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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   1863 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for July 12, 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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Fuck you themotte. Cant you add a "are you sure want to leave" pop up when I'm halfway through my draft ???? I have lost too many comments through an accidental click.

I'd say you should be using a recovery plugin for your browser ... but if you go that route, make sure you check that it works here. Typio Form Recovery works for me on Reddit but not on TheMotte.

Please compose elsewhere. HTTP is not a stable application.

yeah, I guess that's my only option.

In an attempt to better manage my weight, I have gone on semaglutide.

This stuff is straight up magical, and its efficacy has caused my opinions around personal health management to shift dramatically.

Where I was drinking at least 32 oz of sugary soda a day and unable to stop, those impulses have basically disappeared. I fill up faster, but that primal urge, the association of high fructose corn syrup, is gone.

I am not even on max dose, but have already lost 4 lbs in less than a month. I fully expect the entire usa to be on semaglutide or analagous in the near future. The monthly price of not being morbidly obese seems that it will come to about 500$/month, at least until competitors come to town.

The monthly price of not being morbidly obese seems that it will come to about 500$/month

Much less if you're willing to buy from chinese sources, who sell it for around 7$/mg, which comes out to like 60$/month for the typical high dose of 2mg/week.

That's a lot of additional risk, but what sites are these?

on this site, in the top right you see a "contact supplier" section, and in the top right of that, there's a little button with a "business card" hover-on text, if you click on that and enter you email, it'll send you a whatsapp contact number, and then you can ask for semaglutide, payment is a bit of a hassle, and is done through wise, or moneygram, or westernunion (or some other international money transfer site). I can confirm that you do indeed receive some powder which has the effects I'd expect of semaglutide when injected.

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Excellent, I've never done grey market injectables. How easy are sharps to obtain without a prescription? How long does the powder keep?

I could see myself picking up a month's supply and seeing how it goes.

Edit: Nevermind, it seems I could just use insulin syringes, which are available direct from amazon.

yeah I just use insulin needles from amazon, with alcohol prep pads. The only thing you can't get from amazon is bacteriostatic water, which is still over-the-counter, just not from amazon (I got it from here). Peptides in general are best stored dry in a freezer or fridge, but I keep them at room temperature away from the light, the tests I've seen don't really show any meaningful degradation in a few months. Though they start to degrade much faster once you add in water.

Another thing, you probably won't be able to just buy a month's supply, the minimum order quantity is 10 vials of 2mg, which comes in a prepackaged little box disguised as a chinese beauty mask. I don't think the supplier is set up to ship orders which aren't multiples of 10 vials.

Absolute miracle drug, I'm trying to get my mom on it ASAP, since she has pretty bad cirrhosis of her liver already and is likely on track for liver failure. Diet, shame, exercise, none of them worked, and since I'm not the moralizing type or one to turn down net positives, I wholeheartedly endorse it. I can only hope that the price for it, and other GLP-1 agonists, drops to something bearable for 3rd World incomes. At any rate, you Americans are doing the usual thing of being early adopters and bringing the price down.

And the price will fall, maybe OOMs. Nothing quite has the demand or economies of scale like a weight loss drug.

Fantastic pun.

Apparently it can cause problems if you need an empty stomach for an operation, so be aware of that if there are any upcoming surgeries.

I'm trying to restore some good habits after some big (otherwise positive) life changes that messed up my routines. This is more of an accountability thing but I'll take advice if it's going:

  • I'd like to become an early riser again as I remember the times when I would study from 7am until 11am or 12pm on my days off as being extremely productive in comparison to studying late at night. I work late instead of early these days so I no longer have 3-4 days of 6:00am starts to force me to maintain this habit.

  • I've let the gym discipline slip drastically, I'm lifting roughly half of what I was this time last year when I was going to the gym 5 times a week (I have lost some weight but I imagine most of the strength loss is just being rusty). Now I go once or twice a week at most, I want to get back to at least 3 lifting days and at least one cardio day. Part of why I lost motivation is because I hit all my goals and didn't know what to do next, I've always had weak cardio and flexibility so I was thinking of pursuing those instead of just more weightlifting.

  • I'd like to drink less as I think that's a large part of why my progress in good habits tends to becomes undone. I've already cut down quite a lot compared to last month but there are so many social opportunities in my life now compared to last year that I could go to parties 3 times a week if I wanted to.

In an almost identical place in life! Things are going well otherwise but big positive life changes also totally destroyed my self study and workout discipline. Hopefully next week I will get back in the routine. Good luck!

Progress Update (alt title "Dummy learns to code after wanting to understand funny programming memes"):

I'm going to be traveling the half a day it takes to get to my med school to wrangle with the Dean in order to get him to wrangle with the ECFMG regarding the certification of said med school. I can only hope there isn't a lot of money involved, since they're cheapskates, but at this point I think the return from me becoming eligible for the USMLE would outweigh expenses as high as $100k, not that I'm going to offer to pay that much unless I have no other choice. The longer I put it off, the higher the odds that when it finally does happen, they'll throw up their hands and say that they can't vouch for the standard of education at the time I was a student.

In the meantime, my coding saga continues. I've done a handful of leetcode problems (easy, I got my hopes up regarding tackling a medium until I realized that my intuitive approach of using arrays would go FUBAR, and that I need to figure out how to use linked lists and dictionaries, two concepts that were never tackled in my odd 2 years of high school programming experience, meager as it is).

I've done a metric fuckton of MIT OCW problems, though the majority seem to be finicky edge case teachers rather than true concepts, but I'm aware that a fine eye for the edge cases is something programmers need to cultivate.

I try not to use GPT if I can help it, but it often serves to better explain certain concepts I struggle with than even the otherwise excellent MIT professors providing the video lessons of the course. As a note:

Avoid using ChatGPT 3.5 (the free one) for learning to code

From my experience, it makes subtle and fucking annoying errors in about 10% of the problems I ask it to tackle, and I had to beat my head against a wall a few times when it hallucinated issues in the code that didn't exist, or proclaimed that a solution authoritatively, only to walk it back when challenged.

Actual GPT-4 API/Bing are much better, if they're making subtle errors in the code, then it's still running, and the problems are far beyond my capacity to deduce.

I already feel bad for the people in companies who can't use it as a coding assistant, because it makes tidying up spaghetti and fixing syntax errors a breeze. I do my best to grok concepts even when I'm using it, often telling it not to correct any issues in the code or underlying algorithm unless I've personally spotted it, or am utterly stuck.

I finally know how to actually write recursive code, scary as it is, as opposed to having a theoretical understanding of what that involved. That's the first concrete step outside my old curriculum, and it isn't really that hard as long as you adapt to mentally juggling what variables you're tossing back.

My interview went well, and I'm currently on track to get a post in the oncology department at a rather upscale hospital. It's sleepy work, well, if not sleepy, then when patients deteriorate I'm not the one on the hook, but I'd be better served with ER experience, so if I get in, I'm going to badger them into letting me kill a few people once in a while haha.

You know what? I kinda like programming, barring the tedious minutiae. I used to hate maths back in school, but here I get to throw teraflops at knotty little issues till they cave in. Plus you get a visceral sense of progress that studying medicine doesn't provide, as well as regular "aha!" moments. The relative lack of rote memorization is refreshing, and I'm putting in the work while I can.

PS: Do not visit the discussion section in any leetcode problem. My fellow Indian brethren are busy living their wannabe programming influencer dreams in there.

In the meantime, my coding saga continues. I've done a handful of leetcode problems

This is good start but in the long term remember programming and in particular practical ML/data science work involves building something to solve a problem. Once you get some basic skills I recommend finding some real problem of interest to you then building the thing to solve it and struggling with that rather than maxing out leetcode imperial exam style study. If coding is carpentry then learning all the various cuts, tools, joints and types of wood isn't enough. Eventually you need to build the something real that will be used. While that uses some of the leetcode skills, it's a whole other issue to determine what is needed then construct it. These meta skills are important to actually getting stuff done. I preferentially hire those who makes stuff (of whatever type) of their own initiative over the academically gifted for their autonomy and problem solving skills.

On the other hand, leetcode-like problems can be quite refreshing if your job is the equivalent of making flat-pack furniture using System 32: you have learned all the various cuts, tools, joints and types of wood, but all you see every day is particle board, edge veneer and a couple of drilling templates.

I understand, I've already been told that just being a leetcode monkey isn't really sufficient and that some practical work or projects alongside it is a great value add. Thanks for corroborating that view! I'll get to it as soon as I'm a little more familiar with the basics.

Anyone have any suggestions as to things to work on if I'd like to learn to code? It'd be easier to gather motivation if there's a purpose I get value from.

I suppose there's this site.

Actual GPT-4 API/Bing are much better, if they're making subtle errors in the code, then it's still running, and the problems are far beyond my capacity to deduce.

Does anyone have a sort-of ranking overall for the different bots, specifically for coding purposes? Are any of the free options even worth bothering with? I've been avoiding really jumping in lately, mostly because my primary coding language for work lately has been the very high-level language called GradStudent, so I haven't really needed to. But I have a personal project coming up, and I'm kind of wanting to do it in a language that I'm only somewhat familiar with... and it involves an API that I've never used before... so I figured it would be the perfect opportunity to dive in to AI-assisted coding.

Gpt4 >>>> everything else

Its 20 dollars a month. I'd suggest cheaper alternatives, but 20 dollars a month for game changing tech is cheap enough already.

If youre in 2 minds.....The gpt4 api is around 1$ per 50 interactions. (Im making some hand wavy assumptions aboht your usecase). Put 20$ on it and see how quickly you run out. If it runs out in less than a month, go get the subscription.

Chatgpt does a fine job with SQL

I'm hardly an expert, but I do have my own experiences and I know what more experienced people have been saying.

Pretty bad, borderline useful: Bard, free

Worth using: GPT 3.5 via ChatGPT. It's free

Potentially slightly better, but harder to get access to: Claude 1.3 (almost as good as 3.5) and the newest Claude

Good: GPT-4 API, ChatGPT 4, Bing Chat Creative Mode. The latter is free, I happen to have ways to get my hands on the model via the API.

No personal experience: Llama, Alpaca and their derivatives. There are coding focused derivatives and finetunes, but they're still not on par with even ChatGPT 3.5. (well, not no experience, but never for the purposes of programming)

You can try ChatGPT 3.5 or Claude, but be careful to double check anything crucial it tells you, and you can have far more confidence in the "Good" tier.

I thought the main issue with moving to the US as a doctor wasn’t the USMLE, it was residency (which even many American doctors struggle with). Spending $100k only to run into that wall seems like it might be a waste? I was thinking for you, by the way, why not consider Singapore or Hong Kong? Both full of high-paid Indian doctors treating the local and global super-rich.

Coding is fun, I wrote about my own amateurish learning experience with Python and then ML/ data science a while ago. But it’s hard not to think, especially with Copilot and GPT-4 (which didn’t even exist publicly when I started!) that these jobs are going the way of the dodo. Anecdotally there are already stories of big data science / ML teams getting laid off because in-house models perform worse than generic GPT/Claude/large scale pre-trained model merely tuned by a single local engineer on whatever corporate dataset it is. You might well find they’re automated faster than you, since doctors have both a cartel and there’s some public expectation for ‘bedside manner’, comforting patients etc (especially in oncology) that LLMs and robots can’t yet do convincingly.

I thought the main issue with moving to the US as a doctor wasn’t the USMLE, it was residency (which even many American doctors struggle with).

To address this one, I'm personally intent on Psychiatry, and while the residency programs aren't a snooze, the working hours and stress are far lower than they would be in a comparable program in say, General Medicine or Cardiology.

A nice benefit is that there's less competition to get in, it's one of the most IMG friendly options.

I had previously given Singapore consideration, but ran into an insurmountable issue:

They only accept two medical colleges from all of India, the former, AIIMS Delhi, is the premier med school in India. Think of it as being equivalent to Harvard Med. The other, Christian Medical College, Vellore, I've also only heard in very high regard.

I checked, and even the other pathway, being listed as a specialist in their Specialist Accreditation Board, also requires you to have graduated from those two. Barring a time machine (or forgery), neither I nor 99.99% of Indian doctors qualify. This above and beyond the requirement to have done a postgrad residency.

So the people you ran into were the elite of the elite.

From what I've read, there are plenty of local grads in SG, so they're in no real rush to take in any more, hence the exceedingly picky standards. I don't know anywhere else in the world where they're quite so anal about it.

As for HK, they have good pay but horrible working hours. I even met a HK junior doctor giving the PLAB, and she had had enough it. And I'd rather not live under the CCP's eye if I can help it. I think I'd be rather miserable there.

You might well find they’re automated faster than you, since doctors have both a cartel and there’s some public expectation for ‘bedside manner’, comforting patients etc (especially in oncology) that LLMs and robots can’t yet do convincingly.

Always a risk of course, but have I really got anything better to do? My current (default) plan is to give an exam called the MSRA in the UK in Jan, and enter psych training, assuming I have enough work experience to get a competency form signed off there. That involves about 3 months of work experience before their submission deadline. If my USMLE issue is sorted, I will seriously give it a shot, having secured the tentative approval of my girl. Or just skedaddle off to Can/Aus/NZ, since there would be no other barriers for a PLAB graduate with an existing GMC registration.

If I'm solving leetcode mediums by the end of the year, I think I have a crack at getting into something that weights both my clinical experience and programming skill. That means jobs in medical startups or pharma for the most part, and I doubt all of them will dry up in the 2 years or so of runway I can give myself. Think Tier 2, Tier 1 is still a pipedream.

Tangential rant.

My roommate who is a 2nd gen american-indian dated a bunch of indian dudes who went to AIIMS Delhi or IIT Bombay and now live in our high COL US city. She obviously has zero context for Indian institutes.

Then i hear her complain one day about how these men she dates only talk about work, never have time, cant make time for hobbies or jusst generally sound self important.....all while showering praises on any ivy league dude she ran into.

The ignorance is mindblowing. This is literally the 0.01 percentile of the country. They were the top 200 smartest Indians among 1 million annual applicants. MIT CS basically hands out free-admits eyes-closed to any IIT top 100 ranker. Some of my closest friends are MIT CS kids, and it is an open secret that the international chinese and Indian kids are straight up smarter. (Might not be as wellrounded tho) The funniest part is that all of these men are insanely humble, becuase thwy know their brand does all the talking for them. But in this case, they just come off as under-signalling.

Then when her dates dont work out, she'll say something like : "my expectations arent too high. I just want date someone like the guys i go on dates with, but that'll have time for me."

Lady, I dont think you even understand that youre dating the 10% of the 0.001 percentile of India who are both mindbogglingly smart and somehow hot enough for you to swipe on them. Her ex worked at google and paid for a whole Euro-trip and she says she doesnt care about how much money her partner has....... girl.......

Its a little sad to know just how monumentally delusional the expectations on these dating apps are. Also a little sad to hear people say things like : "Green cards to the US are not that hard. My friend did his medicine from Aiims / is a professor after studying at IIT bombay" and he got in. You should try something like that."

Bruh, I'd have better odds if I tried winning the lottery.

Yeah. That sounds like "full professor at MIT or Harvard". As I understand it, MIT also pretty much hands out those free admissions to anyone that's published significant math research in high school or won national or international math contests.

Yup, even though at this point I'm quite confident that I can teach myself enough programming/data science/ML to be employable within a year or two, I'm still worried that visa issues and my Indian citizenship will make it pointless, at least for the sake of going to the US. Do you have any idea what the implications of the EB1 rollback to 2012 are?

Then i hear her complain one day about how these men she dates only talk about work, never have time, cant make time for hobbies or jusst generally sound self important.....all while showering praises on any ivy league dude she ran into.

Man, she really must have no fucking clue, because that type of man (or woman) is precisely what you get after you submit even smart and hardworking med students to the insane standards that AIIMS demands. I really don't think you can go through that and come out a person who cares about anything other than their work and career, or at least that's true for the majority. Even if I was as smart as them (probably not), I certainly wouldn't want to go through that kind of grind.

that type of man (or woman) is precisely what you get after you submit even smart and hardworking med students to the insane standards that AIIMS demands. I really don't think you can go through that and come out a person who cares about anything other than their work and career, or at least that's true for the majority.

Yeah. I've heard that in the US, only the service academies, MIT, and Caltech basically irrevocably change those who attend for life. I know a man who, over thirty years after graduating from the US Naval Academy, will occasionally clean a counter and then say "Hooyah. This part of our mission is now accomplished."

I dont fit into any Eb1 category, so dunno much about it. I have a few tier1 papers and US patents to my name, but none sufficiently cited to get me that Eb1. PhDs are practically required.... and I dont have 5 years to kill.

Isnt your long term partner a US citizen ? I have pretty much resigned to that being the pathway that will come up earliest. I have a pending eb2 submission, but thats a few decades in thw queue.

Isnt your long term partner a US citizen?

She's as Indian as I am, though she could currently sit for the USMLE and I can't.

I'm really unfamiliar with the pathway for immigration for programmers to the US. Was it much easier when you did it? What kind of visa do you think I might qualify for?

I'm not a (immigration) lawyer.
I'm skipping a few important details but.... here's what I know.

The standard pathway is: (I used this)

  • Get into a STEM masters program (Healthcare ML might be a good for you)
  • Get approved for a 3 year work visa by landing a job (STEM OPT)
  • Pray to the god of luck, that your H1b application gets picked up over 3 tries
  • Continue working on the H1B
  • get into a for-ever waitlist for EB2 your green card
  • Live on the H1b for life-ish

In you case some differences are:

  • Not sure if doctors are eligible for EB1 (you can get that in 3 years from application date)
  • If you apply for a Green Card through your partner, then you don't have the usual waitlist (assuming she already has hers)
  • If you apply to do research or work at an NGO, you can get easier visas. (J1, F1, O1, noprofit-h1b)

Honestly, I would look at Canada. Climate change is going to make it very livable, and the immigration process is generous towards high achieving people. You get your PR in 1 year, and citizenship in 5 years. Then you're free to move to the US on a special visa and stay as long as you'd like. Canada will be solving its social-security pyramid issue through brute force immigration. They get to ride the American economic wave for free, while having a ton of under-utilized natural resource in store.

Thanks for the comprehensive reply!

I'll consider Canada, if the US looks currently infeasible.

More comments

Signal boosting (albeit a bit late): Ask a FAANGer office hours scheduled for Thursday 7/13 at 6:00pm Pacific. Google meet link.

Edit: the markdown link handling has a bug. The link is meet.google.com/ieq-zixv-xwf

Edit2: current office hours population is three (including myself)

Edit3: had a second round of office hours, with three newcomers. Total people today: 7. Not bad! I will try again next week, probably at the same time.

That was really helpful, and I do appreciate you taking the time to coach us newbs! Now, I need to figure out the relevant pathways for immigration, because if there's one thing there's a glut of, it's Indian SWEs of dubious quality trying to make it to the States. (I'm no SWE, but I certainly am dubious for the near future heh)

I hope you do this on a recurring basis, I'll hop in to present my progress in the hopes that I can get a grip on how likely I am to progress on the short runway of 1-2 years I can really give myself.

Link is not working.

How about http://meet.google.com/ieq-zixv-xwf

Looks good! Waiting to join.

How many people feel strong romantic connections with their partners? I feel like I experienced this in my first few relationships but not really in the decade since then. I'm not really clear whether you're supposed to still feel a spark in adult relationships or whether those are just irrational young love feelings that don't really pop up again, and most healthy adult relationships are just based on finding someone who's compatible and nice.

It's never been a spark for me, more of a slow steady fire that never goes out. I've been with my girlfriend for about 8 years now, and she's bare none my favorite person, there's nobody I'd rather be stuck on a 20 hour plane journey with, or spend a quiet evening alone with. Everything is just better when she's around. Spark or no spark, if you don't look at them at least once a day and think, dang, I'm glad they're here with me, they might not be the one.

Yes. And if you're a decent looking young man with a job, settle for nothing less. Because it does exist out there and you're making a terrible gamble if you don't feel it, either of you could find it in the meantime.

I've been with my wife for over a decade, wherever we go we're having more fun than everyone around us. When we go to mass, or go to Costco, or make dinner, or drive three hours to see her parents, we're making little jokes to each other we're laughing we're discussing and debating we're judging and mocking. I've seen her naked by now, I'm still looking down her shirt every chance I get, she's still soaking wet when I undress her. When we're apart for 36 hours, the first thing we want to do is talk to each other about everything that happened.

And knowing that exists I can't imagine settling for less, because of I came across this when I didn't have it at home... Boy, I don't know.

It's much more complicated once you share taxes, chores, families. It was simpler when all we did was make love and read in bed after. I'm sure as life continues, it will change. I can't speak for your 40s or your 50s, but in your 30s? You should be in love.

And if you're a decent looking young man with a job, settle for nothing less.

I would add "neurotypical" to that. If you are unattractive or suck a bunch at something, but still want to do something, you're more focused on the least bad outcome than the best.

Would you rather be celibate for life? Have had a few passionate relationships that didn't pan out, and be single from age 34 to your death at 82? Be in a relationship with someone you find physically attractive, and who feels the same way about you...but who is also either kind of a shitbag or a stone cold shitbag?

I should have expected you'd turn up. How are plans going on your Alaska wilderness walkabout?

@Soriek , just in case you're like most mottizens: a touch of the 'tism never stood in the way of true love.

Luckily I have a lot of cool and normal hobbies like posting screeds on tariff policy on obscure internet forums.

In all seriousness I've been very blessed to have mostly had relationships with very good hearted, well adjusted women - part of why I feel guilty for not being able to meet perfectly nice people halfway.

I actually talked about this with my wife the other day. My wife is, in some ways, not a nice person; she was joking about how if she ever divorced me she'd float back into my life every time I found someone just long enough to break us up. And we laughed about women who we knew who were, you know, good enough, but who would have been no competition for her in a pinch.

I suspect, under sufficient social and societal pressure, you would probably meet these girls halfway. And under sufficiently strict social structures, I'm sure you would both figure things out. But we don't have those social and societal structures and pressures. Wishing them into existence seems foolish.

Did you feel like you knew it right away or it kind of built/emerged over time? I've ended several relationships because I didn't feel this, but with 30 looming on the horizon I feel like I see every relationship decision with deadlines, that I can't put off long term life choices / having kids indefinitely.

As another data point that has basically the same feelings for and with my wife that @FiveHourMarathon outlines above, I can say that I felt this way immediately. We were friends for months before we were a couple and I was at least infatuated with her then, if not really in love (I don't know if "love" is ever the right word when it's not reciprocated, someone else can offer thoughts on that one). When we switched from friends to a couple, it was fast, electric, and obvious to me immediately that I was going to stick with it as long as I possibly could. We moved in together almost immediately. She was not my first serious relationship, I was in my late 20s at the time, and I'm glad that I didn't settle for one of the girls I was with that checked all the boxes but didn't light the world up for me.

Well, you guys have both definitely given me much to think about. I appreciate you adding in your own experience.

I definitely feel you on deadlines looming. But keep in mind that you'll never be younger than you are today.

We felt it instantly, even before we saw each other romantically, but we were also much younger. It's perfectly reasonable for it to take months to get to know each other, imho, but in my humble opinion based on data from the Myers-Young Associated Statistical Survey: the peak of your relationship in raw animal feeling is going to be either the first six months of dating, or the first year of marriage. Numbers might get fuzzier for couples who cohabit or get married at unusual paces.

It will decline, quickly or slowly, from there. If the peak was never very high, you don't have room for much decline! If your peak is very high, it will decline, but manage the decline well and you'll still have many good years left.

Think of it like baseball player aging curves: everybody loses half a win a year after their peak whether they're a star or a scrub. But a star who peaks at a 7war year has fourteen years of .5war declines before he's replacement level; a player who peaks at average, 2war, only has five years on .5war declines before he's worse than replacement.

Obviously I endorse a lot of what other people have said as far as deciding on love, choosing it, acting it out, surrendering oneself to it, within this advice. I could have made different decisions, or she could have.

But if you don't get it now, you'll never get it.

Yeah, i know you're probably right. i'm pretty averse to hurting people's feelings so I think I've been avoiding making a harder decision based on things being basically okay, but I know it's likely not going up from here and dragging things out would make it worse long term.

I don't feel like I'm infatuated with my wife but I definitely feel like I love her. I believe it's perfectly normal for the initial infatuation to fade but another love to stay/develop.

Furthermore, I believe there is something to the advice that love isn't just something that happens to you, something that you feel, but it's also very much something you do and those acts in turn makes you feel feelings of love.

Kissing your wife isn't only downstream from loving them, it's also upstream. If you want to love your partner more you should behave more like you love your partner. The opposite is true as well.

Define ‘romantic connection’.

Are you happy with someone? When something happens in your life, are they the first person you want to tell? Do you picture yourself growing old with them? Do you find yourself staring at them when they’re not looking? Do you recall tiny, irrelevant details about them that your mind made a note of because you’re in love? Do you sometimes find yourself telling your friends or family how great they are without prompting? Do you miss them when they’re gone and look forward to their return? Do you have great sex, regularly, and look forward to more? Would you unequivocally be happy with them as the mother or father of your child?

If the answers to these are yes, then I think that is a romantic connection, and that’s something certainly achievable in your late twenties or early thirties!

I think I'm happy with the person I've been seeing and that I could easily see them being a long term partner/parent. But I don't think I catch myself staring at them, thinking about them, or talking about them, and I'm pretty sure they do all those things for me, which is part of why I feel worried for not being on that same level.

If I may insert something here (in no way intended to be a pun on sexual congress), the fact that you are "pretty sure" that the person you've been seeing is in this state of preoccupation with you may be a contributing factor into why you do not find yourself having reciprocal feelings. Perhaps especially if you are male, and I am not feeling energetic enough to close this mobile window and surf through your profile to get a sense of whether I think you are. Your post here perhaps intentionally leaves that vague.

Anyhoo, the way it seems to work is when I can't take my eyes off her, I feel it's natural, romantic, complimentary, praise. When she keeps looking at me with cow eyes, it's off-putting. When I talk about her, it's me wanting to let everyone know how real these wonderfully rare and implausibly strong feelings are, it's me on Oprah's couch feeling the beauty, at last, of pure joy. It's true love, princess; do you think this happens every day? And when I hear she's been going on about me at first it's fine you know, spread my legend, but then it's like do you not have a life?

When I think of her first thing in the morning and last thing at night, it's a magical reason to get out of bed. When I come to understand that she has been thinking of me all day I have the urge to bolt like a deer when the predator"s focus has flagged momentarily.

It's the dance, and if you're lucky you end up on both sides of this dichotomy more than once and with the same person. Too much complacency spells doom for any relationship, but then so does too much obsessive possessiveness.

You also say you're happy with whoever it is and can see that person being a good partner/parent. Well, that's excellent. You won't feel in love TM all the time, even when you do have the feeling occasionally. I find a nice slow burn lasts as long as it needs to, at least so far. Where more than a few explosive flare-ups didn't last long at all.

This probably all sounds like homespun nonsense. Maybe it is. I certainly can't be sure. And it's also true you may meet this evening someone in an elevator who hits all your buttons and for whom you might imagine you'd give up everything, without even having exchanged a word. But those feelings pass. They simply do.

Anyway, that's my take and I am not prepared to offer any pseudo-evolutionary biologist reasons for why it may be correct. I am old, at this point, not even relatively. I am getting up there. But the spark still lights sometimes.

I do think for some, cynicism and mistrust douse the ground enough that spontaneous flame isn't very likely, but again I am not familiar with your situation.

Her 'class' of people is a threat to your livelihood and being. Her, the individual not so much. She doesn't even have an income.

Despite the sincerity of her beliefs, she is effectively a naive liberal who holds her beliefs as fashion accessories to fit in with others in her class. There are a thousand possible psychoanalysis you could do with it.

My point is she isn't really a problem, coming to terms with that should help.

Nevertheless she is family, I don't know this woman, but its probably a safe bet that she is still more likely to come to your aid if shit hits the fan, than some random member of your ingroup. So just treat her as family.

where she said I only felt the way I felt (that jobs should go to workers based on merit) because I’m a white male and stormed off

If it's relatively easy for you to trigger the "storming off" behavior - problem solved. I mean, you don't value her opinion about you, likely. You don't depend on her in any way. You don't seek her company or need her to sustain contact with you, right? Just make any interaction with you as unpleasant and triggering for her as possible, and she'll learn to avoid the pain. You don't have to suffer for it - why would you care what she thinks or does?

I just can’t help thinking about the fact that this person thinks people like me are scum. She thinks my infant son is scum.

But why do you care? Nobody appointed her an arbiter of human worth, and the only reason why you may care about this if you decide to care. You are as free to decide to not care. Let her think whatever she wants. Expell her from your universe of caring. Don't let her live in your head. Yes, you may see her from time to time - but it's your choice how these interactions would go and what you feel about them. You can ignore her, you can treat her as an annoying insect, you can purposely piss her off, you can make a sport of triggering her and mocking her, you can do a lot of things - but you need to be in control and not let her to define how you feel and let her hurt you this way.

Recently I saw an old friend and some of his buddies that were all very left leaning and weren't aware I've shifted right. Occasionally some "white people" remarks came up that put me off, though it was nice to allow myself to actually feel put off rather than pile on with it like I used to.

But I actually did enjoy doing the tricky thing of finding agreement on more right-wing ideas while still presenting as leftist.

The best example that came up with my friends was me saying how much I like Biden because he forgave my student loans. I make enough money that this is totally ridiculous, but it's true, and it's a fun way to kind of present the absurdity of a policy I don't like, without harshly committing to any real position out loud.

By doing this I don't feel fake, it's more like, I'm saying what I believe in a crafty way, and if you really want to know what I think I'll tell you. But if these people don't poke and prod, which they won't because people just talk about themselves, then I can just drop hints as long as I'm clever about it. And the archetype of the clever right-winger can actually be very attractive or interesting to the leftist. Just watch this Bill Buckley interview with Betty Friedan: https://youtube.com/watch?v=E7BJyQmqo_Q

I'll start with what I think you should do before moving on to some more fun ideas.

What you should do. Take the good, try to avoid the bad. Simply leave if she starts ranting about politics. Always be pleasant and kind when she doesn't. It's okay for people to be wrong. Lots of good people are wrong about politics. You aren't going to change her mind, and the stakes are literally nothing. Just let her be wrong, and of course say nothing incriminating on your own end.

Options that are more fun:

"My problem is that only rich white people would use euthanasia"

  • You're a rich, white person. Are you considering it?

  • Wow, Susan, you really are passionate about politics.

  • Sooo... anyway. Anyone catch the 49ers game this weekend?

If you want someone to change their negative behavior, you must negatively reward them for exhibiting that behavior. By arguing, you are giving them what they want: a soapbox. You don't give attention to the naughty child, you ignore them.

Your best bet is to be dismissive. Your words and actions should say "having an opinion about politics is cringe and weird", and "you are not qualified to have an opinion because you are low status". Naturally, this is dickish behavior, and I don't recommend being a dick. But it'd probably work.

I've dealt with similar issues by simply losing respect for the people involved. Children, the mentally disabled, the senile, etc. don't really have opinions that matter much. It is a fact of life that some people are stupid (and/or evil) and their opinions should be disregarded.

A good way to deal with most stuff is just to ask her to not talk politics etc. If you have a ton of social wherewithal, the only alternative I can think of is to play "yes and", subtly exposing her true beliefs to others by encouraging her to express them.

@ fellow sleepyheads

  1. "I have a healthy sleep cycle. I sleep for 8 hours each night, at the end of which my body wakes me up naturally in the morning. I get up and do not feel tired through the day."

  2. "To feel no tiredness upon waking up in the morning, regardless of whether I am woken up naturally, by an alarm, by someone else (etc.), I must sleep at least 10-11 hours a night."

Both of these claims can be true at the same time. They're both true for me. But online advice about sleep cycles has zero real advice for this issue. I don't really care about whether I'm getting the correct amount of sleep. OK, I do, but it's secondary.

My problem is that I don't want to feel tired in the morning for my first 10 minutes of awake-ness. I want to get up after 8 hours and feel awake, not groggy, not sleepy, not 'I want to go back to bed'. To get this feeling, I must sleep at least 10-11 hours a night. There are all kinds of guides on 'how to feel more awake' once you're already awake, taking cold showers, going for a jog, going outside, opening the curtains immediately etc etc.. But by the time I'm doing this, I'm already awake; I may as well just have a coffee.

Is there any way I can change this? I want to eliminate the 10 minutes of morning misery after I wake up after 'only' 8 hours of sleep.

Coffee might be the problem, at least in my experience if you cut out caffeine completely getting out of bed goes much more smoothly.

To hazard a guess I'd say it's because 8 hours (or longer since you're not going to have a coffee right before bed) is long enough to cause mild withdrawals, but really I'm just going off experience here.

opening the curtains immediately

I've also noticed (much milder) benefits from just leaving the curtains open at night. Sunlight causes a much less abrupt awakening than an alarm, though depending on where you live there are issues with privacy, bright streetlights and very early sunrises that make this less practical. Some type of timer that opens the curtains say 20 minutes before your waking time would be ideal here.

I've also greatly improved waking by buying a couple of color changing LED bulbs for my bedroom lamps, which Alexa is programmed to gradually color shift people to my wakeup time, starting with deep blue and getting increasingly white over about 45 minutes. As a bonus, I can make the light brown in the evening before bed.

Not practical at all but sleeping outdoors has that kind of invigorating effect. I'd guess it's the combination of cold night temperatures, unlimited fresh air and natural levels of daylight. Probably the closest you could get at home is some kind of techno fix that draws your curtains and opens your windows wide.

I'm a male so YMMV.

IME, petting the one-eyed snake any few hours before sleeping is guaranteed to result in a bad wake-up. If I don't beat my meat for a few days, I wake up naturally without any grogginess in 6-7 hours. If I let the genie out of the bottle >2-3 times a day, I'll have to sleep 9 hours to wake up without grogginess.

Not sure if my experience is even close to a subset of universal, let alone replicable for a woman. But something something dopamine receptors? Try avoiding pre-sleep screen time as a proxy and see how that works.

Conversely, I sleep way better after having proper sex.

Sex and jerking off are not the same things at all.

Yeah, my experience is that both your point and his are true.

Seconded

When I was in high school, I found I could do this by jumping out of bed immediately upon waking up either naturally or via alarm clock and moving, suppressing any reflection on how I felt or temptation to look at a clock. I stopped doing this after leaving college and felt groggy on waking up no matter what for the next decade or so. I have recently resumed something like this, as I have tried to shift myself into an early riser, and it has worked well.

For me, the 10+ minute loop of grogginess is somewhat re-enforced by a cycle of thoughtful awareness about how I feel, and my body trying to react by going back to sleep. If within 30 seconds of waking up, I am in the bathroom brushing my teeth, and within 2 minutes I am already beginning my day with activity, I don't have time to feel groggy (assuming I am overall well rested). The negative is I now get much tired-er at night right after dinner, but this could be a function of having small kids.

You could delay caffeine 1-2 hours so that it's not the first thing you do when you wake up. I'm not sure of the efficacy here, I've heard that this helps restore your natural cortisol response in the morning.

Maybe also keep a window cracked and your bedroom doors open while sleeping. Anecdata, but my air quality monitor reports fairly significant CO2 spikes at night if we don't do this.

I usually wake up extremely energetic, and I mostly attribute that to years of practicing free-running sleep (https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Formula_for_good_sleep:_free_running_sleep). I haven't woken up to an alarm in years, thanks to lifestyle changes from COVID, and I almost exclusively wake up around 7-7:30 am every day naturally. I'd argue that any unnatural wake-up like an alarm will often leave you groggy no matter what other changes you make.

Other ideas: you could try "artificial zeitgebers" like Nobiletin for a month, which will help normalize your circadian rhythm. In fact, the more zeitgebers (social activity, movement, sunshine, exercise, water) you can incorporate into your morning routine the better, as they'll potentially make an alarm-less or light lifestyle viable.

This probably has to do with sleep quality, the 4 main things that I've noticed make a noticeable difference for me are

  1. stopping caffeine

  2. magnesium supplements before sleep

  3. Some form of bed cooling system (I use the bedjet 3). If you're hot or sweating or cold while you sleep, this will make a massive difference

  4. A weird vibrating ankle bracelet called the Apollo Neuro that works kind of by magic (see this)

Are the haptics of the Apollo pulsing in a particular way? Could I just buy a weak haptic device and recreate it by having it on constantly?

Yeah the pulsing patterns seem very specific, and are probably the entire technical moat of the company. The way it works is that there are a variety of "programs" on the app, so you have a "stress program" that lasts 15 min, which starts with short, intense pulses that get quicker and quicker, then you have a "calm program", a "sleep program", etc. The device modulates both the intensity and the frequency of the haptics over time depending on the program you chose.

I'm actually very curious about the Apollo device, I'm convinced that 'sending signals to our nervous system' or whatever is very powerful, due to my experience with chronic pain. Not sure I can stomach the price though. I hope these things go down in price soon.

This quote from the website slaps:

As a neuroscientist and psychiatrist, Dr. Dave has always been fascinated by consciousness and our inherent ability to heal ourselves from illness and injury. After dedicating his career to understanding the impact of chronic stress on our well-being over 15 years ago, he observed a core challenge that confronts every single one of us - healthy behavior changes will benefit us in the long term, but making those changes when we’re under chronic stress is really, really hard.

The reason? Chronic stress itself. Our nervous system is there to keep us safe. When we face stress, our brains tell our bodies the equivalent of “Hey, there’s a lion over there! Get out of danger!” That’s why we have trouble sleeping, low energy, and a hard time focusing - it’s like the nervous system is saying “run” or “fight” when we’re just trying to get through our day. We developed Apollo Neuro to restore balance to the nervous system, calming the body to clear the mind, and leaving us feeling safe and in control of how we feel.

A weird vibrating ankle bracelet called the Apollo Neuro that works kind of by magic (see this)

No way this works, right?

Surprisingly, it kind of does! It felt to me like it helped me not think of work or other things while I'm going to sleep, the vibrations on your skin have a way of capturing attention very effectively. I tried it out for a few weeks after seeing it recommended here, but I'm now returning it, the difference just isn't that big for me, nowhere near the magnitude that the bedjet is making.

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