I see it more as being about acceptance. If your wife dies, at some point, you will have to accept that your wife died and move on. This doesn't mean that you are cold or insensitive to it, it just means that you have accepted and processed this sorrow fully and are now ready to move on.
Stoicism for me is about practicing a sort of pre-acceptance of such things. To understand that everything bad that can happen eventually will happen (if you live long enough) and to accept it even before it has happened.
I like to think of it as that; you should have principles, such as trying to write DRY code, but any principle taken too far will end up being a bad thing. Don't be an extremist. Practice a sensible balance in everything you do.
This goes beyond programming as well, I think it goes for most things in life.
In every trade or art you start as an apprentice. That is the time when you learn the basics, the rules, the best-practices. When you have mastered the state of the art, you are a master. You know when to apply which rule and tactic to create masterful artifacts. The next step is to learn when you should break the rules and general wisdom. That is where true wisdom starts.
I think men are checking out of relationships because they feel they do not benefit them anymore. Not out of malice or even spitefulness (although there is some of that among some groups), but rather because so many things in our culture and society has been subtly altered to benefit women more and more over several decades to the point that men feel like getting into a relationship, or just investing in a woman at all, is a great way of getting screwed over, and I think there's something to that.
We need deep diving investigations to figure out the exact mechanics of it.
Society went on a binge for about 10 years demonizing men and masculinity, turning dates into job interviews, and courtship into a dream; the apps have made it even worse, i.e. Bumble. No wonder they're turning off, it's just not worth it. One wrong statement, one wrong interaction, and they're afraid of getting put on TikTok.
It's not women, it's society as a whole deciding to take a giant shat on simple being male.
> but rather because so many things in our culture and society has been subtly altered to benefit women more and more over several decades to the point that men feel like getting into a relationship, or just investing in a woman at all, is a great way of getting screwed over
I'm a man, and I don't have this experience. Your comment makes me curious — what has changed and in what way to make it more likely that men will be screwed over by women? Is it that women are more likely to reject/leave a man once he has invested, or are you thinking about something else entirely?
Seconding this. Idk how things got so transactional and product-oriented in relationships for a lot of people but I'm really glad I don't think that way, even as a man who waited until 40 to get married.
I think it's such a huge topic that it's really hard to summarize on an online message board, but in very broad terms I think you could say that the feeling I have is that there used to be a social contract between men and women where men were supposed to be A, B, and C, and women were supposed to be X, Y and Z. But now it seems that only men are still expected to be A, B and C - plus maybe D, while women are instead 'free' to be whatever they want. So you still have to be a 'real man', but she doesn't have to be a 'proper woman'.
The weird thing is that I'm not really pro gender roles, I'm much more pro individual freedom, so I hate being the one to make this argument. But I do think that there will always be some differences between men and women, and I think we are hurting ourselves a lot as a society by refusing to acknowledge that.
My only small antidote would be to allow people to have a marriage that could be more explicit if the partners chose to. If they wanted a 'till death do us part' marriage, then that should be allowed.
well, no. You can say that's what you're doing, and so can your future wife, but it's still incredibly easy to back out of if you change your mind, with few legal, economic, or social barriers to doing so.
On the one hand, these barriers can keep people trapped in truly abusive situations, and it is important for such people to be able to escape. But on the other, 'I don't love my husband/wife anymore', is not any great horror, and I'd hazard that most people who are happily married till death have had at least one long period, potentially of multiple years, where they don't feel as though they love their spouse. But they work through it and things improve. There's something about being 'trapped' with someone that motivates people to make things work in a way that they wouldn't if they know there is an out.
I believe the world ha changed and there is no way this would work in our culture anymore. Personally I treat not being divorced as a kind of achievement, but I realized many if not most people don't share my sentiment.
Yeh, I agree. I don't think there's any sort of legal solution to the problem, since the problem is social, not legal. I was just trying to explain what I think the other person was getting at.
No, we need investigations to figure out if it's happening at all, or simply another incel-like conclusion: "Women aren't good wives anymore, so why bother?".
Figuring out the exact mechanics presumes your sentiment is a fact.
> I think men are checking out of relationships because they feel they do not benefit them anymore.
Maybe we should make it so that men aren't allowed to own property anymore, that it needs to be owned by their wife? That's how it worked for hundreds of years (with the women being the ones not allowed to own property), and it definitely got women into relationships.
Which country are you talking about? Women have been allowed to own property in USA from the beginning. Married women lost their right to own property separately, but that is the opposite of what you are suggesting, women still married men, some women did intentionally not marry though to not lose their property rights.
If we made women have all control over the property after marriage as you suggest we go back to then that would just make men marry women at even lesser rates.
This isn’t about revenge or evening the score. OP described a problem (men don’t get anything out of relationships), and I’m offering a tried-and-tested solution to that problem.
And in the current US military, it isn’t a requirement for promotion to upper ranks to be married (honestly, I had thought it was, but it’s just a rumor), but it does seem to be strongly encouraged.
What do you mean? There's a ... well, not a complete solution, but at least part of a solution, that we did for hundreds of years, and have relatively recently abandoned. And maybe we should bring it back. This seems like a pretty normal type of comment, isn' it?
I feel like the term "alpha" is deeply problematic since different people use it to mean completely different things.
Many people associate it with the toxic traits of dominating others through aggression. While other's use it to reference a healthy, good, strong, well developed and balanced individual who helps others.
I think we need new terms for these things so we can start differentiate them.
Depends on how you look at games as a form of entertainment.
If you see them as long term investments that you intend to give hundreds or thousands of hours of your time, then yes I agree with your stance.
But if you see games more like an expendable medium that gives you a couple of hours of entertainment before they grow stale, like watching a movie, then it's a different thing.
Of course, games are one and the other and many things between. This is one of the fascinating things about the medium — it has much greater variety than "movies", for example.
I don't know much about codecs, but why isn't the music separated its own audio track so one can turn it on/off themselves in the browser? I'm guessing the current codecs being used doesn't support it, but couldn't/shouldn't it?
Morbid can be good. I feel like more parents need to remind their kids of death now and then. I know that sounds crazy, but I really think that a healthy knowledge and acceptance of death is a big part of what makes a well developed and healthy person.
As tragic as this is. I think they should plant a new tree in the same location.
I know it won't be the same, it won't heal the wound, at least not for hundreds of years, if ever. But it's just how society and the world is. Great things are made and appreciated, treasured even, and endure for a while, then they are broken by something, one way or another. And you can't undo that damage, but you can start over and build again. And that's all you can ever do. And although it may not seem like much now, there can perhaps still be greatness in the future again if we start to build it now. That greatness may not be exactly the same as the greatness of old, but it can be great in its own way.
I have been thinking that it should be given the to recover the best it can - it is a sycamore tree, so there will likely be some regrowth. It won't be the same, but eventually it could be beautiful in a different way.
Alternative (and a bit far-fetched) theory, let's imagine a defense that could save him:
"Dumb but not malicious"
The kid was trying to get pocket money, and he was tasked to cut down the tree.
He thought it was a legitimate job, so he took down the tree.
This is also why he used professional tools like a chainsaw.
Unfortunately, we cannot identify the requester
+ the kid had no way to verify the Tree Preservation Order because of technical issues;
(the website with the TPO actually yields an error "This request was blocked by our security service (Imperva)" / "Page not found", depending on the dataset you pick)
Plus all news are biased one way or another nowadays. It doesn't matter if you're left or right, the news you're getting is spun in a certain way to push whatever narrative your particular media outlet wants to push.
This, in combination with their incentive to make everything seem like a huge problem that might lead to the end of the world, is a pretty toxic combination.
Stoicism for me is about practicing a sort of pre-acceptance of such things. To understand that everything bad that can happen eventually will happen (if you live long enough) and to accept it even before it has happened.
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