u/Kikiboba

I’ve run into some weird lab results lately that had me scratching my head:

1. Very low ferritin levels, 14.5 of whatever the standard unit is
2. Very low bone density, bottom 3% for my age and gender
3. Very low muscle mass, bottom 5%

All this is in spite of eating a healthy diet with ample protein and leading a highly active life, working out regularly and walking/ hiking a ton.

I was looking into my symptoms and was kind of shocked how well they align with celiac disease. A lot of other stuff I go through as well like weeks long episodes of daily headaches and random fatigue followed by weeks of feeling normal, sometimes waking up feeling sore in the morning for no reason, seems to be a common occurrence to people with celiac.

Moreover, I eat a fuck ton of gluten. Like seriously, my diet is incredibly gluten based so the nutritional malabsorption that happens to celiac people would definitely be happening to me if I did have it.

I dunno, am I jumping the gun by suspecting this? Should I mention it to a doctor, or should I just cut out gluten for a few months and see if it helps? The one thing that makes me think it might not be is I don’t really get an upset stomach eating bread or other wheat products, in fact bread is one of my favorite foods.

This is kind of an embarrassing question but please just bear with me (no pun intended).

I live in western WA and I love hiking, but most of what I do is C2C day hikes. I drive to a trailhead, summit a mountain, hike back to the car and go home.

This isn’t because I don’t like camping. In fact I love the idea of being out by myself in nature and falling asleep. I’ve happily camped in parts of the world with no natural predators.

The thing that scares me is the thought of black bears. No matter how much I hear it’s statistically rare to run into one and they don’t want to bother you… it just feels so vulnerable to lie down and fall asleep in the prime territory of a 400 lb apex predator who could easily kill me if it wanted to.

Even worse is the thought of running into another person, someone who’s crazy or not right in the head, while I’m out in the middle of nowhere and there’s nobody to help me if things take a turn for the worse.

When I go to bed at home, I’m in a locked room and I know I’m safe from danger. Out in the woods, if a bear, or god forbid another person, came across me and decided to kill me, there’s nothing stopping it. It’s mentally difficult for me to change my mindset and surrender myself to nature when these kinds of thoughts are going through my head. I imagine it would make it hard to fall asleep when I can’t fully let my guard down.

Any advice on how I can overcome these worries and how I can transition into doing more camping?

The goal: turn what is considered a "pig" in today's times into something that can ingest ceramic and metal dishes, process them through its digestive system, and excrete it out the other side as a clean, sterilized dish.

The rules:

(1) No gene editing allowed. Must happen through regular breeding only.
(2) No time limits. This assumes humans maintain and run this program continuously for however long it takes, even hundreds of millions of years.
(3) The pig doesn't need to be able to survive on its own, move on its own, or be an independent creature. It can be bred in such a way that it's fully dependent on life support, immobile, unintelligent, and basically a braindead lump of organic matter.

What do you guys think? Really curious, and I've been wondering this for a while. If I had to guess, I think it's probably possible since the building blocks are there already. The stomach produces stomach acid which provides sterilization, and the gallbladder produces bile which is basically biological soap. It just needs to evolve a much larger mouth and digestive tract that can fit dishes and a friction-based scraping mechanism somewhere in the digestive tract to get all the food particles off the dishes.

The mafia kidnaps you and makes you a deal. They give you $200 to go to Walmart and buy anything you want inside the store. They are going to make you jump off the roof of a ten story building, and you can use the materials bought to build a crash pad. If you survive, you get a million dollars. Do you take the deal?

You can use the materials any way you want such as:
- buying $200 of rope or yarn and making a makeshift net
- buying $200 of pillows and soft materials to break the fall
- buying $200 of kites or some other material to build a makeshift glider or parachute
- anything else you can think of

PS: you’re not allowed to repel or climb down the building

I want to share what might be kind of a controversial take that I don’t see talked about here very often.

Seattle is unique compared to a lot of places in America because:

1. It has a high minimum wage of $21/hr
2. It has an abundance of cheap micro apartments for under $1000 a month

There are few other places in the country where you’re legally guaranteed to make a salary that’s comfortably over twice what you could pay in rent.

I grew up in Atlanta and the absolute floor for the price of rent is about the same as it is here, around $700-800, but the min wage is only the federal minimum of $7-something an hour. In ATL making $21 per hour is actually a pretty big accomplishment; here it’s just the bare minimum.

Food isn’t really that much more expensive if you cook your own food and buy your food from large franchises like Fred Meyer and QFC. In Georgia where I grew up, we have Kroger, which is the same company as QFC/FM, and the prices are nearly identical.

Gas and parking is pretty bad but if you live in the city you don’t need a car anyway.

If you’re ok with living a minimalist life in a tiny apartment with no car and cooking all your own food, and you don’t have kids or pets, Seattle is probably the best place in the whole country to be living. My last job I made $22 an hour and was saving up $1k a month off that salary living in Capitol Hill.

I went to high school from 2015-2019 and I was one of those kids who was obsessed with meme culture. I spent hours on reddit each day, my feed was filled with memes, and I still have like 14,000 memes from back then saved on my camera roll.

Any time I scroll up in my camera roll to look at memes from back then it makes me so sad and nostalgic. My feed is nothing like that anymore; mostly I’m just served short form video content. Memes from the 2010s had so much more character and personality, and 2020s entertainment feels more polished and soulless. Plus, I really hate short form video content and how that’s become the norm. It eats so much data/ wifi, forces me to have sound on, makes browsing on the train or in public a pain in the ass, and I can’t save them to my phone.

Maybe I’m just old fashioned but I miss the 2010s era of entertainment so bad. What happened? Did that subculture of creating memes mostly die out and get replaced with short form videos, or is it still there with the algorithm hiding it from me?

Curious about the extent to which human society is dictated by biology versus social conditioning.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve realized almost every aspect of life involves competing in some way.

You need to compete to get a job. You need to compete to get a significant other. You need to compete to get an apartment/housing.

I don’t have any competitive drive whatsoever, and I’ve found that by being uninterested in competing, a huge chunk of life is completely closed off from me.

I wish I could find the motivation to compete in this world and make something out of myself.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve realized almost every aspect of life involves competing in some way.

You need to compete to get a job. You need to compete to get a significant other. You need to compete to get an apartment/housing.

I don’t have any competitive drive whatsoever, and I’ve found that by being uninterested in competing, a huge chunk of life is completely closed off from me.

I wish I could find the motivation to compete in this world and make something out of myself.

I’ve been trying to do as many hikes I can that:

1. Summit a mountain
2. Have at least 3k feet of elevation gain
3. Panoramic 360 views
4. No class 4 scrambling or technical glacier/ ice traversal

What I’ve done so far:
- buckhorn mountain
- mount ellinor
- snoqualmie mountain
- sourdough mountain
- vesper peak
- mount si

Any big ones I missed? I don’t really wanna do a hike right next to one I’ve already done because then the view is pretty much the same.

Some quick background about me: I’m 25 years old and been living here for a little under a year. I moved here soon after I graduated college for the nature because I’ve always wanted to hike the cascades and Olympic peninsula. I live in a cheap micro apartment in Capitol Hill.

Before I moved here I just mass applied for minimum wage jobs on Indeed until I got one, and then once I did I made the move. I worked as a ramp agent at SeaTac for $22/hr from October through this month, and I quit one day when I got fed up with the 60 hour work weeks and work conditions I couldn’t tolerate anymore.

Now this is where I was horribly mistaken. I assumed the job market would be similar to how it was in the fall, and didn’t realize it’s infinitely harder to get a job now than it was then. I also didn’t realize that even minimum wage jobs are pretty competitive here. After a month of applying on job boards, I’ve come up empty handed, not even one response. I’m not shooting high either, I’m applying for min wage jobs only, and left my STEM degrees and academic experience off the resume entirely. I even submit tailored cover letters to most applications.

I’m also pretty fed up with how difficult it is to be a car owner. I can’t afford a garage where I live and I’m too scared to leave my car parked on the roadside downtown, so I use this app called Neighbor to rent random peoples’ driveways. I’m paying $100 a month to park my car in a random motel lot in Des Moines right now, and I have to take the light rail all the way from cap hill to the angle lake station and then walk a mile to get there. It literally takes me over an hour just to reach my car if I need to use it.

Basically, it seems like Seattle is pushing me out and staying in the city is an uphill battle. Plus I don’t even like it that much anyway because of how difficult my life is.

This leads me to my main question: where can someone like me go? I’m willing to uproot and move anywhere in the PNW. The only thing I really care about is being a days drive from the peninsula and Mount baker snoqualmie national forest, if that’s possible.

Any advice/ suggestions? I’m willing to work minimum wage jobs, live in a shitty studio apartment, eat cheap food and basically have no luxuries. Where can I move in the region just to have a barebones, survivable life where I can reliably get a job and my car isn’t an hour away?

Please help because I’m getting desperate at this point 😭

I have a crippling fear of having my social security number stolen by a Mediterranean great white shark. How can I overcome this irrational anxiety?

Everything about it seems so… performative, for lack of a better word.

It feels like it’s less about your skills and innate ability and more about how good you are at playing the social game.

You need to use exactly the right kind of corporate dialect that everyone else does, suck up to the right people, read the room and selectively refrain from saying what you really want to say.

You sit at a desk all day, do work that’s mostly redundant/ fluff, write emails, attend useless meetings.

And you do all this in the hopes that they will reward you with a “promotion” so you can “climb the corporate ladder” which is just another way of saying you improve your social status.

All the while, you make ridiculously inflated salaries, getting paid f\*\*\* you money while the blue collar workers who actually keep the world running make a fraction of that.

To me, most of white collar kind of just feels like a status game. A corporate job isn’t as much about objective utility to the world as it is about social status. A company hiring you is basically making a statement “we see you as a high status individual who is worthy of joining us” and every subsequent promotion and raise is just a reinforcement of your status. Your salary is a proxy for how “valued” you are by the world.

I’m 25 and have degrees in computer science and math, with a good gpa. After graduating, I was “supposed” to get a white collar tech job at some company, but something about it just didn’t sit right with me. I applied to dozens of tech jobs, went through their hiring processes, but it felt deeply wrong and humiliating to jump through all these hoops for them and basically grovel for their approval.

I almost got hired at a couple places but I would always intentionally sabotage it because I couldn’t see myself in that world. Instead, I just took to working random minimum wage jobs. Washing dishes, loading planes at the airport, warehouses, whatever. I felt like I fit in here more, and I could be my authentic self, and was directly valued for my utility and nothing else. I’m debt free and live frugally enough that I make it work. I have a couple friends who work white collar jobs and basically confirm everything I fear about them is the reality.

I wish I could stop being so cynical, but I literally can’t. To me, white collar just looks like a bunch of monkeys trying to impress each other and make themselves feel more important. I know this isn’t true for all of white collar, but a large chunk of it. Even for jobs where you do objectively serve an important function, usually the skills you need to complete the job can be acquired by most people, and as soon as you meet that baseline competency, it’s all a status game from that point on.

Everything about it seems so… performative, for lack of a better word.

It feels like it’s less about your skills and innate ability and more about how good you are at playing the social game.

You need to use exactly the right kind of corporate dialect that everyone else does, suck up to the right people, read the room and selectively refrain from saying what you really want to say.

You sit at a desk all day, do work that’s mostly redundant/ fluff, write emails, attend useless meetings.

And you do all this in the hopes that they will reward you with a “promotion” so you can “climb the corporate ladder” which is just another way of saying you improve your social status.

All the while, you make ridiculously inflated salaries, getting paid f*** you money while the blue collar workers who actually keep the world running make a fraction of that.

To me, most of white collar kind of just feels like a status game. A corporate job isn’t as much about objective utility to the world as it is about social status. A company hiring you is basically making a statement “we see you as a high status individual who is worthy of joining us” and every subsequent promotion and raise is just a reinforcement of your status. Your salary is a proxy for how “valued” you are by the world.

I’m 25 and have degrees in computer science and math, with a good gpa. After graduating, I was “supposed” to get a white collar tech job at some company, but something about it just didn’t sit right with me. I applied to dozens of tech jobs, went through their hiring processes, but it felt deeply wrong and humiliating to jump through all these hoops for them and basically grovel for their approval.

I almost got hired at a couple places but I would always intentionally sabotage it because I couldn’t see myself in that world. Instead, I just took to working random minimum wage jobs. Washing dishes, loading planes at the airport, warehouses, whatever. I felt like I fit in here more, and I could be my authentic self, and was directly valued for my utility and nothing else. I’m debt free and live frugally enough that I make it work. I have a couple friends who work white collar jobs and basically confirm everything I fear about them is the reality.

I wish I could stop being so cynical, but I literally can’t. To me, white collar just looks like a bunch of monkeys trying to impress each other and make themselves feel more important. I know this isn’t true for all of white collar, but a large chunk of it. Even for jobs where you do objectively serve an important function, usually the skills you need to complete the job can be acquired by most people, and as soon as you meet that baseline competency, it’s all a status game from that point on.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been living here for about a year. I’m a low income resident living in a micro apartment in Capitol Hill. For reasons I won’t get into, I had to leave my current job. (I wasn’t fired, I left willingly)

How hard is it to get a minimum wage job here? I’ve been applying on indeed and poached jobs for a few days and I’m not getting any replies. My background:

- math degree and computer science degree (depending on the job, I sometimes leave these off the resume)
- 8 months working as a ramp agent, about 4 months doing pizza delivery before that, and some paid research and TA work in college

I’m applying for any jobs I can get. Warehouse, hotels, dish washing, etc. any tips to get a job as quickly as possible? I went to a temp agency and they said they’d help me but they ghosted me.

All I’m trying to achieve is matching my $22/hr I made before. I can only survive for a month or two on my current savings.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been living here for about a year. I’m a low income resident living in a micro apartment in Capitol Hill. For reasons I won’t get into, I had to leave my current job. (I wasn’t fired, I left willingly)

How hard is it to get a minimum wage job here? I’ve been applying on indeed and poached jobs for a few days and I’m not getting any replies. My background:

- math degree and computer science degree (depending on the job, I sometimes leave these off the resume)
- 8 months working as a ramp agent, about 4 months doing pizza delivery before that, and some paid research and TA work in college

I’m applying for any jobs I can get. Warehouse, hotels, dish washing, etc. any tips to get a job as quickly as possible? I went to a temp agency and they said they’d help me but they ghosted me.

All I’m trying to achieve is matching my $22/hr I made before. I can only survive for a month or two on my current savings.