Yes, I don’t think I have another app but more features on some apps I use (Smartdock, Joplin, Librera, Rimusic) would be slightly life-changing.

I really, really like this.

This is the single best piece I’ve seen about mental health in mainstream media. Thanks for sharing

Wasn’t GiveDirectly one of EA’s big things and precisely what you’re describing here? Unconditional cash transfers

What do you use for TTS? I’m interested in both a service that’ll turn a PDF into an audiobook and that reads a document line-by-line. I use Librera for the latter but the FOSS voices available on F-Droid leave a lot to be desired.

Can I ask how you ended up there in the first place? I can scarcely think of a more interesting place on earth.

How integrated are you into the local community? How well do you speak the local language? I’m a foreigner living abroad and I would never trust either my own perception of this place nor 99% of other foreigners’ perceptions.

Surprised by how hiɡh up Mexico is!

Why were there trackers initially?

I’ve always wanted to learn to sing, ever since I was a kid. I even started taking lessons before I went through a major life change that pushed all of that aside. I meant to come back to it but I realised recently it just doesn’t matter to me enough to pursue it compared to other things I want to achieve. And it really never became fun for me: it seems like the only way to improve is to 1) make it a team sport, which isn’t an option for me, 2) start improving from when you’re young enough that you’re not self-conscious, or 3) painfully just listen to yourself be awful until you improve as an adult. Which is totally 100% doable, but pretty joyless & not worth the time investment for me rn.

Good for others but doesn’t work for me as it’s not on mobile sadly. There are several mobile translation extensions but they all rely on Google/Microsoft/DeepL & I don’t know how to assess the privacy consequnces of that.

Not too good. I had a half hour long conversation with a friend on the phone recently & I realised it’s the first time I’ve had a phone conversation with somebody I actually wanted to talk to in months, except for that time I called another friend freaked out bc I was scared of my neighbour harrassing me. Not exactly the same giddy energy. This phone friend and I tried to meet up and got foiled multiple times. Shit’s exhausting.

My first edit to this post was “maybe I should take up gardening or sth but where to start” bc I want to be able to interact with and get feedback from just about anything besides my coworkers once in a while.

Good response, thank you! I found the article I posted interesting but I have no horse in the race about whether AA is effective or not. Seems pretty convincing that it isn’t.

I find theorising addiction both unfortunately directly relevant and applicable and abstractly extremely interesting. I recently read an article which was satirical (but seemingly not entirely so) arguing that alcohol (and, consequently, addiction) is a disease of civilisation, Gilgamesh-style. But Amazonian foragers and horticulturalists (to my knowledge) get loaded on manioc beer (and seemingly did so before Old World contact), not to mention dolphins and elephants getting high on all kinds of shit. Fair enough that in a natural setting there are systemic limits on these things so addiction doesn’t often arise. So, how, why? And what roles do different kinds of intoxication (or other non-intoxicating addictive states) play? A million questions for a million different answers, all important in their own way. Gets at the fundamental questions of pain and pleasure and why and how we do anything at all in life.

Sorry, I can’t hear you over my sitting down and standing back up repeatedly xD

Lol no doxxing but in broad terms which lemmy communities did y’all meet in? Interest-based?

One of the recent Facebook whistleblowers said her version of social media was her & her friends sharing news articles in a Signal group chat. That’s, like, my wet dream.

But I have no reason to believe Discord is even an iota less evil than Facebook.

I wish I could loosen up and enjoy malicious tech but like I said, I just can’t unring that bell, even though it makes my life meaningfully worse. Iykyk

Antidepressants can have serious side effects that can persist even after stopping. Look up the Surviving Antidepressants forum. That doesn’t mean don’t use them, but it’s just a truism that all pharmacological intervention has risks. To see randos diagnosing & medicalising someone for a lemmy post that isn’t an obvious cry for help is…objectionable, and in poor taste, and imo diagnostic of some much larger problems, but I don’t have the time to spare to argue that point. But people promoting what could be life-altering compounds as no biggie demands a response. (Again, my position isn’t ‘don’t use antidepressants,’ it’s ‘messing with your brain chemistry demonstrably can have serious consequences and is a serious decision.’)

edit: rephrased