Critical thinking. Not enough people stop and think openly about a given problem, situation, or interaction. If everyone took just a moment or two to take into consideration someone else’s perspective, circumstances, or goals, the world would be a lot less divisive.
Empathy is about understanding the other person’s feelings or experience, usually by being able to share in those things, or experience them vicariously. Empathy can even be used negatively. I believe Donald Trump has at least some empathy. He knows damn fucking well what his stupid words and actions are doing to some people.
I’m talking about objectively taking into consideration the other person’s views, beliefs, and/or desired outcomes and adjusting actions or words based on that.
For example, I don’t have to have empathy for someone who is non-binary to be respectful of their situation. I can’t really know or understand their feelings, because I’m a heterosexual male. I can’t possibly share in their experiences of being confused about gender identity and being ostracised for it. I have no reference point for those feelings.
But I can certainly be objective about their situation and remember that their gender identity and desired pronouns have literally no impact on me. So, rather than be a divisive prick about it and insisting on referring to them in binary gender terms, I can respect those things about them and act accordingly.
Active listening and validating someone’s emotions. Relationship skills in general honestly! Like how to adress the core attachment need in a disagreement instead of just the surface issue.
Don’t have the thing you need? Can anything else work in the moment? It can be as simple as “All my bowls are dirty but I need one NOW. Use the big measuring cup. Or a pan, or a pot, or…”
You’re presenting with a collegue and they mess up their lines, what can you do in the moment to get things back on track? Your original line you were about to say would make no sense now. Think! Yay!
Being able to solve problems with what resources you do have is so fulfilling.
Yeah, but that doesn’t mean it completely goes away. Mental illness is the human equivalent of software issues, the very definition entails you can’t be like Neo from the Matrix and seize one’s own mind.
I’m not understanding your comment. Mindfulness is paying close attention to the actual experiences in consciousness, as opposed to just being carried along by thoughts. It’s not about taking control of your mind.
When I was little, meditation was the buzz. I’ve tried it many times and I just found myself “sitting in style”. Meditation is described as inspired by hypnosis but they never tell you what to do when you’re from the small percentage of people immune to hypnosis.
I have no doubt some people struggle more than others to get to the point where they can sit back and watch. It wasn’t immediately obvious to me either, but a couple of months of short daily practice enough to start seeing what the fuss was.
I’ve had good experience with the Waking Up app, which is primarily Insight Meditation. If you can, a multi-day silent retreat allows you to be truly immersed in the practice of just watching your mind and all of its silliness.
For this topic, it’s far from what I would call an easy skill; I’m going on six years and it still feels like a weak muscle. But it can be really helpful.
Oh man I tried meditation with Headspace too and I couldn’t hack it. For some reason meditation made me so angry! Like this weird rage would come out of nowhere.
I did find it frustrating that the narrator would give a prompt for what to do, then just enough quiet time to begin, and then interrupt my effort with his talking. Aggravating! But the anger was a separate thing.
I always thought meditation was supposed to help you feel calm and grounded but all it did was frustrate me. :(
It made you feel something. Now sit there quietly and think about why that is. What are you getting frustrated with? Why is it bothering you? Unfounded rage is trying to tell you something about yourself. There’s a reason, but you have to be able to be honest with yourself to figure out what it is. Once you can begin to understand it, you can begin to find ways to manage it.
Lol that’s really funny…I actually hate yoga too, but it doesn’t provoke rage, just annoyance because the last thing I wanna do is listen to some white lady done on about chakras! But for it to provoke anger in inmates is disturbing.
Everyone should learn the basics of troubleshooting!
When trying to resolve a problem it’s really important to keep as many variables under control as possible so that you can find the root cause and fix it.
I see lots of people who try a bunch of things without isolating the issue first but can’t figure out what is wrong. Then because they messed with it so much it’s almost impossible to figure out.
This is important for car maintenance, home maintenance, electronics, computers. Just about everything that can break or stop working right in your life.
Your troubleshooting skills are above average, tbh.
You've identified that there's an issue. You tried something simple to remedy. You even tried it again to make sure.
You didn't make a bunch of crazy assumptions about what the problem was. You didn't do a bunch of weird shit all at once to try to fix it. You didn't do something to make the problem worse.
Oh I have to share what just happened! My husband’s power wheelchair suddenly wouldn’t drive. In tilt mode it would still tilt, but in the driving modes it had an error message. By asking in forums he learned that message could mean it thought it was tilted back too much for safe driving, even though it was fully upright. So he tilted way back, and I looked underneath for anything loose, finally tightened one loose screw that I frankly think was unrelated. Then he tilted upright again, giving it an extra couple seconds of push on the joystick, and I pushed forward on the back of the chair. Nothing moved, it was already fully upright. But it did the trick! It’s driving fine now.
My dad can't do this. I've tried to teach him but it's like, a piece of equipment breaks and I'm like "What have you tried so far?" the answer is always nothing because he doesn't know cars/computers/watches/lights, etc etc.
I don't know half of those things either but I'll go over and press all the buttons, if that doesn't work I google it. I've showed him this so many times but it's like it doesn't go in and he's like "But you're good with these things!" Nope, I'm just hitting it until it works.
A lot of the issues learning to troubleshoot are surrounded around not understanding the problem/not understanding the system enough to determine where the problem is. Generally, if you have no idea what the issues could be, you end up trying a bunch of stuff and messing everything up more and people get frustrated you didn’t ask for help sooner, or you do nothing and people get frustrated you haven’t tried anything before asking for help. This may be a perpetuated problem if someone doesn’t have the foundational knowledge to understand the type of system, or if it’s just totally out of their wheelhouse and they don’t have them mental capacity to try and understand any aspect. This can be seen when people have little to no understanding of: cooking and/or baking, car repair, computer repair, fruit and vegetable farming, sewing clothes or clothes mending, etc. we can pay people to do these things for us because there is so much complication in modern life most don’t know how to do everything.
Change a tire on your vehicle. Sure beats waiting for AAA or whatever. (Although some newer cars don’t come with spare tires).
Jumpstart a car. With jumper cables or one of those battery jumpstart boxes.
Changing your oil can save some money. Add chassis lubrication too while you’re at it. Can save quite a bit on service costs. (Just don’t skip other regular services, lest your car fail you which will be expensive in the long run)
Repair a toilet by replacing internal parts such as: valve, flapper, float, flush lever.
Tow companies aren’t paid enough by AAA for them to prioritize you in any way. You will get lesser quality service from people who are frustrated their workplace contracts with AAA.
As much as it sucks, try to save money for vehicle emergencies and/or be able to fix minor vehicle issues yourself.
More importantly, learn your vehicles maintenance schedule and follow it religiously. If you are only maintaining it when something goes wrong, you are missing the forest for the trees.
If you are only maintaining it when something goes wrong, you are missing the forest for the trees.
On the coast we have a ferry system, a public-private partnership - aw fuck, right? - that “runs to failure” and only maintains when things are actually broken.
It’s become such an unreliable mess, now. But the CEO gets a bonus.
“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
Could be either one, though now that I think about it, Biblical tax collectors were the ones who were, in a 100% literal sense, state sponsored muggers (due to the fact that Ancient Rome didn’t have an advanced census system to do it systemically with).
Very basic tools, very easy techniques, yet mind blowing how many people don’t know how to do these things.
To be fair, most millennials aren’t and haven’t been homeowners. It took until 2022 for just over half of millennials to become homeowners.
If you have lived in apartments your whole life, you’re most likely disallowed from doing anything of the sort.
When you’re pushing 40 and you finally own a house, and for the first time in you’re life you’re allowed to modify the place you live, this is the first time you’ve had an opportunity to learn and practice such a skill.
I kind of don’t really blame millennials for this one, although it is arguably an important skillset. Most of us haven’t had living situations where we could do this, it’s as simple as that.
I’ve never lived in an apartment where I was able to hang shelves, let alone paint the walls.
I was a lucky one, bought my house 12 years ago and went to town doing whatever I wanted, holes, paint, ripping up old carpet, etc… then 1 month ago found out my work wants to me move half way across the country in 3 months. Now I’ve got to fix 12 years worth of fucking with my home in a month so I can sell this shit and move lol. Luckily I was a carpenter back in the day (family business) so I know how to fix it all but it’s still shitty. I would suggest not moving forward on projects you can’t quickly finish when you own a home as my thing for this thread lol.
This is so absurd to me how can anyone disallow painting and drilling into walls of an apartment, I’m very glad that tenancy laws here basically say that if you rent a place you can do whatever you want with it, as long as reasonably it’s restore-able.
For a lot of the younger folks in the EU if your rental contract tells you you can’t do something it’s probably bullshit. And even if it isn’t at worst you’ll lose your deposit.
Some US rental contracts even regulate what spices you can cook with, which is arguably something that could be akin to racism since its squarely aimed at certain cultures foods over others.
However, since its not explicitly racism, in the US its totally okay. You basically have to use a racial slur while doing it for it to count as “racism” here.
I agree with you to a point, some spices used in cultural dishes are extremely potent and permeates into everything when cooked even semi-frequently. Even worse than cigarette smoke IMO. Indian curry is delicious, but the cooking process of it…not so much.
It’s not completely unreasonable to class these spices as having similar damage to property as cigarette smoke and often it takes similar remediation methods to get rid of it.
When my wife and I bought our first house, I was able to clean the entire rest of the house in the time it took her to clean the wall where the previous owners had done their cooking.
Good thing is there’s a video tutorial for almost anything like that on the internet at least. One of the more essential, helpful things this age of information sharing has contributed to.
If you have lived in apartments your whole life, you’re most likely disallowed from doing anything of the sort.
This. I’ve had a mortgage for exactly 4 years in my life, and when we panic-sold to move across the country for work we got nothing back for the investment (less, if you count renos we had done on move-in). And there’s nothing I want to do as an amateur in a 50-year-old house that involves opening a wall.
Pollution from “fast fashion” is one of the most insidious types of pollution and one of the highest source of microplastics.
Knowing how to sew has allowed me to keep some garments looking new for over 15 years.
I still have a “snakes on a plane” themed hoodie from 2007 that is still going strong, thanks to sewing and proper washing/drying.
Knowing how to separate your clothing for washing is also helpful in this regard, because it also can make clothes last longer. T-shirts can last a decade if they’re washed on a delicates cycle and hung out to dry.
I honestly could give a flying fuck if everything I own is out of style, I’m fucking old anyway.
I have the coolest clothes. Where’d I get them? I made them, patched them up, altered them, etc. It’s so nice :) You can even patch up things like shoes, luggage, furniture, pet toys, and so much more. Honestly, the world would be just fine if every company stopped making anything at all. There is more than enough products out there to satisfy the world.
Too your last point, yes!! I do not care what people think about me and it helps so much.
Learn where all the shut off valves for your waterlines are at your house or apartment. When you have a leak is not the time to find out or rather figure out where your shut off valves are at. if you don’t know where your shut off valves are at, what could’ve been a minor water mess could turn into a major bill.
Yep! I once tugged the hose too hard and broke the pipe it was attached to and WAM! Water gushing up like a fountain. But luckily I knew where the ‘key’ (what’s the T thing called?) and got to the shut off valve in less than a minute.
Imagine not knowing where it is and feeling so helpless as you watch that water drain your bank :(