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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2528 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for July 19, 2023

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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My sleep hygiene has been decent ever since I started taking vitamin D in the mornings. I have also been a fan of Pokémon since the late 90s.

The Pokémon Company just released a new casual game in which you sleep near a Snorlax and other Pokémon also fall asleep near the Snorlax, and you can collect one new Pokémon every day. It's called “Pokémon Go To Sleep!”

…No, it’s just named “Pokémon Sleep”. However, that’s how I think of it. It’s Pokémon Go, but with sleep. Simply set your charging smartphone somewhere on your mattress, and it records your snores and reads your sleep movement. Sleep deeply, get better Pokémon.

There’s a friend code option to get more boosters and other gamified gacha prizes every day your friend plays. I’ll add anyone as a friend who DMs me their friend code. If you’re worried about opsec, it’s a secret between me, you, Zorba, and the developer who licensed their game with TPC and NoA.

What dosage do you take off vitamin D? Did you also notice being less groggy upon waking up in the morning?

3 of the larger dose pills sold at my local Krogers grocery, I don’t know the dose off the top of my head.

Yes, it was a subtle effect at first, but now I’m no longer groggy even at 6:30am! If I’d had these in high school or my first attempt at college, I might have gotten better grades and made some money off the dotcom boom.

How long were you taking them before you noticed effects? Going to try the same.

No idea. I assume I got my blood levels of vitamin D3 up before the effects started. I’d say try it daily for a month, 15 min to half an hour after your daily alarm.

Will do! What’s the reason for the timing?

I found myself waking to near full wakefulness, half an hour before my alarm would go off, after months of having taken vitamin D right as I awaken instead of on my way out the front door. I have since started taking my vitamin D after my shower. In combination with the Pokémon Sleep game/app, I am now once again having vivid near-lucid dreams when my alarm sounds.

Okay, I’ll try to replicate. The timing is curious. Do you take breakfast? Might affect absorption.

I do, usually within half an hour or less of the vitamin. I usually have the vitamin first.

More comments

Looking for any dentists out there.

I recently started having a lot of gum sensitivity in my teeth, like eating any sweets or anything even remotely cold is painful. And if left unchecked for awhile it hurts if I eat anything. I went to my dentist and he recommended I try this Tooth and Gums Tonic

To his credit, the stuff does work! My teeth are way less sensitive when I'm using this regularly. The problem is that its $40 for a bottle, and one bottle only lasts me about a month and a half. I feel like I'm getting ripped off and was wondering if anyone on here knew of any cheaper alternative to this tonic that could help.

Get toothpaste with nano hydroxyapatite, and mix it with your regular fluoride toothpaste. It'll do wonders for reminiralization and sensitivity.

It's essentially the same mineral form of calcium that's already in your teeth, in a form that easily bonds with your enamel.

I've decided to move to the other side of the planet. Specifically, I'm applying for a two year working holiday visa in New Zealand, and hoping to leave at the end of this year.

For some time, I've been pretty depressed. Depressed with myself, my life, and lacking any kind of real drive, even finding it difficult to generate desires. It's been particularly bad over the past month and I've struggled even to go to the gym, which is unusual for me. I don't know if moving to another country is going to fix me, but it might change me. I find myself wanting this, actually excited or hopeful about the future. It's a little bit scary, though. I've never travelled alone, far out of Europe, or for a significant period of time before, and this is all three.

New shit is always good if you need a shakeup.

Well, I definitely feel like I need a shakeup. But also I want to do it, too.

In the spirit of contrarianism - Is urban/suburban/rural NZ even that different from urban/suburban/rural US? It's all just 'modern city blob' at that point, I think. Why not move to a different part of the US (or europe if that's where you are)? Much easier logistically

Well, I live in the UK. And you're right that it's a similar country. But I think that the logistic difficulty is part of the appeal.

Why NZ specifically? I work with a lot of Kiwis and they honestly seem like extremely nice people. Maybe I'm hoping some of those qualities rub off on me a bit!

Best of luck! From middle America I knew an acquaintance who moved there after graduate school (all but dissertation) but by all appearances seems to really enjoy it.

Thanks. I know a lot of New Zealanders at work and they're generally lovely guys.

I'm having marriage financial woes.

I come from a family of misers, my wife comes from a family which is nearing the bottom of the stairs with their silken slippers. Before we merged our finances, I was always wondering why she was never able to save, and introducing budgeting soon told me why. Our budgeting is virtual, which is to say we assign transactions to categories and there's nothing technically preventing one of us from overspending on a category. We still have our separate bank accounts.

Out combined income is about 175k (65% me). We each get a "personal" category which is funded by $1000 per month. This funds clothes, going out without the other person, gadgets, sports gear, whatever we want. To me, $1000 is overkill. I read other couples' budgets online and $250 is more typical. I save most of mine.

She managed to get into the negatives pretty quickly with hers. We kept on making exceptions for why we could recategorise her purchases, but soon she was -$1500. Eventually I agreed we would reset the balance, as long as she didn't overspend again. At half-way through July she was at $800 spent.

It's really having an impact on our marriage. She feels really bad about it, but can't seem to keep it under control. It's building resentment in me. We've still got a decent savings rate, but we're trying for kids at the moment, and we would go backwards financially if we had a child now. It's not just the personal fund, she consistently buys more expensive stuff in other categories. Even assuming perpetual DINK status, I'm pretty sure I would save more money being single.

She thinks she's doing well, and points out that her family would consider her a miser. I think even I'm doing poorly, and my family would consider me to be wasteful with my money.

I see frugality as a virtue, she sees it as a preference. She feels massive social pressure to not look poor. I'm quite happy to tell my colleagues that I can't afford to go to lunch with them.

She's not a feminist by any means, but does have a strong aversion to feeling controlled in any way, so I'm hesitant to suggest I have greater control over her finances.

Any ideas?

I used to have the same problem myself - I found it very hard to limit my spending to an appropriate amount when I was a student. What worked for me was having a literal pot of money on my desk. Every day, X amount went into the pot from the budget. I could spend whatever was in the pot but I couldn't spend anything else (literally, without going and getting some cash from the bank).

I think you can still set this up cashless. Make a little bank account (one each) with an attached debit card. This is your day-to-day spending and hobbies pot. When money comes in every month, all except 1000 gets automatically sent to a saving account with no attached card. So you can literally only spend what's in the pot. And you don't have to worry about sharing bank accounts this way, so no need for issues around being controlled.

On a different note, it's clear you have different intuitions and preferences so I recommend sitting down and discussing what you actually want to use this money for, in the long run. Early retirement? University fees? Cushion against misfortune? Having a more explicit long-term financial plan might help you both get on the same page.

It will be much easier if you frame it terms of the percentage of her income she gets to ‘keep’. Whatever hers minus $1000 (assuming you’re handling taxes) is, she should transfer to you every month. The remainder (her $1000) she can do with what she wants. She will still ask you for money, but her having to do it every time will remind her of her profligacy.

I won’t be able to combine finances with my partner for tax / IRS reasons (one US citizen spouse, one foreign spouse, both living outside the US is a nightmare if you want joint finances), but I’m kind of glad about it anyway. It’s way too much drama, if one partner is much richer it’s better for them to either hand over their card (if enough trust is there) by doing the Amex secondary card thing, or to pay the other person a set amount each month (if the trust isn’t there).

I have a coworker who constantly gets notifications from his shared bank account whenever his wife spends their money. Seems like a recipe for relationship resentment if you’re hard at work and you’re getting pinged with every purchase on her $10,000 Harrods shopping trip, even if on some level you accept it/are fine with it.

Shouldn't it be more like "whatever's left after deducting shared expenses she can do with what she wants"? The 1K discretionary sounds a tad lower than that (depending on the magnitude of those expenses of course) if she's making 35% of $175K.

"whatever's left after deducting shared expenses she can do with what she wants"

That's one way of doing it. Realistically what this will look like after 10 years is that I will have saved up a lot of money and she will have saved up almost none. Then when we go to buy a house, the deposit will primarily come from me, partly because I earned more and partly because I saved more.

The earned more part I don't have a problem with. That's what I signed up for by getting married. My money is our money. But the saved more part makes me feel like a schmuck. Why should I be sacrificing more for that goal than she?

Sure, that's as good a way, it depends on how much room they want to give each other I suppose.

Just that considering the numbers here, it seems like part of what's going on may be OP imposing his taste for saving on the wife -- if she's making ~60K, that's probably something like 4K/month after tax in the US. If they live someplace expensive I guess they might be spending 6K on general living expenses, but given the 'frugality' aspect of OP's personality as described I'll bet he's got a fair chunk of the wife's money going into savings. If she doesn't want to save as much as him, and he wants to make her by imposing an artificial cap on discretionary spending, it's not clear to me that it's her (or her spending) that's the problem.

I'll bet he's got a fair chunk of the wife's money going into savings.

Well, yes and no. Yes, because 90% of all the bills come from my account, but no, because if she'd paid "her share" she'd have almost nothing left. I think this is part of the problem. Because all the bills are coming from my account, she has quite a lot of money left in her account, and this makes her feel like she hasn't spent much. In fact, she "saved" $10000 in her account over the last 9 months or so, and was quite proud of it. Pointing out that this number wasn't very meaningful because only 10% of the bills came from her account didn't land very well.

Man I feel your pain, my girlfriend is certainly a spendthrift, even if both of our finances are in the red, it's really not a big deal for me since my family is like 1 or 2 OOM richer.

At least she's self-aware about it, and has already committed to giving me control of the purse-strings when we're making actually reasonable salaries abroad or getting married.

Is there some way to automatically shift the money you're budgeted to spend to a different account, so that it can't be mixed up with the discretionary spend? You can frame it as a way for her to control herself better, if you guys can both agree that dipping into the joint savings account should require both your approvals.

Your family is up to 100 times richer than your girlfriend's? India is an unequal place, but that still seems pretty large, especially since you've noted you're far from very rich (at least by Western standards).

Sure, now that I think about it, two OOM is probably an exaggeration, it's closer to like 10-30 times.

Is there some way to automatically shift the money you're budgeted to spend to a different account, so that it can't be mixed up with the discretionary spend?

This is what I see as the next step, but getting there without her feeling like I'm controlling her is going to be difficult.

Also, she's going to need a new phone soon (she's somewhat locked into iPhone out of habit). Realistically that would mean saving up now. What am I going to do, tell her she has to be phoneless until she saves up the money?

I see phones as being so important both as an essential and for QOL that I wouldn't begrudge the additional expense, but I'm sure you have your own priorities, at least if her current phone is in working condition.

Out combined income is about 175k

I'm quite happy to tell my colleagues that I can't afford to go to lunch with them.

This makes me feel maybe you are overdoing it a bit. Unless your colleagues regularly lunch in Michelin star restaurants, you should be able to afford a lunch. You may choose not to go, still - though I always found it's good for team relationships - but you should be able to do it without having your budget ruined.

I think there are two issues at hand here. First is "keeping up with the Joneses", with the Joneses being your wife's family. I think it may be a good thing to talk about how comparing their lifestyle with yours is not a good idea - they do their thing, and your family does yours, and the only two persons that should have a say in it is yourself and your wife. If you both think something is ok, the others should not have a voice to call her a "miser" and she should not feel obliged to live by their standards.

The second question is what your wife wants. You should come to agreement about what are your goals, and you should talk about how wasteful spending makes it harder for your to achieve these goals. Don't make it "you bad, me good" conversation, make it "how we can make it happen" conversation. And yes, it may create some resentment, at least initially, and if it proves hard for your wife to follow through with what you agree - there might be a moment where you have to choose - either you risk a conflict by taking more control over it, or you find means to increase the budget so you don't have to do it. Only you can make this choice.

you should be able to afford a lunch

Lunch costs $40 here. I can afford it with my $1000 budget, but I prefer to spend on my hobby, when I do spend.

you should talk about how wasteful spending makes it harder for your to achieve these goals

We're actually on the same page in principle, pretty much. It's just that she feels like she's already denying herself a lot, but somehow the numbers at the end of the month say otherwise, and she gets defensive about it.

she should not feel obliged to live by their standards.

This is a recurring theme. My upbringing shaped me, of course, but I don't care that much what my family thinks of my lifestyle. She was recently in her home country for her sister's wedding, and the amount spent on gifts and clothing was mind-boggling to me. She describes the lives of her sisters and mother as vicious social status seeking, but she can't help but be sucked into it to a milder extent on occasion.

It sounds like, while doing quite well yourselves financially, she's surrounded by even wealthier family and friends. She feels a bit self conscious about this.

Do you as a couple have any less wealthy friends you could spend more time with? Or at least friends and relatives who aren't exerting social pressure on her to overspend?

This is especially important when/if you have kids. Are these friends/family going to be making her feel bad about only putting her kids in an ordinary charter or private or decent public school when theirs are in boarding schools where they each have their own horse or something?

Personally, I have two little kids, and am a working mom. Several of my friends are stay at home moms who like to organize activities on weekday mornings, and like to talk about aesthetic mothering and homeschooling and "morning baskets" or things like that. This is not something I can participate in very often, or I'll feel angry and jealous. Why are they making aesthetically pleasing morning baskets with their friends on Wednesday mornings, and I'm working a regular job?

The solution is, honestly, to focus on different friends, or at least in different contexts. In my case, it's important to me to talk with different people, who are not all raising goats and looking orderly. In your wife's case, if she's serious about her family, it might look like emphasizing some friendships with people who wear clothing from chain stores, pack their own lunches, and send their kids to public school. Does she have any friends like that?

Do you as a couple have any less wealthy friends you could spend more time with? Or at least friends and relatives who aren't exerting social pressure on her to overspend?

We moved here relatively recently and are both struggling to fit in socially. I'm less affected because I just go and do my hobbies; she has suggested that the isolation is contributing to her spending. We have a few friends now who also don't seem to be spending large, and that helps. However, she spends time with some girls in the city occasionally. A lot of these are single and waiting for a man with a house and a car to sweep them off their feet, and in the meantime not too concerned about saving money.

But on the whole it's her family and upbringing. She comes from old money that is on its last legs.

I take your point on the whole though. I think it's something we/I can focus on, finding friends who are also more future-focused and frugal.

I come from a family of misers,

Bruh. A better way to put it would be to characterise your family as savers and/or investors.

my wife comes from a family which is nearing the bottom of the stairs with their silken slippers.

Consoomers.

She feels really bad about it, but can't seem to keep it under control.

It appears she doesn’t actually feel that bad about it, by her revealed preferences.

She feels massive social pressure to not look poor.

Yes, a pressure that is readily absolved by spending money that’s 2/3s earned by your husband.

She's not a feminist by any means, but does have a strong aversion to feeling controlled in any way, so I'm hesitant to suggest I have greater control over her finances.

Ugh. Stupid husband, how dare you be so controlling over our money, much less my money?

Any ideas?

Perhaps you can make a simple Excel model to show her how your household net worth can grow using a given spending/savings rate, and a given rate of return on investment.

The takeaway for her being: more savings/less spending now, more money with which to flex later upon the Jones’s, other randos, and social media.

This is a category where the conventional wisdom fits really well in that opposite spending styles cause a lot of marriage woes.

My experience with this across quite a few friends and their partners is that with this sort of coupling is that it invariably ends in one of roughly three (I'll outline four but two are variations on a theme) stable ways.

The first is the end of the relationship - there's not too much to be said here. I don't think this is a huge risk for you personally, as this is a more lower-income sort of end. If she's not outspending your actual income then the chances are much-reduced.

The second is that she gets what she wants, which is license to spend what she wants. For some spenders this has an inherent limit and will be satisfied, at which point this largely resolves itself. If her spending is more social - lunch with the girls, keeping with fashions with her friends, etc, etc, this isn't too uncommon. Lots of people feel the urge to spend more to keep up with the Joneses, but many simply want to keep up and don't feel the need to spend incessantly. Lunch, dinners, hairdos, makeup - a lot of women just need these things covered for social reasons which to me is very fair. If she has a compulsion to spend her money no matter how much she has... well, GOTO 1 or 4.

The next two are very similar and differ mainly by degrees but because they play out so differently psychologically I've listed them separately.

The third is when you have auto-payments deducted out of your accounts into non-spending accounts that are hard to access. Savings accounts with no cards attached, 401ks, etc. These automatic debits come out on payday. Once that's done, what remains is spending money. Usually this means the two of you separate out, say, grocery money (a buddy of mine used store gift cards to manage his grocery budget with his girlfriend which meant any further spending had to happen from her spending money) and such, and potentially have a third account for other automated spending like bills and such. In short, making as much of the process as automatic as possible so any spending blowouts are constrained.

The fourth is very similar - money goes into a central bank account under the control of the 'saver' spouse and the 'spender' is given their allowance automatically once a month/fortnight/week. They can still log into it and transfer money, but there's an understanding nobody is going to do that. This is more extreme than 3 and is more when someone has a spending problem, can't control it and needs just to have a card with limits. I have seen this work well with my grandparents - my grandfather always spent money like it was going out of style so my grandmother would always give him a cash allowance for the week to spend and managed the household herself with the rest.

The theoretical fifth is that she just starts budgeting well by herself, falls in line with your spending philosophy and all is well. I have never seen this happen but have included for completeness' sake.

Perhaps therapy for her? Especially if she is spending for social reasons to fit in.

Does she have a specific category where she spends the most? Eating out? Fancy clothes? Etc? Possibly find a way to cut down on specific categories of spending, by not being a miser in the category and spending to be a little fancier, but avoiding the most expensive options. For example rent the runway for clothes, or blue apron for fancier meals. Both are more expensive than the miserly options, but both are cheaper than careless spending.

I probably spend 500-1k a month. My wife probably spends 1k a month. But she also tends to buy all the kids stuff. Our dual incomes are higher than yours so that is still a net positive income. Would it be possible for y'all to earn more money while keeping the spending stable?

Depending on which category of spending your wife is engaged in having kids might actually lower her spending. If it's going out ... She won't be able to for a while. If it's shopping ... Then it might get worse.

Perhaps therapy for her? Especially if she is spending for social reasons to fit in.

She is in therapy. Not specifially about that, but she talks about this too.

Does she have a specific category where she spends the most? Eating out? Fancy clothes? Etc?

It's mostly online shopping, so clothes and handbags. Makeup and getting nails and hair done as well. Coffee and going out with friends.

Would it be possible for y'all to earn more money while keeping the spending stable?

We've both received small pay increases recently. I've been keeping my eyes out for new jobs, but I'm not finding anything that pays more so far.

Is there an easy way to "select all" in iPadOS? In Android apps and browsers, it's almost always an option, but so far I need to drag the selection box all the way most of the time, though I think I've seen it pop up once or twice.

I'm talking about text in websites, not something like images in a gallery.

The select all popup only happens in editable textfields, not other text content. I think dragging the box down is your best bet, or maybe there's a web app where you can past in a url and get the content copied to your clipboard

Ah, that's a shame, but I'll see if I can hunt down a website akin to what you said.

Usually on an iPhone I have an option to just select all if I tap and hold.

I just tried that on a website and it didn't work :(

My stock has 10x-ed in 1 year, but I feel like I'm I'm being pushed into roles that do not match my strengths and specially play to my weaknesses.

Is there by any chance a 1 year vesting cliff that you are coming up on?

I ask because "valuation goes up a lot and founders do a constructive dismissal right before an early employee's options vest and hope the employee doesn't file a lawsuits about it" is a pretty common pattern. The time to particularly watch for it is around months 10 and 11 of employment, if the vesting schedule is the standard "1/4 at 1 year, 1/48 per month for the following 36 months".

But yeah if the cliff is still 5 months out it's probably not that.

I know it stale, but get the bag the bag the bag. Fuck a boss and fuck a corporation. If they weren't getting more out of you than the reverse, you woulda been out a long time ago.

I feel like I'm I'm being pushed into roles that do not match my strengths and specially play to my weaknesses.

Have you considered that while this might be your feeling, from the POV of the startup bosses these are just things that need done, and you are the one available to do them?

More specifics might help, but "most junior member on handpicked startup team of very experienced folx" is going to attract some shit jobs for sure. Also may be worth considering allowing the experience to trump your intuition, while registering your objection early on? If you are actually right about things a few times, you can leverage this into getting your way in the future -- if not, you just made the company Z-million dollars! Doesn't really matter who's idea it was, you're the one who did it.

Many companies are built on milking labor from young gullible college graduates.

Also young college graduates can be useless and do a bunch of unnecessary work to prove themselves, while an experienced employee does the right work in half the time.

Hard to know what your situation is. Getting fired or pushed out is a really shitty feeling. It is good to generally be interviewing elsewhere on occasion.

I also think it is good to have an attitude of working for your current salary rather than your theoretical future salary. Don't kill yourself working for peanuts. Even if those peanuts get described as gold nuggets.

Have an exit strategy. Be prepared to trash them for all their worth on Glassdoor if they screw you over. It's not burning a bridge if they already burnt it. However if they give you a nice juicy payment to go away quietly then accept it and do so.

Never burn yourself out while the boss isn't looking. No benefits. Companies should earn loyalty, not expect it.

A question for all of you:

What does it take - what qualities of character - does it take for someone to willingly and freely choose to sacrifice to be with someone? To freely endure visceral, biological disgust just to make someone happy? More importantly: what kind of person, if anyone, is worthy of this kind of sacrifice - whether for a night or a few years or a lifetime?

Have any of you personally known anyone that you believed was worthy of that kind of sacrifice? Do any of you have anyone in your lives that you would sleep with despite being disgusted by simply because they asked it of you as a favor, or because you felt they might benefit from it? If you do: why? I have...hmm. I knew a couple of people like this who I might sleep with, disgust be damned, because I admired their character that much. Honestly, I'd see it as kind of like a combination of acting and a gross, intimate medical procedure that needed to be performed well. Although I'm not any good at the first, I am no stranger to (limited) participation in the second. One of the guys...he's a fat dude who got hit by a drunk driver at 19, wound up crippled and on crutches for life, but is a hell of a dude: a West Virginia redneck son of a union construction foreman and a nurse that made good, went to Harvard, and then returned a decade later to own real estate in his hometown and live off the profits.

Women are quite different than men, and I can easily imagine some woman is going to be attracted to an able man even if he's on crutches and despite him being fat.

More importantly: what kind of person, if anyone, is worthy of this kind of sacrifice - whether for a night or a few years or a lifetime?

Could you live with yourself if you married someone you were attracted to, then they suffered serious injury so you then proceeded to abandon them and find a healthy partner? Senator McCain could, but he was a special kind of person.

Our crutch using hero wasn't ordinary, and even then, his frat brothers at Harvard told him more or less that finding someone that would be loyal to him would be extremely difficult if not impossible. The guy was a hell of a man, character wise, and it was a huge uphill battle. His own words: "I have a lot to offer. Admittedly, fat cripple is a tough sell."

McCain is...an interesting person. Perhaps an asshole for how he left his wife. I'll grant him a bit of latitude for having endured hell in a PoW camp though. I wouldn't leave my wife if something like that happened to her, though.

Another thing: In high school, I found myself attracted to a girl who liked to swim and hike. She was big into swimming, had a nice body and was fit, very blunt...and very bitter and cynical. She had been burned in a house fire as a baby. While the surgeons did amazing work, she was left missing an ear and with a third of her face looking like Freddy Krueger. It was her sadness that was more a turnoff than her face.

...and very bitter and cynical.

In these kinds of cases I've read that people often stop being that sad after finding a partner.

Perhaps an asshole for how he left his wife.

Well, he's believed to have been beating his new wife for years and having been blackmailed over it. I think he's instructive.

Both he and his father sold their souls in government service - McCain Sr. for helping cover up the Liberty incident, McCain Jr. for helping with the cover-up of the highly embarrassing POW/MIA scandal.

I don't know how my burned friend is doing. She has had a partner, now. She still seems rather bitter and cynical - and also nerdy and blunt.

As for McCain: certainly an interesting guy. You can't knock his strength of will in Vietnam; he refused early release and chose to keep getting tortured by the Vietnamese. Whatever else he did in life, that has to be admired. He was a strong-willed, wealthy man and very much a skilled politician. He was also an asshole in his personal life.

I wonder if this is some sort of implication: you can be an asshole, as long as you are extremely determined and also very socially skilled? I mean...almost everyone reading this will not even come close to McCain's level of political skill or power. Sure, he was born on third base, but the guy had to run home. And run he did.

I think @curious_straight_ca is right that people generally become attracted to ‘what they can get’. Our ancestors were fucking some disgusting toothless people who bathed a few times a year, but I imagine they were into it. You just acclimatize to that level. The fat guy’s fat wife is attracted to him and he to her because that’s where they’re at.

Or the toothless guy hit the toothless girl with a club to the head and ooga boogad that coochy in a dark cave.

Still at least implies the toothless guy was attracted to the toothless girl, even if the converse wasn't true.

I don't disagree in general though I'd say that some people don't ever acclimatise, or else it happens as a result of strong social pressure that allows them to rationalise the decision (I'm in my 30s and need to find a wife/husband before I get old!).

Some of my friends and I have had some long dry spells before we found women who we were really attracted to, of course there's social pressure against introducing an ugly partner to your friends so maybe that was in play too.

Your questions sound a little over abstracted. Some plainer questions you might have:

  • when would you pity fuck someone?
  • would you have sex out of a sense of duty?
  • can and when does an emotional connection lead to sexual desire?
  • can one manifest sexual desire where it doesn't exist?

That isn't what's happening when a 'disgusting' person gets love. When you see someone who's 'biologically disgusting' who has a partner, the partner just ... doesn't find them to be disgusting (potentially in a relative sense). Long-term social contact with someone can build affection that wasn't present from physical attraction! People, generally, just become physically and emotionally attracted to the kind of person who is available to them. If you're a diseased druggie without teeth and the only people who'll give you a second glance are other teethless druggies, you'll bang and develop genuine feelings for the opposite-sex junkies. And there are the rare 'perfectly attractive girl who dates someone with several congenital deformities' (they blow up on social media every so often) or the reverse, but they're just ... rare, people do all sorts of unlikely things for idiosyncratic reasons.

Now I'm gonna respond to your whole oeuvre here, because the question doesn't make too much sense and is probably a severe case of the XY problem ("how do I get people to make that sacrifice to sleep with me"). You're just, generally, comically wrong about the structure of dating / relationships.

From scott,

Second, I had yet another patient who –

(I feel obligated to say at this point that the specific details of these patient stories are made up, and several of them are composites of multiple different people, in order to protect confidentiality. I’m preserving the general gist, nothing more)

– I had a patient, let’s call him ‘Henry’ for reasons that are to become clear, who came to hospital after being picked up for police for beating up his fifth wife.

So I asked the obvious question: “What happened to your first four wives?”

“Oh,” said the patient, “Domestic violence issues. Two of them left me. One of them I got put in jail, and she’d moved on once I got out. One I just grew tired of.”

“You’ve beaten up all five of your wives?” I asked in disbelief.

“Yeah,” he said, without sounding very apologetic.

“And why, exactly, were you beating your wife this time?” I asked.

“She was yelling at me, because I was cheating on her with one of my exes.”

“With your ex-wife? One of the ones you beat up?”

“Yeah.”

“So you beat up your wife, she left you, you married someone else, and then she came back and had an affair on the side with you?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” said Henry.

I wish, I wish I wish, that Henry was an isolated case. But he’s interesting more for his anomalously high number of victims than for the particular pattern.

From secondhand anecdotes from lower-class friends of mine, Henry was not a model. He didn't eat well and go to the gym every week, he doesn't have perfect skin and hair and wardrobe, he doesn't have a top 10% job or great hobbies. He's not that charismatic. Google "arrested for domestic violence mugshot". I'm pretty sure several are uglier than you. I audibly laughed at a few of them.

And they're not particularly intelligent either. Sometimes significantly below average. Even if they have some instinctive social abilities that you don't, you're (just from your writing) smart enough by comparison that you could learn the basics by brute force if you wanted to.

What do they have that you don't have?

That isn't what's happening when a 'disgusting' person gets love. When you see someone who's 'biologically disgusting' who has a partner, the partner just ... doesn't find them to be disgusting (potentially in a relative sense).

I'll agree here. Habituation is a powerful thing. You see it every year with first-year medical students dissecting cadavers. This being said, I am not sure just how far habituation goes; I know that there are a lot of...unfortunate-looking people that choose not to have partners because they find most or all of the people available to them disgusting. You see this more often with middle-class and up people that aren't accustomed to choosing the least-bad option and accepting that they're going to get hosed. There is probably more social isolation there...toothless druggies are one thing, but there is a fairly large and fairly invisible segment of the population that is in and out of institutions of one kind or another. Hospitals, mental institutions, jails and prisons. Fussell's "bottom-out-of-sight" class.

On to our hero Henry.

I've googled "arrested for domestic violence mugshot". Most are more attractive than I am, physically: they're probably taller than my 5'6" and most have full heads of hair. This aside, I believe he is also a liar and con man. A good one. He sells bullshit and promises the world, and seems to deliver at first. He fills his victims' heads with extravagant promises, and may well have an idea of just what kind of vulnerable women will fall for his shit. He's also not averse to committing felony crimes: for a middle-class person like you and I, a felony conviction is a crippling blow. For Henry...well, I've heard that while blue-collar workers (especially minorities) get badly hurt by felony records, the construction industry is pretty open to hiring people with records and often doesn't do background checks.

I don't think that Henry is some kind of badass charismatic mid-level drug lord or gang leader, the kind profiled in Sudhir Venkatesh's book Gang Leader for a Day. Instead, he is a huckster who is able to lie his way into women's pants and prey on the isolated and vulnerable.

As for what Henry has that I do not: a willingness to outright lie and bullshit, being OK committing misdemeanors and maybe felonies that land him in jail multiple times. He is probably taller and better-looking. As for the social aspect: sure, autistic people may learn social skills almost as a second language. And some may become very...proficient, at least by certain metrics. However: in some ways, Henry the high-school dropout with a GED has better command of the English language than a foreigner that moved to the United States as an adult, learned English, and became a tenured professor of English. Sure, the university professor can dissect Jane Austen and Shakespeare and Dickens with the best of them...but is he able to create - not just understand - the same informal grammatical constructions as Henry? Social interactions are - at least in my experience - far more informal and fluid than writing or public speaking. And even so: my writing may be good, but it isn't that good. It is not good enough to inspire someone to overcome a visceral and difficult-to-articulate ick, an uncanny-valley sensation, a "creepiness" that exists in the absence of any kind of wrongdoing that can be put into words. I will concede that it may be possible for people to habituate or to become used to this sensation, either from having autistic friends and relatives; there are also people who lack the sensation I am talking about because of variations in psychological and biological makeup. I've known people that were completely lacking in empathy (but were decent human beings); I've read of people that didn't feel fear and others that barely felt pain.

I also don't think that moral virtue comes into it a whole hell of a lot. It would be rather absurd to ask "What kind of moral virtue does it take to convince someone to buy a dogshit car from a salesman simply to make him happy", although if that salesman or anyone had that kind of saintly character, determination, willpower, and virtue it would probably be enough to make him a good salesman. Attractiveness is about as correlated to moral virtue as something like basketball skill, in my opinion...the 6'6" asshole is probably beating the 5'6" saint in a game of one-on-one.

Google "arrested for domestic violence mugshot". I'm pretty sure several are uglier than you. I audibly laughed at a few of them.

I did so out of morbid curiosity, but all the results (other than the battered victims) seem to be absolutely normal looking, some verging on mildly attractive.

https://ibb.co/JjckSBs

The order seems to depend on who searches and at what time. And I'm claiming that many of them are ugly, not most, domestic violence (whether against a wife or children - many of the results seem to be for child abuse) happens all across society. I don't think domestic abusers are in total that below average, althoguh they seem to have strong representation from the very below-average due to the relationship between domestic abuse and generally being a criminal / lower class dysfunction.

But here are a few of the ones that I saw (notably these are different images than the ones I saw a few hours ago, and only one overlap on the 'first page', extending to 4 of overlap with your first page after scrolling for a while):

one two three four five

this one comes from 'domestic abuse' instead

If this is at all a representative sample, they're all more physically attractive than I am. They're probably taller (I'm 5'6; average US male height is 5'9 or 5'10) and three have full heads of hair.

I turned on incognito mode and got pretty much the same result as the first time. It certainly does seem like a fairly representative sampling of the kind of underclass that is particularly prone to that kind of behavior.

What do they have that you don't have?

Ah yes, a pivotal scene from The Wizard of Oz: “But they’ve got something you haven’t got…”

I think I need to rewatch that scene yearly, with my big goals in mind.

Came here to say this. If you respect someone then eventually you will not be physically disgusted by them.

I don’t really get where you’re going with this. Is it just about sleeping with people, or is it about making sacrifices in general?

Specifically with regards to sleeping with people, the answers you’ll get from men will be pretty uniform: “I’ll sleep with most women who aren’t physically deformed, and it wouldn’t even be a sacrifice. And if it’s another man… yeah sorry but you’re on your own.”

And what about if the women WERE physically deformed?

Hell. I'd find a way to clean out my buddy's septic tank or haul idk rotting livestock carcasses if he really needed someone and 'untrained semi competent DIY dude' was the best he could do. Sure, it would be literally shitty as hell and there's a good chance I'd puke my guts out. It's gross, but I will say there's something about being in healthcare in any capacity for any length of time that (at least for me) allowed me to just not give a fuck about any disgust that I felt. I was just a guy that had to watch a C section or lug pieces of still warm resected colon to the pathology lab or whatever...we (med students, residents, even attendings) were warming our hands on patients' intestines in the OR.

I don't know. Would most guys fuck a deformed female friend if she asked nicely and they really thought it would help? If they would, under what circumstances?

He's been posting about how he's too disgusting to be loved by anyone for the last 6 months or so.

The unfortunate irony of this is it's probably his conviction that this is true, more than anything else, that makes it so.

There is no reason to believe that it is so at all. These kinds of thoughts have a way of persisting against all logic and evidence. I often have thoughts about how disgusting I am, but when I go out I get plenty of attention from men. So it's possible that Skookum could be attractive.

Yeah I only realized that it was that same guy after reading the other replies lol.

How do I decide if I simply have no talent in something? I had a 2.8/4( bad) gpa as a computer engineering freshman (not putting much work in), and really don't know if I should try to transfer to other majors. I enjoy reading and generally am better at language than math. I am currently taking some online courses on digital logic design and I suck, a lot. I know if I put more time on studying I would probably like it, but right now, I am just terrified I have no talent in engineering. I really want to migrate to other countries (eg Germany), and I figure engineers are in demand, but it seems that's the only reason I am still in engineering.

Thank you for all of your advice. I really haven't put a lot of work in, to be confident to say I hate engineering. I think I deserve one last chance, to give all I have, and try to excel. If I still don't get 3.0, or find myself in misery, I will switch. I probably will only be able to switch to some less popular majors, such as economics or sociology, but I guess at that point I have to take it.

I am very aware of self prophecy, and would try to encourage myself to learn before I deny myself any chance to study hard.

what do you want to do? digital logic is just a more formal version of the logic that logic bros want everyone to use. it’s all and/or and if/then. you don’t lack talent for doing it, probably just practice. so if it’s the right path to lead to something you would enjoy then it’s worth it and you’ll get it with effort. the difficult part is to figure out what you would actually enjoy having not done those roles yet.

no talent

not putting much work in

Sounds like you might have the talent but not the motivation? Then the question is: why? I had a 3.0 my first semester (other STEM majors), because it took me that long to realize my "don't bother studying, just absorb the material instantly" strategy from high school but wasn't going to cut it in college. Fixing that fixed the problem.

if I put more time on studying I would probably like it

And if this is the case, then you're gold. The only thing that would worry me is if the converse is true: "if I liked it I would put more time on studying". To some extent anything remunerative is going to involve hard and/or tedious work (because otherwise many people would be happy to do it for cheap and the demand would be filled), but ideally it should be work like conscientiously brushing and flossing teeth, not work like pulling teeth.

Unless you like pulling teeth, I mean. Dentistry pays well and has great job flexibility.

I'll echo others here - unless you need to support family, kids, or some other circumstance where you desperately need to make a lot of money, don't go into a career you don't like! It will wear you down, make you a shell of a person over the years. It's not worth it.

Try a different field, if you like; if the shit you have trouble with in compsci is logic design it's all logic design. There is nothing there but remembering symbols and designing logic.

You think compsci guys are in demand? Mechanical engineers, civic engineers, fuking DIRT GUYS (geotech dudes); all the boring stem fields are always hiring here and everywhere.

That said: all very math and remembering shit heavy.

If you don’t enjoy engineering, I’d argue try doing something else. I think migrating to another country is a fine goal, but if engineering is just a means to an end, you may be setting yourself up for an unenjoyable four years of college and, even worse, an unenjoyable career. I chose engineering because I had a flair for math and thought computer programming was cool, but I found I both hated and wasn’t good at programming or circuits. I still work as an electrical engineer, but I’ve never much enjoyed the work, and always had a what if… feeling in the back of my head. I could do it over again, I would go back and stick with Political Science (or history) and have gone to law school.

To answer your question more directly, engineering is fucking hard. Even at the undergraduate level. Some people are more talented than others, but trust me, very few people find it easy. Regardless, it’s worth thinking long and hard on what you’re interested in (and good at) and weighing your future job prospects.

I had a worse GPA and was working pretty hard. I am now a professional software developer making good money. Engineering seems like a good field, good enough that it might be worth pursuing even if you think another career might be a better match. But in the end you know yourself best.

You won’t know until you put in the work.

Financial wellness:

What should I read or watch in order to become informed enough to make somewhat prudent and wise investment decisions?

I want to stop my savings from getting eaten by inflation and make some profit each year (or at least some likely profit over a 3 year or 5 year period). I can tolerate low to moderate risk.

Feel free to give straight up specific investment advice too.

Advice for people in europe: There's a number of brokers in europe available, such as scalable capital or trade republic.

Also as others have mentioned if you have no idea about investing and no interests in having to move your money around regularly, I strongly advice to just park your money in an index ETF. As an example, I currently have 75% MSCI World and 25% MSCI Emerging Markets on scalable capital. Since US companies are dominating the stock market, the MSCI World is strongly biased towards US companies. At least for me that is a positive, since a recession in Germany may already hit me hard without also ruining my savings, and vice versa. Investing somewhere that you're not living is imo also a good way to diversify. If you see it differently, there is enough different index funds to allocate your savings differently. But the details even of this will depend on your country. For example here in Germany, there is the "vermögenswirksame leistung", which means that the employer will pay money for you into savings, and some plans may be usable for this while others are not. I don't think you'll be able to inform yourself well without country-dependent information.

I have the same question, but for Europe. A lot of online advise is very tailored to US tax quirks

Yeah, I noticed. I'm also in Europe (Norway). Everyone just assumed I was American, including you! :P

R/bogleheads. 3 fund portfolio. Doesn’t get any easier for retirement prep.

3-5 year time horizon is a much different animal. If you’re looking for something guaranteed, a high yield savings account, CD, or money market fund are where you want to be. Anything invested in equities is going to be too risky for such a short period of time.

I don't aim to withdraw everything after 3-5 years. I meant to say I want something that'll go up over moderate amounts of time, even if it doesn't go up over just 1 year. I know there are swings. For instance, if there's another pandemic, I'd want my investments to come good after it, if not during.

Again, nothing is necessarily safe in a 3-5 year time horizon with the exception of a savings account, CD, federal bonds, or a money market account (others may quibble with the last one, but it’s generally true). So I think you need to have a better idea of what you’re saving for. If you think you may buy a house in 3-5 years, you can certainly invest your money in the stock market, but there is a risk that you will lose money. Now if you just have an amorphous idea of I want to have more money in 5 years but there’s nothing I really plan to buy, then going for an overall index fund may be the move.

Think I'll go for a fund that has beaten the index over the last 5 year period.

You do you, everyone has a different risk tolerance.

Past performance does not guarantee future results.

Clearly not, but it is generally the case that past behavior is a predictor of future behavior. So if I have the choice between funds that have regularly failed to match the index and funds that have regularly surpassed the index, I'm picking the latter.

Sorry, I really should have mentioned that I'm from Norway and that I have no previous exposure to finance terms. Much of your post is Greek to me. :)

That Boglehead thread is a nice throwback. I remember reading it for hours and still not getting a conclusive answer.

The standard argument around here presented in enjoyable (to me) book form: A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

The standard argument around here presented in video form: Ben Felix on YouTube.

And if you can tolerate more risk you can always lever the index funds to get more swings.

Will try to read that book. Cheers.

When you say lever the index funds, you mean leveraging using derivatives or debt to e.g. double the return on the index funds' increase in value? While also basically doubling the risk?

I see.

Seconding the FIRE reddit. There is also the UK personal finance flowchart and their wiki which I generally endorse.

Assuming you have your bases covered, I would just buy index funds. Pick a diversified fund, stick your money in it and then ignore it for the next five years.

FIRE Reddit has good content.

Standard advice is just going to be index funds. Add automatic rebalancing via places like Betterment for an easy path to slightly better optimization.

I’m interested in reading some high quality Christian apologetics. After having a bit of a crisis of faith with my vaguely eastern/agnostic spiritual tendencies I want to give the old J.C. another chance. Right now I’m on Mere Christianity by Lewis.

What are some other high quality, semi recent books for someone in my circumstances?

ETA: would anyone be interested in a book club or study group along these lines?

Depends what you want. Personally I found Tim Keller's The Reason For God very helpful. It's written as a practical, down-to-earth discussion of Christianity in the modern age. https://www.amazon.com/Reason-God-Belief-Age-Skepticism-ebook/dp/B000XPNUZE?ref_=ast_author_dp

On the other hand, if you want something really meaty, consider Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self and A Secular Age. They're mostly social history and philosophy rather than straight apologetics, but considering western modernity from the outside and seeing how all the parts worked and where they developed from made a big difference to me. That was what really allowed me to take Christianity seriously; until that point the apologetics were just an intellectual curiosity.

And certainly would be interested in a book club. I know much less than I'd like about christian teaching through the ages, especially in comparison to someone like @FarNearEverywhere and I've been meaning to read more for a while.

Mere Christianity has a lot of good content, but if you end up finding it a bit simplistic in places, it's good to remember that it was originally a bunch of general-audience radio talks, so that kind of comes with the territory. As far as C.S. Lewis goes I recommend The Problem of Pain and Miracles for deeper treatments of their titular matters. They aren't perfect, but they are very good.

Lewis also has a number of good shorter essays (often adapted from talks) that are maybe not apologetics as such, but are also high quality and in the same vein. I remember finding "On Obstinacy in Belief" insightful, for instance. I can try to dig up a more complete list (I'll need to skim and remind myself from my collection) if you are interested.

Another poster has already recommended Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man by Chesterton, which are very good but have quite a different tone and approach (and are much less recent). Lewis is more philosophical but also chattier; Chesterton has a better prose style as well as much more of a flair for melodrama and wordplay -- he often presents his ideas in a way optimized for emotional and/or intellectual punch rather than for clarity or airtight logic. (That doesn't mean his ideas aren't good -- they usually are -- but it rubs some people the wrong way.)

On the flip side, I anti-recommend... most pop-apologetics, frankly, and that means most of the recent stuff. Pretty much all of it (that I've seen, at least, though I haven't been paying careful attention to the space) is more or less in Lewis's shadow and is either just dishonest or a worse version of Lewis.

GK Chesterton.

Orthodoxy/The Everlasting Man are both chewable even if you've got no sympathy or openness to his arguments and consider him a memetic infohazard.

I'm not going to recommend any actual apologetics because I'm not familiar with any high quality ones, but I am going to suggest that you give Nietzsche's The Antichrist a read to serve as a good counterpoint.

The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach by Mike Licona.

Edward Feser's The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism is a great introduction to Thomism. It gives good Aristotelian arguments for the existence of God.

Dostoevsky's oeuvre is the last word on dealing with a crisis of faith from either direction, imo.

It make no arguments one way or the other (or rather it makes arguments from all direction to all directions); but it externalizes the conflict more completely and precisely than anything else I've seen.

High quality and recent: Rick McGough’s Faith & Reason Made Simple (Rationally Defend What You Believe In A Culture of Skepticism) is from 2018, and is quite comprehensive. Here’s a sermon from the author of the book. Message starts around 42:40.

Here’s a link to recordings of a 60-hour church apologetics class on the book with the teacher citing additional material when appropriate. Each video is around an hour, and the media library is arranged recent-first.

And yes, I’d be interested.

It’s not “apologetics” in the William Lain Craig style, but Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is a fascinating investigation into the nature of faith.

I’ve posted about before, but I’m constantly dealing with this issue on-and-off that feels vaguely autoimmune:

Joint pain Muscle cramps Muscle spasms Neck and shoulder pain and tension

I found some significant relief through LDN and going lite keto, but some days I’m really floored by it (and it feels like it’s getting a little worse again). I went to a neuro years ago and nothing from Lyme tests to antinuclear came back positive.

I’m pretty afraid I’m treading water with what is an autoimmune issue, but I have no faith in the medical establishment to figure out what this is. Any advice?

I'm had success with some relatively non-specific musculoskeletal stuff with targeted exercise and weekly rapamycin. I have strong inflammatory tendencies and family history, but no diagnosed disorder. Also psychotherapy helped my general improvement, so maybe that too.

Assuming your responses to LDN and keto weren't psychologically mediated (a big possibility -- many of these problems have a psychological component) then rapamycin could help you. It's not an unusually dangerous drug, but not 100% safe either, so ideally you would find an experienced doctor to prescribe and monitor treatment.

For autoimmune, some people respond to heat: get your core temperature to 102F for a few minutes every few days. This is supposedly safe-ish, though didn't work for me. Again, the standard of care involves medical guidance.

Are you sure you're not sitting or sleeping in a sub-optimal position?

If you want to eliminate weird shit:

For the fire fighter friend of mine with random joint pain it was heavy metal accumulation from inhaling a fuck tone of mercury at some point. Went away after a couple months of chelation therapy. (not the woowoo hack type; the real shit at a real hospital.)

Different friend had some sort of allergy to a protein supplement that caused joint inflammation; went away when he stopped supplementing.

Family member with congenital spine deformities she has held off for 70 years by doing hard-core Yoga (vinyasa and ashtanga in the style of a 100 year old dude lookin like he's made of beef jerky who lives in the woods and practices on a rock).

If you are desperate to rule shit out and you got fat stacks, you could try a comprehensive allergy panel. Don't do the online ones, they are garbage that just measure inflammation response which triggers on fucking anything. You gotta get the super annoying scratch and sniff type if you want to really rule shit out.

I had neck, shoulder pain and weaknesses. Self-diagnosed a cervical radiculopathy. GP concurred.

Traction and physiotherapy resolved.

Sounds like you’re where I was at five years ago. I had all sorts of diagnoses from sciatica to nerve damage to hypermobility. Turned out it was all BS and I wasted years and tens of thousands of dollars on pointless medical interventions.

Check out any books by John Sarno, here is an article that gives a bit more depth. There are some other mindbody apps like Curable I’ve heard good things about. You could also look into the Alexander technique school of physical therapy.

I wish you luck. Chronic pain is not easy to live with, and as I’m sure you know most people simply cannot understand.

Does anyone have the background or experience to advise on this family issue? Changing all of the names and some of the facts for privacy, but keeping true to the essentials:

My sister Ruth and her ex-husband Danny have 50-50 custody of their children. Shortly before their divorce, one of Danny's family members, to whom he had always been close, was arrested for truly disgusting behavior with an adolescent boy. This man, John, confessed and struck some sort of plea bargain. He got probation instead of prison time, and he was not placed on the sex offender registry. Ruth and Danny agreed that John could never be alone with their children. It would have been smart to write this into the custody agreement, but it did not occur to Ruth that she might need to.

In the years since, Danny has not cut John out of his life or the kids' lives. John is still invited to birthday parties and dinners at home. The kids have been dropped off at his house to be babysat by his wife. When they hit their teens last year, Ruth asked Danny to inform them of John's history and of the rule that they were never to be alone with him. Danny dragged his feet for six months, but he did eventually comply.

Recently, she saw on social media that Danny and the kids were on a camping trip with John and his wife. She asked Danny if he was still enforcing their agreed-upon boundary. Danny told her she had already been too overbearing on this subject, and that her questions were "unreasonable" and "controlling." He went on to say, "Fuck off, you take plenty of risks," and, "If you don't trust my parenting, hire a lawyer."

Last week, one of the kids told Ruth of John taking him on a cool shopping trip just the two of them.

Ruth is looking for an attorney. Until she talks to one, I can't get these questions out of my head:

  1. How big is the risk? On the one hand, John was lightly sentenced for a first offense. On the other hand, there were informal accusations many years prior. His official victim was pubertal and unsuspecting; Ruth's kids are a bit older and forewarned. As far as she can tell, John has never been inappropriate with them. What's the correct level of alarm?

  2. What is the most efficient way to keep John away from the kids? A restraining order? He is on probation, or at least he was a few years ago. How likely is it that he still is, and that one of the conditions is no contact with minors? Can Ruth find out? Can she just inform someone, and he'll get arrested, and she won't have to fight with Danny about it?

  3. Is there something seriously wrong with my ex-brother-in-law? He was always an asshole, but this just seems nuts. Does Ruth need to completely reassess how she co-parents with him?

  4. Is Danny endangering his custody here? "Fuck off, you take plenty of risks," was sent via text. That is in writing, on the record, as his response to questions about bringing a child molester camping with his kids. This seems phenomenally stupid.

I understand if no one is comfortable offering anything resembling legal advice on this. In general, it may be too big/personal/nasty a problem for the Wellness Wednesday thread.

But I'd appreciate thoughts on question #3. My sister's mental model of her ex seems confused at best. Until recently she insisted that, whatever her ex's faults, he was "a good dad." She has chosen not to make an issue out of other things that alarmed me, and she claims this tolerance comes from a genuine desire to co-parent peaceably for the children's sake. She doesn't want to be micromanaged in her own home either. Besides, in many ways, her ex can be reasonable, flexible, and amicable.

But I suspect her conflict aversion actually results from just how unpleasant he can be when challenged. He once tried to "win" a petty power struggle with forgery, taking out a debt in her name to leverage it against her.

Nevertheless, her ideal resolution to this issue is that, after consultation with the lawyer, she has a face to face meeting with her ex, asks him to commit to enforcing the existing rule, and explains what legal steps she'll take if he doesn't. He agrees, and she drops it until she's presented with evidence of noncompliance.

Every time she tells me this, my head very nearly explodes. I don't think supportive big brothers, no matter how protective, are supposed to yell, "Are you fucking stupid? What the fuck are you talking about, 'getting him to agree'? He is a proven lying shitbag. Seek a court order now banning all contact, or you're as bad as he is."

Am I crazy, or is she?

This is serious shit and you (or you and your sister, rather) need to speak to a real lawyer now.

She’s calling around to find a lawyer and set up a meeting. I’m not relying solely on internet strangers.

I’m asking in large part to quiet my racing brain until the appointment.

How do I get these dogs to get along?

I have two dogs, a GSD and a lab, and my girlfriend has a glorified rodent of a Spitz. All of them are males, albeit with the literal OOM size difference, it's hard to believe they're the same species.

My GSD is reactive to other dogs, both as a consequence of his breed, and because he's used to seeing hostile strays who have no compunctions about barking or ganging up on him.

My lab is, well, a lab, so he would hurt flies and mice, but that's about it. He'll bark at street dogs, but he won't pick a fight.

Her dog is about as harmless as one can get, though you wouldn't know it from how he mouths off to others. He gets along fine in his dog creche.

She can't afford a creche every single time she comes over to my place, so she usually brings her dog along, to be kept on top of a wide cupboard where he can stay safe from the gnashing teeth of mine.

We've tried our best to socialize him with my dogs, but to little avail. The moment he comes down to ground level, they do their best to get him, or at least my GSD does. The lab is content to bark or growl, if her dog gets close.

I'm sure my GSD would absolutely masticate him, and even a nip would be dangerous given his tiny size.

We've been trying for months, offering treats to my dogs while we bring hers down, and rewarding them when they don't bark. It just doesn't work, or hasn't after a lot of trying. The moment her dog gets a bit of misplaced confidence, he starts barking back, which resets all the progress.

I've tried scolding and yelling, feeding all the dogs at the same time, some weird ultrasonic training tool, and yet I'm at an impasse. I just want them to get along, or at the very least not go for each other's throat. Any advice would be appreciated.

Honestly, it sounds like a classic case of tiny dog syndrome. Take with a big pinch of salt because I've never owned a dog, but I've read that you often get problems with tiny dogs who are indulged because they're cute and they take that as proof that they're top of the pecking order. The fact that you scold your dogs for trying to hurt him only adds to this.

Ideally, what you want is to make him realise that he's a tiny dog. It sounds like your lab is harmless, so perhaps you could let him interact with the spitz without the GSD present. The Spitz can wear himself out, realise he isn't taken seriously, and maybe calm down a bit. Then maybe you can reintroduce the GSD at a later date.

Obedience training for the spitz might also help.

https://holidaybarn.com/blog/small-dog-syndrome/

https://www.purina.com.au/dogs/behaviour/small-dog-syndrome

My girlfriend absolutely spoils him, so while I suspect you're right, it would be a bad idea to voice it haha.

When the lab and the Spitz are left together, they keep their distance unless someone forces them closer, at which point the lab starts growling and barking, and the Spitz either shuts up or starts barking back if he's being coddled safely. In more neutral settings, before the barking starts, the lab will happily sniff the Spitz without barking first.

I'll give your advice a whirl! Thanks.

Have you tried taking them to a neutral location and tiring them both out? Sometimes the problem is that introducing them at one home or another sets off an intruder / defender dynamic where one dog feels the need to protect its territory.

Take the dogs camping and run them around separately. Let them both sit by the fire once they're too exhausted to fight.

Honestly not a bad idea, I think it might help defuse the tensions!

Does the shepherd like, sit/stay?

If not, you should probably train him to anyways -- once this is done (or if he already does) then making him do that (and rewarding him) while the small dog does stuff in the general area should get him bored of the thing fairly fast.

He does so, but only inconsistently if food isn't involved. Given that he's always on a leash outdoors, I've never had a strict need for that, but I'm sure it would be useful.

I've tried having him sit with the bribe of treats while the little dog runs around, but the moment they're gone and he notices it, the cycle resets.

Oh yeah, don't be afraid to sock it to him with the treats -- this can be a significant proportion of his daily calories and it's fine!

If he's used to chasing, it will probably take a while to get him into the habit of not doing it -- so the time commitment is significant, but I don't think there's a shortcut. (other than turning them all loose and letting the chips fall where they may; higher risk there though!)

Clicker training seems gimmicky if you haven't tried it, but I've found it pretty helpful at building this kind of response faster. Low barrier to entry, the clickers are like 2 bucks and you are giving him treats anyways.

Thanks for the advice! I'll try and see if I can make some more headway.

If you try the clicker thing, Karen Pryor is kind of the mother of it -- I don't love her specific dog-training books so much, but there's one about general use of the clicker for behaviour modification in animals that's a good read; I think it's this one: https://www.amazon.com/Karen-Pryor-Behavior/dp/0962401714/

For training our dog (a lab/pointer mix) not to bark at or attack our cats when we first got it, we first put the dog in a fold-up portable kennel in living room and then let the cats roam the room freely while we were elsewhere for a bit (1-2 hours at a time usually). After a few days of this, she mostly stopped barking at them and largely ignored them unless they showed interest in her, and they became comfortable being around her. After that, it was a gradual process of closely supervised interactions between them where we showered all of them with attention. Any time she'd bark or lunge at them though, she'd get immediately smacked firmly but not hard on the nozzle and locked up in the kennel for a time out while we kept playing with the cats. After a few weeks doing this and a steady reduction in aggression, we deemed it safe enough to let her be around them unsupervised and now (5+ years later) they're cuddle buddies. I don't know if this would work for small dogs though.

Her dog has often spent the better part of a day up on the cupboard or wardrobe, with my dogs roaming freely at the bottom. Even if they stop barking at him when he's quietly dwelling on top, any attempt to bring him down or take him elsewhere just causes mayhem.

Given the sizes of my dogs, I don't think I can really safely keep them at the same level, at least not without a cage which I don't have.

Her dog has often spent the better part of a day up on the cupboard or wardrobe, with my dogs roaming freely at the bottom. Even if they stop barking at him when he's quietly dwelling on top, any attempt to bring him down or take him elsewhere just causes mayhem.

One aspect of this is that dogs are very territorial. You need to show the bigger dogs that the smaller one is free to roam what they consider their territory. Letting them roam while the smaller one is isolated reinforces that this is not the case. Also, accept that there will be mayhem until the desired pecking order is established.

Given the sizes of my dogs, I don't think I can really safely keep them at the same level, at least not without a cage which I don't have.

I'd recommend getting a foldable one for each, but locking them in a separate room (eg, the bathroom) while letting the small dog roam might also work.

I've tried scolding and yelling, feeding all the dogs at the same time, some weird ultrasonic training tool, and yet I'm at an impasse.

We've found an immediate firm (but gentle, just enough to get the dog's attention) smack on the nozzle or butt and isolation is much more reliable than any of these.

I'll try the keeping them cooped up while the little one runs free a go, shame I have to keep him under close watch, he's not house trained in the least.

Thanks for the help!

Thesis statement : Targetting-based 3 pronged model for conceptualizing negative emotions

Placeholder comment about a rough new (reinventing the wheel, or just bad at a google?) model for handling negative emotions. If this gets any interest, I'll try to make a longer comment on it.

Single-source past derived negative emotions can be divided along 3 separable lines:

  • Grief or a sense of loss - untargetted

    • unary negative emotion.
    • has magnitude, no vector
    • Can be processed without hurting anyone
    • you don't gain anything from it

  • Regret - Self-targeted or action targeted negative emotion

    • targeted inwards.
    • Can be in association to an action, but usually action that 'you' did or did not take
    • has magnitude and vector, but no real destination
    • wrongly processing it can involve hurting yourself
    • can be used productively to plan decisions in the future

  • Resentment - targeted towards someone

    • targeted towards another person you feel resentful towards
    • is usually in association with an interaction with a person. Either "they did X to me", "they made me do X" or "we did X."
    • has magnitude, vector and a destination
    • wrongly processing it can involve hurting yourself and another person
    • can be used productively to establish boundaries or request change in someone else's behavior

I have recently tried to verbalize the breakdown of grief/regret/resentment that I am feeling when a negative emotion comes up. In my experience, without this model, people can often act out grief by misconstruing it as resentment, and destroying relationships. Similarly, some people will fall into un-identifiable sadness (grief) when in reality they real issue has to do with resentment (and needing to establish boundaries from an individual).

I have found this model to be quite useful for my own issues. Lmk if this sounds useful for you guys too.

If you steal this idea, please give credit. If someone else has done this better, please link.

I was thinking along these lines in regard to anxiety, which is a targeted vector. What it is targeting seems to at its core be imagined events happening or not happening. And I imagine this to be a core emotion in which these other negative emotions are used to "manage" it to various degrees of success.

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