Totally Human Emdash User

Talking publicly about how and why you fired someone that used to work at your company is generally a no-no, for legal reasons if no other.

There are so many different competing apps and discord copies that have risen and fallen, it’s hard to really get attached to any that have little movement in fighting the network effect.

In other words, you are saying that there is too much discord in this space?

FOR GLORY!!!

Some people are just nice by nature.

The fact that I have to use a more complicated tool than cd.

But how does changing the current directory backup your files???

This article, and thus the discussion was not intended to belittle anyone who finds exercise does not help them.

However, people making the claim that they are too depressed to exercise are being belittled. For example, to quote another comment:

I’m not sure that “too depressed to exercise” is a medically recognized state short of being bedridden and comatose, so unless one is unable to get out of the bed to go to the bathroom saying “i’m too depressed to exercise” is just words being used to justify not going for a walk

You are denying the existence of clinical depression?

Yes, but I think that my point still stands that if one is too depressed to exercise, then exercise is not the solution to the depression. You yourself have just said that you had to use other techniques first to get to the point where you were able to exercise.

Also, very importantly, I really think you need to reject the thinking of “the only one stopping you is you”, both in yourself and in the advise you give to others, because makes it seem like the problem is a lack of willpower, and I think that telling people that they just need to try harder to fight their brain will just cause them to dig in. Furthermore, since you have been practicing mindfulness, you know that there is no “self” at the core but just a collection of mental processes, and that thinking of there being a “self” at the core actually causes harm by creating a false narrative about the way that the mind works which makes it harder to guide it in a better direction. Telling people that there is a “you” that is the one stopping things from happening reinforces this misconception. The better thing to do is just to speak from your own personal experience of watching your mind and seeing how many of the things that were holding you back were just appearances, and once you came to appreciate that, their hold on you was loosened.

Finally, a lot of people have (very roughly speaking) brain chemistry issues, and all the therapy and mindfulness in the world can only help so much with that.

My general advice would be to be very wary of projecting your personal experiences onto others, even when you are sincerely trying to help (which I believe that you are!)

Or… maybe not everyone’s brain works the same way?

Not just casual walking, I was speed walking. My hear rate was pretty high while walking.

So it sounds like, by definition, you were not too depressed to try exercising because you did it. Go you?

Also, a lot of people simply do not get anything out of exercising, unfortunately; it never stops being uncomfortable tedium that brings no improvement in their mood.

I prefer to think of it as my carbon supplement—given that I, like my fellow human beings, am made of carbon!

It’s funny how people can be so different.

I personally love the feeling of exercising, so unless I am experiencing severe anhedonia—which has happened in the past when I was on a lower dosage of antidepressant—then it always bursts my mood while I am doing it, which provides significant motivation. However, exercise does nothing for my wife except to make her feel sweaty and unpleasant, so she feels no motivation to do it, and even though I understand this intellectually I still have trouble “getting” it.

Right, they are too depressed to try exercising, so they have not tried exercising.  That is practically a tautology, so I am not sure what your point is.

I have to listen to my teenage self if I want to have any chance of getting him to listen to me!

Does personal amusement count?

In fairness, the swastika was important to Hinduism long before Nazi Germany started using it, and one could argue that Indians should not feel that they need to give the symbol up just because some Europeans misused it.

On the other hand, do you think this would be giving them too much benefit of the doubt? Hindu nationalism seems to be pretty scary, after all.

How much success have you had with that approach?

Just to be clear, the article itself was written by him; he was just experimenting with an AI tool to extract quotes (because learning about AI tools is literally his job), and because he had COVID at the time he got mixed up and pasted paraphrased quotes rather than original quotes. (Arguably he should not have been experimenting with a new tool while sick, but I am willing to cut him some slack because he was probably not thinking clearly at the time.)

The serious thing here is actually not so much that he used an AI tool at some point in the process but that fabricated quotes ended up in a published article.

It helps if you think of America as believing that when an individual gets sick it is their own fault.