@AlohaPizzaJack Structure is good, as is being/feeling useful, @Morpheel, but all of that is within your own hands/power, and depends on personal motivation/willpower, NOT on having to go to a workplace or office where we do stuff that we are told to do, because someone hired us to do it.
Mind you, I'm not ANTI-work, and I may come across as rather adamant/overbearing in regards to this topic, but
I just hate that some people indeed seem to be fooled into thinking that life IS work, and the other way around. Life is about carving out an existence, and giving meaning to yourself and to others that you care for.
A boss/employer is not included anywhere on that list. Work is just a means to an end, and if you have nice colleagues and a job that you actually like doing, then that's just a bonus, an added benefit to make the necessary a bit more palatable.
If I could make more than enough money by doing nothing, then I would stop working effective immediately. And so would the majority of people, if they'd be really honest with themselves. There's so much to do and see on this planet, and life is so, SO short, that you shouldn't really be spending it, working yourself into an early, and stress-filled grave...
Ever wondered why people invented stuff like "TGIF", or "here comes the weekend"? Definitely not because they LIKE to work...
P.S.
@AlohaPizzaJack Hunter/gatherers did what they did to make sure that they and their families survived, by having food in their mouths and bellies. Not because they "liked" to eat. Gourmet cooking was something first invented many, many thousands of years later.
@Morpheel Maybe. I'm just trying to figure out if any of what I just ate made sense.
@Tyranexx Yeah, chocolate ON ice cream is fine. I do like chocolate milk though, but only the good stuff. And it needs to be cold outside, really cold.
@Tyranexx Funny coincidence, although: funny... My dad also has diabetes. But contrary to your sugar-guzzling father, he's actually on meds, and doing really well. Also still exercises daily with weights and what not, and he'll be 76 come June 8th.
By the way: who eats more than one slice of cake on a birthday? Must be an American thing, cause over here, you're not even offered a second serving, so it's one slice or one pastry a piece. All you can get on top of that, is multiple servings of coffee. In all fairness to the Dutch though, it is followed by several other "courses":
when the coffee and cake is finished, we usually do a small break, and then move on to sodas, beers, or whatever you care to drink, coupled with crisps, nuts, various kinds of cheeses (sometimes on miniature toast), sausage slices, raw vegetables for the health freaks, or just for variation, so cucumber, tomato, carrot, celery, various pickled goods, salads (also on toast), and after another food break (alcohol and other beverages will continue to be served), the deep fryer (or nowadays often the air fryer) will be pulled out of the closet, and all kinds of dishes full of fried stuff will land on the table...
@Morpheel Concerning ice cream: some of my favorites are either Haagen Dazs or Ben & Jerry's strawberry ice cream, Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey, and Ben & Jerry's Cookie Dough.
And over here, in the city center, there's an original Dutch ice and pastry making artisan, who has been in business ever since 1937, and they make the best hand-made vanilla ice cream which they mix with their also hand-made whipped cream. Both of which are made fresh daily. Especially in this time of year, and when it gets REALLY hot, people are forming long lines, pouring out into the street, all to get their hands on a cone or cup of that classic goodness.
@ThanosReXXX If I had been forced into the world of sales I'm pretty sure I'd have drowned myself by age 20. Or drowned a whole lot of other people. Maybe the latter.....
@AlohaPizzaJack Any environment that needs motivational posters is a soul sucking lifeless environment where nobody feels useful to begin with. They complete assigned tasks for a thankless taskmaster to get paid, and are pretty sure there's no actual value to what they are doing beyond making money for someone who already has more money than themselves, and typically doing the work they do to obsolete the necessity for anyone to be doing that work, including themselves. Which is most office jobs.
And if you' like working for someone else, you're a psychopath, but then, you like pineapple pizza, so this is not news to us.
@Morpheel If going to an office full of motivational posters to perform your soul sucking meaningless tasks for people who hate you gives you a reason to wake up in the morning, you're probably better off not bothering to.
@Tyranexx I read your post and I can't help but think of the medical-industrial complex and it's bizarre attempt to make people healthy by telling them how to live and watch what they eat. "pre-hypertensive", watching this, avoiding that medication for that. Humans lived thousands and thousands of years before any of that. Some people lived to 110, some died by 18. Same as we have with all the medical intervention, minus the side effects. They want to sell you the disease and the cure, even though the cure may cause new diseases needing new cures.
@ThanosReXXX beer...more beer....more beer.....yup, sounds like NED. Honestly though I'll just take more cake. Unless it's supermarket cake. Those things taste like cardboard and I'd rather have none at all. Give me a good bakery cake and I'll give you an empty box in an hour or less or your money back.
The Zestos locations in my town opened up recently for ice cream season. They’re a small, but national chain. Haven’t been yet, but it’s a once a month thing when they’re open for the season. I’m very simple. Chocolate malt or cherry malt. Every time. Unless I’m feeling real crazy, then I get a chocolate cherry malt. The biggest one I can get. It’s 32 ozs of malt. I’m usually nauseous in the best possible way when I finish one.
@NEStalgia I said beer or whatever you like to drink, so that could be just about anything.
And cakes over here aren't simple slices of bakery cake, but more similar to the ones they serve on weddings, except just one layer instead of a tower. And usually, there's at least two or three flavors to choose from.
Seeing as they contain heaps of sugar and confectionery, and the cream/whipped cream that's used over here is also heavily-sugar infused, I wouldn't even be able to eat several servings of cake. My sweet tooth can only handle so much sweetness on one evening... I'm all about hearty snacks, which also go much better with beer and/or rum and coke.
As for the sales bit: I wasn't forced into it. I applied for a sales job completely voluntary. I always like to challenge myself, throwing myself into the deep, looking for new experiences and trying to learn new things. In 2001,
I worked on Hewlett Packard's Corporate Laserjet Support Desk, and having to help people with a variety of printer problems was about as exciting as it got, so I decided to look elsewhere.
That friend I mentioned earlier, the one living abroad, has also been my mentor as well as my colleague, in a variety of sales jobs over the decades, and he definitely helped shape the (professional) me that I am today.
He was always successful, to various degrees, so that, and his willingness to mentor me, was all the motivation
I needed. No motivational posters necessary...
Completely agreed on people being duped by the medical society and/or the companies behind them. I also firmly believe that there's a lot of factors involved of wanting to keep people on certain meds, and possibly even creating new diseases due to (over) usage of these drugs. Because that's what we should really call them.
They're basically now in the business of trying to bring some new stuff to the market that'll cure the side effects of the side effect of the actual drug that you were supposed to take...
Also agreed on the very valid point of some people just working to help someone else, who's already rich, get even richer, instead of actually doing something for themselves, but the majority of society has lulled itself to sleep believing this is actually a good thing, and that they're "contributing to society". Sure, they are, except only to high society, not to their peers.
For all intent and purposes, we might just as well be stuck in the Matrix...
@ThanosReXXX Berry cake? I don't know, it sounds like the Dutch could learn a lot from the Germans and French about how to make a proper cake..... German food is dismal but German dessert is divine! There's been a trend in the US that icings get sweeter and sweeter as well.....at least on commercial cakes...bleh. A good buttercream has just the right sweetness. I could eat it by the bucket!
Wow, you were Laserjet tech support? I'm sure I flipped you off at least a dozen times in my life then. I was very disappointed when Samsung sold their printer division to HP..... Back into despair. Maybe I'll go Xerox next.
Yep. Most of the medical complex is little more than legalized drug dealers. A lot of the old school doctors know this. Many have retired out in recent years struggling with the new systems (in the US, proscriptions of drug x for symptom y are mandatory. The doctor can't use his own judgement to override, his medical license could be stripped if he tried - his job is to obey the pharma lobby.) And I don't believe you're far off, perhaps not intentionally creating diseases (though they accidentally/knowingly create many), but in terms of not curing diseases that can be cured, due to the profit motive that selling lifetime treatments is infinitely more profitable than selling one-time cures. They don't go as far as to call it a subscription model...that sounds tacky when they're selling you your own life....but that's what it is. If I'm not bleeding out or in excruciating pain, I don't believe in the "benefits" of the medical world actively searching to find problems to treat. There are of course plenty of doctors that agree, but their voices are generally suppressed until they quit or are forced out. Medicine as an industry and a product to advertise and sell isn't a pretty sight. It used to be about treating the sick. Now it's about selling services in advance. It's like when you take a car in for an oil change and they come back with a bill for "recommendations" for new tires, a new alternator, an A/C recharge, a battery "refresh", and an alignment. If you go asking someone to find problems to fix, they're always going to find some.
They'll produdly cite the higher life expectancies today, but they'll neglect to mention the lack of wars, lack of occupational hazards, etc contribute heavily to that, and also neglect to mention the WWII generation for whatever reason (such as Doris) lived abnormally lengthy lives on average and life expectancy is on the decline again, even as more and more medical services are sold. I suspect the low stress adult lives of the WWII generation with a great work-life balance and high amounts of stability and social stability led to their long lives more than magic genetics or superior treatments. Heck they chugged first and second hand smoke for decades and still outlived most. For us that wonder from day to day if tomorrow it all comes crashing down, I imagine that permanent stress does a lot to reduce lifespans.....drug dealers be darned.
As for "contributing to society" it all sounds wonderfully Communist, doesn't it? I commented in another thread recently, and I believe to you once before that Lenin missed the obvious when he said the object of Socialism is Communism: The object of capitalism is also Communism. It just gets there slower.
And as for the Matrix...the more I've played with PSVR, the more I realize that actually is the future of mankind, or worse, as Elon Musk has said, crazy though he might be, maybe we really are already in it. Would we know the difference if we were?
@AlohaPizzaJack Well, that's basically what constitutes me saying that work is a necessary evil.
Any and all positive side effects, such as the work itself being various degrees of enjoyable/entertaining, having nice coworkers, sitting in a beautiful office/work space, getting a great package of benefits and what not are just coincidentally beneficial side effects.
'The console wars are like boobs: Sony and Microsoft fight over which ones look the nicest and Nintendo's are the most fun to play with.'
@Octane I always have preferred plain white milk. Chocolate milk is meh, and strawberry milk does NOT taste anything like a strawberry (at least the artificial-tasting crud I've had). Fruit and ice cream mix well though.
@ThanosReXXX I recall my dad being very skinny and fit back when I was a little kid; he farms by profession, so he's pretty active at certain times of the year. Even during the more lax periods of time like winter, there's plenty of stuff that he could still be doing to stay active.... He's getting quite a gut.
Part of the problem, besides his general diet and slowing metabolism, is that he has a tendency to sleep if he doesn't have something that he immediately needs to do with livestock or in the field. Some of this is due to some meds that he's on (unrelated to the diabetes) that make you sleepy, but a lot of it has to do with his sleep apnea. He doesn't get a good night's sleep and won't wear a CPAP machine since it "doesn't help". My mom has tried multiple times to get him to use/wear different things, but it's to the point where he won't even bother. I genuinely fear that he'll stroke out or suffocate in his sleep at some point. We had a pretty open floor plan when I still lived at home, so I'd hear one of his (thankfully infrequent) gagging fits once in awhile when he slept out in the chair. Not to mention the chainsaw snoring....
Edit: I forgot to address the cake. In some settings here, you only get a single piece of dessert at a restaurant. However, some celebrations and restaurants that I've been to have plenty of cake and sweets in a buffet style environment; you can easily grab more than one piece and there'd still be plenty for everyone else.
Then there's people like my grandmother who think that you're getting "too skinny" and feel insulted if you don't have a giant helping of something....
@NEStalgia I haven't bought into some of the health mumbo-jumbo - typically if a diet has a name, someone is likely trying to sell you something - and think that everything in moderation is fine. I do agree that Americans as a whole probably eat more garbage on average than we should. For example, I don't beat myself up for eating a small piece of candy once a day; that's just a small blip on the radar compared to most of my diet. I don't count calories or anything like that, but I do keep an eye on ingredients and try to eat less processed stuff in general. There are some things that I'll occasionally eat when I'm out and about - like my beloved French fries or by supplementing my pizza addiction - but I don't stock any of that at home either. Some things I don't even crave anymore that I used to, like potato chips. To be fair, I sorta got tired of those even before gradually shifting my diet around. XD
I'm not anti-med or anti-vaxx, but I also like not putting any foreign meds in my body unless I feel it's absolutely essential. I stock few OTC meds and am currently not on any prescriptions...though I have been offered a couple.
To be honest, losing weight and increasing my fitness level was more of a decision for self-therapy, both physical and mental, in the face of some IRL issues. I by no means starve myself and eat regularly; the main thing is not overeating and getting better at recognizing when I'm full or approaching that point. It has definitely been a learning process. The internet has been a big help, but like with almost everything else, there's quite a bit of noise and opinions to sift through. I don't believe carbs are bad for example; it just depends on how much and what kind of carbs you're eating.
@NEStalgia Berry cake? Where did I say that? And trust me: the Germans got nothing on the Dutch, where it concerns making pastries, cakes and what not. If you ever decide to visit, I'll take you on a sweet-tooth tour of the city.
As for the medical industry: I do believe that in certain instances, there are some fair handlings of diseases, and they're REALLY making strides to cure or even eradicate them, but plenty of lesser afflictions are solely being kept in check, by moderating distribution of the cure and/or the doses of said cure, because like you said, there's more money to be made from maintaining that situation than by giving people the single cure medicine.
This situation, or rather: artificial construct is, in my opinion, hiding in plain sight, if you stop for a minute and wonder how it is possible that we've either completely halted or severely crippled a series of deadly diseases, to a point where they aren't terminal for a large percentage of the population anymore, but somehow, it's impossible to cure diseases like diabetes, certain lung diseases, birth defects, and so on. Don't shoot me if I got some of those mixed up, but it's the thought that counts. There most definitely ARE examples of diseases that are strangely still around, more or less thriving, regardless of the ever advancing state of our medical knowledge.
As for you flipping me off during my Corporate Laser Jet department job: small chance. I was in Europe, and we only handled European calls. And besides, it was in 2001, so too long ago as well.
Concerning longevity: we also need to remind ourselves that even though we don't live in stressful times of war or depression, like our grandparents used to do, we do live in a world that's actually way too fast for us. An example: while the average person back in the 50's or 60's, heck, in the entire pre-internet age, got about 70 to a 100 sensory stimuli a day, that number has now easily multiplied by a tenfold, if not twenty.
So, small wonder that so many more people are going crazy, getting stressed out, or suffering a burnout.
As for the object of capitalism: that's simply to enlarge capitalism. Communism at its core isn't bad, it's just the leaders that abuse any and all ideas that are truly meant to be for the people. But better not stray too much into politics here.
And if you want to find out if you're already in the Matrix: take a red pill and try to pull that plug from the back of your neck...
'The console wars are like boobs: Sony and Microsoft fight over which ones look the nicest and Nintendo's are the most fun to play with.'
@Tyranexx Haha, yeah... grandmothers are like that, aren't they? We've got one abroad, because my mother's brother married a Danish woman, and these too are big eaters and drinkers. In fact, all Scandinavians are. True enjoyers of life. Burgundians, as they say...
Anyway, we used to visit our Danish family every two or three years, and even though we'd always stay at my uncle's place, we obviously had to visit all the various family members, and then when we'd visit his mother in law, it would always seem as if she'd emptied the entire fridge, pantry and cellar onto the table, because any and all food or drink was on there, both hearty and sweet. And all they'd say to us is "please, eat. Have some more. Please eat".
Yeah, we sure had to avoid standing on any scales for a couple of weeks, after we returned back home...
'The console wars are like boobs: Sony and Microsoft fight over which ones look the nicest and Nintendo's are the most fun to play with.'
@Tyranexx - I just hit a year using my cpap (deviated septum), and it has completely changed my life. At first it was an awful adjustment to learn to sleep wearing a mask with a long hose on the end, and it didn’t make an immediate difference. Over time though, I became accustomed to it, and the payoff has been enormous. Sleep apnea is very dangerous. It’s basically slow, methodical strangulation, and it breaks down our bodies at a cellular level. I couldn’t have hated it more at first, couldn’t love it more after I adjusted to it. I hope your dad gives it another chance.
@ThanosReXXX If I'm allowed to chime in. It is important to keep in mind that the severity of a disease (or at least, the perceived severity, because there's no way to ''objectively'' measure it) is not related to the ability to cure a disease. The underlying cause can vary greatly from disease to disease, but the severity of a disease has nothing to do with ability to cure it, or prevent it.
''Mild'' diseases like asthma and diabetes for example are caused by the malfunctioning of a tissue or organ. Simply put, ''curing'' it would require alteration of the entire tissue and their germ cells on a cellular level, or an organ/tissue transplant. The former is currently very much sci-fi, whereas the latter also brings a ton of complications with it, if it's even feasible at all.
On the other hand, a severe disease caused by a bacterial infection may be way easier to treat. Of course, from what I've seen and learned, it's never as simple as that. And there's often way more factors that play a role in it.
In the end it's true that medicine suppliers are still a company, and rely on profits to keep going. But there's no reason to believe it's all one giant conspiracy of keeping people with diseases in check.
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