I appreciate seeing the Quaker love on Lemmy! (UUs are awesome too, in my experience!)

There’s a lot to take issue with in your post that doesn’t mean people prefer fake things.

Assuming people hate reality because of these arbitrary dichotomies that aren’t actually black and white.

Spending time online can mean making real, personal connections. Why is that less valuable than spending time outside? Are people who have allergies or heat intolerance or live in a big city somehow lesser because they can’t spend as much time in nature?

Many people don’t get plastic surgery or any of the things you listed. Plus a lot of people who claim they hate makeup and prefer “natural beauty” actually just like natural-looking makeup and prefer that to people who truly don’t wear any.

Organic is more expensive and less accessible than not-organic; often it’s not a choice. Plus like another commenter said, it’s not like GMO means fake. We’ve been genetically modifying plants for millennia through selective breeding; we’ve just sped up how it’s done.

Ozempic is an easier way to weight loss and yeah, some people take it as a lazy way out I’m sure. But also a lot of people who are overweight aren’t just that way because they’re lazy, but because there’s an underlying issue. Mental health issues like depression or addiction; physical health issues that cause weight gain like hypothyroidism or issues that make exercise difficult (and yes, weight can add to these problems, but a lot of time it’s a both/and situation); socioeconomic problems that make healthy food inaccessible due to time or cost limitations or living in a food desert. There are many reasons people are overweight beyond simply choosing not to exercise. (And I shouldn’t have to do this but just to head off any judgment you want to throw at me: my BMI is currently 18.1, putting me in the “underweight” category. I have never been overweight, I just have empathy for people who live different lives than me.)

You’re making a lot of false dichotomies and everything you’ve said is rooted in judgments of people. I suspect that’s where the downvotes are coming from, but I also suspect you’ll find issue in what I’m saying and dismiss me for it rather than checking in with your own biases and judgments.

My partner and I started dating when I was 23 and he was 35 and while I don’t think OP is in the right, I really feel like we stretched the bounds of what was ok. I still had a lot of learning the basics of being an adult, and he had to put up with some incredibly immature shit from me. We’ve been together 13 years now so I don’t regret it, but I do cringe and worry when I see others following in my footsteps.

My dad has always been on the right and he’s a Trump voter, but he’s mostly avoided going full MAGA-proud. We have always had a tense relationship when it comes to politics and at times had very little personal relationship. Now we just avoid political discussions or keep them very high level, and it’s manageable. I talk to him a lot less than I would if he didn’t have those views. His health is declining significantly at this point so I have decided it’s not worth trying to change his mind.

My mom is still with him and she’s leftist and we talk all the time.

My dad’s two sisters are deep into MAGA (they were proud attendees of Trump’s first inauguration). They’ve been far-right fundamentalist Christians most, if not all, of my life, so I already had a strained relationship with them before 2016. I haven’t even tried in over a decade now. I was recently diagnosed with a chronic disease that one of them also has and I kept thinking about reaching out but ultimately decided I don’t even want her in my life for that so I haven’t bothered.

My company has started using a survival metaphor of air/water/food.

• Air - “keep the lights on” work; things that will fundamentally stop the product or business (legal, compliance, security) if not done in the next year
• Water - foundational work; tech debt is here
• Food - strategic work, new features, experimentation

It works because it recognizes that you need all three to survive and you have different time scales on which you can survive without them.

We will choose not to drink water sometimes to make sure we can eat some food. But we will die if we only consume food.

I’m on the product side and trying to buy my teams as much capacity to pay off some of our wayyyy overdue tech debt, and this metaphor has made it easier to convey where we are to my higher ups.

Usually I’ll answer product management because that’s what I do and I enjoy it (and I had no idea this career existed while I was in school), but reading this I actually think it could be a good fit for you, depending on how you feel about socializing with people.

I have an English degree but I also worked at an IT company every summer from high school through college, doing many different jobs with an increasingly technical focus. I taught myself HTML and CSS when I was like 10, but except for one high school class of Java I never got deeper into coding than that.

My interest in language and words combines with my technical aptitude in product management. I usually describe it as a job of translation, because I have to work with customers, internal users, business leaders, designers, and developers, and I need to be able to talk to and listen to all of them and understand their context well enough to translate to the other groups. I might need to tell the exact same story half a dozen completely different ways depending on my audience.

There are lots of different approaches to product management and every company does it differently, but some of the critical skills are being able to identify and deeply understand problems (of the business, of customers, etc.) and propose solutions to those problems.

It sounds like you have some technical aptitude but also interest in language and story telling (and a big part of product management is writing what are literally called “user stories”), so if you don’t mind the people interactions, it might work for you too.

I’ve been on or involved with Product teams for about 10 years now and had an actual Product Manager title for over 6, managing a team of PMs for the last 3. I feel like I found it by accident but I totally lucked into a career I actually love, so I’m happy to talk to people about it any time!

You and I are on the same page. My only point was that there are unfortunately many people out there now who believe they have a “healthy” level of skepticism, but are actually misled, misinformed, and not educated enough to distinguish reality. And I named specific groups who frequently fit this pattern.

When skepticism is truly healthy, it’s great. But there are many people who are unable to identify what “healthy” means here. No where did I say or mean to imply that some skepticism is a bad thing.

Unfortunately this also gets abused by some people who believe they have a healthy level of skepticism, but actually are way off the deep end. Like anti-vaxxers, flat-Earthers, and other anti-science people.

So “healthy” in this context shouldn’t be defined by the individual.

Worth noting since “sugar-free” sometimes means “sugar substitute” in marketing parlance: some peanut butters use xylitol as a sweetener, and xylitol kills dogs.

So yeah, read the label. Some peanut butters have literally just peanuts as an ingredient and those are best!

And the difference between that level of “upper class” vs the truly wealthy is insane.

Unless you’re in places like CA or NYC, $170k allows for a very comfortable life. It’s nothing to scoff at and it is absolutely beyond what most people in this country have.

But when thinking of the “upper class,” I think most people picture lush lives. Mansions, yachts, foreign vacations, private schools, house staff, etc.

I don’t think most people imagine someone who lives in a nice suburban neighborhood, saves enough money for retirement that they actually expect to retire in their 60s, and takes a modest vacation every year. But that’s closer to what $170k gets you. It’s comfortable and it’s a life most people would kill to have. But it’s a whole lot closer to a stereotyped “middle class” experience than it is to what most people imagine “upper class” to look like.

My partner and I have discussed our wildly different willingness to try to survive in a post-apocalyptic world plenty of times over the years. He would work to survive and would probably thrive more than the average survivor. Me? I’ve always said I’ll likely head to the cough syrup section of the pharmacy.

This conversation came up earlier today, in fact. Well, I was recently diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. I’m still sorting out the right medication to get it under control and am dealing with a lot of pain, but way less than before starting treatment. I told him with this diagnosis, if society ever collapses in a way that causes me to be unable to get my medication? I’m out.

Thanks for links. As someone recently diagnosed with RA, I’m still trying to absorb as much information on it as possible.

What’s interesting about the study is it focused on RA patients without positive rheumatoid factor (RF) blood work. Now, in my skimming I didn’t see it mention anti-CCP, which is the more definitive test for RA. Despite the name, positive RF alone could be any number of things that aren’t RA. They didn’t mention if they were totally seronegative, though.

I have an unsubstantiated theory that seronegative and seropositive RA may be distinct diseases, but we don’t know enough yet and we treat them the same, so they get the same name. If the pts in this study were totally seronegative, that could correlate to my theory where maybe “seronegative RA” is actually more of a long-term infection triggered by measles. But these are just idle musings.

As a side note, the name rheumatoid arthritis is pretty silly from an etymological standpoint. The words basically break down as:

• rheumatism means inflammation
• -oid means like a thing
• arth- comes from joints
• -itis means inflammation

So put together, it’s “inflammatory-like joint inflammation.”

I use alt+0151 for em dashes and alt+0150 for en dashes, or if I’m in Word or Outlook I use its autocorrect to trigger them (“word - word ” turns into an en dash while “word–word “ turns into an em dash).

But now I’m starting to avoid them. I’m just glad AI hasn’t ruined semicolons yet (especially since I’m using them sometimes to replace em dashes).