The Bible as lame as it is to say. Particularly Ecclesiastes and Job. Absolutely brilliant, beautiful, full of humanity.

Damn, that’s awful. How allergic? Like anaphylaxis?

Twitter isn’t and never was useful as an organizing tool. Arab spring was a failure. Twitter is actually more useful to the ruling class than not because it gives a way for the masses to expend it’s restless energy without changing anything.

I use vanilla gnome. Dead simple, no nonsense, gets out of my way. Perfect DE for me.

One of the other interesting twin cities facts is that we have a very large theater scene, one of the biggest in the nation outside NYC.

You should think about Minneapolis. The winters are gnarly, but very few climate change related problems on the horizon, reasonable cost of living, one of the most bike friendly cities in the U.S.

It’s okay to be angry, and to have big feelings. But also, remember that your parents are people. There’s two sides to that, everyone has biases and perceptions that they can’t see past, but there is also the spiritual and beautiful things that transcend all of that.

Beauty and love surpass all the other stuff. Look for the ways that there can be love between you, even when it also means holding the tension of love and anger together. It can work like that, and sometimes that’s just what family is. Also before you know it you’ll be on your own and that will give you a whole new perspective on family as you build a new life for yourself.

I remember when I still lived with my parents it was impossible to see past their flaws. But now as an adult on my own, I have a much greater appreciation for how easy it is to be shitty and how hard it is to be good.

At the end of it all, sometimes you just gotta feel your feelings, hoping that at the end of it you’ll be a little bigger and a little more expensive, able to hold more of life together and not less.

I actually think the best solution for a space like Beehaw is to just turn off the creation of new accounts for the time being. The point of this instance isn’t to be the biggest, it’s to be a high quality space. People will still be able to interact with Beehaw from the outside too.

So what I’m hearing you say here is: “If smart people believe in magic sky fairy, magic sky fairy must be logical to believe in,” which is about the level of discourse I’d expect from someone unfamiliar with the concept of critical thinking. Thanks for being an object lesson.

This is such a bad reading of the comment that I can only imagine you’re acting in bad faith. You have made the assumption that reason will inevitably lead people to the same conclusions about the world, but that is not true, and that is what the OP is bringing up. How is it that many people, when presented with the same sets of facts, and using the same reasonable principles, can come to differing conclusions? This question should keep you up at night, but instead it seems you’re only interested in saying “those other people are dumb, I am smart.”

As someone who’s been there done that, this is the worst time to try and get into academics in the humanities. English departments are downsizing everywhere. There’s an incoming “demographic collapse” coming to higher ed by 2026 - i.e. birth rates went down between 2008-2011 by a large degree and that cohort is 25-30% smaller than previous years. A lot of small, tuition dependent colleges are going to fold. In preparation, non-essential departments are cutting people like crazy. STEM and business are money makers, English and History aren’t.

Best thing you can do with a creative writing degree is go into corporate communications/marketing. Find a gig at an agency and do creative writing on the side.

Many things are outside of your control. You were given life outside of your control, and you will die outside your control. Whether you die of cancer at 50 or climate change at 50, you die all the same.

We still have a moral duty to make the best choices that we can with the information that we know. A lot of the existential crisis though, I think, stems from a fear of mortality. Coming to grips with the fact that you must die sets you free to act rightly within the world.

You definitely added more than zero value! I begin to feel more and more that for a high percentage of my generation (born post-2000), learning how to navigate social networks IRL wasn’t a skill we learned. There’s a generational atrophy when it comes to organizing parties and mixers and social activities larger than your closest friends.

One of the things I’m trying to break down in my friend group is the apathy towards mixing different groups of friends. Like we think different communities won’t be able to get along with each other, and there is a paralyzing fear of any kind of social awkwardness. This also likely has to do with the friends I’ve made over the years, as someone who has struggled greatly with social anxiety I think I’ve naturally selected for groups of socially anxious people. Ack.

I’m of the opinion that it is time spent with a thing that makes it valuable. I’ve had my current car for a couple of years and hope to keep it for many more. Each year we have new experiences together, fond memories that get triggered when I sit in the driver seat. Eventually, when this car breaks down and I have to get a new one, some of those memories will be lost with the car.

I see you, but man, I am of the exact opposite opinion. Configurability is, for me, a bug that needs to be fixed when it comes to desktop environments. It should be as standard as possible across machines.

Prayer, typically on my front porch, with a cup of coffee. Biking has also become a big thing for me. I don’t live near the sea but have lots of lakes nearby, so sitting on a beach also.

I don’t care if it passes SCOTUS or not. I say this as someone with current student loans, what matters most is directing that money towards public institutions to drive down tuition for students right now.

Forgiving student debt doesn’t solve the problem, it just pushes it onto the next generation. Let’s actually solve the tuition crisis first.

This is a typical take, but the the hard problem of consciousness has very strenuously denied neuroscientists for well over a century at this point. We know a lot more about the systems of the brain, but no more about the nature of consciousness itself.

It’s still an open debate, some people don’t believe the hard problem is unsolvable, but on every debate there are really smart people who defend absurd positions. The reason I think it is unsolvable is that consciousness is by definition unobservable, except by the subject.

We can know a lot about the brain, neurons and structures etc. But that doesn’t really get us closer to understanding how an aggregation of impulses and chemical signalling takes us from what is essentially inert matter to a brain.

If you’re interested, the book On Purpose by philosopher Michael Ruse has a chapter on it that is succinct and up to date with the latest neuroscience research. I am sure there are better books out there on the subject but I can only recommend what I’ve read.

I would go a step further and say that there are many things that science, by nature, cannot answer. For example, what consciousness is and how it arises as a phenomenon.

Yes, very much. I think it would be impossible for me not to be religious. If I wasn’t Anglican I’d be Buddhist or Baháʼí.

Everyone is already giving the generic advice of do hobbies or volunteer. This is good advice! That’s how you meet people. But the transition from “hobby” friend to “life” friend is difficult and frankly just awkward. It’s kind of like romantic relationships, there isn’t a right or wrong way. You just got to take leaps of faith and be vulnerable with people with the expectation that rejection is possible.

I’m still kind of navigating this phase. I have some good friends that I do my hobbies with, and then it’s like, how do I go from there? Really it’s just about being open and hospitable towards others. Opening your home and inviting people in, asking people if they want to come over for dinner or watch a movie with you.