u/Da-up-and-downer

I’m 29. I grew up believing in heaven and hell, but somewhere around 21–25 I started leaning toward the idea that death is simply “lights out” forever.

Now that I’m almost 30, though, I find myself thinking there’s a decent chance reality could be some kind of simulation. Maybe when we die, we essentially “wake up” outside of it. Perhaps we already knew about whoever or whatever created the simulation before we entered, but that knowledge was wiped when we were born. Then, once we die, our memories come back and we understand what this reality actually was and how it all worked.

How does psychology explain why people who frequently make jokes at other people’s expense often react poorly when the same type of joke is directed at them?

Whenever we hang out, my friend comments on almost everything I do. When I’m driving, he’ll question what lane I’m in or tell me what I should’ve done. When shopping, he comments on what I pick and suggests something else. Sometimes his advice is actually good, but I hate feeling watched and evaluated all the time. It makes me second-guess things I normally wouldn’t. How do I tell him to stop without making it seem like I never want his advice?

I was talking to this white dude and he told me the reason he used to see all black people as gangsters is because he couldn’t differentiate between different types of black people. And since he knew no black people growing up or had black friends, the only source of info was through our music, movies and culture online. He was like with the white community he knows if someone is a nerd, or fratbro, business man, athlete and so on, but he couldn’t with black people.

I think that’s pretty dumb because if you have any sense of observation, how can’t you tell who a gangster from a black lawyer

I was talking to this white dude and he told me the reason he used to see all black people as gangsters is because he couldn’t differentiate between different types of black people. And since he knew no black people growing up or had black friends, the only source of info was through our music, movies and culture online. He was like with the white community he knows if someone is a nerd, or fratbro, business man, athlete and so on, but he couldn’t with black people.

I think that’s pretty dumb because if you have any sense of observation, how can’t you tell who a gangster from a black lawyer

Or a villain. Or maybe you get lucky and become the best character

The older I get, the more religion looks unmistakably human-made to me.

Think about the world ancient people were living in. They had no modern understanding of evolution, astronomy, disease, weather, psychology, the brain, earthquakes, reproduction or what happens to consciousness when we die. Yet human beings have always hated unanswered questions. So when people couldn’t explain something, supernatural explanations filled the gap.

Why did lightning strike? A god.

Why did the crops fail? The gods were angry.

Why are we here? A creator made us for a purpose.

What happens after death? There must be another world waiting for us.

Why did something horrible happen? It must be punishment, fate, a test or part of some greater plan.

That doesn’t necessarily mean ancient people were stupid. They were trying to explain an incredibly confusing world with the information available to them. But the fact that completely different civilizations created completely different gods, creation stories, afterlives, sacred rules and supernatural explanations should at least make us ask whether humans created religions rather than religions revealing some universal truth.

Religion also became an extremely powerful method of social control. If a ruler tells you, “Obey me,” you can question him. But if society tells you, “The creator of the universe commands you to obey, and you may be punished eternally if you don’t,” that is an entirely different level of authority. Suddenly laws, hierarchies, sexual rules, gender roles, warfare, loyalty and obedience can all be given divine legitimacy.

And one of religion’s greatest strengths is something much simpler: conditioning.

Imagine telling a child from the moment they can understand language that ocean water is boiling hot and that stepping into it will cause unimaginable suffering. Their parents tell them. Their grandparents tell them. Their teachers tell them. Everyone they trust repeats it. They hear stories about people who doubted it and suffered terrible consequences.

That child could grow into an intelligent adult and still feel genuine fear standing at the edge of the ocean.

Not because they independently investigated the claim and proved it true, but because the belief became emotionally embedded before they were old enough to critically examine it.

Religion can work the same way. When somebody grows up being told that questioning God is sinful, disbelief risks hell, misfortune could be divine punishment and doubt itself is dangerous, simply examining the belief can produce fear.

And fear is powerful because coincidences reinforce it.

Someone begins doubting religion and then loses their job. “God is punishing me.”

They stop praying and something goes wrong. “I knew I shouldn’t have turned away.”

Meanwhile the thousands of ordinary things that happen without supernatural consequences are forgotten.

It reminds me of being afraid to disobey a parent, teacher or boss. Their authority can feel enormous until the first time you finally disagree or refuse..and then you realize the sky didn’t fall. Nothing supernatural happened. The fear itself had been doing most of the work.

There are other things that make me skeptical too: religions overwhelmingly follow geography and family upbringing; sacred texts contain fingerprints of the cultures and historical periods that produced them; religions split into denominations that confidently contradict one another; doctrines change over centuries; and countless civilizations throughout history were equally certain that their gods were real.

If one religion were an unmistakable revelation from a universal God, why does religious belief look so strongly like cultural inheritance?

None of this proves with mathematical certainty that no god of any kind could possibly exist. That is a separate philosophical question.

But organized religions being human creations?

Once you look at their history, psychology, contradictions, cultural distribution and usefulness as systems of authority, I think the human explanation becomes extremely difficult to ignore.

I have terribly bad breath that I can’t figure out why, I brush floss and clean teeth quarterly, is it possible that my cheek biting addiction is causing this?

Need someone to answer this question once and for all. If you lift heavy enough that by your 10th rep you’re on the verge of popping a blood vessel due to failure, why do you need more than 1 set?

I have anger problems that mostly stem from my upbringing and the way my parents handled anger. I’ve lost a lot of friends and damaged relationships because, for a long time, I thought the proper way to deal with anything that upset me was to blow up, yell, and then go silent for hours or even an entire day.

The problem was that I genuinely believed my reactions were justified. I thought that if someone did something that made me angry, I had every right to react that way. And if I did something that made someone else angry, I assumed they would be equally justified in yelling or blowing up at me.

Because of that, I was always confused when people started distancing themselves from me or eventually cut me off. In my mind, I was focused entirely on what they had done to make me angry. I didn’t understand that feeling angry or annoyed wasn’t necessarily the problem. The problem was how I expressed that anger and how I treated people while I was angry.

I didn’t really start recognizing it until after high school. One of my friends straight up told me, “You get mad so easily.” At first, I was in denial because when you’re angry, especially when you grew up around that kind of behaviour, your anger almost always feels justified.

But looking back, something finally clicked. I realized that when most of my friends were angry with me, they rarely screamed at me, blew up, or treated me the way my parents did when they were angry. That was when I started realizing that what I had grown up seeing as a normal response to anger wasn’t actually normal or healthy.

That was the beginning of the epiphany for me. I’ve been actively working on it from about 18 to 29. It still gets difficult sometimes because those reactions were deeply ingrained in me, but compared to who I was back then, I’ve improved significantly.

I have anger problems that mostly stem from my upbringing and the way my parents handled anger. I’ve lost a lot of friends and damaged relationships because, for a long time, I thought the proper way to deal with anything that upset me was to blow up, yell, and then go silent for hours or even an entire day.

The problem was that I genuinely believed my reactions were justified. I thought that if someone did something that made me angry, I had every right to react that way. And if I did something that made someone else angry, I assumed they would be equally justified in yelling or blowing up at me.

Because of that, I was always confused when people started distancing themselves from me or eventually cut me off. In my mind, I was focused entirely on what they had done to make me angry. I didn’t understand that feeling angry or annoyed wasn’t necessarily the problem. The problem was how I expressed that anger and how I treated people while I was angry.

I didn’t really start recognizing it until after high school. One of my friends straight up told me, “You get mad so easily.” At first, I was in denial because when you’re angry, especially when you grew up around that kind of behaviour, your anger almost always feels justified.

But looking back, something finally clicked. I realized that when most of my friends were angry with me, they rarely screamed at me, blew up, or treated me the way my parents did when they were angry. That was when I started realizing that what I had grown up seeing as a normal response to anger wasn’t actually normal or healthy.

That was the beginning of the epiphany for me. I’ve been actively working on it from about 18 to 29. It still gets difficult sometimes because those reactions were deeply ingrained in me, but compared to who I was back then, I’ve improved significantly.

Just to specify I mean physical imperfections.

Just to clarify I mean physical imperfections.

I shot myself in the foot this season (first year in business) by giving customers mosquitos warranty. learnt my lesson