🕯️ Sounds of Aquarius ✨

*finishes 3 hour long movie*

who am i

There’s actuall this really cool thing called ‘Experience-Taking’ that happens when you’re forced to consider events from an alernate point of view! Basically, if you’re reading a story that starts off with a relatable character, you identify them subconsciously as an extension of yourself. Then, as they filter and translate what’s going on around them, you begin to rationalize and think logically around what’s going on as if it’s happening to you. This is especially fascinating as a group of random straight people reading a short story about a gay person who isn’t revealed to be gay until part way through are more accepting of homosexuality in general than a group of random straight people reading the same story, except the character is immediately introduced as gay. By slowing the revelation of potentially alienating details down and allowing the reader to identify with the character, you force the reader to absorb aspects of the character’s personality and life in order to accurately predict and understand other events and characters within the context of the story. To summarize, the reason you feel this way after a good movie or book is the same reason your personality and mannerisms are altered by the book series you’re into- you temporarily adopt that character’s personality, and some aspects of their personality may stick depending on how much you fall into their story and what conclusions you draw based on your judgements.

I truly felt like I’d been gone 100 years after I came out of seeing interstellar

@funnier-as-a-fictive

Sometimes it feels like everyone around me is speaking in a secret language and I'm the only one who doesn't know it.

The thing about knitting is it’s much harder to fear the existential futility of all your actions while you’re doing it.

Like ok, sure, sometimes it’s hard to believe you’ve made any positive impact on the world. But it’s pretty easy to believe you’ve made a sock. Look at it. There it is. Put it on, now your foot’s warm.

Checkmate, nihilism.

This is a powerful positive message..

I’m literally reading a book right now (Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski) that says this is scientifically sound.

There have been studies done on rats and dogs where they develop learned helplessness in the animals by giving them impossible tasks. Eventually the animals stop trying, even when the task stops being impossible. (I.e. put a rat in a maze with cheese it can’t get to until it develops learned helplessness, then put the cheese somewhere it can get to it and it won’t even try.) But once they show the animals they CAN do something - i.e. physically moving the rat to the cheese - the learned helplessness goes away.

No one can move you to your cheese for you, but the book says DOING something - which they define as “anything that isn’t nothing” can help. Make a food. Work in the garden. Clean a thing. Do a favor for a friend. Call your elected officials.

Knit a sock.

If you feel overwhelmed by existential despair, do something. It doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be anything that isn’t nothing.

This is really good advice for ADHD people because when executive dysfunction gets bad it’s easy to fall into this pattern of thinking. Do just one thing. It doesn’t have to be your homework, or a chore. It can be something small, it can be something you enjoy. But do just one thing to remind yourself that you can.

This is what “humans want to be productive” really means

We want to make things. We want to do something and at the end of the process see that something has changed. We want physical proof that we did something. We want to be able to point at something and say “I made this”. We want to be creators