Formed Frontal Lobe Thoughts

[soos_mite_ah]

1 Year After Plastic Surgery

It's officially been 1 year since the surgery and I feel great. I think this was a really good decision on my part and 100% worth the $10k I spent on this. My body image is more stable. I have a better relationship with food and I'm more in tune with my body's queues since I'm focus on the looks less. I have a lot more mental space now that I'm not nearly as physically self conscious. Shopping doesn't feel like torture any more. I feel good on a day to day basis. 

I will say that I feel 7/10 in my body. I can't say that my body image is perfect. I still have days where I don't feel my best and I think much of it has to do with the return of the early 2000s skinny standards which is very unrealistic given my build. I also think that I'm more insecure about my chest. I wouldn't say that the insecurities I had around my stomach went towards my chest because I don't feel like I returned back to the same place emotionally that I was in pre-surgery. It's more of the fact that my boobs were already big and now they feel even more so because of my proportions. Shopping, while it doesn't feel like torture, is still a chore and a struggle because of my chest. I don't think my boobs are that crazy when I'm naked but whenever I try to put clothes on, that's when I'm reminded that most people are smaller than me and that my chest is disproportionately big. 

I feel like I can lose a smidge of weight in the body fat percentage sense, not because I'm insecure about my size but because I like the look of defined muscles and I like the thought of having back mucles specifically. I also have the faintest hint of abs after the surgery which is something that has me excited. I'm still a little numb towards my waist but I think I'm like 95% recovered. It's to the point where I don't really think about the surgery all that much anymore. 

Emotionally, I feel like I'm still working through some self-esteem issues that this process has uncovered. I wrote about this in a previous post: 

On 11/3/2025 at 1:01 PM, soos_mite_ah said:

But now that my insecurities around my weight are mostly gone, I feel like I have unlocked a layer of insecurities around my perceptions of my own desirability. I feel like my insecurites around desirability was always there but it wasn't in the forefront on my mind as it is right now because in the past, I had this thought that was along the lines of *hey, I'm not ugly, I just need to lose weight and get rid of my stomach.* But now, it's like.. *well maybe I am just ugly.* And I have just been trying to sit with it and process where this might be coming from and how to address it. 

I feel like I have worked through 70% of this. My confidence around my looks is still a work in progress. 

[soos_mite_ah]

 

[soos_mite_ah]

Navigating Adult Friendships 

I feel like I have just been going through it when it comes to this area of my life after graduating college and I want to use this post to review the different parts of it. 

1. The Changing Landscape of Maintaining Adult Friendships: A lot of people's lives are much more integrated when they were in school. You go to school 8 hours a day and during that time, you are spending time educating yourself, developing personally, interacting/ socializing with your peers, building / maintaining friendships, and you have some physical activity built in there  (recess if you are younger, or even just having a gym period, a sport , or walking from class to class). After school, then you go home to your parents, you do some homework to reinforce learning, you spend time with family, and you get some rest in. However, once you move into working full time, you have 8 hours of work just like you do at school. Except now, the socialization / friendship maintenance isn't built in becuase your coworkers aren't your friends and office politics is a thing (you can have some coworkers as your friends but it's probably not wise to have your social circle and social validation revolve around your workplace). So now you have to schedule hang outs with your friends of a google calendar. Physical activity isn't built in (in a corporate job), so now after work, you need to set an hour aside to do something physical. Family time isn't built in if you choose to move out of your parents' house and it's a whole thing you need to navigate if you move farther across the country so now your parents and siblings are people you need to schedule out in your PTO to see. And self development and learning isn't built in to your job in most cases because companies value shareholder value instead of  building a competence workforce in most cases. So unless you are setting apart time to educate yourself and work on yourself through therapy, hobbies, and trying new things, it's very easy to stagnate, especially after age 25 since a lot of people settle into their lives and many developmental milestones are reached by then. 

I don't think people's order of priorities have changed rather it's harder to water all of those priorities logistically. I feel like back in school, for most people the priorities were the following:

Your Wellbeing/ Self Care      Family     School    Friends. 

But now it's like: 

Your Wellbeing/ Self Care  Work/School                                Family                                                                                                 Friends? (if you can get to it)  

The order is the same but because of the lack of integration, it kind of feels like friendship is more of an after thought when you try to balance the other 3. 

And this doesn't even go into detail of the real life struggles people can have regarding things like mental health, job loss, shifting life circumstances, moving, having kids etc. Each of these things can totally rearrange the extent in which people show up or are actively in your life and depending on ther preson, how they communicate, how they deal with problems, what they need emotionally to feel connected and supported, the way you and the other person navigate the situation can be very different. As an only child who prioritized friendships growing up, I have never expected my friends to put me above their siblings for example. I still don't expect that now. But now as an adult, I'm feeling the gap more because friendship is often harder for some people to prioritize and it does fall in the back burner. 

I think this is why I found it important to be able to differentiate between friends who are actively in my life versus my catch-up/ party friends. The later isn't less quality or less deep, but it is to say that the level of engagement is different. The former has more insight as to where I'm at with my life now, knows who I am more, and is more logistically reliable to show up. The later is usually people who have at one point been more actively in my life but have since stopped being active due to logistical changes (moving, health issues, career changes etc.) but they still put in effort to maintain the relationship we built before by showing up either by catching up every now and then or by showing up for big events like weddings, birthdays, and other celebrations.

I was always told growing up that relationships change as you get older. As a teenager, that felt like common sense because I never expected people and dynamics to indefinitly stay the same. But what I wasn't prepared for is how many close relationships can get shallower as a result of the changing level of engagement and the lack of logistical integration, I miss doing life with people and that is still something that I'm still figuring out on navigating. 

2. The Grief Around Relationships: With change often comes grief. Over the last 3.5 years since graduating, I lost a couple of friendships. I've had relationships where I know there is a lot of love become shallower. And I have had a lot of relationships where the dynamics were all over the place or kind of took a not so healthy turn, not because we fundamentally changed as people and turned toxic, but because of... well..... life. I feel like I have been dealing with the cycles of grief from the denial, the anger, the bargaining, the depression, and the acceptance. 

Denial: I think much of the denial stems from me not fully realizing the extent of which the changing landscape of maintaining adult friendships can influence the dynamics of relationships. It isn't so much me covering my eyes and ears to the changing nature of relationships but it's more of me not fully realizing or articulating to myself the changing reality of what it means to be a good friend once you graduate from school. At this point in my life, I consider a lot of people friends but not necessary good friends. Not because they are bad people but because some people aren't in a place in their life where they can show up and be a good, reliable friend. It's in the same way where someone might be a good person and be smart but because of life circumstances, they aren't a good student at this time. 

Anger: I've had moments where I have felt frustrated or resentful of the ways people show up in my relationships, especially in regards to how I find myself being the main person reaching out. I am not writing people off in terms of them not valuing me. I know I have genuine people in my life and part of the reason why I show up more is because I have the priviledge of having a more stable life in terms of employment, stable hours, and good physical health / semi decent mental health. I have had to take a step back from some people so that they can have the space to navigate what they're going through without feeling like I'm putting another to-do list item in the form of a catch up meeting. And that also gives me the space to not let the resentment build up (plus I think it's kind of a consent thing if you find yourself being the main person reaching out, like maybe the other person isn't in the space to prioritize this relationship and you cannot keep forcing them to do so.) I also think there is a difference between valuing something vs prioritizing it. For example, I think a person can value friendship but might not be able to prioritize it if they got laid off and are financially struggling. So instead, all their efforts go towards their career even if they aren't a super career oriented person deep down. And I think a lot of people in my life do value me but because of the dumpster fire of a world we're in right now, they cannot always prioritize our relationship. 

Bargaining: Sometimes I wonder if the reason why I'm struggling in my friendships is because there is something wrong with me. Maybe if I showed up for people in a way that is more aligned with their emotional needs that then I will be more incorporated to their day to day lives as they are going through something. Maybe if I was smarter, funnier, more charismatic, people would want to be around me more and my friends wouldn't be dropping like flies. Maybe if I just did a couple things differently and had a proper conversation, maybe that one friend who abruptly cut me out of their life would still be there with me. Maybe if COVID didn't happen and maybe if my grandmother didn't die in highschool, I would have more friends and wouldn't be as stunted socially. COVID and the mental health issues that came with it basically rearranged my entire college experience and my social life during a time when people often establish life long friendships. And while it was inevitable that my 98 year old grandmother was eventually going to pass away, I had no support system in terms of how to navigate that grief of losing someone in my small family who I saw on an every day baiss. And that eventually led to a situation where I lost all my friends from school. There wasn't a huge conflict, but it's more along the lines I changed a lot as a person after that event and my friends at the time started growing in a different direction (plus they were also 16/17 and it's kind of unrealistic to expect them to know how to handle things like grief in their friend group.) 

Depression: I think there is a lot of overlap with the bargaining and the depression. I think the intersection of these two things is a sense of self-deprecation. I often feel like I'm not a good friend, that I'm not really a likable person and that a lot of people probably just tolerate me out of politeness. I feel like there is something wrong with me since I'm not particularly successful in this area of my life and I wish I could fix it so that I can be worthy of connection. I feel like I'm not hardworking or resiliant enough and as a result not interesting enough either. I think all of these coincide with the "maybes" in the previous section and I know that a symptom of depression is having low self worth.

I feel like these days I do feel a sense of heaviness of the sadness. I had to get off social media because I kept seeing updates about what my friends are doing and it feels sad because I'm watching their lives while not really being in their life or really knowing what's going on with them. It also just feels weird for me to have access to people's lives when I'm not part of it. Like why do I know about some girl who I had a group project with in 2018 that she got married this year?  Social media feels oddly parasocial and I think part of it is my own relationship to social media. I don't post on my social media because for me, social media is mainly a place for memes and pop culture. But I do know that for a lot of people, social media is a way to keep in touch and an outlet for self-expression. As a result, I'm not judging social media specifically and I don't think it's the whole problem. Rather, I'm reflecting on the way that I use it and relate to it. The parasociality comes from how it feels one sided with me knowing about my friends but them not knowing me. It also comes from seeing images of various milestones but having very little to no context of what's actually happening. There is only so much you can know from someone's social media and as a result, I never felt it was a legit way to feel connected to people and keep in touch. I don't want to like a few pictures about your trip to Baltimore. I want to at the very least have a conversation on the phone of what that was like for you. I sometimes feel that social media creates a false sense of intimacy in the way that it makes connection seem so frictionless and convenient. Because intimacy is created through intentionality and through the friction of everyday life, whether that is coordinating with people, engaging in healthy conflict resolution, and the process of incorporating people into your life however messy it may be. It isn't the convenience of liking someone's story while you're sitting on the toilet. And sometimes I think this false sense of intimacy is one of the things that is stopping me from moving into a place of acceptance in my grief around my friendships. It makes me feel like I'm part of something that no longer exists and it also gives me a sense of missing out when I do see people out and about with their friends. 

Acceptance: I think I'm still mainly in the depression phase but I also feel like every new realization I have around friendships in adulthood and as I'm learning to navigate this, that I am moving into acceptance. I've always been the type of person who gets a sense of peace from understanding things after picking it apart and analyzing them. In a way, this entry is part of my process of making sense of my experience and fully accepting it. I also find it helpful to find gratitude in my own grief. The grief is difficult because I have a history of good friends. And I'm so grateful to have experienced something so good that it's absence feels like a void. 

 

3. Friendship is not highly valued and not valuing friendship is the path of least resistance: I am in a romantic relationship and it feels really weird that so much of my social diet comes from my significant other despite us being together for about 4 years now. I was in the chronically single category before meeting this man. That doesn't mean I had an absence of love growing up. For most of my life, my social diet was comprised of my friendships. I credit my success in my romantic life to the friends I have had over the years. I have learned to love, learned to communicate and work through things, have patience and understanding, and so many other relationship skills through my friendships. Because in the end of the day, human relationships are human relationships whether they be platonic or romantic. So someone who is a good friends, has a pretty high liklihood of also being a good partner because the skills are mostly the same.

Because of how pivotal my friendships were into shaping who I am today, it feels so disheartening that after school, friendship is often an afterthought. We have so many ways of celebrating romance and families from weddings to baby showers but we don't have the same energy for friends that we put a similar amount of cultural weight to. It isn't weird to date someone new and expect the other person to meet with you once a week but it's clingy and crazy to expect hanging out with a friend once a week. It's normalized to carefully work through things with a romantic partner and have some rough patches but to cut friends off without the same degree of conflict resolution. We have so many ways to conceptualizing a romantic break ups. You cry to Adele and hype yourself up with Beyonce and maybe reinvent and love yourself in the process. But we rarely talk about friendship break ups which can also be immensely painful, sometimes more than a romantic break up. Hell, when you say break up, it's assumed that it is romantic unless specified otherwise.

This overemphasis on romantic love segways into the emphasis of the nuclear family as people start getting married and having kids. We have bought into the model of a nuclear family over having a community which can be seen anywhere from how suburban hellscapes are built to who we are allowed to take time off of bereavement and who we can list as an emergency contact. I wrote about this more in a previous post where I talk about how a lot of people once they graduate college, their lives become mostly focused on their jobs and romantic relationships/ later immediate family.

Also, I keep losing the baddies to toxic men and toxic workplaces that overwork them and I'm tired. 

4. That one specific friendship break up: I'm pretty much over it at this point but it did do a number on me mentally. I still have the following thought loops that come up for me every now and then: 

On 10/25/2025 at 3:15 PM, soos_mite_ah said:

• I think I'm a trauma dumping crazy person who is miserable to be around and that makes me scared to open up to people at times. 
• Sometimes I think people secretly hate me and I have no friends.  
• I'm scared I might be overestimating my place in people's lives 

I'm also incredibly socially anxious these days. I'm overthinking social situations because I don't want to accidentally come off as weird/ malicious. I think social media has been particularly bad regarding this in the way that it pathologizes normal behavior. Like a few weeks ago, I came across a bunch of posts that said "you're being a bad friend when you say 'let me know if you need anything.'" And I say that quite often as a way to opening the door to giving help so that people can communicate their needs and how I can help. But the internet was like "no, you should be able to know what to do for your friend without them bearing the mental load of telling you what to do during such a difficult time." And then I fell down this rabbit hole where I was like *have I unintentionally been an asshole this entire time??* I have other examples and I think the main solution to this is me touching grass. 

I think my desire to seek out life advice from the internet is because navigating friendships in adulthood is still something I feel unsure of in my life. And it's not always that the advice is bad, rather, sometimes the advice can be misapplied. For example, I fell down a rabbit hole of people justifying cutting off your friends with no explanation because odds are the other person is not capable of conflict resolution. And yes, there are situations where  you have to cut people off with no explanation but there are also situations where that is an inappropriate way of handling things (i.e. when the other person is capable of conflict resolution and genuinely had no idea that you were harboring resentment this whole time). 

 

5. Life Issues: I think there is a variety of things that can fall into this category but I'll list out a few things off the top of my head: 

• Physical health issues 
• Mental health issues 
• Moving across the country or outside the country 
• Job instability (moving around / risk of getting laid off) 
• Financial issues 
• Unemployment 
• Weird, often unsustainable employment hours 
• Toxic Family Members 
• Toxic Significant Others
• Taking care of aging parents 
• Taking care of siblings 
• Balancing any other family responsibilities
• Grief (especially of close relatives like parents) 
• Dealing with current events directly impacting friends and family (deporation, wars in the Middle East, issues with the economy and job opportunities, abortions/ lack there of etc. )
• Alt-right radicalization 
• Differences in values when it comes to the role of friendship in people's lives (i.e. some people are male centered, career centered, has a niche hobby that take up all their interest etc. and as a result don't really prioritize friendship. Or they are dealing with a different life situation where they cannot nurture their relationships for whatever reason) 
• Getting Married and how that can shift (or in some cases reveal) people's priorities / values
• Having Kids and how new parents adapt to that 
• Starting school again 
• Travel commitments 

Each one of these things can totally shake up a relationship and the solutions/ way you navigate them in order to show up for each other will vary from person to person. I think each of these things are a different beast entirely to navigate and it can be tricky, especially when you're in your mid-twenties and people are bouncing around trying to figure out their lives. Like I felt like the entireity of 2024 and 2025 was me getting an update on some kind of major life decision and then I had to figure out what that could mean for my relationships. It has been a lot and I don't think there is much of a guide on how to tackle these types of things on top of the whole changing landscape of how to make / maintain friends. Honestly, I feel like I have more friendship drama at 25/26 than I did at 15/16. 

Edited April 5 by soos_mite_ah

[soos_mite_ah]

Rage Quitting

I feel like I'm depressed with work but in a high functioning way. I'm still able to keep up my responsibilities and seem like a normal person socially but I feel this persistent heaviness. I think it's a combination of the state of the world, my current work environment, and my social life (or lack there of). 

I feel like I'm harboring more animosity towards my job than usual. I remember when the snowstorm came in through Texas, part of me wished that we were snowed in with no electricity so that I won't have to work for a few days. And I remember clocking myself and mentally thinking *it's kind of fucked up that you hate your job / want a break so bad that you would want to deal with a natural disaster.*

Around the same time, I remember also REALLY beating myself up for being exhausted with work and life in general. And while I was in a bad place mentally and I felt consumed in that, I also had a voice in the back of my mind saying *Hey, this isn't how you normally react and it isn't a reflection of your actual values. This is a conditioned response you have been getting from your job in an environment that keeps demanding more and more in terms of productivity.*

The other day, I was in the dentist office and it was taking longer than expected. I took time off from my regular work day for this. And lowkey, while I was in that dentist chair, I was kind of hoping that there was something fucked up that happened to my teeth to justify taking the whole day off. 

I also have been having recurring fantasies to rage quit with no back up plan because the thought of hopping to another job also feels enraging. The fantasy involves me being unemployed for 3-4 months, travelling, prioritizing other areas of my life, reconnecting back to myself, and then coming back to the work force. Or better yet, start grad school and stay in school for a couple of years (debt free of course), then go back to work.

Basically, I want a summer vacation lol. I want a few months where my daily schedule doesn't revolve around increasing shareholder value and then time to decompress from increasing shareholder value. I want to use these few months travelling, educating myself, working on personal habits, bed rotting a couple days without feeling a scarcity around my free time, introspecting, enjoying my hobbies, spending time with loved ones, and just in general slowing tf down. 

But here are my problems: 

• I don't want to quit my job because I don't want to lose out on the tenure I do have in this economy (which can protect me financially) or my opportunities for relocation. I have a stable job that I'm performing well at in a stable company which if shit hits the fan in this country, I can easily jump ship. That's not to be treated flippantly in today's world especially considering that my job is mostly just mildly toxic and kinda annoying as opposed to straight up abusive. 
• I feel like I don't have a good enough reason to take leave. I know a lot of people take leave because of physical health issues, to take care of loved ones, maternity reasons, dire mental health situations etc. And I'm just here with high functioning depression and an existential crisis. 
• I also don't want a permanent exit. Like I don't fantasize about being a stay at home wife nor do I want a life where I don't have a job at all. 

Then I came across this video and I thought I'd go through each section here: 

"Suddenly, the corner office looks less like an achievement and more like a slow motion suicide." The video above talks about it in the context of a health scare or a parent dying. But for me, I'm seeing in the way that my thoughts have been slowly rewired over the last couple of years and how I feel a sense of dread at the thought of a promotion or doing better work. 

"According to research from the Journal of Positive Psychology published in 2020, the people who successfully exit the race often share a specific cognitive trait. They score higher on what psychologists call 'temporal discounting flexibility.' Basically, their brains are better at valuing future well being over immediate status gains. Most human brains heavily discount the future. A reward today is worth way more than the same reward tomorrow. It's why we eat the cookie, skip the gym, take the promotion that'll wreck our health in five years. But some brains, either through genetics, experience, or conscious rewiring, can actually feel future you as vividly as present you. When they imagine themselves at 65, exhausted and wealthy, it feels real enough to compete with the dopamine hit of today's achievement. That's not weakness, that's a different kind of intelligence. Let's talk about what goes into the decision to exit. Becuase it's not simple. It's not just work less, stress less. There is a complex psychological equation happening."  Like, I feel my brain constantly scream at me to take a break even though I'm functioning okay on a day to day basis. I think this is why. 

Then the video goes into the following concepts: 

• Identity Dissolution: You stop defining yourself according to your job. I never defined myself according to my job. 
• Social Pressure of what the tribe thinks: People will ask if you're okay, having a crisis, got fired etc. You're making an unconventional life choice. I think what I said about feeling like I don't have a good enough reason to take a break is a symptom of the social pressure of what situations are acceptable to take a break from and what you're expected to power through. 
• Financial Fear: earning / saving less / retirement issues. You can have higher anxiety around money even if you do this responsibly and you are financially secure when you remove the upward trajectory. I relate to this. I feel like I have a good amount of money saved up to where if end up unemployed, I'm not going to be freaking out about bills rather I'm going to be freaking out about a gap in my resume. I also feel like this fear comes up when I think about changing careers or moving to a place that has a higher cost of living. 
• Loss of the game itself: Some people miss stress, the clear metrics, the competition, the adrenaline of high stakes performance. They get addicted to the rewards and the challenge itself. Yup... I cannot relate to this. 

Then the video goes to explain that the "quiet exiters aren't escaping to a blissful, stress free paradise. They are trading one set of problems for a completely different set." Yes, studies show that people are happier because of less stress, more time, more autonomy because people who prioritize time over money report higher satisfaction. At the same time, other studes show that people have more existential anxiety reagarding how they had to figure out what actually mattered to them outside of external structure of achievement. Many people don't ask these questions because they use career achievement to distract themselves from deeper questions about meaning and purpose. They don't know what they want from life so as a result, when they exit, they don't find peace, they find themselves face to face from questions they've been running from. Other people notice that once they aren't chasing the dopamine hits of achievement, they have to learn to be okay with less. This is difficult because it's hedonic adaptation in reverse. 

I think for me, prior to my corporate job, I already went through the phase of  figuring out what matters to me in life and my own personal definition of success. So I don't feel like I have been using my job to distract myself from deeper questions. As a result, I don't think I have an issue with the highs of dopamine hits of achievements or other life style factors since I generally have a pretty modest life. I think what this job has done is that it has caused me to "lose the plot" on some level due to the day ins and day outs. On a mental and emotional level, I do care about travel, self development, my relationships, and my well being waaay more than my job. But in action, I dedicate a very large portion of my day to my job. And I don't think it's a bad thing, my job can be a source of self development and structure that also helps fund the other important things I have listed above. However, I think the way that my life has been structured has been feeling like it's causing me to stray from what's important rather than to fuel it. And I have been observing this attitude shift in the way that I feel like my free time is scarce, how I beat myself up for needing rest even though I didn't do that before, and how I have been putting more and more pressure on myself to be functioning  on an individual level better than the system I'm functioning in. Basically, I expect myself to have my shit together on an individual level despite the world crumbling around me on a collective level. And I don't think that's a very realistic set of standards to hold myself to.  I think in addition to wanting to pour my energy into different areas of life, more than anything, I crave slowing down and being present. 

"But here's what people who successfully exit the race often discover, a completely different kind of freedom. They're no longer making decisions based on what looks impressive to other people. They're making decisions based on what actually feels good to them. And that shift, according to research on self determination theory from the University of Rochester, is associated with higher intrinsic motivation and sustained well being." I think in general I have a pretty high degree of instrinsic motivation but I still do care about what other people think in order to maintain my employment and basic sense of security. I think I can improve upon the sustained well being bit. 

"Research from the Journal of Happiness Studies shows that people who work fewer hours report experiencing time as moving more slowly. Not in a boring way, in a present way. They notice seasons changing. They remember their weeks. They feel less like they're skimming across the surface of their own lives." I think this pretty much summarizes how I want to feel after my break and further emphasized the bolded part above. 

Finally, the last five minutes of the video was talking about how people can train themselves to think this way by deliberate practice, exposure to different values, through enough pain so that the old equations stopped making sense. With sustained effort, people can reshape their reward pathways, and as a result, change what they are motivated, what they are inspired by, as well as what they crave/ find pleasure in. "You can literally rewire what feels rewarding. But it's not easy. It's not a decision you make once. It's a decision you make everyday, every time you chose time over money, every time you disappoint someone's expectations, every time you resist the urge to compare yourself to the people still racing. You're fighting against 300,000 years of evolution that says 'climb higher' and that takes a very specific kind of courage." 

Basically, my takeaway is that you can rewire your brain for more fulfillment. And I'm pretty sure that can be the same for less fulfillment as well. I think my job has been rewiring my brain apart from how it was when I first started this job and I want to get back to my own sense of authenticity. I think if I were to take a break, it's not going to be as existential crisis inducing as this video suggests since I have already ldone like 80% of the work prior to being in my corporate job. Wiring your brain for fulfillment is like working a muscle. For me. it's more like getting back into the gym after not going for a while, having to struggle for 2 weeks, and then your muscle memory kicks in and you're back to your previous performance levels. That is waaay different than someone who never worked out who is trying to establish the habit of working out for the first time. 

[soos_mite_ah]

"I have no time for my actual life because I'm consumed by the negative space of survival" is not a flex lol. 

This video mainly talks about how the Romans viewed leisure activities, like engaging with hobbies, socializing with friends, relaxing, being mindful, contemplating are the main quests and that jobs should just be the side quest. 

This video talks about how saddness was viewed throughout history and how it can be seen as a source of genius, a by product of contemplation and depth, as well as a way to enhance the human experience. But then, after industrialization, people started demonizing saddness more because it can come at the cost of productivity. Here are a quote I liked: 

"They believed that melancholy gave life texture. Happiness, the argued, is smooth. It's pleasant but it slides off you. You can't hold on to it. But melancholy sticks. It has weight. It makes you appreciate the contours of existance. It forces you to confront the fact that everything beautiful is also temporary. And that awareness, that bitter sweet ache, is what makes you feel the most alive." 

"Melancholy is the happiness of being sad" - Victor Hugo

"By the early 20th century, something more sophisticated was happening. Industrial psychologists, newly credentialed experts in human efficiency were being hired by factory workers to find ways to make workers more productive. One of the most influencial was Mugo Munsterberg, a German psychologist who worked with Henry Ford. Munsterberg's job was to figure out how to optimize not only the assembly line but the workers on it. He developed tests to screen out people who were temporarily unsuited for factory work. He studied fatigue, attention, motivation. He wrote books titled "Psychology and Industrial Efficiency." The same methods used to optimize work flows were now being turned inwards to the workers themselves. Your mind wasn't your own anymore, it was part of the machine. And if your mind wandered into melancholy, you weren't just wasting your time, you were sabotaguing the entire operation. "

"We have lost the social script for sitting with bad news, for allowing someone to be sad without immediately trying to fix them. Every emotion has to be justified, explained, and ideally resolved in a single conversation. The Internet has excellerated all of this. You can't just be sad online, you have to contexualize it, perform it correctly, make it relatable, funny, or inspirational. Raw melancholy, the kind that has no clear cause, no narrative arc, no resolution, doesn't fit anywhere. It just people makes people uncomfortable." 

[soos_mite_ah]

Some videos I liked: 

 

 

[soos_mite_ah]

 Navigating Adult Friendships Part 2 

I have really been grappling with this in an unhealthy way as of recently. Because I have been stressed at work, I have been turning to social media to disassociate. And then, I see things on social media that causes me to overthink and question myself and my friendships to the point where I have cried myself to sleep. It's been a horrible cycle and I have just gone ahead and deleted Tiktok and Instagram as a result. That was about 2 weeks ago and I think I have been doing better. 

I also talked to a friend regarding this matter. This friend is someone a bit older than me (I think like 5-6 years older) and I basically went to her because I felt really confused with my life to where I felt like I needed guidance from someone with more life experience than me. I sent her what I wrote about in Part 1 along with some additional notes. We ended up talking for 2 hours on Sunday and I think that has helped me considerably so I want to write about it.  

I'm going to be referencing Part 1 and I'm going to dissect it portion by portion: 

1. The Changing Landscape of Maintaining Adult Friendships + 5. Life Issues + 6. Dealing with the Chaos of the 2020s.

I didn't write about part 6 in the post above but it is something that I came up with and wrote about to my friend. Here is #6:

Relating back to the list above, overall, in a lot of cases, the girlies aren’t alright and it feels like everyone is struggling right now. It feels unreasonable to expect people to show up when they’re holding on to dear life. And yes, I feel like I’m struggling too. But I feel like I tend to be more high-functioning and in a lot of ways, my problems aren’t as bad as other people’s problems. I’m not trying to downplay it but the best way I can describe it is that imagine throwing up for 3 days straight. You go to the doctor, and nothing is helping. So, then you go to the ER. and you’re stuck in the waiting room because 2 people got shot, one person is in labor, and another person got into a car crash to where they need to get an amputation. You throwing up for 3 days straight can range from bad food poisoning to a ruptured appendix that could kill you even though it doesn’t look as bad as what other people are going through. Yet, you’re stuck in the waiting room.

And the reason why a lot of shit sucks is because of systemic factors. I feel like I have been watching everyone in my life being personally affected by the tom foolery that is late-stage capitalism, Trump, and other current events. The world feels colder because of the declining quality of life causing everyone to be more on edge, which leads to people being a lot less forgiving, kind, and understanding. I remember when body positivity was mainstream. Now we have the Ozempic era. I remember when people were trying to de-stigmatize mental health. Now we have come full circle, and people are using weaponized therapy-speak to reinforce more mental health stigma. I know the pendulum swings, but it’s been difficult.  

I’ve also talked about this with some people who are slightly older than me who knew life after graduation pre-COVID. And I think COVID fucked up a lot of people’s social development (myself included) and it has changed the way people interact with the world around them. People have been socialized weird. Like I have heard / encountered the Gen Z stare and I had the displeasure of finding out what looksmaxxing and Clavicular are as incel terminology has made it more to the mainstream. I had to have a conversation about the state of dating these days and what a podcast bro is to my poor boomer dad who cannot wrap his head around how a lot of young boys these days are more misogynistic than he is despite him growing up in the 50s in a developing country.

I know it’s been like 6 years since the pandemic and I shouldn’t blame my problems on it. But on top of the changing landscape of friendships, grief, the weird break up, and various life issues, I’m struggling to navigate this and make sense of what I lost in my adulthood in terms of community and socialization from the pre-COVID era.

 

My friend is a therapist who works with children from age 5 to 17. She explained that COVID affected the socialization of the kids she is dealing with both when it comes to the ones who are in her office as well as the environment they are navigating. She mentioned that the kids aren't doing alright either because they are also picking up on the chaos that's going on but instead of understanding what's happening, it's manifesting as a myraid of mental health issues. It was nice learning that I'm not blaming the problems on the pandemic rather it just takes time before we realize how large events actually impacts us and society. She also let me know that I'm doing my best to navigate these factors and that I'm not surrounded by weirdos and just being aware of it is indicative of me putting in the work to introspect/ figure this out. 

2. Grief Around Relationships + 4. That one specific friendship break up: 

I think this is the area that I've had the most improvement in. I wrote in Part 1 about how I feel like I'm mostly in the Bargaining and Depression stages. I feel like after this conversation and after talking about the one friend break up I had, I had a better understanding that nothing is wrong with me personally and that people do care about me. We also talked about other life experiences she had with friends acting weird, what it's been like to maintain relationships as they move through different life transitions, and specific friend break ups. I found that after this conversation combined with my deletion of social media apps, I'm not self deprecating in the way that I was. 

Since I'm not self deprecating in the same way, I found myself going back into the anger/ resentment phase. I think I have healthy relationships for the most part and the only issue really is that I find myself being the main person reaching out which has caused some resentment. It's causing resentment because friendship is an area of life that I put a lot of importance to and associate with a sense of duty and responsibility. I check in. I follow up. I make plans. I am proactive if something has come up and I can't make it. I'm good about comunicating my needs etc. So when the other person falls short of initiating, it feels unfair and unbalanced. It leaves me feeling like the other person doesn't value me or the relationship. And now that we have taken the self blame / deprecation out of the equation, I found myself swinging the blame of feeling unvalued back at others. I have been giving myself the room to feel this way instead of using my understanding and empathy I have explained in #1,5,6 to brush off my feelings of resentment. I think I'm still going to continue to not reach out in order to give people in my life the space to figure their lives out, honor the season that this relationship is in, and prevent my resentment from building up so that I can continue to maintain these relationships as opposed to lash out at people. 

 

 

I also found a video from Dr. K that helped me as well when it comes to a number of the factors that I'm dealing with

 

In the beginning of this video, Dr. K talks about how learning from failure isn't always a good thing and that therapy is often there helping us unlearn bad lessons that we learned from bad situations. Just because you failed, doesn't mean you made a mistake. Sometimes, what we learn from bad situations causes us to be on edge and mess up any other good situations in the fear of repeating the horrible thing that happened. Which is why it's important to process  your emotions, calm down, and then see what you learn from the calmer mindset as opposed to the chaotic state of mind you're in after you fail at something. I thought this section was applicable to what I was dealing with in that one friend breakup because just because that relationship failed, it doesn't mean that I did anything wrong per se and that it doesn't mean that I should use the lessons I learned from that situation to sabatoge my other relationships. 

42:39 Mentalization is understanding that actions and behaviors in the outside world are connected and driven by things in the inside world. 
This seems like a fairly straight-forward concept but people who fail to properly mentalize tend to not look at all the factors influencing a situation. Say a person thinks they are ugly and they think that this is why people don't approach them and flirt with them. This negates all the other factors that might influence people not flirting with them because it's not taking the internal states of the other people into account. Maybe the person is a coworker who doesn't feel comfortable flirting in a corporate setting. Maybe the other person is going through a break up. Maybe the person who thinks they're ugly is really bad at identifying flirting. 

I think my process of identifying the changing landscape of socialization after school, recognizing how COVID has impacted us socially, and thinking of the whole list of things affecting how someone shows up in a relationship are all me mentalizing in order to make sense of why it's harder to maintain relationships as opposed to using this narrow sense of self-deprecation as the only explanation as to why I'm struggling in this area of my life.

I also think the following posts are also indicative of me mentalizing: To tie the concept ot mentalization and the notion that learning from failure isn't always a good thing, I think if I look at these posts, along with the factors I'm taking into consideration for maintaining friendships, these are things I'm coming up with in a more sound mind frame as opposed to the self -deprecation and post break up thoughts. And as a result, I should take these things into consideration much more as opposed to my insecurities and random pieces of advice I'm seeing in the internet.

Dr. K. also talks about how advice on the internet can also come at odds with the process of mentalization because internet advice has to take certain factors as assumptions that may or may not apply to the person viewing the advice. I have thought of this in the past where it's not that all the advice is bad but that it's more likely to be misapplied and sometimes be harmful if you aren't the target audience. For example, I saw a video on how if you're the main person reaching out that it's because the other person doesn't respect you but sees you as easy to keep around. That can be applicable to some people who are engaging with shitty people but given that I know who I'm dealing with, it's not the case for me. Therefore, me internalizing something like this does more harm than good which is why I decided to hop off the internet as I'm learning to navigate this area of my life. 

Edited April 30 by soos_mite_ah

[soos_mite_ah]

Things To Do During My Time Off

If everything goes according to plan and the paper work is done and processed, I'm going to be taking a leave of absence from work for about 8 weeks starting on 5/19. I journalled about my inital thoughts about what led me to this decision here: 

Since I will not be working 8+ hours a day, I have decided to give my days structure in other ways and come up with a list of things I want to do during my time off.

75 Hard

The 75 Hard challenge is a social media challenge where you do the following for 75 consecutive days: 

• 2 workouts everyday for 45 min, with at least 1 being outside (the workouts also need to be 2 sessions at least 3 hours apart) 
• Drink 1 gallon of water 
• Progress picture everyday 
• Your desired diet plus no alcohol and cheat meals
• Read 10 pages of a non-fiction book a day 

If you are unable to do anyone of these, you have to start the 75 days again.

My leave of absence is roughly 75 days long and I think I'm in a mindset where I can really benefit from this with a few tweaks. Since I'm not working, this challenge is something that will be more realistic for me because I have the time and energy to dedicate myself to it.

I think this will also help me give my days structure while also promoting healthy habits like working out, eating healthy, getting enough water in, and reading more. I already have a habit of working out but I want to do that more. I'm pretty bad about drinking enough water (I'm not drinking sugary drinks everyday, I'm just a dehydrated bitch lol) so I think this will jumpstart that habit. I want to read more since I have been putting things off. As for my diet, I'm thinking of leaving my diet the way it is for the most part except I want to moderate my snacking (1 really good and nutritious snack a day as opposed to random nibbling) since I tend to snack more with free time, and I want to cut out sugar. I'm not thinking of cutting it out completely. Fruits are fine. Just no chocolate, desserts, or sugary drinks. I'm not adjusting this diet due to weightloss or aesthetic goals. I'm mainly trying to do something that feels good for my body and that can challenge me a little. 

The tweaks I'm going to make to this challenge are the following: 

• No progress pictures: I have a history of body dysmorphia and disordered eating and taking pictures everyday can cause me to spiral. Plus, I want to do this in a more intrinsically motivated way rather than focussing on how I look. 
• Instead of reading 10 pages of non-fiction, I want to read 1 hour each day of any book of my choosing: I think both fiction and non-fiction can both be beneficial in their own way in the way they work different intellectual muscles. 
• Instead of having to start the 75 days again, I'm going to add any make up days if I screw up: So if at the end of the 75 days I screw up 10 times, that means I have 10 extra days that I will have to follow the rules above. The program has been criticized for being very all or nothing as opposed to promoting healthy habits and I think this all or nothing mindset can result/ fuel disordered eating, especially for someone who has a history of that.
• Depending on how I handle the gallon a day, I might take a page off of the 75 Soft challenge and do .75 gallons of water a day: I'm only 5'2" so my water needs do vary compared to the average sized person who needs more water than I do. Like, I want to be hydrated but I don't want to pee every half hour. 
• I also want to add another thing to this challenge, and that is no social media / short form content / or random mobile games: I can watch longer youtube videos and listen to music but no Youtube shorts. I also think I will need to wean off the random games and reduce it ideally but I think my priority is not taking in short form content and social media. I deleted my social media apps for the last 3 weeks and I think that has done a lot of good for me mentally. 

The list of things I want to do while on break: 

Physical Activity Related: I have been drawn to being more physically active over the last month and a half. There is no set fitness or aesthetic goal for me. I have been going to the gym for straight vibes because my body has been wanting to move more. Maybe it's a reaction against having to work a desk job. But over all, when I am physically challenging myself, I do feel more alive. It's like whenever I'm pushing myself, whenever I'm out of breath, whenever my muscles are sore and I tell myself I have 4 more reps to go, I'm forced to be present. Working out lately has felt like a moving meditation of sorts and it has been essential in maintaining my mental health. Here are somethings I have found enjoyable and that I want to do more: 

1. Work out more: Lift weights + Continue doing cardio 
2. Yoga classes: I haven't done a yoga class in a while because life got busy.
3. Maybe some pilates classes: Again, having done this in a while because life got busy 
4. Swimming: I have been enjoying this and I think this can serve some of my cardio goals 
5. Ice Skating: I have been falling in love with doing this all over again and I want to be able to do this mid-day on a week day when the rink at the mall isn't crowded. I can do a whole post on this tbh.
6. Enjoy the outside: I live in a semi walkable area and multiple parks near by. I go to these parks often but I want to do that more. Plus, I like feeling the sun on my skin and seeing random people take their dogs on walks. 

Intellectual / Spiritual Pursuits: One of the weirdest things about working in corporate is how I feel like I am learning a lot but not feeling educated. I attribute this to how learning is filtered through increasing profits instead of developing an understanding of yourself and the world around you like it was in school. I miss how much I would learn in the classroom and in my day to day life back when I was a student and I was exposing myself to new experiences. This is how I'm planning on replicating that: 

1. Read the books from my undergraduate degree: I have been putting this off for a while as a goal and I think this will be the perfect thing to do at this time when I'm not utilizing my mental energy towards my job. 
2. Read the fiction books I have been putting off: I'm going to be honest, my ipad baby tendencies have done a number on my attention span and I think reading fiction is the perfect way to recuperate that because you have to infer and interpret the themes on your own instead of the intellectual spoon feeding that can happen when you're reading non-fiction. I think this can also help hone in media literacy skills. 
3. Keep up to date with my favorite Youtubers: This means watching things on my Watch Later list, especially when it comes to the longer form, documentary style content that is about 1 hour 30 minutes or longer (yes, that includes revisiting videos from Actualized.org) 
4. Journal + Reflect: I can do this at home, on a walk, or go to a coffee shop 
5. Meditate: Just allowing myself to be and enjoy the present moment
6. Continue going to therapy

Random Things I Want to Do with More Free Time: 

1. Go to the grocery store midday on a weekday: I used to do this in college and I miss doing this. 
2. Maybe go to the mall and buy some new clothes: I haven't done this in years and my clothes are looking rough 
3. Try 2 new recipies weekly: I have been eating the same 3 meals in different fonts for a while due to the depression so I think some variety would be good for my soul and my cooking skills. 
4. Sleep in guilt free: I have no problem still being productive even when I wake up late. I think my reasoning for this is not to sleep until 1pm every day rather it's to listen to my body instead of expecting myself to be energetic and alert at 6:30 every day on a week day. 
5. Deep clean the apartment once a week: Mopping, scrubbing the shower, vaccuming, laundry
6. Have a guilt free bed rot day and not worry about wasting time. 
7. Have more sex: My sex life has been suffering / nonexistant due to the increase in stress and I want to connect with my partner more.
8. Get back into art: This can be drawing, painting, or simply coloring. 
9. Hang out with my friends more: I have a friend who is going to be in town who I'm looking forward to hanging out with. I also have a couple of friends who are unemployed and I think it would be nice to hang out with them more outside of the weekend/ evening hours.  
10. Go Furniture Hunting: My apartments needs side tables, a bed frame, and a dining set and I have just been putting it off. 

Travel: 

1. Go to Washington D.C.: I have been thinking of going to D.C. for the 4th of July as it is the 250th Independence day
2. I need to plan out my trip to Africa: I haven't been really doing that since I have been overwhelmed by work and other things in my life. 
3. Maybe go to Australia for a week or two: I'm seeing a lot of naturey things to do there and I always wanted to experience Christmas in July. Those two things coincide with my leave times and things I'm gravitating towards so I might seize the moment. Going to Australia this year specifically wasn't part of my original plan when it came to going to all 7 continents by 30 but I'm open to the idea. 

Broader things I want to Accomplish with the Time Off Work: I don't think I'm going to accomplish all of these but this is what I'm orienting myself around / working towards when it comes to working through my high functioning depression. 

• Reconnect with myself and my sense of joy by engaging in hobbies and moving my body
• Work out issues in my social life regarding navigating adult friendships
• Figure out if I want to have a child
• Feel less stagnant in my life and personal development by focusing more on my life and less on increasing shareholder value 
• Allow myself time to work through my issues and actually reflect on what I'm experiencing instead of just trying to regulate and keep things moving without deconstructing why I do what I do. 

I know I have listed out a long laundry list of things to do but I do not feel intimidated by this. Instead, I find it to be quite exciting because it's all things I want to do but don't always have the time and energy to do such things. It feels less like someone piling on papers and assignments to work through and more like a menu to your new favorite restaurant that has all your favorite foods that you get to try one by one without worrying about the cost because it is free. 

[soos_mite_ah]

I was just browsing Leo's journal and I came across the following article. I felt really seen when I read this and I wanted to keep it somewhere I can easily find it (i.e. my own journal). I have also decided to hold off of psychedelics until age 25 but it may be longer since I'm trying to get certain things in my life in order (I'm 26 now). I made this rule for myself at 20 because I didn't want to accidentally fry my brain before the frontal lobe was cooked. 

Hold Off On Psychedelics If You're Young

By Leo Gura - April 13, 2026

I recommend that you don’t do psychedelic until the age of at least 25, so that they don’t derail your focus on mastering survival. I also recommend you don’t get into heavy, regular use of psychedelics until at least the age of 30, for the same reason. Heavy and regular use of psychedelics will significantly derail your work on basic survival, family, relationships, career, and business. You need to have those things in place before you dive deep into trans-human states of consciousness or your overall life will be negatively impacted. Your 20’s should be focused on mastering basic survival: career/business, dating & social life, practical self-help, practical psychology, life purpose, financial security, emotional stability — not chasing mystical states.

Be strategic about how you pace all this out. It is not good to dive early into psychedelics while the rest of your life is a half-baked mess. Your 20’s is all about building the practical foundation to handle all your basic survival needs, so you are not desperate and cornered. If you trip a couple times a year between 25-30, that’s okay. But if you’re tripping weekly or even daily, that will derail your foundation-building too much.

If you take a lot of psychedelics, they will disillusion you with material life. This is okay later on in life, but a big problem early on in life before you solved survival. I am so disillusioned with life that it’s hard for me to even care about business, finances, dating, family. This is dangerous for an unestablished youngster. Disillusionment is a serious thing. You don’t want to be dealing with it while you are starting your business or career. Working on material success demands a certain level of illusionment. Deep spiritual work isn’t free, it has a cost, which is why most people don’t do it.

I even want to go as far as saying, don’t do psychedelics at all until you’re 30+. The longer you hold off the better. I want you to be successful before you open that can of worms. I know that’s disappointing for those of you who are eager, but psychedelics are truly no light matter.