Feeling pretty depressed. No matter how hard I work in my day to day, the hopelessness, self-loathing, and anhedonia always simmers beneath the surface, waiting to bubble up. Can't establish any sort of individual identity, nor find meaning or belonging in a collective. Almost nothing I do pleases me, I'm either doing it because I feel obligated to do it or to escape from reality, or I simply don't do anything at all.
I've gotten myself in the best shape I've ever been in. Quit eating fast food and soda, dropped 20 pounds (195 to 175) in a few months, then started lifting. Struggled with progression because eating at a surplus was mostly making me fat again and my joints were getting fucked up by the lifts. Got a few different trainers to check my form and they couldn't find any real problems so idk why I was getting hurt
I don't know what would make me happy, if anything. Maybe my brain has been too damaged by escapism to be satisfied with the mundane and real. I'm not sure if I would be happy with a loving family. I think I would always have doubts about my parenting, about my children's place in the world, not to mention how hard it is for me to give up my privacy and autonomy for people that usually don't appreciate it. Also, I've come to realize that marriage nowadays doesn't offer me as much as I risk losing
Can any anons recommend a stable, straightforward means of employment ? I was recently denied entry into the local university and I can’t move. I have an AA with the majority of my credits being in core mathematics and science. I would particularly enjoy anything that puts distance between me and vile corporate life.
Just spent the last two weeks with no PC and smartphone. Been using a brick. Read books, lifted, listened to the radio, studied, wrote, practiced guitar. Feel like I've just gained so much extra time in the day.
Best two weeks of the year so far. Really calm and at ease. I've been singing while I cook. I feel like I did when I was a child, everything is slower, days are longer, I'm more in tune, simpler things make me smile, I see beauty in everything.
Gonna keep it up, but with internet time scheduled each week so I can check my emails and pop in to chat with you guys.
if you do not fuck lolis you're wasting your time bucko https://pjb.primecdn.net/pics/original/59/597c25d4.jpg
Taking it slow.
MWF, bench press and chin ups
TThSa, 1.5 hours Muay Thai practice
I'm a terrible procrastinator and I have problems with consistency. I am just trying to get these two points locked in before adding to them. Besides, I have an underpowered upper boy and really want to lose 10-15 lbs of fat.
If you want to work from home there are a lot of jobs that will let you do that. I would NOT recommend working in any job that is like a call center, say working customer support from home.
https://youtu.be/6It6SnNwsh8 Count Dankula is dead on in this video.
However, working other sorts of jobs from home is great. If you have kids it is awesome, it means you don’t need childcare and you can homeschool.
Right now I work 2 jobs from home. 1 in online treasury management support (work about an hour a day answering emails, the occasional call) and get paid for a fully day, that’s $85,000 per year. The other job is making $25 an hour teaching Chinky kids English. Most of the time I do both jobs simultaneously so I get two paychecks for the same amount of my time.
Working from home is awesome if you are into /SIG/ you can spend a lot of your time on self improvement. If you don’t have children like me it also means you can travel the world and collect a pay check too, many companies will let you work from anywhere as long as you have a stable and reliable internet connection that can do 10Mbps down and 2Mbps up.
Stop buying books. Unless you’re going to read it over and over, don’t buy it. Get it from your local library, if they do not have it they can get it from a library that does. Also, many libraries have an associated app and service you can get free eBooks with. Your local library has a wealth of resources. I got The Tuner Diaries at my local library, no shit.
This is good advice if you're low on money. But having non-fiction (reference) books available at a moment's notice and that you can highlight and dogear and bend/abuse while keeping it around for a long time is highly valuable. All else being equal, if money and possibly space is not a concern then having a large corpus of reference material at hand can drastically increase your efficiency.
[–] 18020737? ago
Tips on getting good at something quickly/effectively, besides the obvious "practice more".
Realised I suck at all my hobbies. Thought I was a good guitarist until I heard my new flatmate play, and he's been playing for less time than me. Thought I was a good climber until I went to a competition and got humiliated.
Have always been kind of relaxed with my hobbies and saw them as leisure, never got too serious about them. Now I'm sick of being embarassed and being worse than people, I want to be the best in the room at what I do. Any tips on achieving this?
[–] 18020747? ago
You need to find the most efficient means of practicing. Usually this involves focusing on the fundamentals, with an eye towards constant progression. For example with language learning you have to grind vocab with flash cards using an efficient SRS system. Each flash card has to have as much context as possible (image, sentence, audio). Then you have to be advancing in difficulty at a smooth pace so that you're dealing with mostly comprehensible input, but just difficult enough for a slight mental struggle. Where you still need to look up words in a dictionary fairly often, but not so often that it totally breaks the flow of enjoying the content.
For guitar it would probably look like a good routine of working the scales, chord progressions, all against a metronome to build rhythm from the beginning. The bulk of your time should be spent on these sorts of exercises rather than just playing off of a songbook. Systematically cover each of the main major and minor scales. If things start to get easy, move on. Then periodically come back to the basics so you can reinforce them. You want to be aiming for as close to a 1:1 correspondence between effort and results as possible to avoid long plateaus. When you are close to a 1:1 correspondence then you can increase the practice time and make massive progress quickly. Make sure that your guitar is always in tune and at hand, sitting on a stand next to the amp, with picks at the ready and strap adjusted or next to a good seat where you're comfortable playing. If an obstacle is the amp being to loud for neighbors or something, get a pair of headphones that plug into a portable amp. All of this should be at the ready so you can pick it up at a moment's notice and practice in short bursts, without it being a chore to set up. Similar to how if you have a pullup bar in the threshold on the way to the bathroom you can easily crank of tens of pullups every day with little effort to increase volume just as a habit. You should also use an electric guitar rather than an acoustic for your main practice, since it will be easier on your fingers which means will translate to the ability to practice for longer and more frequent sessions. At the same time you must understand that plateaus are inevitable, while learning to get yourself out of them ASAP without dwelling on frustration. You also want to be reading about music theory so you can tie the practical into the real and make periodic leaps and bounds in your understanding. Then you can translate that knowledge into the ability to jam. When you can, get with better players so that you're absorbing their knowledge. Ideally you'd have a sort of mentor. If you can join a band. If you are the best member of the band, switch bands to where you're no longer the best, and ride that pattern of switching until you're happy with your skill level. This is similar to how a boxer or MMA fighter would want to switch camps if they are stagnating either because the level of the gym is too low for them to make progress, or they just need to be exposed to new coaching methods, technique pool, and sparring partners. Don't cheap out on things that will facilitate your progression. If better strings will be easier on your fingers, buy them. If you are stuck on music theory, buy several of the best books so you have multiple sources to reference in case one of them doesn't click, and to cover knowledge gaps. Don't be afraid to alternate between skimming reference materials and doing deep dives. You don't always have to read the entire book from cover to cover, often it's best to skim the whole book quickly after looking at the ToC then zoom in on a chapter or two that are most relevant to your current sticking points.