I'm starting a collection
Suzanne Collins gripping my face with her hands: listen listen the first step to evil is dehumanisation, always, the second you start to see people as less than people no matter what they've done to you that's when you start heading down a path of selfish destruction and violence
It feels taboo as a childfree person to admit this but I actually do have concerns about who is going to take care of me when I'm old. The elder care system in our nation relies A LOT on the unpaid care labor of adult children. I just don't think that's a good reason to have kids.
"But you'll have more money!" does not completely put this to rest for me. Neither does "Buy care insurance!" Even if I can afford direct personal care, who is going to advocate for me to get it? Who is going to navigate bureaucracy for me when I'm 80?
"If you do have kids, there's no GUARANTEE that they'll take care of you when your old!" That's true, but doesn't solve my problem.
I think childfree people get very defensive about this question because its used as a kind of "gotcha!" against us, but I actually do not feel we can afford to be in denial about this reality. Based on current trends of more people in their 30s stating they intend to be permanently childfree, we are going to see a huge wave of childfree adults hitting the eldercare system at once in a few decades. Childfree people in their 30s should be advocating around eldercare NOW.
Writing: The only job where your coworkers are fictional people who constantly sass you.
The best piece of advice I ever got was not meant as advice, but as an edict. If I was going to threaten people as a joke, it had to be so far out of proportion with what happened that it would be obvious I was joking. This changed how I expressed frustration with others. It then changed how I expressed frustration with myself.
Not “I’m going to hit you” but “I am going to buy a tuna sub from the gas station and hide it under the seat of your car”
Not “I’m going to kill myself” but “I am going to walk into the desert and let the scarabs take me”
The other side then happened. When I mess something up, instead of saying it’s bad and perpetuating negative thoughts, swing hard the other way.
Not “this art is terrible” but “this shall be framed and mounted on the wall in my museum exhibition as testament to the suffering I had to overcome”
Have been doing this since high school. It was my drama teacher who asked me to please stop scaring the actors. The other half of the edict was that I had to say it in a polite tone, and end it with either please or thank you.
Life changing. 10/10 Mr Muëller. Highly reccomend.
i don't care if it's nazis, mormons, or a bunch of misguided autistic people. if anyone ever tries to tell you your soul is from another planet and you're actually part of the class of impressive people that secretly did everything cool in the world but is now extinct and lives on through your broken genome, you RUN. YOU WILL RUN AWAY. YOU WILL SPRINT FULL SPEED AWAY FROM THAT.
vegans making honey a bee labour issue is the funniest thing imaginable because like, you picked the one animal that has already unionised
as an aroace person with limited sexual experience, no interest in watching porn, and poor sex ed as a teen, there IS something simultaneously funny and vaguely tragic about being 28 adult years old and realising how extremely tiny your frame of reference is for genitalia and deciding you should expand this to better understand bodies (yours and others). and then you're just there like "okay so what the fuck do I even google right now, anyway"