rooker

The problem is centuries and millennia are but fragments of time compared to the entire life of the universe...so it's kind of like the ant analogy of a colony in San Fran looking for one in Paris, but only looking from 2:10 pm and 5 seconds to 2:10 pm and 5.1 seconds. Even less than that, probably.

He writes like he's trying to evoke JFK, when in reality he evokes Richard Nixon.

More like a padawan mind trick...pretty transparent, if you ask me. You're right, "brothers and sisters" had me rolling my eyes as soon as I read it. Not to mention all those articles saying he sold his shares of Zynga right before the layoffs..

You'd be surprised by how passionate waiters can be about their jobs. None of these claims are universal, and not everyone can be passionate about their jobs. I agree that society needs garbage men (and garbage men actually get paid quite a bit), but that doesn't mean that for those of us who have more of a choice/desire to find fulfillment in work we should completely ignore the idea of seeking such fulfillment because some others choose not to.

I disagree. The problem lies in the definition of "passion," which a lot of people take to mean that it's going to be some sort of thrilling, meaningless underwater basket weaving. In reality, combining interest and hard work can lead to more fulfillment than simply drudging in and out of an 8-hour work day to collect a paycheck. When a person simply believes that they're working for a paycheck, their satisfaction will tend to decrease, as the paycheck starts to seem smaller and smaller with regard to the amount of time they're putting in. 8 hours a day is no small chunk of one's life. It also doesn't have to be the most fulfilling time in a person's day, but to say that having a passion for your work is a BS ideal (and to attribute it to baby boomers at that) is oversimplifying the issue.

That said, you're completely right that living a normal life is not enough for some people. These people will tend to be either extraordinary or extremely depressed, all the while thinking they're normal/below normal.

Why apply free market tactics to a service that is almost certainly necessary for everyone in their lifetimes? If anything, I feel like that would make things more expensive because this is a resource that people can frequently NOT decline (at the risk of losing their life) because the cost is too high. People are essentially a captive audience, so that's where regulation should ideally step in to keep costs down. Obviously that's not working, though..hmm..

Serious question - can you negotiate your hospital bill like insurance companies can?

I did the "attractive women" thing (took a hit for the team, for science) and that was absolutely true. The odd thing was, the first random girl I clicked on was this girl I kinda had a crush on in college (all my "People you may know" recommendations were from college, even as I'm three years out) who happened to be Asian. Then...all of the "Also Viewed" were fairly attractive, well-groomed Asian women. Isn't that interesting? I thought at the very least it would break me out of race, but apparently they're their own class.

The other thing I'll say is perhaps this author is tapped out of "People you may know" and LinkedIn is simply guessing . Mine looks fairly reasonable, random, and not like they were digging particularly deep.

And we get to enjoy the pleasant tunes of Leona Lewis.

It's funny that you say all of this, because I think it's completely true. I've never tried mushrooms, LSD, or any sort of hallucinogen beyond MDMA. MDMA alone changed my life, but what followed was how I utilized that moment of awareness that I experienced. I started meditating, read The Power of Now by Tolle, and having had enough of a philosophical and meditative foundation for understanding what Tolle was saying, I can occasionally enter a realm of understanding far beyond the shallow experiences I had lived in my life up to that point. It's so true when you say that reality is so much bigger than you think, because once you realize the ridiculous amount of depth that goes into every single thing around you (even the room your in contains materials built by dozens of people from across the world - think of how long it takes you to cook breakfast in the morning) then everything in your life begins to take on a sense of perspective.

That said, I really want to try mushrooms/acid because I feel like I'm at this midway point, bobbing back and forth between the awareness of meditation and the power of the present and slipping back into old thought habits and anxieties. I feel like a pokemon evolving, flashing between my old form and my new form and my ego keeps wanting to hit B to stop the evolution. :P

I was just thinking about this recently. Our generation is so fucked. Tuition rising, fewer jobs, recession, social security not going to be there when we get older, the first true tax increase for every American (payroll tax, we all felt it to the tune of 2% on our first paycheck of January) since the mid-90s, and now the retiring generation is saying "Welp! It's up to you to fix it! Good luck!" Assholes.

Oh they've promoted it. They shut down all pictures on OkCupid for the day to promote the new app. People are PISSED. Hah.

How do you know that that's what special blend is? I haven't been able to find anything conclusive from OkC regarding that.

What? Are you generalizing to an entire gender?

You'd be surprised. In the course of 4 years at university, I somehow never once crossed paths with my roommate, despite the fact that I knew all of her friends and our school is incredibly small.

Okay but obviously we know that's not a real picture, but instead a hyperbole of a photo. Still proves your point, I suppose. It's fun meeting people in real life then finding them on Facebook and seeing their complete lie of a profile picture that makes them look 3-4 points higher on a 10 point scale than they really are.

Yeah. Attractive people are fairly consistently approached or hit on or treated differently or what have you every day in real life. Remove the approach anxiety that the other 90% who DON'T approach these people but want to by creating an easy forum for approach, and you have an overwhelming amount of messaging. I don't blame girls for being quickly disillusioned. Even as a guy, I feel like the pickings are slim, and I'd much rather date a friend than meet someone through OkC.

I believe this is a very, very wide net. They send it out to the upper 50% is what I've heard.

That actually exists already. It's called LikeBright, and it hooks up to your Facebook, pulls mutual friends, and has you vet them for each person, basically asking "would you see these two people dating?" And if you have a mutual friend, and that friend has vetted you, you can just go ahead and message.

Great point. As someone who has been studying psychology for a while now, you're completely right that people tend to diverge into one of two paths. On the one side you have people like Skinner who become completely robotic and excessively scientific, on the other side you have Jung who still maintained the mystery and excitement of life in his writings and musings.

I don't think you can attribute this specifically to psychology, it's sort of applicable to every science. You have someone like Neil Degrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan to every emotionless, numbers-only physicist who doesn't sleep with his wife.

It's a personal choice, whether to accept life as a mystery and study it as such or consider it a problem that needs to be solved analytically and without emotion.

That said, yes, when I worked in a psychiatry department I worked around the most miserly, insane people I've ever met. They were more cold and soulless than the homeless people we were treating. I got out of there right quick.