Eternity Async Tutoring

[Eternity]

Here’s some writing to share and general updates:

I’ve been keeping up with Dface's Topic about Self-Help Books He's Reading and one particular post you made in the thread stood out to me that I thought was quite relevant to my life:

@Elliot

People get angry and act like a jerk and think that “I was having a bad day” is a good excuse because they aren’t usually like that. If famous, they may give a public apology saying that’s “not who I am” (I think because on most days of their life they didn’t do anything like that).

Who you are near your worst is actually really important and says a lot about you. For many purposes, judging people by the minimum quality standard they maintain at all times is a better approach than looking at their peaks.

Very exceptional circumstances can be discounted like if you said or did something bad while you were having a stroke or after someone drugged your drink without your knowledge. But if your dog died, or your colleague said something nasty to you, or you slept poorly, or you voluntarily got drunk or high, those are not good excuses; that’s just part of life.

It’s OK to have some particularly bad days, but you still shouldn’t yell at your family, customer service workers, or people on Twitter. Instead, you should recognize you’re having a bad day and deal with it appropriately: take your time more, be slower to speak, don’t make any big decisions with lasting consequences, avoid risk, maybe take a nap, etc. And this should be infrequent. Like if less than once a month you spend a day or less being careful and not doing much, and you’re successful at managing it, that’s OK. If once a month you’re a jerk to people, then you’re a jerk. And if once a week or more often you have a really bad day, that isn’t a special outlier; it’s part of your regular life.

I think this kind of stuff applies to me. On most days I’m not a jerk and I’m not mean to people. I would say for the most part I get along with people quite well. However, if I’m tired (or hungry or something) I occasionally get angry and say mean stuff. I do genuinely apologize and feel bad, however I typically excuse it because it happened while I was tired and felt off. I think I take the bad thing I’m doing seriously but I don’t take it seriously that I am a jerk. Relatedly, I also don’t take fixing my anger seriously because when I do apologize and feel bad and acknowledge and all that stuff, I feel as if I’ve addressed the problem. I got angry. Said something mean. I apologized and recognize I messed up. It feels like, to me, the problem has been addressed. I think is true for a lot of other issues I have. I treat acknowledging and understanding a problem as addressing the problem.

Some writing I did today that I thought was related to feelings and stuff:

Thinking about it: I think it has been conflated that the being angry (or other negative emotions, but primarily angry) equals being a jerk. Anger is a feeling, so is happiness and so is sadness. So is pain, so is being tired. These are all things you feel. What you do in reaction to these feelings is not set. There are certain actions and behaviors you may do when you feel happy, angry, or sad. Those are not set in stone. Hmm. Lets go with some actions. Lets say your sad. You hear that your dog died. You knew it was coming. This makes you feel sad. Ok. Some people will get that feeling and start crying. Others can hear that and not cry. Others may go for a walk. You have control over how you act based on a feeling. If something angers you. You can choose to be mean to the person angering you (which can seem justified with that particular feeling) or you can choose to not say anything.

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Last month I missed three days of writing due to a distressing event with a friend. So I wrote 28 out of 31 days.

Also due to that event I stopped playing Baba is You for a while. I recently (past week?) got back into playing it again. I don’t have my switch on me as I write this, but I beat around ~210 levels in the base game. One level in the base game I did look up a hint for, not a solution.

This past week I’ve beaten around ~60 easier levels from the other two level packs available to you.

After coming back into playing Baba I’ve realized I need a better method for approaching the harder late game levels (especially after losing momentum from my break). So I think I’ll try and use the method you shared in the Baba is You thread on some “easier” levels in the level packs before trying to the later game stuff in the base game.