eos_nyxia

A few other thoughts: Is Denmark (you're Danish, right?) not a great place for what you're interested in? I thought the Nordic countries all skewed more liberal, even hippie-ish... Maybe city/ suburban boys just ain't your thing.... (they're not my thing either)

Have you tried going to meet-ups and places where people of similar interests would congregate? (e.g. conferences, retreats, etc. These types of events only tend to attract people who are more seriously invested in said interests, as opposed to an online group where the interest is more likely to be a fleeting one, as monetary investment and a time commitment have a way of filtering out people, for better and for worse.) My brother, for instance, met his now-fiancee at an extended meditation retreat. In no particular order: "law of attraction" sometimes has a nasty way of facilitating your "lowest common denominator" reality, not your aspirational one. As an analogy, water also flows down toward the lowest possible place due to gravity and your proverbial bucket (the reality you wish to attract/ create), a mirror reflection/ refraction of your mind itself, is leaky for whatever reason. Often this has something to do with past trauma, and if not, then definitely it's strongly ruled by the residue of our social conditioning and what we've been conditioned to accept as tolerable, unavoidable, necessary, etc. This is a huge reason why people get into "shadow work" in the first place. Unfortunately, many women get stuck with this lesson in their intimate relationships with men: ...that our closest relationships ought NOT to be a charitable cause, including after when a relationship starts to become very serious and established. Realistically, too much charity with the wrong people in an overly close way without boundaries results in all of you sinking to the lowest common denominator. With many men, "sticking it out" in the name of being loving and virtuous is not worth what you reap from it. There is a difference between helping someone who needs help, who you truly believe deserves it, who generally respects and is conscientious of your time, energy, and purpose (even if they fall into a bad place), and also you have both explicitly agreed to that dynamic (not that it devolved into something deeply undesired over time). IMO, if you don't want to do that mommy stuff, you have to shut it down ASAP. Shut it down, walk away, and don't apologize for it, for wanting whatever it is that you truly want. Don't let people waste your time or let others make you feel bad about it. After all, if the tables were switched, would they care or would they be content enough to keep draining you? Unconscientious takers often don't care. (Though it seems you've already got that down pat.) I have noticed a reoccurring pattern in heterosexual relationships: a draining man easily drains you of your radiance, your beauty (not just your physical beauty and youth, though it could be that too, as the "spirit" reflected through the body), your health, your drive and purpose. Like literally, it drains our life force. And for what positive ultimate benefit for either you or him? Keep in mind that making him complacent, comfortable, and satiated for absolutely no higher goal or purpose isn't actually in his ultimate best interest either. Other than character (including sufficiently similarly aligned values and priorities), IMO both people need a strong sense of reciprocity and what feels balanced and sustainable for the both of you individually. You need your partner to fundamentally not be ok with you being drained, neglected, stressed, unsupported, etc., while he takes and gets to be comfortable and even prospers while you suffer.

You guys are all on the technically SFW (??) fetish side of Youtube; I don't think you're using that material for what it was originally intended for.... (At least that's the vibe I'm getting from Ms. Fart-in-Jar over here.)

I'm not offering advice since I don't feel qualified to give it: But even without reading what you wrote, you have your whole life story written in your eyes, like this sense of self-rejection and unlovability. It is very... real and out there, as if nothing is veiling it. People, especially strangers, likely will shy away from this. If at some moment, it's not your eyes, maybe it's your body posture and language. Perhaps in some moments, you are not so conscious of yourself and how you come off, so something else is shown. Or perhaps you are painfully, paralyzingly self-conscious and that also shows? Maybe there is something contradictory in the way you present yourself, like a sort of cognitive dissonance (for example: trying to appear confident even as you also feel very unconfident), and this can come off as suspicious and untrustworthy with strangers, as in, it makes people's spidey senses go off. Unfortunately. And if none of my projections are true, say you are super excellent at masking. Still, these deep beliefs about ourselves have a very nasty way of coming out at the end in some sort of self-sabatoge. Not sure if any of this rings a bell. (But this is not meant as a criticism against you as a person, really.)

To those of you who said that rape is not common in the Middle East @LSD-Rumi @Moutushi (??), and anyone else who knows anything and is inclined to answer: How do you know that it's not underreported? What's the process for going from filing a claim, handling and investigating evidence, to actually getting someone convicted? How safe do people actually feel reporting? If someone reports their rape, is there the possibility to be violently retaliated against (either from the police or others in their community), along with extreme social shaming and ostracization? (Note: people often don't feel safe reporting here in Western countries either, because of the social shaming/ ostracization factor.) Corruption and Social Values: How trustworthy and invested are the police, basically? Like, there can be a huge disparity between the law on paper and how it's actually handled most of the time... Also, do primarily religious authorities handle these cases in some Middle Eastern countries? (Alternatively, how subservient is the government, even if not technically hyper-religious, to religious authorities of a fundamentalist nature?) What is the actual definition of rape from country to country in the Middle East? I'm under the impression that it's defined much more strictly and conditionally than we define it here. In Western countries (at least in Canada/ the US), we have the term "sexual assault" which is an umbrella term for a whole bunch of things where proper consent is deemed not possible, including: having sex with an inappropriately aged minor as an adult (aka. "statutory rape"), rape, molestation, drugging someone so that they can't consent properly, molestation and groping, etc. ....basically, I'm wondering how easy is it to by-pass legal loopholes?

Yep, I was just going to say this. The wealth disparity is extremely in-your-face too (at least with HK; I've never been to Singapore).

My feet, ankles, knees and general posture feel a lot better while wearing them, even if just for an hour or two a day while doing outdoorsy, athletic stuff. But they are not cute. I found some of the nicer ones too. Also, I love my Dr. Martens.

Society in the "West" is still trying to make sense of what it means when the ones you are supposed to be able to trust and love you instead violate you. We are still very much in the process of adjusting how we think and talk about it, especially in public to other people. IMO a lot of progress has been made in the last 20 years or so, so that sexual assault isn't just seen as something that mainly happens when strangers jump out of dark alleys or manage to roofie your drink in a bar. Nor is it something that mainly happens while you are wearing the wrong kind of outfit, being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, while giving out the wrong signals. (Because apparently just existing is also "giving out a signal".) If people who are raped are solely responsible for preventing rape (both on a moral and a practical level), then the uncomfortable implication of most rapes (allegedly) being done by someone the person knows is to just not trust anyone and let them close to you, lol. To live in a bubble, to stay single, and to not have any male friends or unnecessary acquaintances. But if everyone who was raped, sexually assaulted, or molested avoided the opposite sex, somehow that would be women's fault too for "depriving men". So this whole issue has gotten tangled up in the gender wars along the way. It seems like sexual abuse amongst family members is the hardest thing for people to wrap their heads around though, out of all the things people want to not talk about, sweep under the rug, and minimize (either that it could not possibly be that bad, that it never happened, or that it doesn't happen that frequently therefore it probably never happened to the person speaking about it). It has gotten miles better though. Actually, one benefit of Youtube and the internet is more people being able to tell their stories without barriers to entry. The actual strong deterrent to this fixation that people lie about SA for attention is that not that many people actually want being raped or molested as their "claim to fame" unless there is a goddamned good reason for it. There is usually some amount of shame, humiliation, or at least reticence to get over, and that's even if no one shames you along the way. It's also much harder to blame someone for not avoiding SA, usually a child, without looking like a complete sociopath. Unfortunately, based on some of my own early experiences, my expectations of a good number of people are so low that I assume that if they could publically blame a child for being raped, they would. The "rationality" is just a cover for whatever it is that they both want and can get away with justifying.

Fun Question: how well would our major city infrastructure run if legally underpaid international students were not a thing?

Everyone I know growing up who wanted to have kids and not rent forever left Metro Vancouver a long time ago. Like 10+ years ago. Often to the farther reaches of the Fraser Valley or to Alberta. I can't blame people for neither wanting nor feeling financially secure enough to have kids here, period. The rest of BC seems to be following the rising rent prices, including places that many of us growing up in the Lower Mainland (Metro Vancouver) thought of as the absolute boonies. I didn't realize how badly it had gotten until I started looking around very recently at rental prices all across BC and even in other major cities in Canada (excluding Toronto, Montreal, etc.), including the East Coast, Alberta, etc. It seems like post-Covid has been especially bad, like the last 2 years, the reality of which I've been blissfully insulated because the price of my rental has mostly been locked in since I moved to my current location in about 2016, and only started rising significantly within the last couple years. Many places have doubled or even tripled the cost of what it would have been less than 10 years ago. Instead, we have many people house-sharing, and renting single rooms for what used to get you a 1-2 bedroom suite (albeit a cheaper one). Pretty much no one here has any chance of ever buying a house unless your parents help pay for yours or gift you one. It really doesn't matter what sort of traditionally upper-middle job you and your spouse work. It's not happening. Overall: we're not really the fighting and protesting sort, are we? Critiquing and complaining, yes. I think we're fatalistic overall, and often trying to make the best of whatever is given to us circumstantially.

I'm not disagreeing with you and you're not telling me anything I don't already know, with what you said. This especially. Quite a few people who have been raped, molested, etc. have spent ungodly amounts of time and energy putting themselves in the positions of the perp in order to understand, well aware that the reverse happens much more rarely with perps. Often it's an unavoidable part of working your shit out, sometimes it's an attempt at preventing something similar from happening in the future, and for everyone else, it's moreso a morbid, compulsive curiosity or a luxury.

@Basman There is an issue with people trying to say, with absolute certainty, how much of human behaviour is raw “biological wiring” and how much is pure socialization, as if there was always some clear, definite line dividing one from the other. There is probably not and it is an exceptionally hard thing to trace as causality rather than making loose links of causative association, if it is not already entirely impossible. Asserting a definite link of causation appears to be very common from people with various agendas, in various ideological camps... and is based in what, exactly? Some narrative people invented about the Paleolithic area? What about the people of Mohenjo-daro, were those people definitely rapists because some proportion of human males are always inclined to rape, or were peaceful people simply all wiped out and replaced with the ancestors of murderers, rapists, and opportunistic exploiters? What about the Neanderthals? If it’s not purely a raw biological impulse (divorced from the past), then how much of it is some amorphous factor like ancestral or inter-generational memory? (With the latter, take a look at how much CSA tends to reoccur in families where this is not just a learned behaviour, but magically and "mysteriously" skips generations.) A lot of these narratives could go an which-way, really, and ought to be constructed carefully and not in a meme-like fashion where people co-opt the narrative for whatever specific personal agenda they have. Consider also that we are learning new details from anthropology about our paleolithic ancestors decade by decade. Other than that, yea. Rape happens and did happen in nature. Female ducks evolved anti-rape vaginas, etc. IMO rape is antithetical to our development as a social species, period. It is the literal definition of antisocial behaviour (unless, of course, society endorses or looks away from it in certain circumstances, with certain types of people who get othered). Collective ethics serves a function: without collective ethics, social norms, and a degree of shaming, I question how many people would behave in a way which is either for the collective good, or at least does not actively destroy lives. There appears to be some sort of necessity to it, unfortunately, though it has its downsides. It is a prime motivator. It might (potentially) stop people who would unknowingly, carelessly rape, but it also makes intelligent people with sociopathic tendencies hide themselves better, instead of letting it all hang out in the open because they truly do not give a shit. That makes it hard for those who would be predated upon to avoid them, unfortunately. However, there is no rule that says judgments or moral prioritization has to wholly influence what you are allowed to perceive, or are willing to perceive.

I was going to say this.... Personally, I think all the Jesuses should get into a giant arena and have a face-off, like a battle of wills, gladiatorial style. The winner gets to be crowned the Real Jesus Christ (TM) -- and finally settle this debate once and for all! It doesn't have to be violent... it can be like Iron Chef but with more people shouting over each other and psychic powers! I would pay seriously good money to see that.

Woah, I just realized I've never seen the actual organism part of the barnacle before. Aka. the "squishy bits". Interesting video. Underwater life is so fascinating and alien. Fun Fact: You can eat them. Supposedly they taste good, though I've never tried it before. Source: I have a Chinese parent. Fun Fact 2: Barnacles have the longest penis-to-body ratio of any organism: https://nerdist.com/article/barnacle-penises-are-eight-times-as-long-as-their-bodies/

You literally just summed up the naturalistic fallacy. This doesn't just mean "nature is good" but also is in the vein of "nature is justified" and "all results of potential natural selection are better and are (or were) necessary, because it's natural selection".

I am. And I'm not strictly heterosexual anyway (like I'm attracted to any gender potentially) or even intrinsically monogamous, what I mean is that reading threads like these make me feel less attracted to heterosexual men as a whole, lol.

If you're North American (US/ Canada, not sure about Europe or elsewhere), your public library probably has some excellent contemporary audiobooks for free. I'm in Canada and I can borrow and listen to audiobooks through an app as well (Libby). (Though personally, it didn't end up being my cup of tea, with many modern writers taking way too long to get to the point and all, so I'd rather just read it in print.)

There are some excellent "New Thought" audiobooks on Librivox, which is the Western progenitor of all of the "Law of Attraction" stuff that's been floating around for the last 20 years or so. Personally, I was surprised at the quality of the work compared to modern work on the subject, as in it tends to be more practical and directly written with significantly less amounts of fluff and repetition. (Though it's true: there really is not much new to say on the subject that has not already been said since time immemorial, but the quality of language, accessibility, and contemporary applicability are hugely variable.) Out of the top of my head: most of William Walker Atkinson's more popular books were good. (Thought Vibration, The Power of Concentration, Memory: How to Develop Train and use it, etc.) All the books are free to download on their website. You can also buy the phone app for a couple dollars; I've gotten really good usage out of it myself. There are also lots of amazing public domain books there, if older books are your thing. Personally, I find a lot of books by ancient Greek and Roman authors to be a dry read, and even though I'm a super fast read and was never much of an audiobook person, I've actually ended up getting through a bunch of ancient historical works that I would not have enjoyed as much otherwise. The reader quality is variable though, which is to be expected since it's done by volunteer readers and it's free.

Well, they're not going to be marrying him, so who cares what they think? Do not let other people influence your decision-making process excessively when they won't have to live with the consequences of your decisions. Nothing good comes from this. A more extreme version of this is people who follow the "prescribed life track" because they're supposed to. Like if you're a woman, getting married to the right type of man, at the right time, having your 2.5 kids, and doing everything in the order people expect you to do it in. Also: having the right career, and "doing it all", whatever the F that means. And then later: *****wow, I've made it. ...but why am I not happy?***** If you expect what you want vs. what other people want and what looks good on paper (or social media, alternatively) to line up or to be something that can be reconciled perfectly, you're probably in for a fight. Personally, I would say... don't do it. If the feeling aspect isn't there, don't do it.

This thread made me more lesbian.

It's I'm on top of the world making him feel on top of the world, and vice versa, or bust.

You might gain more insight from talking to people who have been through the traumas than anyone here telling you not to fixate on it because it's not beneficial for you as a personal entity, especially on an emotional level. Though it might be true, it's really just a similar type of rationale dressed up in "spiritual" or highfalutin language. Don't care if you don't want to get your hands dirty, but why go through so much effort to rationalize your choice? At some point, the world does rely on people who care about something outside of themselves, who see the world as themselves and are willing to take action, to guide any sort of social change, particularly to social systems. The other side of this is that everyone must change for themselves; these are not mutually exclusive processes. Though do you consider it to be a morbid curiosity? Outside of this particular bubble, there are people who would care that you care, because a lot of people outside the bubble don't actually care as well. Or it's a performative sort of caring. Personally: death is death. It's intrinsically neutral to me. I am aware that dying is not actually painful after the point of no return. A quick death is more merciful and painless than a death that drags out for years and years IMO. But then, people are weird about death. In my own experience, it was about 15-20 years to get out of the hole, and that's with actively and perpetually putting in the work to heal. I've seen at least a couple of other people describe it that way, though I have no idea if there's any universality to it. What has felt hopeless to me was being younger, as a teenager, and having people describe themselves as lifelong survivors on a perpetual "healing journey", whether it's of war-based trauma, CSA, or sexual assault. Like if it's going to be your baggage your whole life no matter what you do, what is even the point? Feel free to ask me anything you're curious about; I'm not that sensitive about direct questions. Though personally, I consider CSA (especially by a family member) to be a different enough trauma than rape as a war crime. I don't mean the damage to your body and nervous system, but I mean the emotional qualities of it. For the latter, there are many first-hand accounts you can read. If you're curious, it's worth reading as many as you can in order to form a balanced perspective on it (or as many as you can stomach).

Honest question: what does it even feel like to be the kind of person where this is the worst (or one of the worst) fates you could possibly conceive of? From my perspective: it must be nice to have that luxury. Though I'm sure it doesn't actually... feel nice. I get that loneliness and invalidation isn't a joke but... If this is actually the central point of your being, it's like you're made of paper. You're an animal that can make use of human speech and thought patterns, and not much more. What's even underneath that grief and anger; is there anything at all?

You can communicate, just not directly with human language; it has its limitations. Sometimes that's a purpose of "elevated" art forms, If you can communicate with your whole beingness, anyone/ anything that is truly open will be in communion with you. It is inescapable, really.

Is that actually true? I thought that statistically speaking, Boomers and Gen X were the sluttiest demographic. They started having sex near the beginning of the invention and mass distribution of the pill, and before "(casual) sex positivity" has been slowly but surely its shine for millennials. Maybe people are still doing it, but where is the optimism about it?? The pre-AIDs era seemed absolutely wild, though I'm sure, as usual, only a fraction of people were living to their "fullest potential". I'm not under the impression that gen Z is casual sex positive (if I'm gonna make a massive generalization....) I mean, they have the internet. It's a lot easier to avoid talking and dealing with the opposite sex, especially if it doesn't come to you naturally. If anything, mainstream attitudes toward sexuality for gen Y and Z tend to be more permissive, which isn't the same thing? It's just how you feel about it. Honestly, what worries more than anything is the kids raised with a theoretically infinite supply of hardcore, violent porn during their very early formative years. Especially without any kind of proper sex education, both from schools and parents/ guardians. Not to fear monger, but I seriously worry for any girl under the age of 20 especially. I have heard some really terrible stories of girls losing their virginity, getting abruptly choked, slapped, dicks shoved down their throat, etc. by boys who have no concept or desire of consent or the fact that the physical aspect of bdsm cannot actually be casual nor risk-free. Because... porn teaches you absolutely nothing. I have heard that say: in the 80s or 90s, it was not like this at all. Legimiately, this is deranged. Incestuous friend groups have always been a thing though. Source: people I knew in high school.