Yes, but "GIF" is not etymologcally Germanic. 😉

The people already with the money have orders of magnitude more freedom on average to decide and pursue opportunities.

Free market inventions do not guarantee persistent and open access.

Espresso in the morning. Cappuccino after meal. It's been at least ten years.

It looks like I have a great place to land if fzf ever starts to make my life difficult. Thank you!

But I also feel like a loser, because even those ranting doctors earn more than twice what I do… and they get to sit for longer than I do.

Regretting my life choices.

What kind of "I also feel like a loser" is this feeling?

Maybe the sane choice here would be to study or to get a certification that means a higher salary?

What in particular would that get you? I mean beyond the obvious "More money would make my life easier" thought.

Peace.

I think MIT Open Courseware would be worth exploring.

I've never done this and would never do it, for all the reasons people have already described.

I would, however, choose a 6-hour train over a 2-hour flight, as long as I traveled in (European) first/business class with a seat reservation.

There is almost no amount of money that could convince me to travel 36 hours by bus if I could instead spend 5-6 hours going through airports and only one flight. If I literally didn't have the money to fly, I would spend all my energy figuring out how not to go at all.

Some people learn about the limits of their control over events by meditating. Even when you stop trying to do anything, your body tries to do things and things change around you and you have the impulse to control things. Repeated exposure to this impulse eventually caused me to start laughing at how silly I was to assume that I was in control.

Maybe something like that could help you. Peace.

I'm annoyed when things don't work. I'm even more annoyed when something can't be made to work.

I find the first kind of annoyance much more ephemeral.

Yes.

Also a machine on fire tends to run a bit more slowly. 🔥😉

Very specifically for me, two parts of Getting Things Done:

• get things out of your head
• always set reminders

I have felt so much lighter for over 15 years because I can safely forget all these things I used to struggle to remember so that they wouldn't sneak up on me.

Getting things out of my head was easier to build as a habit at the dawn of having a computer in my pocket all day. Even back then, I simply chose to be an asshole for a few months, stopping everything to write things down or to do them on the spot if they truly took only 2 minutes. Especially taking photos of receipts and labeling them when traveling for business.

Setting reminders was similar, but rockier, since calendar apps sometimes have defects. I gradually learned which alarms to trust and learned to use those more often. Even so, Samsung Clock has at least once surprised me by setting my alarm volume to 0, causing me to miss one alarm in the last 10 years.

In both cases, I did nothing special except decide to build the habit and spend the effort to ingrain the habit through repetition over the span of a few months.

Yes. Of course. I fail to see where I suggested not softening the rejection. 🤷‍♂️

I write "You can't make them take your no for an answer, they have to choose to do that. It's not a matter of politeness and it's not your responsibility." and people draw conclusions based on facts not in evidence. That. Is. My. Point. Whatever you try to do, they'll find a way to find you rude, so don't take responsibility for that.

Moreover, let's also remember that a less-polite "no" is still a "no", and people need to learn to respect those, too. A sharper "no" is very often the result of 100 attempts to be polite and still be considered rude.