I’m sorry if this is not what you want to hear, but I’ll give my perspective anyway.

Why do you care about getting “back in your industry/career”? Yeah you did it previously, but is it really what makes you happy?

When you have goals, you always think “once I reach this, everything will be better”. In my experience and with everyone I ever talked with, this was never the lasting case. Reaching some nice goal gave satisfaction for days or sometimes even weeks or months, but never longer. Then it was back to dissatisfaction and another goal.

The common path frequently described out of depression is getting back into the groove of setting goals, following them, not being satisfied, setting another goal, repeat. This is not how I got out of my depression and also not a good life.

I don’t think it’s important that you reach your goal of getting back in your industry or whatever. I think it’s important that you’re fine with not reaching it. I think it’s important to recognize that you can be happy and satisfied right where you are, exactly with what you have.

What to do with it is to act understanding and empathetic with people like that instead of standoffish and hostile. You still insist on the better way of doing things, but there’s no actual need to attack anyone that doesn’t support the better way of doing things, even if their reasons aren’t rational or even morally questionable/bad. It only serves to further entrench them in their positions, while the opposite might have a chance to happen in a more cooperative approach.

Funny how you made exactly the comment the article predicted within itself xD

Wow, why is it so hard for you to say what the problem is? It’s going to be a bit hard to get any advice.

I assume you wanted children but are sterile? You can still adopt. Even if that’s not what you mean, there are always alternatives in some way that let you achieve what you want, maybe not exactly like you imagined it, but a similar thing.

Everyone else already has said the “general” stuff that can be said without getting any more information from you. If you really want help, you should be ready to share some more information and answer questions people have, as well as answer people’s comments with sharing your true thoughts, not holding back like you did in your main post.

In the end, how do you get over this? You understand rationally that you can never plan the future 100%. You understand that once people achieve a goal/plan, they don’t become happy, they just try to achieve a new goal/plan. To become happy, you have to be happy with what you currently have, no matter what that is.

You don’t have to have an identity to live. Identity is irrelevant. It’s a thought-up human concept that in the grand scheme of things has no meaning. What does it matter what your identity was 100 years from now? 1000 years from now? A million years from now?

And once you rationally understand these things, you have to convince your subconscious of them as well, which is much harder and requires lots of practice.

I think there is a difference between apathy and being fine with the results. I’m still sad if things go wrong, or happy when they go right. I still want things to go a certain way. I’m not indifferent.

I just know that nothing will ever be perfect, so I don’t need to stress about if it isn’t.

Of course there nudity is also not perfectly normalized, especially in some circles.

Also obviously because of privacy reasons people don’t like their pictures posted online, nude or not.

In what way exactly? I’m sorry, I don’t see it

It’s only a big deal because of puritan society like in the US or UK or similar in the first place. There are societies where nudity is not a big deal anyway, so nude photos of someone are also no big deal.

Look at Germany for example. Lots of FKK (nude) areas. No one really bats an eye. Of course there nudity is also not perfectly normalized, especially in some circles. But still, not many are concerned about nude pictures of themselves.

Obviously AI makes more nude pictures faster than someone skilled at Photoshop. So if your society has a problem with nudity, there will be more problems than before.

But really, there shouldn’t be a problem anyway.

When does it matter in a dating situation?

I simply stopped worrying and being fine with any result.

Didn’t find the next place to rent? Guess I’ll have to keep living right here.

Didn’t book an appointment for my hurting tooth? Guess I’ll have to go to the ER once it’s unbearable.

Don’t have a plan B for the journey? Guess there’s just simply no journey if the first plan fails.

Nothing in my life moves? Guess everything will stay still.

Living on autopilot? Guess that’s how I live.

And I’m actually absolutely fine with these results.

Do you really think people who have problems sleeping don’t try these obvious things?

With this answer I would also change my answer. It seems to me simply that you have found “love on first sight”. For some reason this guy’s looks, smell, mannerisms, movements, whatever are all fitting together to make him extremely attractive to you. Seems like not your usual type but as you said, definitely attractive.

I’m not exactly sure why you cry xD but it could be because you’re feeling regret to not having approached him? Or it could be that you wish some of these other men were “like him” because you would like to be with them, but unfortunately they didn’t have that same spark with you?

I love you, you understand me. I completely agree with everything you wrote. Of course there aren’t only 2 types in total. I just thought what you wrote sounded like these 2 types.

And the answer to mine and the downvotes are exactly what I’m talking about, they are the social conditioning speaking. My views have to be dismissed without looking at what I’m actually saying, because it goes against this conditioning. No one is actually talking about your problem/issue/question anymore.

Luckily I don’t care about downvotes/disagreement. If someone is clearly not even reading past the first sentence I don’t need to spend my energy engaging with them more, trying to work against their offendedness.

Did you really just not even finish the first paragraph after reading the first sentence?.. The second sentence is literally “Obviously best combined in one person”

Are you biologically female and cis? You guys have attraction for 2 types of guys, the long term, dependable type, and the physically attractive “stud” kind of guy. Obviously best combined in one person, I’m just talking about types of attraction.

But of course it’s hard to be such a “perfect specimen” and combine both types in one. Most men lean/optimize more the one direction than the other.

Now it’s quite obvious which type society conditions you to want - the long term kind of guy. You’re also getting a lot of “slut shaming” or puritan sex shaming type of conditioning from society which pushes you away from the physically attractive, dominant, “stud” type of guy.

But both attractions are still very real, you’re just being pushed in one direction and away from the other.

So for me it seems like you are in conflict with your natural attraction you have and the way society conditions you to behave. This conditioning is very strong, so that you consider giving in to your sexual desires impossible. As such, you feel a real sense of loss - you lose the opportunity to follow your desires, you “lose” this person you desire - and a feeling of loss makes you sad, so you cry.

But what classes as excessive?

That’s a good question, one that I have not defined for myself perfectly.

I think part of it is the nature of the transaction. When you sell something off your Etsy shop, you create a thing, you sell the thing, you can’t sell the thing again. A shop like Steam continuously takes money from you for the exact same service. Of course it takes money to run the servers and any other running costs, and I’m not saying those shouldn’t be covered. But theoretically, if they have set their automated systems well, Steam runs by itself without intervention from anyone. Whoever owns Steam basically makes money on their sleep. They created it once and it continually makes money for them.

When a game sells well, this game will be downloaded more often, so the relative load/usage of the Steam servers increases. So it is fair to take more money from games that sell better, so tying it to “amount of games sold” makes sense. But does the load on the Steam servers really change if a game is sold for 50€ or 10€? No, what really matters is the size of the game, the amount of updates the developers push and so on. So tying the costs to sale price is also not necessarily fair.

Apart from that, it’s hard to define something as “excessive” without comparing it to other things. As I mentioned once, I don’t think a teacher is doing a less valuable job than a CEO of some big company. Most jobs are benefitting others/society in some way, so I actually value most jobs roughly the same. In conclusion, I would define as “excessive” anything that is a large deviation from mean income, completely arbitrarily I might say if your income is more than double the mean, it would be excessive.

All profit is excessive by nature, isn’t it?

I don’t necessarily think so. People die, so their accumulated wealth disappears or is transferred to someone else. Human beings are made to acquire more resources. But death is a natural endpoint to this process. There is probably an equilibrium point of profit that is sustainable with a certain population.

If the amount of money massively outweighs your bills, then I would say yes. Also if your “bills” are extreme luxury, then even without that. We really need to stop with this massive wealth inequality. Our economy works on transactions. If the profit margin on any transaction (including labor) is exorbitantly high, then something is going wrong. An investment banker is not more valuable than a teacher. A CEO is not more valuable than a janitor.

Who said anything about costs/bills? I’m talking about excessive wealth extraction. If a group of people gets massively wealthy by taking lots of money from other people, one should wonder if they really need all that money.

It’s still stealing if the profit is this extremely high. Of course a successful business includes providing a useful product. But if you make so much more money per employee than any other company, that means the amount you’re charging is disproportional. They could change Steam fees to 5% and still be extremely profitable. They choose not to because of greed.

This is not me condemning them by the way, I think their greed and what they do with the money available to them is still mostly better than what other people do, but it’s still greed.

I define all excessive profit as stealing. In an ideal world everyone would be earning roughly the same. (Or no earning being necessary at all, but I don’t want to go into every detail)

You’re absolutely right. I live in a country of socialized healthcare so it’s easy to forget how important it is.