Tedesche

Around 19, I’d say. 42 now.

Try to find a job you enjoy from 9-5. That means focusing on activities you enjoy that are the main activity of said job. I worked in a pet store because it afforded me 30% of my time playing with puppies, even though the remaining 70% was cleaning puppy shit and stocking goods. I now work as a therapist because I spend 70% of my time talking to people about their problems (which I enjoy), and 30% doing paperwork and correspondence. Make your job something you enjoy most of them time and it gets much easier. Then, you retire and collect Social Security. As long as you’ve worked for most of your life, that’ll be a decent retirement. You’ll have to live frugally, but it’ll be livable.

Also, if you can manage it, invest $10,000 as early as you can in a stock market index fund and pay for a fund manager. By the time you retire, that will provide you with a substantial cushion to rest on.

Quest for Glory series. Got me into RPGs.

It was so traumatizing he had to go see Richard Dreyfus for therapy.

That’s a limerick conservative parents tell themselves to feel better about their rebellious kids.

And not what I’m talking about at all.

As a serious answer, I’d guess Lemmy skews younger. Too many idealists here to think the average user base has the wisdom that comes from experience.

Sorry, younglings. You’ll know when you get older: the long view clearly demonstrates optimism is a lie. History is a corkscrew. Progress is made, but only through endless repetitions of past mistakes.

LOL. Omg I’m such a survivor. I’m only a survivor because I survived this long. I would be a completely different person if I I just survived longer than this. 😝

Because you invested in a shit plan or simply made your investments poorly. I know plenty of people who are doing well on their retirement investment plans, and I’m doing fine too. Don’t blame America, the country, for your shitty decisions.

That movie is like watching my own childhood.

Hopefully without the intellectual impairments all the main characters have?

Napoleon Dynamite, but that’s intentional.

Lemmy will never understand how amazing this movie is.

No, you’re wrong and I’m not going to debate this with you. Study some psychology before making false claims. Good-bye.

No, the reason religion is excluded is because delusions aren’t supposed to reflect cultural conditioning. Delusions are, by their very definition, an abnormal brain process. Cultural beliefs are not abnormal brain processes, no matter how irrational they are.

Please understand that this exception is accepted by the entire field of psychology. If you disagree with it, you have 200 years of psychological debate and study to contend with. Don’t pretend you’ve read enough to claim you have grounds to disagree with something the entire field of psychology considers a settled issue. No matter how much you wish religion is a mental illness, it’s not. Sadly, the irrationality of religion is fully explainable within the bounds of normal human psychology.

Damage to the prefrontal cortex resulting in cognitive inflexibility can result in a myriad of fixed beliefs—they’re not necessarily religious in nature.

And religious fundamentalism is a particular type of extreme religious belief; most people don’t hold to fundamentalism but are nonetheless religious, so the study doesn’t account for anywhere near all religiosity and certainly doesn’t refute the point that religious faith isn’t a form of mental illness.

I want to make something clear here: I’m an atheist and an antitheist, but I’m also a therapist and it really irks me when atheists try to conflate mental disorders with religion. It’s an example of atheists fueling their distaste for religion by giving in to amateurish ignorance about psychology. Learn what the fuck you’re talking about before trying to make claims that go against what all of the experts in a field of study agree upon. Honestly, atheists ought to know better.

But they’re not persistent delusions. Delusions are, by definition, NOT cultural in origin. This is something that gets pretty well drilled into you when you study abnormal psychology. There’s a difference between someone’s brain malfunctioning and them simply being possessed of outdated cultural beliefs or traditions. It’s why religious beliefs aren’t considered mental illness, but still believing in Santa Claus when you’re an adult would be.

It’s not group psychosis or mental illness, true, but it is divorced from reality. Sadly, the human mind is capable generating demonstrably, obviously erroneous beliefs without suffering from significantly abnormal psychology.

Religion is a set of extremely successful myths, which have survived mainly by convincing people that you can’t be a good person without them, which frequently involves disparaging people of other beliefs as bad/evil.

In other words, a really shitty worldview.

Such a tragedy that this didn’t/doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

Alzheimer’s, and the fact that my mother’s genes put me at terrible risk of developing it. The idea of my mind slowly fracturing while my body continues to live is utterly terrifying to me, and I have actively thought about buying a gun to take care of the problem should it ever appear. Problem is, I don’t even know that I’ll recognize it if it does.

I would argue the plumbing system beneath and behind you is more useful.

I think this is it, actually. Having a lot of money can lead to spending it on frivolous things, but I don’t think that’s what we mean by corruption. It’s when you have so much money that you can use that money to influence people in power that it gets bad. Suddenly, when getting your way is merely a question of bribery and you have plenty of means to do it, people start thinking they have a right to pull the strings in the way they see fit.