bolido_sentimental
No bio...
User ID: 205
bolido_sentimental
17d ago
How do you feel about your personality, currently? Do you make friends easily, or have many satisfying relationships with other people?
I'm not implying that you lack those things, I'm just curious about your self-perception of them.
bolido_sentimental
18d ago
Often I understand a book differently because of the way I've changed in the intervening years. Sometimes I enjoy it much more, sometimes much less.
Also, after 10 years or so I've often forgotten much of what happened. So, for books where I remember there being some wonderful, moving scene, I can re-read it knowing I have something good in store, but not clearly remembering what it was.
bolido_sentimental
26d ago
We're around the same age and I've been considering the same question. Like others have said, it's basically a question of taking whatever skills you have to whatever the largest employer is. If I were going to try and move to Muncie, Indiana, then I'd try and see what kind of jobs I could get at Ball State University, or at the Magna plant. If you're IT (like I am), you see what MSPs serve the area and see if they need an engineer, or you try and get on as a sysadmin at whatever businesses there are.
Career paths - as you note, you're kind of locked in with what you've got unless you want to learn a new skill. My barber says he'd train the right person from scratch if he liked him. Every town has lawyers, every town has accountants, every town has police, every town has clergy; but it's hard to transition into one of those things without being ready to change your life tremendously. Nevertheless I have been thinking about it anyway.
bolido_sentimental
27d ago
I like to use it to get summary answers to questions which would otherwise require me to read many different sources. For example you might ask it, "What was it like to work as a police officer in Portsmouth, OH in 1954?" There may be no single article that describes this, but the AI will paint a plausible picture if you ask it to, and will fill in a number of details you might not think of on your own.
It works well in this application because I don't need hard facts or a working solution to a problem; I want a general idea and it gives me quite a full one.
bolido_sentimental
27d ago
The earliest I clearly remember it is reading SSC on my breaks when I was teaching English in Korea in 2013. I was 24 years old then, and it was kind of my first exposure to serious current thought outside the left-liberal bubble. In those days I had a legit Tumblrina girlfriend; I felt like some of the things she believed were crazy, but I had no real idea of what else it was possible to believe. I think that's more or less how I started digging into the culture war.
Something I somewhat lament is that I've never gotten into top-level posting, even though I've wanted to; I think I have quite low argumentativeness. (There's probably a better name for this quality.) When I read something online that I disagree with, I just go, "Ah, interesting;" I don't have that urge to push back, correct, or give alternate perspectives. I think this is mostly just my personality, but also from engaging with bad-faith interlocutors when I was a teenager and concluding that Internet arguments are pointless. However, I also sometimes think that my failure to post is actually an indication that I don't pay much attention to or think much about the world around me.
But anyway, yeah, I've checked the Motte probably every day since it was created, with only very occasional interludes when I'm on a plane or something; and I was on the culture war subreddits way back when as well.
Mottizens: do you have a good relationship with your parents? More specifically: do you try to make them proud and live up to values they inculcated in you? Or do you think about failings they had, and try to orient your life toward avoiding those?
Found myself wondering about this yesterday, how in some cases you have children who strive to continue the sort of life their parents led (e.g., multigenerational families I see at church), and in other cases you get total rebellion, children who want to be as little like their parents as possible and adopt opposite positions to what they were raised with.
Thinking about my own case, it's a little bit strange in that it never felt like my parents steered me towards any particular mode of living. I try to be like my dad in certain respects: taking responsibility for things, trying to solve one's own problems with one's own resources, managing money carefully and thoughtfully. My mom is just sort of a pleasant, rather daffy woman who lives a very simple life and isn't trying to impact the world in any way. I observe that neither of them are especially opinionated, and neither am I; they are casual, moderate, Clinton-type liberals and I've gone more conservative, but it's not something we ever fight about - they don't go into arguments about "issues" and don't mind people disagreeing with them. In general it's like they're just sort in the middle of most types of bell curves; even if I were of some rebellious nature, they aren't polar enough about anything for me to take up the opposite pole.
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