u/CivilUniversity2755

I’ve been looking into a train crew position, trying to weigh all the pros and cons. Right now, I’m in a dead-end job that I don’t particularly enjoy. The job description and pay sound decent, but the hours give me the biggest hang-up.

I have a wife and three kids. I don’t mind being away from home, and my wife says she is fully supportive if I can find a job that’s better than the one I have. So we’re considering this option, but…

What do you all say? Paint me a picture of your work/life balance.

I am having the hardest time finding other screenwriters to have regular discussions. The closest thing I could find was an online meetup once a month, but I’m trying to find something more frequent than that.

I just started writing a new script and it’s the most I’ve written in over ten years. Back then, I was part of a local screenwriting class that made it easier to write the dang thing because I was having regular conversations with others about how to improve my script and how to write in general. It kept me in that mental zone, but the class doesn’t exist in my area anymore.

I’m extremely passionate about this project, more than I think I’ve ever been in my many years of writing creatively. I’m just trying to find ways to network and keep the momentum going, learning more in the process.

I am philosophically, ethically, and morally against abortion. Yet I cannot make a reasonable legal case against it.

What we need is a reorientation of values. Somewhere along the way, we decided we don’t care about future generations. We don’t live in such a way that will support the children who come after us. Moreover, we view new life as a burden, an inconvenience that can easily be disposed of.

However, the relationship between a mother and fetus is simply unique. There is no equivalent situation. Everyone likes to make the violinist argument for pro-choice or point out the inherent value of disabled and unconscious people for pro-life, or some other analogous situation. But none of them fit perfectly. It’s a new life that requires nine months of gestation within a woman’s body. That’s how every life comes into existence.

Mothers are life-givers, and that is a fundamentally sacred role. So at what point should the state be allowed to interfere with that relationship? If you’re not allowed to abort the baby, how do you prove a genuine miscarriage? If abortion is unrestricted, why does passing the birth canal suddenly give the child legal protection? Arguably, taking care of an infant is more demanding of a woman’s time and effort than being able to just carry the child inside of her, minus the physical pain, but still why shouldn’t abortion be permitted after birth if it’s ultimately the woman’s choice?

Eventually, the state recognizes that a life should be protected and murder is illegal. But how much power are you willing to cede to the government to make that determination? To make the final decision on whether a parent is fit to raise their child? Any which way you slice it, the government sets an arbitrary point where they’ll say this life is worth protecting and that one is the woman’s choice.

My position is that life starts at conception, because that’s the cleanest, least arbitrary point in the development timeline. But no government in their right mind would start banning morning-after pills or restricting sexual activity for solely procreation.

The reason this debate has gone on so long and so passionately is because you’ve got two competing claims that can’t be resolved. If life at conception must be protected, the woman must bear that child. If the right of the mother is the deciding factor, why does the government then get any say in any parenting decision?

The best way through this, I think, is to incentivize pregnancy. If we truly want to support the next generation, the government should make having kids so much more financially appealing than not. That, and a culture shift, to the point where abortion is not necessarily illegal, but socially taboo.

That’s probably because I live here. I’d probably feel that way about Japan if I was born there, or the same with Australia.

This is our homeland, and millions of immigrants want to come here. It is a special land of freedom and opportunity, and it has done great things for the world at large.

After 250 years, though, we need to reevaluate who we really are. This country was established in a particular time and place, borne out of motivations and actions that appear abhorrent to the modern eye. You can’t change the past; this is a legitimate country in the world now, so the conversation has to move toward what it will be for the future.

The global landscape is fundamentally altered and the genie is not going back in the bottle. Time was, a civilization only cared about itself and had no knowledge of other civilizations across the globe. We know everything now. We are all connected. This makes national borders a sticky subject.

We can communicate instantly with Hispanics, Palestinians, Asians, Pacific Islanders. They have become our global brothers and sisters. How, then, can we feel justified maintaining an invisible line around this spot of land and say don’t cross it unless you go through the correct process?

The correct answer is that a border should contain a shared set of values. When you cross this invisible line, you must be beholden to the laws and customs therein.

Well… what are American values? You’re going to get a billion-plus different answers to that question. That’s why constant dialogue between its citizens is paramount, to strengthen what works and fix what doesn’t.

Does Trump stand for America? Maybe not for your America, but he does for other people’s America. In two years, we’ll have a (hopefully) free and fair election to change the direction of this country.

And that’s an INCREDIBLE American value! That every four years, the conversation is renegotiated. That we don’t live in a monarchy; we can change leadership on a regular basis. That SHOULD be maintained, and thus election integrity is critical.

Some people see America as the armpit of the world. They’re ashamed of its history, of the current administration. Other people will cross oceans and flee brutal dictatorships to make it here; this land is their salvation.

One thing is for certain: the greatest can always be better. We don’t have a perfect union; we’re always in pursuit of that more perfect union. I believe in those ideals. I want people to be just as proud of America as I am.

God bless the USA!

I don’t have problems with forgetting things. I’m aware I need to brush my teeth, shower, eat at appropriate times. I just physically cannot trigger the mechanism to go do the thing.

I know I have a project due tomorrow. I know I should have started it weeks ago. But I just didn’t want to. Now I have an interest because of the urgency, but it’s not enough time to do a quality job; it wasn’t urgent then so I didn’t care to do it.

I love writing. It’s what I’m most passionate about. But heck no, I can’t spend every single day doing even the tiniest scribble of words; I need to be in the mood. Even though the vision of the completed project is clear as day, I’m more interested in that than in physically typing words in a document.

Anyway… how do you guys cope?

Arrival
Fiddler on the Roof
The Godfather
Inside Out
It’s a Wonderful Life
Life is Beautiful
Obsession (just added)
Parasite
Silence
Skinamarink

These are my movies and I love them. I saw Inside Out nine times in the theater. I watched It’s a Wonderful Life for the first time last year and thought it was just great, until I saw the final scene and gave it 5 stars right then and there. Watching the surprise reveal at the midpoint in Parasite was one of the best theater experiences of my life. Skinamarink is the scariest thing I’ve ever seen; it’s the best horror because it refuses to comfort the audience with explanations or traditional movie structure, much to other people’s annoyance. Obsession is one of the very few movies I walked out with zero notes; it was pitch-perfect in everything I wanted out of a movie.

Just recently discovered that I may have an interest-based nervous system as opposed to an importance-based nervous system.

I am not motivated by things that are considered important, or have a reward/consequence attached to them. I am only motivated by a task when it is consistently interesting to me.

Planners, routines, working even when it’s hard. These do not move the needle for me, even though I know intellectually that they should. Instead, a task has to follow the PINCH model; either I have a Passion or Interest in the task, the task has some Novelty to it, it involves some sort of Challenge, or I have to Hurry out of basic survival instinct.

I would love to write a screenplay, but that takes daily discipline. Anytime I step away for a day or two, it takes 1000% more effort to start back up; I lost the interest.

Anyway, I’m just excited to have a name for what’s been bothering me my whole life.

I, 32(M), have spent my whole life in the same cycle. It all began as a child, hearing excessive praise from my parents and teachers over how good I was at math. Looking at how my classmates always struggled with the concept, I started to feel special. I took pride in my intelligence. At the same time, my parents never instilled a proper work ethic in me. What resulted was a sense that life should be easy, and anything that wasn’t, it didn’t matter to me. Throughout my entire education, I would procrastinate, lie, avoid, sometimes just outright not do any homework I didn’t care about. I would only do the bare minimum to keep me from failing, but even when I did get F’s, I suffered no real consequences. My parents would get mad and take things from me, but that still wasn’t enough to motivate me. Eventually I got my stuff back once I worked just enough to satisfy them, and then I returned to the same pattern. It created intense psychological strain, constantly hearing about my potential to do great things, but not doing anything to make it a reality. I became a perfectionist, never risking to try something new in the chance that I could fail; I subconsciously equated failure with an attack on my fabricated identity. Now, in my 30’s I’m suffering all the time, caught between two extremes. I have a vision of the kind of person I want to be, but it is physically impossible for me to self-motivate or self-discipline, to do the things I intellectually know will help me accomplish my vision. Last night, I did a ton of research online, outlining all my issues and really trying to narrow down my problem. I eventually discovered something that no therapist ever suggested because - as I discovered - normal advice about motivation and discipline is geared toward people who have an importance-based nervous system, who are motivated to do tasks because they are important or they promise a reward or prevent a consequence. None of those things move the lever for me. I can only stick with a project as long as it is actively interesting to me. I can play video games for hundreds of hours, I can hyperfocus on monotonous tasks, I can begin a project if my brain is fired up with creativity. This is a problem when I try to write screenplays. Finishing a screenplay requires discipline, sticking with it even when it’s hard. Once I step away from writing for even a day, it’s like I’m starting from scratch. It takes 1000% more effort to sit down and write because, for whatever reason, I am not interested in the subject anymore and want to move onto something else. Even though I have constant, vivid dreams of being an accomplished writer, that future idea is still not enough to keep me on track. I need sustained interest, or I just stop, and no traditional advice of pushing through the pain works. This is exciting to me, because no one has ever been able to suggest that this is what’s wrong with me psychologically. Even though I knew I avoid doing hard things, I always just considered it laziness. But if it’s an actual neurological deficiency where my brain simply does not respond to regular external or internal motivators, then I have a starting place to work on the problem.