Dropping my performance level at work to what I perceive my coworkers are doing.
TIL I’m the low bar someone sets their standards to! 😅
Jokes aside, I’m happy you found what works for you!
Thank you for your sacrifice 🙏 may your wisdom spread over to more people.
But yes, instead of doing 4 people’s worth of work, I now have most of the day to myself and it’s been… therapeutic, to say the least.
I work just hard enough to still be one of the most productive people there. Just
Just generally in life?
Care less.
Even if you think you don’t care anymore, there is another level of caring in the back of your head that you need to kill.
Every social construct you’re told you should care about makes you a little more miserable.
Nothing matters, it’s all made up by people trying to manipulate you. Do the bare minimum of what you need to do to get to what you genuinely enjoy. No one will ever think fondly about what an adult or professional you were, it’s just manipulation. Humanity is a bad joke of unearned self-importance.
Care less.
But still care about some things.
Care about eating food, keeping your spaces clean enough, and your overall health. Too little care can be a deep hole to climb out of.
I’d file that under bare minimum, self-care yes.
As for holes, we all find ourselves in one sooner or later. No one gets out alive. You’re only in a hole if you consider it a hole. Some people’s happiness is in avoiding people and playing video games, that’s only a hole if you want it to be and choose to internalize other’s judgment of it.
The greedy powers that be have made the act of trying in this civilization into a trap for their exclusive enrichment at the expense of those they trap, and eventually those they trap stay trapped out of the sunk cost fallacy. Don’t fall for it.
Stop trying to please or get along with toxic people just because we share some DNA
Getting smart lights at home.
I live in Sweden, I also live alone, this means that for about a third of the year it is dark when I get home. Which means that when I open my apartment it is just a dark and depressing hole that I stepped into.
With smart lights I can turn on some of the lights before I open the door, and get to step into a lit apartment with mood lighting active, it has had a huge impact on my mental health over the last six years.
My main lights are still normal dumb lights, but the hue system is amazing.
Also a Swede - taking supplementary vitamin D in the winter season has given me a lot more energy to do things.
I also used to have a show auto play when I lived alone. Just some sitcom or cartoon I’d seen before. The noise helped my mood immensely.
I also used to have a show auto play when I lived alone. Just some sitcom or cartoon I’d seen before. The noise helped my mood immensely.
Stopped drinking. Full stop
Cut way down on alcohol. I was never a heavy drinker, but still 2-3 beers a day adds up and takes a toll on your body. Now I only drink on special occasions or socially, and minimally at that.
Similarly, stop drinking energy drinks and soda on all but rare occasions. My acid reflux vanished after I cut out energy drinks.
It’s always shocking to me how varied what different people consider to be heavy drinking. 2-3 drinks a day would kill me after two or three days, or at least my stomach.
Learning how to cook - not just follow recipes - but really learn about what cooking is and the underlying chemistry, science and art.
Over time I slowly developed my skill/knowledge and I can now improvise all kinds of world foods from whatever ingredients and flavors/spices I have before me.
I take great pleasure in that. It’s a joy to serve my food to others too, and watch their eyes widen as though they’ve never tasted anything so true and delicious. Sometimes it’s downright funny because I will just serve unsalted nuts and people will demand that I tell them where I got them, for they are the freshest and most explosively flavorful thing they’ve had… and I’ll say look I just roasted some Costco almonds. 15 min at 340C lol
Although time consuming, it has saved me a lot on food costs and my health has changed profoundly as well - lost over 50kg. Vastly expanded my food horizons as well.
There’s something so indescribably rewarding and satisfying being able to take whole ingredients and make something amazing. I think it’s a wonderful skill that takes a lifetime to develop.
Your story sounds interesting. I never even thought about learning the underlying science. How do you even find this information?
My approach:
- try and error: Just experiment with things, change one single thing and observ what difference it makes (Eg.: season half batch before, half batch after)
- Research on the internet, I mean there are tons of blogs/forums where ppl sharing their experience, just be mindfull, and take everything with a grain of salt (hah!) (Eg.: One anon in reddit collected brownie recips and methodically tested and documneted each approach and what difference it makes, so technically his/her/they recipe is not a single one, but a collection family of recipts where you can choose your desired results)
- Educational-Cooking channels, there are plenty of cooking channels which are showing the underlining science and connections, just to name a few: MinuteFood@yt, aragusea@yt or if you want hardcore data: Talon_Fitness@yt
It’s sort of a loose process of mine.
I have a curious mind that demands to know how things work, not just be told to do things.
So if I was told in a recipe to fry a piece of meat, I would stop and research what happens when you fry meat and why do you fry meat in the first place?
From that I would learn a few simple concepts like the Maillard reaction or how proteins change shape when they are heated.
From there my curiosity would lead me to a more questions like why do we cook meat until it changes color?
Or I might make a stew, and learn that to thicken up the gravy, you’ll add some flour. So then I’ll research what is happening inside of gravy when you add flour; why doesn’t it seem to thicken until it’s heated? That would lead me to learn how carbohydrates transform in different ways under different conditions, or how emulsifications work.
That’s really it in a nutshell, just cook daily but always stop to try to figure out what’s actually happening in the steps I’m following.
By slowly developing that deeper understanding, it made it so I could eventually just throw the recipes away, because I had learned so much intuitively that I just didn’t need them anymore. It also gave me that skill of being able to look at a proposed recipe and just laugh because you know it’s not going to work or taste good.
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Putting the shopping list in store-order before I go into the store; saves so much time and fuss in the store and makes me feel like a hyper-efficient grocery god.
We are cut from the same cloth you and I. It’s off the utmost import that everything is in its right place because I don’t like spending an hour at the store.
Unfortunately, I frequently forget lettuce. I should probably cross items off as I go, but if a head is lettuce is the one casualty I can accept that.
I do the same and even though I’m still in the store I question if it’s worth doubling back for that one forgotten item…
This iOS app does that automatically, for the UK at least.
I wish that our store layouts were consistent enough for this to work, I have to change my list order if I’m going to a different store, and remember idiosyncrasies like in one the condiments are at the entrance before produce…maddening!
In no particular order:
Getting a 3rd opinion on my ulcer. Death to h. pylori!
Reading Getting Things Done by David Allen
Divorcing my first wife
Getting into exercise
Figuring out how to ask for a raise
Stop feeling sorry for myself. I wasn’t quite at the incel level of anger at the world but getting there. Life was unfair, other people had advantages I didn’t, things were better in other places in other times.
Took a while to figure out but when I finally stopped thinking about how things should be and started just taking life as it comes everything improved immeasurably.
Buying a KitchenAid mixer. Baking a lot was exhausting. With the mixer, I still have energy after and my arms don’t hurt.
Counting calories with a phone app to lose weight. Tried a lot of diets with mild successes. Started counting calories, weighing myself and what I was eating. I lost 40lbs and have been able to keep it off.
I did this but to gain weight. I have been underweight since highschool due to a high metabolism and active job/lifestyle. Using a calorie tracker helped me hit my calorie and macro goals while also giving me a solid idea of my overall diet. I’m still a little underweight but I’m making progress.
This was my experience. It made it so easy to learn how calorie dense foods were and from there, what I needed to do to stay under target and still feel full. Wish I had done it sooner!
So crazy. Same exact story with me.
Cleaning up after myself at home by:
- reducing the amount of things i have which i dont use (i had like 30 plates, 15 cups, etc at one time, now i have 4 of each type)
- house cleaning weekly and tidying up here and there in between (so things dont pile up)
- cooking my own meals instead of having take out all the time (this improved my overall health)
Melatonin. Basically every night for years I was lying in bed for hours every night wanting to sleep but couldn’t, immediate fix.
