I just don't want to be homeless when I am old. That's all I want. Having food and housing. A two room apartment for me and my husband would be nice. If I can use the public transport on top of that, I'm all set. A three room apartment would be a luxury and being able to go out every once in a while would be absolutely astronomical.
(I also want to have healthcare but I am in Germany so I got that going for me which is nice. )
I did in another comment above!
Ideologically, I can follow your argument. I just don't think this fits with the AA philosophy. But that being said, AA is not the one and only or the gold standard for self help groups. It's not a one size fits all. For me, AA is almost too religious and also didn't fit into my life back then.
In my early 20s I actually went to AA meetings over the course of probably a year. I kept it very secret, as I did with my very problematic consumption.
It was a group of probably 15-20 people, most aged 40-70. I was by far the youngest there. And let me tell you they would not have appreciated someone coming in who is under any kind of influence, including marijuana (even if it had been legal back then). Some people smoked cigarettes but even that was kind of frowned upon. At some point I mentioned that I have been getting into non-alcoholic beer, and even this was controversial, because I allegedly was masking the behavior and a slip back to alcoholic beer is easy. With that same logic, any kind of coping by using alternative drugs is just redirecting your addiction. In the group there was a strong belief that you are an addict for life and that you have an addictive personality type. And at least to me it's kind of true. As a side note: Nowadays I am drinking sugary lemonade as a treat (something I would have never done in my 20s) and a fuckton of specialty coffee. For me, this is ok, and it works. But I understand if in their philosophy this is not a good way to go about your problems.
Anyway, at another point someone else asked about benzodiazepines to ease the first transition. This has also been controversial, and while you can get this prescribed when you are becoming sober, everyone recommended not to do it. There seemed to be a strong belief that the best (or only) way to go about your addiction is to rawdog sobriety - don't mask, don't cope, face your feelings and pains and reasons for your consuption. Only then can you move on, forgive yourself, ask others for forgiveness, and all of these famous steps.
There is also a clear rule that you come sober. Although this is specifically in regards to alcohol, I am really sure any other mind altering substance that numbs or excites you would have led to you being excluded from this week's session.
Now, this is my experience with one group outside of the US. Also, I was a very shitty member and should not have been there to begin with. I made a joke, a competition out of it, I'm not even sure why I kept going there. I went there drunk, but no one ever suspected anything. The paramedics hardly suspected anything when I had 3.5%o blood alcohol, they assumed I had a slight migraine. I went to AA with literal booze in my handbag just for the thrill. I did so in university and relationships and with my family, and I was always so successful, I think I just wanted to see how far I can push my behavior before someone notices, before someone stops me, before I fuck up.
I stopped going to AA because I went abroad, but it was just a great excuse to stop going. The truth is I wasn't ready to stop drinking quite yet. Committing to never having alcohol again when you are missing the one thing in life that you have actually wanted and you're just 22 is just really hard.
Tl;dr: I would not recommend marijuana use in AA groups, to be honest neither during/before, nor in between meetings. It might not be the community you are looking for if you want to cope with your addiction by using an alternative drug. Whether or not it is a smart or sensible thing to do might be up for debate, but from my very limited experience with AA this would neither be ok for the group, nor go with their philosophy.
You've never been to an AA meeting, have you?
I was thinking about not donating to charity but buying stuff directly and asking them for support to ship it. Basically that makes you buy and not gift. If you buy 1 gigaton of rice for Ethiopia (I have no clue how many people a gigaton of rice would feed and I also have no clue whether Ethiopians need any rice) from Costco, well, then you have spent the money on it. Fuck it, maybe buy a boat. A ferry to ship it all directly. Buy land and don't gift but let workers work there. For free. For eternity. Oh you happen to pay them 50 times the average salary of their country? Well you're probably a bad businessman but you're not gifting. Pay the lawyers to make a bulletproof testament where you explicitly state that these poor fellas will never own the land but will for eternity be able to use it for free until the sun explodes.
And then bribe. Bribe away the heartache, bribe away the pain. Bribe the SCOTUS to retire. Bribe Putin to stop the war and fuck off. Bribe Trump to fuck off. Bribe Musk to get a vasectomy and fuck off. I mean you're basically just lobbying at that point but we all know that that's bribing and not gifting.
I think technology is the culprit in another way. It is not that we have too much time now as technology does all the work for you (also, really? Like, how does your life look like? I hardly have 10 minutes to feel bored, these 10 minutes take away from my very limited sleeping time). To me it seems more like we have gotten so used to filling every spare second with information, scrolling, clicking, googling, playing, texting, interacting, communicating. So much so that we have constant dopamine kicks and just cannot stand one second of being not busy. Everyone is shopping with headphones on, listening to music or a podcast. You're on an escalator? Better pull out your phone. You're cooking or cleaning? Turn up the volume! For real, when was the last time you just raw dogged a chore?
Admittedly, as someone living in Germany, I had a good chuckle about the guy's surname.
Adeline Um, a 27-year-old living Boston musician, has recommitted to using every ounce of skincare products from their bottles, as well as continuing to use scruffed-up but functional makeup brushes and wearing 15-year-old clothes.
“I really dislike throwing away food or like when food is rotting. I just feel so guilty about that.”
“You don’t need to buy a new set of hair straighteners just because your current ones are crusty,” she said. “If it still works, it still works. For me, it’s actually been a great reminder.”
Aren't all of these absolutely normal behaviors?
Fuck yeah!
If you think about it - such a big building is a great gigantic canvas. Like yeah, all these buildings in my city look nice from rather close with some details, but come on - a mosaic like that just rocks.
We live in a house from 1900 and thanks to a lot of work our apartment has the energy efficiency grade A to B. We will also get a heat pump in the next few years. We have PV on the roof (I'm not sure what for right now), our windows are triple glassed and we have two heat exchangers thingy that sucks air from the outside and pushes inside air out. A couple of months ago they also insulated the roof of the basement better.
We are very lucky that the owner is behind all these works. Most aren't, but it is to show that you're absolutely right and how much can be done and improved. (However, I still don't like the cut of the apartment or not having an elevator/barrier free access to the basement. And the bugs.)
Damn you made me remember last night's dream where I handed someone three bags, one of them contained dirt, one nutella, and one poop. They were all indistinguishable visually and somehow not even via smell. And then I ran away. I don't know why I was so panicked that they would come after me but I woke up panicking.
I recently moved to a German city that, whenever I mention it, is described as "ooh it's such a beautiful city!" because it wasn't bombed to shreds in the war and a lot of buildings are from 1900ish and older.
Honestly I would rather prefer to live in a building like the post. The apartments often are cut more efficiently and fit better for a family. Yeah, the outside isn't as appealing as around here but I don't live on the outside of my house, I live inside of it, so I barely care about its outsides. The other side effect of eastern blocks is that the density per square km is amazingly high. This also leads to supermarkets etc being everywhere. (I am, of course, making generalizations here.)
Of course I need to say that the energy efficiency in old eastern block houses is also awful.
But I don't want to bash the 1900s houses too much. At least they have 4-5 levels. That's still better than single family homes in the middle of a city (talking about you, pipe smoking guy in the middle of Sendling).
You do realize that if they did it that would imply Trump wins this term and Harris the next? Jesus Christ this is terrifying
I'm not sure you used drive intentionally but it was a good pun that made me breathe out through my nose real fast
There's a similar comment in their profile on another post so I think that's their actual opinion and not a joke.
Would it be possible to use aerosol-based geoengineering technology locally to cool houses?
This is both a shower thought and a stupid question but I think it fits this community better.
Since air conditioning is apparently heating the local environment while cooling down a house I was asking myself whether it would be possible to basically either build a layer of glass/plexiglass right over the actual outer structure of a house, leaving a tiny gap between wall and glass, or at least put a house in a kind of glasshouse dome with a double glass wall. And consequently inject a sulfur compound, calcite etc into that "gap", basically creating a very tiny micro-atmosphere that has that sun blocking effect.
Would that work, just logically/technically? Would the environment heat up less, more, or just the same as with geoengineering in the stratosphere? Would it even cool down a house/keep it cool at all?
Wo finde ich Listen mit geplanten Demos?
Leute, ich bin einfach zu blöd zum googlen.
Ich würde gerne an mehr Demos teilnehmen bzw mich informieren, wann wo was stattfindet. Ob München, Leipzig oder Berlin - ich schaffe es einfach nicht, eine Liste mit angekündigten Demos in meiner Nähe zu finden. Demos müssen doch eigentlich angemeldet werden, müsste es dann nicht ein Einfaches sein, für jede Stadt eine Liste zu finden? Bis vor Kurzen habe ich noch in München gewohnt und hätte gedacht, dass auf münchen.de sowas doch gelistet sein müsste, aber ich hab nie was gefunden.
Immer wenn ich so etwas google, finde ich aber nur Nachrichten zu vergangenen Demos. Mit ganz viel Glück habe ich vor knapp zwei Jahren mal einen oder zwei Tage vorher einen Artikel gelesen, in dem Aktionen gegen den Krieg in der Ukraine angekündigt wurden.
Vielleicht kann mir hier ja jemand weiterhelfen. Gerade habe ich wieder versucht, etwas zu finden in Leipzig oder Berlin am 24. Februar, und stoße schon wieder nur auf alte Artikel.
Edit: Vielen Dank für die Antworten und die Links! Sie helfen sehr weiter. Vielleicht laufen wir uns ja mal bei einer der Aktionen über den Weg.
Is there a name for downplaying your suffering because other people have bigger problems?
I am looking for a term to describe the line of thinking that goes something like "I hate my work, I am sick all the time, I am depressed, I can't find happiness. But I should be happy. Those problems don't matter. All my problems are so insignificant, there are little. They're just some stupid first world problems. I have it good, I have food on the table and a loving family. There are millions of people who have real problems, people living in severe poverty, starving to death, being bombed."
I think about this often, it came up when I was talking with someone with mental health issues and I remember him telling me that this way of thinking has a name/is a common symptom that occurs in people with a specific personality disorder, although I cannot remember what disorder he claimed it was. Also this was more than ten years ago so it might have either changed or my memory of this event changed.