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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   1971 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for August 21, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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So, I'm at college now. After dozens of minutes spent researching schools, many sleepless nights spent putting off homework, and endless effort spent on not giving a shit, I'm here, and I'm...not disappointed in myself, exactly, but I absolutely could have done better.

As I alluded to, I didn't really care all that much about being attractive to colleges in high school, but I now regret it, at least a bit. I had a 99th percentile SAT and plenty of AP and dual enrollment credits, but my lack of extracurriculars and thoroughly mediocre GPA sunk my application to the point where I only truly got into one of the five schools I bothered to apply to. While I didn't really have a "dream school", my current university is on its face significantly lower-ranked than my top pick; by median SAT scores, my preferred school is about 15 percentile points higher than my current school with a particularly prestigious CS program (my major) to boot.

Regarding my current situation, I ask a couple questions of the Mottizen public:

1.] How important is your alma mater for job opportunities with a CS degree? While I want to transfer to my preferred school for a variety of pragmatic and personal reasons, I do have a not-insignificant scholarship at my current institution. It wouldn't ruin me financially to forgo it as my college fund should cover the brunt of it, but it is a counterbalancing factor. (N.B: I have now seen this thread partially answering this question. I'd still like to know how much it matters for CS specifically.)

2.] What are job prospects for a CS degree looking like in the next 5-10 years? I've heard that the CS bubble has popped and I'm fine with not having a junior position handed to me on a silver platter, but I wouldn't mind switching tracks to a different engineering degree (and consequently removing much of my incentive to transfer) if CS is headed for the shitcan thanks to AI/oversaturation/whatever.

I have a genetic defect that puts me at extremely high risk for developing a fatal neurodegenerative disease in my 50s or 60s. Recent evidence suggests that reducing neuroinflammation might help delay or even prevent onset, and there's also evidence that a diet high in soluble fiber can reduce systemic and neuroinflammation through increasing production of butyrate and reducing production of lipopolysaccharides by gut bacteria.

Which is to say, I've been trying to eat more legumes, but legumes are kind of a pain to cook. I want to live, but I'm also lazy. Purely by chance, a package of ZENB spaghetti, which is made of yellow peas and nothing else, caught my eye at 7-Eleven, and I decided to try it out. With the caveat that I have eaten very little pasta in the past 20 years, and pasta enthusiasts may disagree, it doesn't taste much different from wheat pasta to me. Pasta's mostly just a vehicle for sauce anyway, right?

The more people buy it, the more likely they stay in business, and the less effort it takes for me to do everything I can to keep my brain from eating itself, so I'm pimping it out here. If you like pasta, but wish it had more protein, fiber, and potassium, with fewer empty calories and/or no gluten, try ZENB pasta! Your Italian grandmother will hate it, but you might not!

As a fellow legume pasta eater, there's chickpea pastas out there too, lentil pastas, green pea, etc, if you want variety in your legumes. I've never heard of ZENB funny enough but will check it out.

Oh and lentils cook in about 20 minutes if you boil them, quicker than beans. Basically just fill a pan with 2 cups water to 1 cup lentils, then bring the water to boil and dump in the lentils and cook for 20-30 minutes, can add dried spices to taste. That's how we do it in our house, it's simple but doesn't taste bad and you can add stuff like basil or bay leaves or curry etc.

Buy a tin of canned chilli con carne, and a can of black beans (in water). Mix half of each can, and you've got a full and cheapish meal with extra legumes.

You're aware that you can buy pre-cooked/softened legumes that are ready to eat right out of the can/package right? Its more expensive than the dried stuff but its still cheap and super low effort.

Or is it some other part of the process that feels like a pain?

My regional home cuisine is very legume rich. I can recommend a few options. Legumes are only high effort because they need soaking & sporuting. Other than that, they are very easy to cook.

  • Kala Chana (black chickpeas) is very simple to cook.
  • Matki (moth beans) are similar and my personal favorite
  • Masoor Dal This is a classic first-recipe for a lot of India when they leave home. Shit easy
  • Lentils also make for great flatbreads

They may look daunting if you've never cooked Indian food, but it is genuinely super-easy once you have done it a couple of times. All of these are lazy 10 minute recipes. You just need to do 2 minutes of work the night before.

If you've never had these in a home-made style, then try out the ones you get at trader joe's. It's a good representation of what you can expect.

Generally, talk to people with celiac. They incorporate lentils into a lot of their meals.

With the caveat that I have eaten very little pasta in the past 20 years, and pasta enthusiasts may disagree, it doesn't taste much different from wheat pasta to me. Pasta's mostly just a vehicle for sauce anyway, right?

No. Emphatically no. Pasta should taste good on its own, even if you eat it without sauce. It's kind of like bread - one doesn't normally eat just a slice of bread by itself, but bread should still taste good even if you do eat it plain.

So, work is really stressing me out right now.

For context, I'm a junior tax accountant, and I recently had some client work delegated to me for a client experiencing some financial struggles. Aside from preparing their business activity statements and income tax returns and so on, one of the tasks delegated to me was to add a small amount owed to their pre-existing payment plan with the ATO (Australian Taxation Office), where the client is supposed to pay off a tax debt in monthly instalments. I called the ATO on the tax agent line, and was informed that I needed to cancel the previous payment plan and renegotiate a new one. Because of some past defaults on the client's end, we were incapable of setting up a payment plan via the tax agent portal, and had to call via phone.

I informed my superior of this fact, who then gave me the go-ahead to re-negotiate the payment plan with the ATO. Note, my superior has worked on this client for longer, and has a more detailed knowledge of their financial situation than I do. I have also never negotiated a payment plan with the ATO before (they have), and was not provided any context regarding how to deal with them. So I pretty much do as I'm directed, and attempt to set up the new payment plan, but the ATO refuses to provide assent to establishing any new payment plan because they are unsure of the client's ability to make the payments on said payment plan. At this point, the original payment plan has also been cancelled, so the client no longer has their original deal either despite the fact that it was previously agreed on.

Dealing with the ATO is a bit like dealing with a little autocrat where the rules of the game are entirely determined by them. When you're dealing with most creditors you typically negotiate the cancellation of the old arrangement and the formation of the new one at the same time, and sign off on it all at once as a legally binding contract. With the ATO, the very process of renegotiating the terms of your plan has the distinct possibility of leaving you stranded, with zero recourse to any agreement at all. It’s not a negotiation between parties, it’s a rent-seeking coalition that has the power to unilaterally decide whether or not to grant you clemency, and whose leniency (or lack thereof) heavily depend on how their revenue collection targets have been set. The issue is not so much that they're severe on taxpayers as much as it does that they're fundamentally unpredictable and unaccountable, leaving people in a perpetual state of uncertainty regarding what one should expect from them.

Eventually, the client pays the original debt they want to add to their payment plan, but their original payment plan is also cancelled so they have a larger tax debt to pay off. And at this point, I'm wondering how much responsibility for this entire shitshow can be hung on me. I've kept my organisation in the loop throughout, and I've taken a huge amount of screenshots of Teams chats specifically showing that I informed my superiors of the requirement to cancel the prior plan and was still instructed to set up the new payment. I still feel some level of responsibility for the entire thing, despite the fact that I was basically doing exactly what people in my organisation had asked me to do, and have zero control over my client's financial decisions or the ATO's dictates.

Honestly panicking a little bit. It often feels like much of the work that more senior accountants don't want to do gets unceremoniously offloaded onto me even when I have limited experience doing the work, I'm given little to no guidance as to how to do it, and I'm left in a potentially precarious position when things go wrong.

This is a fairly standard slice of life for a conscientious ethical white collar professional working in Australia (and probably much of the West). There's a fair bit more to say about the ATO, which as far as I know is inscrutable and unaccountable in the way the OP has said.

OP, the world won't end and neither will your career. This won't fall on you. You're predicting (and wisely planning for) the worst case scenario which will never eventuate. Senior professionals not training or preparing juniors under them is unfortunately business as usual. You've done the best you can with what you have in terms of time, resources and knowledge. Rest well. If the client comes after the company, they won't come after the junior.

Also, well done on covering your arse by saving correspondence and secreting it away on your private servers away from the company. In my career, I've never needed to use a security blanket like that, but I've heard stories and so I still think it's best practice for any white collar professional getting directed to do something they are not comfortable with.

And at this point, I'm wondering how much responsibility for this entire shitshow can be hung on me.

Objectively speaking, you're not responsible for any of this. But your boss and company may very well throw you under the bus anyway.

Best app for converting your phone to grayscale? Ideally I'd like the best Android one and the best iOS one.

On ios it's under accessibility -> display and text size -> color filters. After you've selected grayscale you can map it to the accessibility shortcut so you can turn it on/off by clicking the power button three times. Which might undermine the effort-- assuming you're doing this to de-mesmerize the mobile device experience-- depending on the extent to which you believe we're as good as a lab rat in a battle of wills against the cocaine dispenser.

Thanks so much, this is really helpful.

Android can be set to grayscale in the operating system's developer options ("Simulate color space" → "Monochromacy"), with no app required.

Amazing, thank you!

Update:

The roommate is gone, as is his annoying not housebroken dog. Kicking him out wasn’t as hard as I’d expected, and that fact leaves me with more self-recrimination than relief. I aggravated an ankle and pulled some muscle or ligament in my hip moving his bariatric chair out of my place but that was worth it (and both are progressively hurting less day by day such that I’m confident that I didn’t hurt anything serious; I’m just on the wrong side of thirty and out of shape so these things happen when lifting heavy things and moving them in weird ways) I should have done this years ago and my failure to do so cost me an enormous amount of money. I take no relish in the situation I’ve exiled him to (a tenuous couch surfing situation in a cluttered up house that smells in a way that just stresses me out the moment I walk in the door, and I am pretty lazy/lenient about cleanliness.), but I had to do it. My obligations toward him ended long ago, I have to defend myself, and I’ll leave it at that. He muttered something about contacting his family up north and that’ll probably be the correct course of action for him to take.

I’m relaxing right now with my door open, cats going in and out, and the A/C turned off like I like it (I’m bad about forgetting to turn the A/C back on and he’d pitch a fit about it.). The last week or so has been a rough mess of feeling badly emotionally dysregulated but as I’m typing this I feel like I’m on the other side of it and past the worst of it. If everything goes right and I don’t happen upon anything better to do I plan on renting a carpet cleaner and deep-cleaning the apartment over the weekend.

This is what winning looks like. Maybe I don’t have it in me to feel satisfaction or elation over finally fixing my own fuckup but I do feel relief. I feel at peace. I appreciate everyone here (and my IRL friends) who pushed me to quit putting off/tolerating things and get rid of him. To my buddy RJ in particular, you don't owe me shit. Sure, I covered a $70 or so tab and stayed out with you on Sunday night till the bars closed against my better judgment but you busted your ass helping me move his stuff with little notice. You're a true friend and I'll never forget that.

I'm proud of you. Now you've got some momentum, go and slay King.

Well done! Now on to the next thing.

Anybody else use zyns as a productivity/occasional stimulant? Dang they're good

If you are going to use nicotine why not just use losanges? I not really endorsing it but surely is cheaper than zyn..,

probably cheaper yeah I'll look into em

Paradoxically, nicotine products designed for quitting nicotine are often significantly more expensive than regular nicotine products unless your insurance or employer or whoever is subsidizing them. I assume this has to do with FDA approval overhead.

They also tend to be designed to have a somewhat unpleasant user experience, with a very slow absorption rate. The idea is to give you just enough nicotine to avoid cravings, but not enough to give you a buzz.

Oh I didn’t realize that! I guess I’m just on a low enough dosage (I use the 1 mg habitrol losanges he’s) not to notice.

Not enough nicotine in those, and in reality they are obscenely expensive compared to recreational products in my area, anyways.

Should I? What’s the risk?

Personally, I believe that the dose makes the poison and that people are different, and it's telling that the medical literature on the topic is clearly searching for downsides out of a puritan sense that they must exist while not having clear examples of any.

But, I'd imagine that they wouldn't be great for your teeth/gums, especially if you used a lot of them a day. And I'm pretty sure nicotine is addictive, though I've seen zero sign of it personally.

I tend to use a Zyn more or less exclusively when I'm on a long drive, or I need a pick-me-up on a boring workday and don't want to drink another coffee. Two to three times a week at most. I don't notice any craving for nicotine on days I don't, and I've sustained that pace since Easter more or less. They're very pleasant, in that it gives me a bit of a nicotine buzz and a little bit of energy, along with a little pop of flavor and a sense of "something going on" that on a long drive or boring doc review I might otherwise fill with a snack.

That's where knowing yourself comes in: while I've never really used hard drugs, I don't tend towards addiction to the soft ones I have used. I notice the pattern of behaviors in other people's descriptions of their relationship with weed or alcohol or nicotine, and I don't identify them at all. My relationship with alcohol, weed, kratom, modafinil, nicotine has mostly been one of having a vague idea of trying it or "getting into" it, then ignoring it entirely and forgetting about it in my cupboard. While my wife, who is by no means a person "with a problem," will tell me a couple times a year that I need to hide the weed from her. My friends, who I don't think are alkies, will talk about fighting the urge to have a drink as soon as they get home from work. I don't feel any of that.

Idk exactly I mean nicotine can be addictive, and apparently there may be some heart issues associated with long term use?

Idk @FiveHourMarathon would know more than I do he has written about nicotine before iirc

I narrowed down the span of possibilities to roughly two options:
1.I'm a meat clockwork with a peculiar quality of being obsessed with the fact that it is a meat clockwork.
2.I'm a soul with acute awareness of the inadequacy of a merely material universe, yet unable to even confirm any that "outside" exists, let alone make any other progress
Either way, this is so very tiresome.
More generally, as I age I find I'm just getting increasingly fed up with my eccentricities, rather overcoming, integrating or getting used to them as I'd have hoped.

Welcome to the Motte. When you say "this" is so very tiresome, what is the "this" you are referring to? Existence? Or the navel-gazing that you may be prone to? In my experience eccentricities are what make the world go round. Short of those who are intolerable, I like variety in individuals (and in the end I may be one of the intolerable ones for many).

Also is there not always the opportunity to--once you know what you do not like about yourself--change it? Generally I agree with those who say most people do not change, or, if they do, they become worse, but I don't believe this is true for people who take a sudden decision to alter themselves. Sometimes this is because of an outside event (e.g. someone dies, they themselves almost die, etc.) but it can also be a moment of realization, a quiet epiphany brought on by something otherwise benign. It's possible to do better.

When you say "this" is so very tiresome, what is the "this" you are referring to? Existence? Or the navel-gazing that you may be prone to?

Neither? Both? I want answers, a resolution, good or bad.

I don't know if you are going to be able to get that here. Certainly nothing definitive. Though you may get reassurance--that everyone at some point, or at many points, has experienced and will experience a similar feeling.

Where do you feel stuck?

Gaining firm footing under my feet, existentially, meta-narratively speaking

Yeah pretty fkin hard man. It took me a while but it does feel good after you get there.

I would tell you what worked for me if you're interested, but idk it seems like most people need to find their own answer to this sort of question, unfortunately.

God be with you. :)

I’m curious, mind sharing?

Well... since you asked! I'll go ahead and ping @Bottomless_pit_supervisor in case he's interested.

Basically I had what I imagine is a common upbringing for a Mottizen. Stopped believing in God in early teens, oscillated back and forth between being really into Buddhism and then angry rationalist atheism.

Started to get a sense that something was missing. Dove even deeper into reading about Buddhism and trying to learn more. Got to the point where I was delving quite deep into 'no-self' and that sort of esoteric stuff. Btw, I DO NOT recommend you try this. I ended up having an almost week long like... not psychotic break exactly but very intensely black nihilistic episode followed by over a year of very difficult personal struggle.

Throughout that process I ended up coming back to Christianity, via the Orthodox Church. I got really into it at first, staking all of my worldview on it being True. That helped me stabilize, gave me a local community, and some guidance from kind older men which I desperately needed.

Over time as I got more stable I started questioning things again, going back into Buddhism. Started working with a solid therapist. He helped me understand that as humans we are flawed, and no matter what we do we can't get to actual, capital-T Truth. At best we can have models that approximate truth, and our goal is to figure out what we care about, and work with the models that help us get there.

Throughout this whole process, for years, I also dealt with a lot of chronic pain issues, and learned that my pain was coming from repressed emotions. I began to work with those directly doing somatic work, hypnosis, emotional expression stuff and meditation. That's a whole nother rabbit hole.

I decided that I cared about Love in an abstract sense. My goal is to love myself and others, and to try to spread that. It's simple, but deep and profound. At least for me.

I still go to church and think of myself as a Christian, but I would say I'm not staked entirely on that view anymore. I have finally become a bit more comfortable with the fact that I'll never know the actual Truth. It's still something that bothers me occasionally, but it doesn't keep me up at night like it used do.

Hi there, delurking to say thanks for your comment--there's lots here that I identify with myself!

So, umm, would you mind saying more about the black nihilistic episode that you experienced? If not I totally understand, it's just, well, I actually took the cosmic black pill myself (and managed to come out the other side) what seems like a lifetime ago and I'm intensely interested in learning more about what it was like for you and having a conversation about that if you're open to it.

Yeah np. I read Spiritual Enlightenment by Jed McKenna and there was a scene where he talks about like a black cloud coming over people when they realize that no belief is ultimately true.

It really struck me deeply - there were other big things going on in my life at the time like I was struggling in my job and my relationship quite a bit - but that just kind of broke me.

For a few days I went around asking my friends and family and partner what the point of life was, how do they deal with the fact of their death, and did and said some really like unhinged things like threatened some people etc.

Luckily I had a really good support network of close ppl and they helped pull me out of it over the course of like a week. But if not for them I easily could've fallen into a much worse place.

Hello again and thank you for sharing! Although my experience significantly differed in some key ways, (I was having an amazing trip on the best acid I'd ever had before things took a turn, for instance) I can really sympathize with what you went through. My sense at the time was essentially the blackest version of Hindu and Buddhist belief that I could contain; that existence itself is a deep, pervasive, and conscious lie that we believe, that our lives hold no greater meaning than what we personally instill them with, and that with said conscious belief in life we were actively participating in our own torture and suffering.

Yeah, I was a struggling, wangsty kid from the wrong side of the tracks coming to the end of his teen-aged years at the time. I'm happy to report that thanks to the actions of some friends and their families in key places at exactly the right time, I pulled out of it (probably narrowly avoiding inpatient mental hospitalization in the process) and got better! I'm grateful that your support network helped you out, too.

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Thanks for sharing. I'm not sure how much of it I understand though.
Do you believe in God? Are you trying to believe, act as if you do, or some other variant, or do you have a firm "faith" of some kind, a feeling you didn't have before, but now do?

I do believe in God, now. Not exactly the Christian God necessarily, although I do think that the Christian conception of God tries to point at the type of God I believe in.

I see God as basically the ground of reality, the ultimate Source, First Mover, all that jazz. Basically the cause of the universe instead of like some dude in the sky who's all powerful.

For a long time I tried to believe, and acted as I did. It was difficult and painful, and I did a lot of soul searching and had some pretty intense/weird experiences, but eventually I did start to believe. Now I do have a kind of firm "faith," grounded in the felt sense of love in my body. To me, whatever the source of that feeling of love is, which feels vast and boundless in the right mental state, is God.

To statin or not to statin.

So... my cholesterol is not good. When I was doing keto my LDL spiked to extremely high levels. I've been off keto for awhile. My LDL is down, but now my triglycerides are high.

I think the standard medical advice here would be to start taking statins. What are the downsides (if any) to statins?

There are currently way more varieties of statin (medically hydroxy-3-methyl-glutaryl-coenzyme A reductase inhibitors or HMG-CoA inhibitors) than ever. The enzyme inhibited by statin consumption (typically once a day, after a meal or before bed) is involved in synthesis, within the liver, of blood cholesterol. Many of the stories creating the bad rep for statins were from, say, thirty years ago (1987 was the first year statins were available, specifically Lovastatin). Mainly used now are atorvastatin, rosuvastatin, fluvastatin, and pitafastatin, and the differences in these and why they are used are more complex than I understand but involve how much cardiovascular risk is involved for individual patients.

Having written that, I will say that there are controversies over whether a change in diet (not necessarily reducing dietary cholesterol per se, but reducing saturated fats, and increasing fiber intake) and increase in exercise can do the same thing statins do, providing better overall health and QoL over a longer time. There are also cases of idiopathic reactions to statins that have more to do with individual differences than problems with the drug itself (the same reason you see death as a possible side effect of many drugs if you read the fine print. It is possible under the exact right wrong circumstances that a drug will kill you.)

I was prescribed Rosuvastatin about a year ago, after my TC was up to like 290 and my LDL 170. I was taken off of it after three months of much improved cholesterol levels (my HDL notably did not really go down by more than one or two (mg/DL), which is good). Then after going off statins my levels went up again and I was put on them again by a new doctor. This new doc seems much more interested that I never ever skip a day (maybe he's being paid off by AstraZeneca.)

Doctors like Robert Lustig (an endocrinologist) will say the focus on LDL is unwarranted and we should be looking at VLDL and the HDL/Triglyceride ratio. (You mentioned your triglycerides are high. That is unequivocally a red flag and opens you up to a higher likelihood of a cardiac event of some kind). Peter Attia says we should be looking at Apolipoprotein B (Apo B) as the one to keep low. Neither of these are usually measured in routine clinical settings.

To answer your question, statin use has had side effects on some, but after a month of use typically a followup visit/blood test will detect whether you're having a bad reaction (fatigue, myalgia, problems in the liver, etc.) My answer as usual is to communicate clearly with your doctor and ask questions and insist on as unambiguous an answer as possible. Also don't be afraid to ask for certain checks/tests, though depending on where you are and insurance requirements, etc. I don't know how effective that will be.

Warning/caveat, this is not my specialty.

IRRC once you are on statins, it’s dangerous to ever stop them. I could be wrong on that though, I’m not a doctor.

I'm not sure where you read that or if you may have read that this occurs in certain circumstances, but I know that in Japan, for instance, it is routine to stop prescriptions for certain statins (e.g. rosuvastatin) after 90 days to check then cholesterol levels after a period. There is no danger except for cholesterol levels rising again, as far as I am aware.

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