late_night_lawyer
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User ID: 2605
late_night_lawyer
8mo ago
Sorry if this is not the angle you were going for but: becoming rich My mature self thinks that of course one needs enough money to survive and to help your children thrive. And maybe some for retirement and so on. But I'm naturally very frugal and my wife is even more so, mainly we just don't like most things and the things we like aren't high in demand or do exist in abundance. We both have parents who will help us if we ever need it and our earning potential is probably quite good. But I still have this deep desire to have a high number, like a literal number of money. It is completely unrelated to spending any of it. It is some kind of continuation of the feeling of putting coins into a savings box as a child - somehow comforting - not because you want to buy something but probably more similar to the feeling people who collect something have? I'm not sure.
On a lighter note: I always liked Haribo jelly bears and I indulge into this want every so often till complete satisfaction. Sadly I must report that the association with nausea never lasts more than at maximum a few months so I'm not sure you could permanently cure your desire for Reese's peanut butter cups this way for good. On the upside I'm quite sure that gaining 2 lbs of weight from eating till nauseous once is quite ambitious - especially since if you try this feat in the morning you might not be able to eat anything till the evening. I think one would need to carefully construct ones consumption to actually gain 2 lbs of body fat from a single meal. :)
late_night_lawyer
8mo ago
I know I'm a bit late, but that reminds me of a thought I often have, which sadly I'm not able to properly put into words:
A year ago I was telling my father about people I met and their identities(mostly a few strangely similar depressed feminists) and about me struggling with having no real identity I can think of. And he was extremely annoyed with the way people today emphasize their identities and with me feeling like I needed one. I on the other hand wasn't sure whether anything really changed or whether most people were always this way and their identities just were different to today. Maybe being transgender/woke/MAGA/PUA-adjacent is similar to how being an officer at the royal navy in the mid 19th century felt. Probably there was also a lot of behavior which was unnecessary for the fulfillment of their duties, but which helped to sustain one(or a few) coherent identity. My father thinks, that this is maybe true, but in the 70s and 80s and more generally after WW2 people in western countries actually started having less and less strict identities and we were kind of at peak individualism when it comes to identity construction and now have regressed a bit.
Anyone any intuition on whether the "strict/normed identity" vs "plain/naked individual" actually changes and if in what way historically?
late_night_lawyer
9mo ago
First comment here (and in fact first comment ever on the internet) after lurking for a while. I preemptively ask for forgiveness. I also was a sci-fi nerd, in fact your "tag" is maybe derived from my favorite sci-fi-medium to this day. So naturally I wanted to become a physicist to understand more about the universe. Everything turned out quite differently and now I'm on track to become a lawyer very soon. (still at uni for now) Though my wife is a theoretical physicist and it brings me satisfaction, that someone is doing the hard math/work of contributing something eternal to the realm of human knowledge for me, while I'll do something which is extremely fun, completely arbitrary and transient but will support my wife, me and future children. Besides two people trying to stay in academia is way to complicated anyway. I'm sorry for the long sentences, my mother tongue has this feature and it is hard to get rid of it.
I very much agree with the weirdness of human experience. I sometimes find it so strange, that I seriously wonder whether reality is really all that real.
I am glad that I know that my family understands this and I will try to show my future children that having even unsettling weird experiences is a normal part of human condition.
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