buying a house I could just escape these people, even though I love all of them.

I feel so drained by the drama around me that I can't do what I love. I use to play video games 12 hours a day and not give a f. If my future me could have told me when I was 10 years old playing World of Warcraft was when I peaked in life I wouldn't have believed him. Okay that was kind of harsh, I achieved a lot and worked a lot for what I have now and I am proud of me but the people around me are lost and that makes me depressive.

I can't watch my brother be a leech, my mom and her brother fighting, my wife not being able to work in her "dream" field anymore duo to failed exams at the age of 30. She is literally starting from scratch with nothing at 30 years old. My alcoholic friend... man I feel sorry for all of those people.

I really know that I am lucky to be in my position. But I feel like I can't enjoy my "luck" or what I "achieved" because of everyone being so "bad" in life around me... it makes me feel sad I can't celebrate anything I achieve. It's frustrating going to work finishing a huge project and all my coworkers bitc.h around: "Great now we gotta repeat this til we retire.".... I can't get home from work and be happy cause my wife is rock bottom. I can't go to my mom cause she has problems. My alcoholic friend is a problem. I have no one to go to and be "happy".

I wish I had a few people in my life that have no problems and just enjoy life. That would actually be my wife if she didn't fail exams because she is the best person I know. I really wish she gets a better oppertunity.

My youtube feed is full of videos of being a better person, learning how to give 0 fcks, "mindset changing life" etc. The whole search feed is screwed and thinks I am a wrecked person eventhough I am just searching and googling for stuff about other people.

I'm really excited! I hope I can make friends this week

I worked as a plumber for over 10 years. The company I was with got acquired by a larger one, and after a few years, they shut down the entire plumbing department, laying off around 10 workers, including me. I was faced with the choice of either finding a new job in a small(ish) town, competing with 10 other plumbers for the same position, or finally doing what I’d been thinking about for years: starting my own business.

I didn’t want to focus solely on plumbing, so now I’m essentially what you’d call a handyman. I take on a variety of home improvement projects according to my skills, and I absolutely love it. Not only is there no one telling me what to do, but the variety of jobs I get to do is immense. No two days are ever the same.

On top of that, I actually receive gratitude for the work I do. Practically all of my customers so far have been visibly satisfied with the quality of work and service they’ve received, which makes my job extremely fulfilling. I actually feel like a useful member of society now. To be honest, I’m quite surprised by the amount of positive feedback I’ve gotten. I’ve always known that I have extremely high standards for the quality of my work, but I never considered myself a particularly likable person. I might need to reconsider that as the evidence to the contrary keeps piling up.

Of course, there are downsides. I took a significant pay cut, and the long-term success of my business remains to be seen. But so far, things look promising. I’m not looking to get rich, grow my company, or hire employees, but if I can maintain my current standard of living and never have to go back to working for someone else, I can safely say this has been one of the best decisions of my life.

Feel free to have a look at

• !movies@lemm.ee
• !showsandmovies@lemm.ee
• !animation@lemm.ee

I got hurt kinda badly on the job a few weeks back and so far the process has been agonizing between a RN that didn't believe I was in pain, an employer that seems to be laying groundwork for firing me a and a worker's comp insurance company that is more than a little loose with the timing of their payments. The whole thing has me pretty anxious, unable to do most things I enjoy and in a whole boatload of pain.

Anyone had an experience with an on-the-job injury? How'd it go? Any tales of full healing and victory over disability to brighten my outlook?

Okay this might sound weird but I work only nightshifts because I love the night and I do it since 4 years.

I wish I would have done it earlier cause I was never able to sleep at night before my morning shifts etc. and now I feel so good with this job. It's relaxing, it's a fun job and the best: I have no co workers in my shift I work alone.

For many this sounds like a nightmare but no management, only getting a 5 minute report from day shift is so nice.

Either way... I slept the first time in a fresh made bed after my nightshift for the very first time.

I usually make the bed fresh and my wife sleeps in it and then I get home to a yucky warm used bed. Some like it, I do too but nothing is better than laying down in a freshly made bed that smells so fresh and is cold.

My wife went to work and I took the time to take off all the bed sheets and made a new bed. At this point I might be crazy but I think I'm gonna change this task to "morning" task in the future. Why should I change the bed sheets but never be able to experience that fresh bed? If I only do it in the morning so I get to experience it would that be considered toxic? Would you guys care?

It's the little things in life I cherrish the most. A fresh unused bed is so underrated.

Follow up to this post: https://dubvee.org/post/1715655

I've completed the first week of my 30 day dumb phone challenge. There were a few hiccups along the way, and I had to break out the old smartphone more often than I'd expected, but overall, it's still been successful beyond my expectations (my expectations were quite low, and I figured I'd have given up already lol).

I probably won't be doing weekly updates, but the first week was pretty much expected to be the most challenging, so I figured a follow-up would be warranted.

TL;DR: So far, so good, and I'm actually enjoying it rather than tolerating it as I initially expected.

Main Challenges

MFA for my work VPN

That was, by far, the most frequent cause of having to break out my smartphone. Despite changing my default MFA method from app notification to code, nine times out of ten, the VPN would still try to send the app push. This is made worse by the really crappy VPN my work offers that will, on a good day, disconnect you at random one or more times per workday (sadly, I have no say in what product we use for that). Needless to say, the old phone remained at arm's length most of the workday (though I was successful in keeping it "out of sight, out of mind")

On day 3, it started to prompt for a TOTP token about half the time (yay, progress), and since day 5, it's asked every time. Why it took 3-5 days for that change to be fully effective is beyond me. Note to self: If I ever do change back to app push, never lose my phone.

Looking up Business Phone Numbers

I was out running errands and needed to call a local business to see if they had a specific thing in stock (the big box store I was near was out). Rather than run back to the parking lot and grab my smartphone from my car, I re-enabled the mobile browser to grab their number from their website. While this went against the spirit of the experiment, my old dumb phone way back when did have a primitive mobile browser which I used similarly, so I'm going to let this slide. I've also left the mobile browser enabled since needing to lookup a business phone number while out and about is not an uncommon situation.

Pokemon Go

Ok, so this is purely an indulgence, but I do have a very long, unbroken streak going on Pokemon Go. I'm not really a die-hard player anymore, but I do refuse to break my streak. So every morning when I let the dogs out, I sit on the patio, drink my coffee, and catch my daily Pokemon as well as play a few of my daily word games. For those purposes, the smartphone is basically a wifi tablet/Game Boy that gets used for about 15 minutes and then put away. I can live with that.

As far as the challenges go, that was pretty much it. Looking at the contemporary slate of feature phones (most of the ones I looked at run KaiOS), a web browser is pretty standard so I didn't really cheat much at all by re-enabling it. As far as "feature completeness" is concerned, re-enabling the web browser seems to cover all my known bases.

General Experience

It's certainly been different. I still have the "itch" to pull out my phone and start scrolling at the first hint of boredom, but having this pseudo dumb phone is kind of like wearing oven mitts to keep you from scratching when you had chickenpox as a child lol. I've found myself taking in my environment more, being more observant of people/things around me, and generally listening to a lot more music when I need a distraction.

Beyond that, it's been great not getting notifications for every little thing, and there's been very little FOMO with not being "always on" in multiple IM apps. People were also quick to start reaching me via SMS instead of IM.

The other thing I'm really enjoying is just using this thing. It just feels so much more comfortable in my hand than any of the cookie-cutter rectangles I've used for the last 16 years. It took a little less than a day to get back into the full swing of tap and T9 typing, but I'm enjoying that, too (or maybe I'm just enjoying physical keys again). I have to make far fewer corrections than with the on-screen keyboards, and going back to fix a mistake is way less frustrating with physical arrow keys than the stupid finger slide smartphones use.

I've also quickly gotten spoiled by not having to suckle at the teat of the nearest USB cable throughout the day. Partly because I'm not scrolling on it all day and partly because there's just less phone the battery has to support, it easily lasts all day with plenty to spare. It'll get unplugged around 6am and only be down to 65% or so by the time I go to bed. I'm used to being well below 65% before lunch lol.

Next Steps

This is only the end of week 1, so I've got 3 more weeks to go before I really feel I'm ready to make a decision. Based on initial experience, I probably could go for a true dumb phone, but the only thorn in my side is my bank app. I really hate to lose that, and it's the only thing I can't do even with a modern "dumb" phone.

Before beginning this experiment proper, I did play around with this as the smartphone it actually is (I disabled a lot of things on it to dumb it down for this challenge). It's certainly a weird form factor to use Android with, but it's got its charms. One thing I noticed was that I could do everything I could do on my main phone. The nice thing, though, was that I just didn't want to. Like, it was just annoying enough with the small screen and tap/T9 text input that I was happy I could do something if I needed to but was too annoyed to make a habit out of it. That said, I very well may un-dumb this when the 30 days are up and keep using it as my daily driver.

Recently, I've been trying to find ways to manage my time better. The biggest problem is that I would get stuck in YouTube binge-watching sessions that I couldn't pry myself away from. I would constantly be looking for the next thing to click on that was just interesting enough to keep my attention.

As I became more and more disillusioned with my situation, I began to realize just how severe the problem had become. I spent most of my free time just watching videos. Not socializing, not making anything cool, not learning any new hobbies. Just YouTube. Was this the life I really wanted? How many of those videos do I even remember anyway? Oh god. Thousands of hours of my life are being lost forever... I HAVE to stop this. How?

Analyzing my behavior quickly revealed the culprit — YouTube video recommendations keep tempting me with content that I never planned on watching. My eyes would always be drawn to the wall of titles and thumbnails for me to click on next, and that kept me in a vicious cycle. Click on a mildly entertaining video, look for another mildly entertaining recommended video, click. Rinse and repeat.

What if instead of doing that, I threw it all out and only chose a select few really good channels to watch? Oh wait, that's called the subscription feed!

I went through all of the channels I subscribed to over the years. Disturbingly, I found that I didn't actually care about most of them. It was cheap, mass-produced content to make the creator lots of money, and it was just barely entertaining enough to keep my attention.

I removed 95% of my subscriptions and kept only the best channels. These were often beautifully presented, thought-provoking STEM content, which prioritized quality over quantity. Now, instead of a binge of 30 videos, my subscription feed for the day had... just three. That's it. After those three videos, I would be done for the day.

There was only one thing left to do now — delete the recommendations.

I wrote a hacky script that simply removed the recommended video column and end screen, and finally, I added the YouTube homepage in a webpage blocking plugin so I only looked at the subscription feed. Just like that, I had fixed YouTube. There were no more distracting recommendations. The choice of what to watch was back in my hands.

It only took 20 minutes before I grew completely bored and wanted to do something else. But that's not a bug; it's a feature. That sense of boredom is there to push me to do something meaningful with my life — make something, pick up a new hobby, or meet people. The fact that I felt it so strongly meant that my plan was working. All of those things I always wanted to do... now I can actually do them. As long as I never allow endless scroll feeds and recommendation algorithms to rule my life again. But knowing the damage they've done to me, I never want to go back.

Because to be free, I ultimately need to make the Internet boring again.

What about you? Do you have measures to prevent the Internet from taking away all of your free time?

Hi! I (21M) recently developed a lot of tender feelings towards the idea of a particular kind of relationship lately.

For many years, I knew that I was heterosexual, but I never felt any romantic spark that made me want to actually pursue a relationship. Eventually, I assumed that I wasn't interested, but a part of me always wondered if I was wrong.

One day, I got bored and tried to imagine a hypothetical relationship that would feel wonderful and natural for me, irrespective of societal norms. After hours of roleplaying hypothetical scenarios and writing down what made my heart the most happy, I finally settled upon a coherent vision for a theoretical partner.

She'd be really sweet and loving, but the twist is that she'd often take lead over me. She'd be on the confident and assertive side and would totally break my brain. She would often initiate affection unexpectedly, and I'd get all flustered and totally melt for her. She would adore my softness instead of expecting me to suppress it. She would call me cute nicknames like "Cupcake" or "Pumpkin", and I would feel very comfortable and safe with her.

This blew my mind because it went against everything I thought hetero relationships were. And yet, I responded so strongly to it. I began searching to see if anyone else felt this way and I found "role reversal," a term referring to the inversion of traditional heterosexual relationship dynamics. I found a role reversal community and it had the most adorable art I've ever seen and perfectly encapsulated what I wanted. (Some of this content can be found on Lemmy at !rolereversal@lemmy.ml. I love this post in particular. Honestly, I'm thinking of reviving it and posting content there myself!)

A day later, I woke up with constant euphoria and a nonstop firehose of vivid romantic fantasies. It lasted all day, every day. For 10 days straight. My feelings were so intense that I barely ate anything and only slept for 3-4 hours a night without getting tired.

Those fantasies not only showed me how wonderful a relationship would feel, but also that I myself would want to be very affectionate and adaptive to my partner's needs, not just my own. I was enamored with the idea of being the sweetest, most loving boyfriend I could be for her. It wasn't long before I wanted a relationship like this more than anything else.

In retrospect, perhaps it's unsurprising that my ideal relationship would be nontraditional. After all, I have spent my whole life fighting masculine gender expectations. I'm super outwardly emotional, I love to make people happy, I'm very gentle, I love adorable things, and I make myself look cute, nerdy, and non-threatening. I loved it when some of my female friends called me adorable and gave me cute nicknames, and I was full of admiration and gratitude when one of them physically protected me.

I feel like the phenomenon of role-reversed relationships is likely more common than the actual usage of the term. But perhaps I'm still a bit of a unicorn. So, what do you think? Have you seen relationships like this in the wild? Have you known about these dynamics, or are they unfamiliar to you? I'd like to know your thoughts!

Hey.

I never lived in a city, not talking about the huge cities like London but average 50.000 to 150.000 people cities so I figured I'd ask people on here who actually lived in a city.

I grew up in a small town and now I built a home in a few miles away from where I grew up in another smaller town and everything would be cool if I wouldn't have "fomo".

My town has about 1000 people living and the next larger city has about 500.000 people (40 minute drive by car or 1 hour by train). And two other smaller cities with each about 75.000 people but only 25 minute drive by car.

Now that my wife and I have settled I can't get rid of fomo feeling.

I catch myself thinking "man if would have built in the city,..." but my wife is right. We can't afford property in a city and heck, even if we could afford it there is no property left to buy. And then when I visit the city to go shopping for clothes or just eat out I am always glad I can leave again.

But than I wake up the next day and would think it would be awesome to have a gym in the same block, a grocery store under my flat, a nice bar or coffee around the corner where I could socialize with others. But then my wife comes again with reality: "And it all costs money. You'd be broke two days after paycheck if you live in the city how you live in it while you visit it" and then she explains that life in the city isn't all that great and I ain't missing out because most people aren't more social in cities than in our town or small city next to our town.

I imagine city life kind of vibrant though. "Hey let's host a boardgame night" and 10 people showing up. But it might not be like how I imagine it? Is city life kind of overrated or am I missing out?

I go to the bigger city maybe once a month to go shopping for clothes I can't get here. Like for example the skater shop a few brands. A few friends and I also take the train every half a year to party a night out but take the train back home. There are many things I also don't like about the city, for example sometimes the smell, the homeless, the traffic, and I sometimes think I'd still need a car because of groceries, visiting family in the country side where I live now so I couldn't sell my car anyways. Now that I have "settled" I shouldn't be thinking about this anyways but there is always this feeling I am missing something. Maybe I should have lived in a city just for a year to experience it before building, but I never had the desire to. I was always happy leaving the city and I still am happy when I can leave after a whole day in the city but maybe I'd like it longer if I'd live in it?

This feels like a topic I am going to ignore til I am 85 and then add to a list of things I regret: "Never experienced city life when I was young".

The only thing that makes me feel good though is that all my friends that currently live in cities are searching for property out of the city and want to move back where we all grew up and all of them saying I didn't miss anything. My wife is also saying it, so I guess they might be kind of right. I am saying "kind of right" because this might be something that only one can judge for him/herself if city is good or bad. I feel like I have no opinion on this subject and this makes me crazy.

Edit: The only big city life experience I had was three months traveling through South East Asia where I stayed like a week in Bangkok and I remember many nights in Kao San Road partying. But that ain't anything one can do every day in the city especially if you work. That was like vacation city experience and I sure do know I was glad when I left Bangkok. The next city experience I had was Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) in Vietnam which was okay but I left it after day 3 feeling drained. The best experience I had was in Singapore. But I figure after reading all about Singapore that no city in my country could keep up with Singapore. I think I'd like living in Singapore more than in Bangkok or Saigon lol. But even Singapore was really busy...