I just realized how love can feel one sided even if you are already in a very healthy relationship. If you give too much effort and time for someone that continuously not choosing you, or changing their ways that badly affected you. It just means that they never really give the love you deserved in the first place. Cause all you wanted is to feel seen by your other person like you care for them.
Our lives are pathetically and unfairly short. It's actually untenable.
Yeah, I said it. I've seen this first hand in REAL LIFE. Girl was 35 dude was 18. Only comments made at work were about how lucky he was.
No one talks about how maybe "he was taken advantage of." Also, just imagine the comments the other way around.
Make no mistake about what I'm arguing about. I'm talking about the double standard. And I'm being upfront.
Women are capable of making decisions. When we say otherwise we're essentially saying that they are inferior beings.
My family comes from poland. My grandma tried to raise me and my siblings catholic, my parents left us the choice if we want to believe but still took us to church on easter and christmas, I am also baptized.
When I was a kid, I was pretty sure that things like god and religion (I only knew of catholism at the time) was a very large make-belief we all played along with. Like the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus.
We pretend like its real because its fun and interesting, but we all know its not that serious, right? Its all just a game, right?
And then I got older, I had a communion, and I kinda realised 'hey, people actually take this a lot more serious than Santa Claus. They didnt build large, beautiful buildings because its fun, they build them because they actually believe there is a man in the clouds watching their every move and reading their thoughts.'
I dont mean to thrash on religion, do what makes you happy, but when I had that realisation at a child it was wild.
I think one of the hardest things to explain is that you can grow up loved and still grow up emotionally damaged. I wasn’t the child people would look at and immediately feel sorry for. I had clothes, gifts, attention, birthdays, memories. My mom loved me. But love alone doesn’t erase chaos.
Before me and my middle sister were even born, my mom already had a whole life of trauma and instability. My oldest sister has a different father, and during that time my mom struggled badly. Addiction, arrests, unhealthy relationships, chaos. My oldest sister spent a lot of her childhood being raised by her grandmother because things were so unstable.
Then my mom eventually got herself together for a while. Long enough to build a family, have me and my other sister, and create what probably looked normal from the outside. But the damage never fully left.
Later on the alcoholism became part of my childhood memories. Emotional instability became normal. My middle sister started spiraling in her own way and eventually ended up in a state program. And I just watched all of it happen around me while trying to act okay.
That’s what people don’t talk about enough. The child who watches everything.
The child who becomes hyperaware of moods, tension, silence, anger, drinking, lies, emotional explosions. The child who learns how to emotionally survive before they ever learn how to emotionally feel safe. Every room becomes so easy to read.
And I think growing up like that wires you wrong in relationships later. You become someone who craves love deeply but also fears it. Someone who overreacts, overthinks, self sabotages, clings too hard or pushes people away first. Someone who mistakes chaos for connection because chaos is what their nervous system grew up around.
People hear “she was loved” and assume you should come out emotionally healthy. But you can be loved and still grow up in an environment that quietly damages your ability to regulate emotions, trust people, or feel secure.
I don’t hate my mom. Honestly, I think she was fighting demons long before I existed. But I think being the youngest meant I absorbed the emotional aftermath of everyone else’s pain while trying to convince myself it didn’t affect me.
Now I’m older and realizing maybe it affected me more than I ever admitted.
Your country, family, money, education, connections, and even confidence a lot of it assigned before you can speak.
Yet people judge others like everyone started on equal difficulty settings.It’s a weird paradox to sit with. On one hand, you have to act like you have total control over your life just to stay motivated. On the other hand, looking around at how fundamentally unfair the distribution of initial luck can make the whole system feel incredibly cynical.
How do you guys reconcile this? Do you think recognizing the birth lottery makes people more empathetic, or does it just breed defeatism?
You've seen it. You've lived it. What? I can't say this? But I'm saying it.
Fat women are sour about being fat. They even make their sexy coworkers dress conservatively because OFFENDS them.
Big fat fatty.
So gross.
To all of my homies in the workforce, you know that HR is always fatties!
During my daily scrolling I had stumbled upon a video where the person present in the video was walking through an isle in their local Costco, within the isle they had shown us the countless amounts of dog food but upon reaching the end of the isle, we the viewer are then shocked to learn that only a tiny space in the end of the isle was reserved for cats, with only 2 cat food options and 2 unpopular cat litter products and then the person posed a question why is there less cat food then dog?, upon opening the comment section I found the top comment very interesting , it read “Because of Patriarchy… I know it sounds insane but it is true…”, i won’t lie it’s not necessarily jaw dropping but it’s the kinda comment that’s simple but makes you think, and that’s what I did, I had thought for a while and wanted to get straight into writing my response but there were already 93 replies, and the post/comment was a few months old so I felt as if it would’ve just gotten buried so I decided to do the next best thing and post my thoughts here instead. (It should be noted that im talking about it specifically about America, mainly because of the location of where the poster and commenter reside and due to her replies as well as other replies under her comment which I don’t have enough space to list so I’ll just credit them both in the bottom of the post)
While I consider the commenters statement to not quite be entirely incorrect, and I would go as far as to to say that it would be wrong to say that the commenter was completely incorrect, however I disagree, personally I don’t think that’s the main reason, to illustrate my point I’ll explain where I come from, I am an Arab man who was born and lives in a gulf country in the Middle East called Kuwait, within my country you can find the exact opposite of the nature in the video, where I’m from it is cat food, cat toys, and litter that is wayyyy more prioritised/frequently sold than the dog products despite there being a solid dog owning population in my country, this occurs despite the fact that my country is patriarchal, but rather it is due to a certain connection to cats within our (meaning my people) traditions and history, to me the prioritisation mainly just comes from the culture and that’s sort of how I see dogs in American, I’m obviously not American but I did study in America for my bachelors and masters degree, where I had also noticed a strong connection between Americans and dogs, literally so many things have to have or include dogs, for example the pup cup at coffee shops, the dog parks, bringing them dogs everywhere, and even in my friends that I made whom were American and did have pets, but why is that, why are they so engrained into the culture? In my mind it’s quite simple, the appreciation and connection with dogs that connected them to the culture stemmed from hunting, its whole thing with man befriending the wolf and then joining in alliance to hunt for food only to come closer than co hunters but into friends, and this is the angle that I constantly see people use to connect the dog culture to the patriarchy, especially considering that some would consider hunting a very masculine practice, but I don’t quite buy it, the dog does not hunt with the man to feed only the man, it does not protect the only the men in the groups, it does serve men as much as it serves the community that it connects to, it is not just the hunter or the me that can only appreciate the benefits of the dog, but it is the community that benefits from the dog and appreciates, the men, women and children alike, I mean i feel like if dogs were inherently a male centred thing, they likely would not have been as popular as they are, as a whole half of the community would not be very accepting of them and women today would not in huge numbers own them today but that’s not the case
I’m very interested in hearing your thoughts, I’m not the best writer so I may have a few hiccups in my paragraphs.
Credit:
Poster - @ninaskiandrave
When you’re younger you assume adults, bosses, leaders, and successful people must feel certain all the time.
Then you get older and realize most people are just carrying stress differently. Some are calm, some are loud, some are organized, some are pretending, but almost everyone is improvising parts of life as they go.
Honestly made me judge people less.
Contemporary civilization will feel like the cushiest safety net in the world…until it vanishes. We grow up in such structured environments (to a more or lesser degree) that our reality is distorted by the illusion of security. Children are raised up through rigidly organized graduating systems, among all of their like-aged peers, fabricating the perception of being a part of a whole. We learn to trust that this whole, this system, will always be there. Grade school becomes college, with career paths and stability promised. Obviously, things get messy and maybe not all of our preconceived ideas of success will pan out. But we’ll always have this conglomerate of cogs to sustain our society, and so ourselves, right?….right?
I’d like to become acquainted with the true meaning of letting go. This ride was destined to get out of control from jump, I ought to accept the crash and embrace the freedom of the ride.
About 4 years ago I was in a car accident, I was at a pretty high speed and the car was destroyed but somehow I walked away complete uninjured and went straight home after talking to the police and getting it towed. At the time I was pretty amazed by this but didn't think much about it ever since.
My life has had it's ups and downs since then but overall I think I'm doing pretty good even though it's been a wild ride, sometimes things just don't seem to feel "real" though and I was thinking if somehow it would theoretically be possible I actually got seriously injured in that crash and everything since is just some hallucinations of a comatose mind...
I'm not going to give this much thought but it's a pretty wild and interesting idea isn't it?
I've spent my whole life looking at the things no one sees, I learned so much that nobody wanted to know, that others hide in the truth of the world, and i made it, it brought me a lot of pain. But even with all of that, I never wanted to give it up, I guess it meant something to me, but I got to the point, where I no longer wanted to know anything. I wanted to stop seeing, stop knowing, stop hearing, stop understanding, and I couldn't. And now I want all the knowledge gone, the ability to know taken away, not just ignorance ...in the absence of anything. It's like I spent my whole life feasting on the apples of knowledge. Even through all the pain it brought me, but I eventually reached enough knowledge, I don't want anything.
The title sounds weird, but let me explain.
Let me illustrate with a made-up example: Let's say you want a child to engage in good conduct for behavior. Like, let's say they're being loud or something. And, the reason you give for why they should be quiet is "because everyone else is quiet." And that's the only thing you say.
This causes the person to be potentially swayed to do bad things in the future by applying the faulty reasoning themselves, or having people use a similar reasoning to convince them. This means people, possibly up to adulthood, will have to deal with the consequences.
Continuing the made-up example, they learn that everyone else doing something or not doing something is a valid reason for (in)action. So, let's say, they observe another child getting bullied, and they might participate too, or be another bystander like many others, but they don't intervene because nobody else is. Or they try to, and they're told by a peer something like "Do you see anyone else caring?" So they use the reasoning to reach a faulty conclusion of "this is justified."
Obviously this is exaggerated, but there has to be someone who understands what I'm trying to say. Maybe a clearer example is when you beat a child, which inadvertently teaches a child that violence is a valid strategy to get what you want, regardless of the original behavior the initial beating was suppose to encourage/discourage.
Or, if the child DOES understand that the beating is just to get children specifically to do something, then it inadvertently teaches them that certain social groups deserve to have different rules for enforcing acceptable behavior imposed on them, as opposed to the groups they are not part of.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/s/77W5asgbZc
Imagine a posts where people are judging women for not being or doing something's and saying that women need to be more feminine, secure in their feminity, be more submissive kind of stuff?
When I read the comments, the number of times people were talking about masculinity, men to be secure in themselves or their masculinity. It reminded me of all the times people on the internet try to push men to be not insecure, not angry, advising them to adjust or grow even if the advice for similar posts made by women have a more different, kind, sympathetic tone to them.
And Gods, this shit is so awful, like why tf are these people pressuring men to be all these things.
Insecurities and emotional/mental issues are signs of something gone wrong and need a lot of proper self navigation and more importantly, proper guidance to navigate their their own self, emotions, and are something even most psychologists would approach carefully.
This is kind of f'ed up and would just make most young guys or men try to do stupid shit to get approval from people/society to not be seen as a "toxic" guy, but then they would be called "Performative males/men" and this just goes on without no end.
And gods, we need more people not only preaching about how to be better and good, but also those who explain about these things and teach most men to ignore these bs or fight against them and not just to respect and be kind to other, but also to not accept it if someone doesn't even gives basic respect or kindess towards them.
Maybe people aren’t always searching for something missing. Maybe they’re searching for awareness of what has been there all along. Happiness, peace, love, purpose — sometimes we overlook them because we expect them to appear in a different form.
200 billion stars and hundreds upon hundreds of billions of planets in a single galaxy.
At least 2 trillion galaxies.
Why?
One thing I have been noticing about growth is that nobody really talks about the loneliness that comes with it.
People say healing.
Growth.
Self-awareness.
Finding yourself.
But they rarely talk about what quietly disappears.
The conversations that no longer feel the same.
The friendships that were built on old versions of you.
The strange feeling of being surrounded by people and somehow feeling more alone than before.
At first, I thought something was wrong.
Maybe I was becoming harder to please.
Too serious.
Too distant.
But now I wonder if growth is not only about becoming.
Maybe growth is also grieving.
Grieving the old environments that once fit us.
The people we could once relate to.
The version of ourselves that knew how to survive spaces we have quietly outgrown.
And maybe loneliness is sometimes not punishment.
Maybe it is simply the space between who we were and who we are slowly becoming.
My silent observations has led me into thinking that good has to be neutral in every matter to think for the best possibility & bad always holds some limitation that doesn't allows it to reach the level where good can. What do you think about my understanding of the formula for world? And if you agree, how do you think our actions & intentions behind should be affected?
Because we are seen and loved only by those who wants us, not because what you can do, but because who you are.
So if nobody wants you, you do not exists truly, you are not dead, but you don't live.
And even if you are needed ( at workplace or somewhere else), you are just tool for other people.
So nobody wants you = no life
I have no clue if this is an appropriate place to post this or not. My apologies if not. I just need to throw this into the abyss I suppose.
I just was talking with a family member and they randomly said “you’re a mom. But you’re still (my name) too.”
And for some reason, that just made me catch my breath... I think I may have completely forgotten that I’m a person also. My kids are still young and I do probably 90% of the child care, so it’s a big part of my life. But I have no clue when I forgot that I too am a human. I forgot I had needs. I deeply want to be a good parent, I invest so much mental and physical energy on it, and I constantly feel like I fall short. I have always been told I’m a perfectionist, and definitely I would love to be a “perfect” parent… but that just doesn’t exist. And I wonder if it all feels so hard because I just totally forgot myself in this process? And is that even good for kids? How can I teach them to care about their own wellbeing if I don’t model that behavior?
And aside from parenting, I had a good career. I had hobbies. I did SO much. I have three degrees including graduate degrees. I had a high paying job I left to stay with my kids while they were young. I had interests. I loved to think and read and write. I have published works… and now, I feel like my brain is a bowl of oats. Honestly, I feel dumb. I feel like a shell of that girl. Who I used to be feels so far removed now, like it was a totally separate life. I don’t understand how I got here? How did I completely lose myself? How did I quite literally forget that I am an individual person?
Has anyone else experienced this? What did you do?