The Serenity Prayer - “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.”
I don’t consider myself very religious, but this has always stuck with me.
That’s how I started out too. You pick a few things here and there, next thing you know a few years later you build a server capable of storing half a petabyte of data. The important thing is to know when it starts becoming a problem. I am at 216 tb now, but I should be good for years to come.
In 2004, I was working on the bridge of a ship that was going to be inspected in a few days. There was a small hole in a wall about the size of an electrical outlet with exposed wiring that I wanted to hide from the inspectors. I printed out a picture of a kitten and taped it over the hole. I visited the ship again in 2018, and the kitten was still there.
I get exactly what you’re saying but I’m not sure I have a great answer for you. I think it’s all about dopamine. Smoking cannabis reconnects me with that childlike feeling. Also, having a kid really helped me. Seeing the world through her eyes as she experienced childhood is amazing. Before kid I felt like I couldn’t really enjoy anything like I could before without drugs. I’m not sure how much of that is depression and how much is just getting older.
I was at work last week and two colleagues loaded on an apple update to their phones. Their phones slowed to a crawl and lost battery charge quickly through the day. The next thing I saw was one of them with the internet browser open putting his credit card details in to buy a new iPhone £650 gone just like that. iPhone users wouldn’t balk at expensive contracts or spending £600 quid on a new iPhone. It seems to me apple deliberately trash their phones and users accept it and upgrade to a newer model. I could understand if it was a cheap phone but jeeze crazy money for something with such a short lifespan. Would you buy a ln expensive TV if you thought it wouldn’t last you any more than a couple of years?
Plenty of iPhone users rocking iOS 16 on the iPhone 8 (from 2017) with no trouble. For many iPhone users the longevity is one reason they use it. Others will always update to the latest and greatest.
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Frank Herbert, Dune
Now, what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I’m asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian
FYI formatting those quotes as code makes them really hard to read, at least for me–the lines don’t break, so I have to scroll the text to the right to get it to be visible. You’d probably be better off with a blockquote,
which would look more like this. That’s done with a > at the start of the line
Not that you feel less. But when you are young the experiences are brand new and the feelings novel and so the memories are stronger. As you get older you can still have these memories of strong feelings, such as your wedding, the birth of a child, or traveling but those novel experiences are fewer and farther between as you age
asklemmy
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