Some of you have never gotten all your books confiscated by your third grade teacher because you were reading them under your desk in math class and it shows
Congratulations, B.o.B., a dude more than 2,000 years ago figured out what you still can’t understand despite the benefits of free public school, generations of documentation and the internet at your fucking fingertips.
THIS mathematicians have known the Earth is curved for MILLENNIA
The thing about knitting is it’s much harder to fear the existential futility of all your actions while you’re doing it.
Like ok, sure, sometimes it’s hard to believe you’ve made any positive impact on the world. But it’s pretty easy to believe you’ve made a sock. Look at it. There it is. Put it on, now your foot’s warm.
Checkmate, nihilism.
This is a powerful positive message..
I’m literally reading a book right now (Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski) that says this is scientifically sound.
There have been studies done on rats and dogs where they develop learned helplessness in the animals by giving them impossible tasks. Eventually the animals stop trying, even when the task stops being impossible. (I.e. put a rat in a maze with cheese it can’t get to until it develops learned helplessness, then put the cheese somewhere it can get to it and it won’t even try.) But once they show the animals they CAN do something - i.e. physically moving the rat to the cheese - the learned helplessness goes away.
No one can move you to your cheese for you, but the book says DOING something - which they define as “anything that isn’t nothing” can help. Make a food. Work in the garden. Clean a thing. Do a favor for a friend. Call your elected officials.
Knit a sock.
If you feel overwhelmed by existential despair, do something. It doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be anything that isn’t nothing.
no offense but the new aladdin remake looks like hot garbage and literally nobody asked for it.
this looks like some direct to tv afterschool special not a multi million dollar budget
jasmine: alright. clearly inspired by the original animated costume. looks very bollywood and pretty
aladdin: hello fellow kids. life on the street ages you terribly but i am totally an 18 year old boy on the streets of agrabah and not a well put together 30 something year old retail manager who bought this outfit at the gap.
It’s always rough, Anon! And it depends upon whether this was just something you were doing as an adult, or something that other people were depending on. Like, fixing “I accidentally burned a scorch mark in the wall while making french fries” is different from fixing “I accidentally deleted records in a database other people use.” That said, let’s see if we can’t create a structure for both!
1. Admit you fucked up BUT ALSO give yourself permission to have fucked up. A fuck-up, by definition, is not something you meant to do, because if you acted with malice it would be sabotage. So allow yourself to be imperfect, and then admit, to whoever needs to know, that you made a mistake.
2. Ask for help. You have to admit what happened because usually you will need help to fix it. If nothing else, you will need the complicity of other people to cover this from an authority that would punish you for being human. But more importantly, if people know there’s an issue, they can put their own effort into not making it worse. This has the added benefit of reinforcing, to others, that you want to put it right, and you weren’t trying to screw everyone over.
3. Do what needs to be done to fix the problem. Don’t push it off on others, but also if they tell you that they’ll handle it, listen to them. When I realized I had a plumbing issue I couldn’t solve on my own, I asked the building super for help. I set out a light source, laid down a towel on my kitchen floor, and left my tools out, so he would have easy access to both the sink and any tools he might not have. Do the work or make life easier on those who have to do it.
4. Learn from the mistake – identify why it happened and take steps to rectify the issue. This has the added bonus of sometimes realizing it wasn’t your mistake – like deleting records from a database is something that should be very, very hard to do, and if it isn’t, then you should talk to the administrator about putting failsafes in place. Identify the source of the problem and think seriously about how to prevent it from happening again. And if you know it’s highly unlikely to happen again, great! Then this was the easiest step.
5. Make sure the people who helped you know you’re grateful. Tell them thank you, and that you owe them one, and explain how you’ve worked to stop it happening again. And in the future, if/when you see them struggling, lend a hand.
6. Let it go. It’s in the past now, and over-apologizing, over-thanking, or just repeatedly bringing it up are all really just ways of forcing others to reassure you (or, if they eventually refuse, of making yourself feel worse over something that’s been fixed). You’re fine now!
7. Because we are human: Repeat as necessary, for all of life.
Most realistic scene in Homecoming: pretending to be interested in another person’s distractions when you’re privately experiencing identity crisis and internally panicking.
