u/deferredmomentum

I realized that my brain perceives tasks as the same “unit of work” even if the actual effort needed is much less. For instance, where I lived before this I had to take my trash outside to dumpsters quite a ways away, and even further for recycling. It would be a good 10 minute round trip. Then I moved to this building, where there are trash chutes on each floor and a recycling dumpster in the parking garage. Amazing, I think, it’ll be so easy to get myself to do it now! Nope, my brain perceives the same amount of effort as it did before. Another task my brain always made a big deal out of was scooping litter boxes. Then I got two litter robots instead. Holy shit, I thought, this is never going to feel like a big deal again! Nope, my brain just decided that changing the bags is exactly the same amount of work that scooping the old boxes was. I know lazy is a bad word around here, but I just hate that my brain inflates the smallest things into huge tasks. I just want my brain to recognize when I make something objectively easier.

With all the recent planetary fuckery I’ve just been thinking about this. For context I’m an ER nurse, so I have an immune system of steel (get exposed to a ton of shit before it gets diagnosed, so taking proper precautions isn’t always an option and similar to preschool teachers after a year or so of being constantly sick it does pay off) and prior to this spring hadn’t had so much as a cold in four years. I never got covid despite working through the pandemic, haven’t had the flu since I was a kid, you get the picture. Anyway, in April I went on vacation with a friend where we had to share a bed and she had a cold so I caught it, and for some reason it just completely razed my immune system. I realized yesterday that I was getting my third cold since, this is ridiculous! (For the record, neither my friend nor my mom who also caught it while we were visiting her has been sick since.) Anyway, I was just wondering if I can blame it on the universe or if I’m just spectacularly unlucky lol.

Edit: to be clear, I don’t *actually* think the planets gave me a cold lol, I do believe in science. I just know a lot of us have been having a stretch of bad luck recently