Has anyone else noticed how, when you have a chronic condition of some kind, that there’s always the basic assumption from people around you that you’re not already doing everything you can?
It’s all about the illusion of control. People who are healthy like to believe they can always keep being healthy if they do the right things. They don’t want to think about how good people get struck with terrible circumstances for no reason.
So they keep assuming that if they got sick, they could do something to make it better.
And if you’re still sick, that must mean you’ve done something wrong or not done enough.
Nail. Head. The same attitude can be seen in how a lot of people talk about poverty.
And sexual assault. All they have to do is not go there not drink that not wear that not date them and they’ll be fine, right?
The Just World theory – that as long as I do everything right, I’m safe, and everybody who isn’t safe is at fault for not doing everything right – is perhaps the most harmful and widespread mindset today
if you ever see a conservative and wonder just how in the world they have so little compassion? they are genuinely convinced that most – not all, but most – bad things that happen are the fault of the person affected, because then they don’t have to feel bad
somebody explaining this to me as a young adult was, quite literally, the start of me seeing the world in a new way and moving considerably to the left politically. by letting go of the just world mindset my conception of reality shifted considerably
Willy Wonka sent out his chocolate bars worldwide, and 5 white kids (4 with first-world problems) still won.
To be fair, his goal was apparently to send a stern warning about the evils of entitlement by murdering them in ironic ways.
Also, the rich, spoiled, first world white kids aren’t presented in the story as having gotten the tickets by chance, the story is very clear that they and their families used their privilege and power to game the system – taking what was initially presented as a random selection and cheating by leveraging their disproportionate resources – wasting mountains of chocolate in pursuit of gold…
So I have it on the authority of both the animal shelter and the guy that runs the fish and reptile store that this is FINE.
People at the shelter are thrilled to have people come pet/play with the animals to help socialize them, and you can even sign up for scheduled dog walks or other socialization events there! Reptile store guy says that as long as you’re not tapping on the fishtanks or bothering him while he’s trying to help customers, it’s great to have people in the store and learning more about reptiles/getting them accilmated to humans. He even let me hold the boa contrictor once while he was cleaning out her cage.
So go in, be polite and nice to the animals and staff, and have a good time!
To a kid, making music can seem very mysterious, but the fundamental love of playing around with different sounds and listening to how they sound when strung fluidly together is something every musician and composer discovers first in childhood. “I wanted a toy that allowed children to discover for themselves how music was actually made.”
i have no words for how thoroughly this blew my mind.
last year when i was teaching 11th grade one of my fav students came in crying so i put the class on a filler activity and we just talked. they were doing ICE raids in the city and she was worried her parents wouldnt be there when she got home. then she was worried that ICE may come to the school and take her. we looked the laws up together and printed it out so she could carry the papers with her.
it is illegal for ICE to raid a school and take children. ILLEGAL. i told my student (and eventually the class in like a blanket statement because i had quite a few undocumented students) that if anyone did come i would put my body between ICE and my students and really struggle. honestly my heart broke so much that day – take care of undocumented people in your life because they deserve so much better than this ffs. this woman is so very evil and has a black heart and i hope she rots in prison
i feel like the most important piece of wisdom i can impart on teenagers is that no one–no one–knows what the fuck they’re doing
my brother is 26 years old, makes $200k a year, and just bought a house with his fiance. he’s the success story you hear about but never actually meet in person, but it all happened by accident. he wanted to go to college for clarinet performance, but he got rejected from all the top schools. so he decided to major in physics instead, and then went on to get a doctorate to put off being an adult for a few more years. but then he ended up dropping out halfway through the program and accepting a job with google as a software engineer. so to reiterate: my brother majored in something he was not interested in, and then he got a job that had nothing to do with his degree.
he isn’t successful because he had some master plan he followed, he just stumbled around blindly until something worked out. and that’s what we’re all doing–i majored in political science and now i do customer service for a company that makes industrial-sized gas detection monitors. the marketing director at my company has a degree in biology, and my mom has an MBA and works at a middle school. no one knows what they’re doing, we’re all just trying different things until something works out.
so if you don’t have a plan, that’s fine. most of us don’t. and even those of us who do, don’t usually end up doing the thing they thought they would. it’s okay to relax and let life carry you wherever it’s gonna carry you. because even though a lot of us don’t end up doing the thing we wanted, most of us end up happy anyway.
I’ve been thinking about this post since I made it a few hours ago, and I realized that I literally don’t know anyone who’s doing what they thought they’d be doing at this point in their life. I know a girl that has a degree in neuroscience and works in a restaurant (and makes quite a bit more money than I do, might I add), and a guy who wanted to be a parole officer but is now a security guard. I know people who wanted to be lawyers but ended up not having the grades for law school. I have a friend who’s 24 and just finished her bachelor’s, and two friends who decided to go to grad school because the idea of joining the adult world terrified them.
When I was seventeen, I was 100% sure that I was going to get a job as a bureaucrat and save the world. When I was a 21-year-old recent college grad, I found out that it’s impossible to get a government job unless you know someone. So I gave up and found something else. I know my teenage self would be disappointed if she could see where I’m at, but you know what? I don’t care. Because teenage me was an idiot. She didn’t know anything about the world or how it worked, and she couldn’t have possibly predicted the curveballs that life would throw at her. And because I don’t know a single person who’s doing the thing they wanted to do when they were teenagers.
I know a thousand people who aren’t where they thought they’d be, and zero people who are following the path they set out for themselves. All of us are confused and all of us are scared, and it’s okay if you are too.
Honestly thank u, i needed to hear this again
Looking back at my closest friends in college, only one is doing exactly what she thought she’d be doing, and she’s considering changing career paths.
Looking at the most successful and happiest people I know, they’ve all gone through serious career changes before the age of 30. Most of them have done crazy things like cross-country moves or quitting a successful career to try something new.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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