Thoroughly agreed, that’s what I call everything not viewed as immediately societally productive. More of a sarcastic reversal of the main complaint I’ve received throughout my life while just living it.

It really does take a while… Had a 9-month breakdown during the Pandemic, that one was exclusively for mental health care. I literally locked myself in my apartment and did nothing but eat, sleep, play vidya, get high, and have weekly therapy sessions for the entire duration.

It took 8 months to stop being anxious about not being stressed out. Used to wake up every morning with that sharp fear that I’d missed my daily meetings, then it would slowly turn into an “oh, shit, I’m not being Productive” jumble of self-loathing and panic.

This is what life should be like in a sane world. Work should never take up as much of our cognitive bandwidth as it does now.

Agreed, expressed it incorrectly, the burnout is nowhere near the main reason for my taking time off. I needed to take a break from Adult Stuff. I mean, last time I did anything even remotely resembling a vacation/holiday was in 2014, now I’m taking my time.

Also, thank you so much for your kind words! Honestly, burnouts are just part of the routine at this point, I’ll be back on my feet in two-three months tops!

Nothing! I’m super-serious, and I plan on doing exactly that for the following 6 months (quit my job, taking a break to address burnout and reorient): nothing.

By that, I mean I’ll allow myself to get as much sleep as I humanly can, try to feed myself healthier food (and more regularly), develop my hobbies (mini painting, playing the bass, sketching, writing), re-establish a semblance of a social life by exploring the city and its options, spending more time with friends… Pretty much just living life. No goals, no quotas, no deadlines, no performance metrics, no side-hustle, no Work™.

Because English archaeologists would have been upset by semantics.

Very much this! Especially with anaesthesiologists!

The walnut tree. Its leaves are dense so it casts a cohesive shadow, perfect for shelter from the sun. I LOVE how it smells, especially when developing walnuts, and green walnuts are entirely unique in how they taste!

Honestly, being an amoeba isn’t all that bad of a past life, all things considered! Felt significantly less… biological than one would expect, but it’s as good an explanation as any, to be perfectly honest!

Honestly, I don’t know! I’ve chewed on this pretty much ever since I had it, but I couldn’t put my finger on any particular occurrence.

The closest I can come to explaining it is that it was my subconscious’ way of assimilating my fear of my family? I had a… complicated childhood amongst some very specifically toxic personalities and always had the instinctive drive to not be like them, because it was shitty behaviour. I also feared them, because, like… I was a baby. They could literally crush me if they wanted to, and I knew it - none ever got THAT violent or crazy, just to be clear, but they were very on edge pretty much all of the time.

Maybe it was just the fear of getting caught up in that, of becoming that, but expressed abstractly, shapelessly because I didn’t have the conceptual or contextual tools with which to shape it yet. And this is also sustained by the fact that that… thing felt very familiar.

Or maybe I’m reaching and this is utter nonsense, I have no idea!

I remember it as being my first dream ever, think I was around 1-2 years old when I had it, but everything’s very fuzzy timeline-wise up until I was around 5.

It was wholly abstract, I dreamt of myself as an amorphous mass of… something. I wasn’t panicked that I had no limbs or defined shape, and was fully aware of myself as said mass.

I was floating in a void, and a much, much larger mass of the same something of which I was made started drawing nearer and nearer to me, almost painfully slow.

I can’t begin to describe the sheer terror I felt when I realised I couldn’t retreat fast enough to not get caught. I was… moving my ass off away from the thing, and it seemed to just be strolling its way closer and closer - the fact that it seemed entirely relaxed in its pursuit somehow made the feeling of terror even worse.

Then, it finally caught up with me. The first thing which struck me was its size. To say it was towering over me is an understatement, the thing was incomprehensibly vast.

It was all over in a flash. The thing just… advanced “through” me, it simply assimilated me into its mass and I was gone. That was when I woke up. I still remember that terror, never felt anything close to it since.

I am of the opposite opinion, I LOVE winter for the exact reasons you’re describing!

I have some inherited photosensitivity, so nighttime’s my favourite time! I also handle the cold waaay better than I handle heat, and my organism just feels like it starts coming back to life once autumn shows up!

Summer pretty much always makes me wish I could sleep my way through it.

I don’t really have guilty pleasures, but I’d probably keep Pupil Slicer and HIDE for the third or fourth date…

Well… if it means I’d die of lethal diarrhea immediately after being reincarnated, I guess it could be worse! Like having to live 6-7 decades with the knowledge that I may or may not, at one point, contract lethal diarrhea, and that I’ll just keep on coming back to this particular reverse-roulette wheel over and over and over again, being forced to play the odds on an infinite canvas of probabilities. You know what they say, the anxiety’s always worse than the thing-in-itself!

Reincarnation, which has now been reinforced by no. 2 (pun not intended, but welcomed).

“Lethal amounts of diarrhea” has now entered second place on my Worst Nightmares list. Thanks for that…

Dammit! Could’ve been a commercial star in the 80s had I been born in the 80s and, like… a different country…

Ooh, that’s the fancy kind, I’m generally too lazy to wait for toast.

Ooh, I get it now! Yeah, that sounds unnecessarily spartan. Although healthy, I guess?

Sorry, focused more on the components than the context…

Honestly, can relate! Had a month-long period when all I craved were carrot and white onion salads with a tiny pinch of salt, a load of ground black pepper, and drowned in vinegar. Used to chop the carrots down into tiny strips.