13159 replies to this topic

[pokari]

Jutte

VvvVVvvvVVVVVvvvVVvvv

[PItiful Boar]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleobis_and_Biton

Edited by Feishy Pit Boar, 05 June 2019 - 03:14 AM.

[penrosecat]

Lavish

 

"...green fields of home."

[pokari]

Moors

Misty moors of morning.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleobis_and_Biton

...yet another demonstration of why you shouldn't ask the Greek Gods for any favours, or get their attention in any way at all, good or bad. They have wretched senses of humour.

[penrosecat]

Noggin

 

I stopped reading at happiest person in the world.

 

If you look from the perspective of the nearest person, neighbour or even any random person, I doubt they will have 'happiness' on their minds. It's probably only thought to solve life's next 'challenge', which although not exactly unhappy does actually speak about how 'busy' we are. Is 'busy-ness' an exchange for the more primitive pastimes of apes that we aren't allowed to do in modern society?

Edited by penrosecat, 05 June 2019 - 07:24 PM.

[pokari]

I mean, the story has Hera killing the brothers and saying: "Look, now they're happier than anyone else," so whoever was coming up with the story obviously didn't think much of seeking happiness either. And also was maybe waaaay too pretentious. owo;

Not everyone is as challenge-oriented as you, dear penrowo, though I can believe that it's like that in your immediate surroundings. :/ (Well, people end up busy a lot where I am, too, but that doesn't seem quite healthy to me either. People burn out eventually, if they don't rest properly... In school the breaks are built-in, usually, but after that they aren't.)

Obviate

Of course, though, I agree that an existential question like happiness is probably not foremost on most people's minds. If it is it's usually because someone feels they're missing it, though, which is sad. :/

[penrosecat]

Perhaps

its nice how i come across that way uwu

[pokari]

You say that but I am genuinely worried you're working too hard sometimes. *headpat*

Giving it your all is fine, but remember not to give more than that. Burnout happens over long periods of time :/

Quaver

[penrosecat]

Result

Well, that's what friends are for, right? Curing each others depression just by each others company. Though burnout is slightly different, I guess...

I'm still glad to have nice friends >w< *hugs*

---

Hey, is it really true that 40% of schoolkids in the states do drugs? Or are in general super edgy? Somehow it seems tough to grow up there. Also juuls are super popular now among kids..?

[PItiful Boar]

I’ve been out of school for too long to know what kids these days care
I imagine college drug use would be around there

E-cigarettes are popular yes but they’re being cracked down so I expect the trend to drop.

Is it difficult to grow up here? I think it’s not as bad as Asian countries where they send you to cram school and you have to study twenty hours a day. Is it difficult compared to the past? Certainly. Is there a lot of pressure to succeed? Absolutely.

[pokari]

Result
Well, that's what friends are for, right? Curing each others depression just by each others company. Though burnout is slightly different, I guess...
I'm still glad to have nice friends >w< *hugs*

>w<

Hey, is it really true that 40% of schoolkids in the states do drugs? Or are in general super edgy? Somehow it seems tough to grow up there. Also juuls are super popular now among kids..?

First off, for any impressions our media gives of how "school kids are these days," I have to remember that they said wild stuff about us back when I was in school, too, but real school was always much less exciting and more normal then they said in the papers. There might be a kid who got in trouble here or there, maybe, but most people were, well, normal.

Now it's possible that this is because I live in the suburbs and urban and/or rural schools are unfathomable hell-holes that bring down the other end of the averages, but mostly I'm inclined to think the pictures painted are just a tad sensationalist.

(Also data seems to show that drug use has in fact gone down overall in recent years so in theory the schools should be even tamer than when I went to the , at least to the extent that I trust these data.)

Second, consider what we're measuring:

Most likely the number cited includes every kid who ever tried a substance even once, which is very different from the mental image of "a kid who does drugs" in practice. Usage should be on something resembling a normal distribution curve, so a good deal of this "40%" should in fact be kids who only tried drugs once or twice, and had enough.

Even then, 40% of "school kids" at large still seems suspect in light of basic sanity checks; broadly speaking more than a third of kids are in elementary school and unless the world has gone more wacko than I thought, the drug use there should be quite low (a quick check seems to confirm this); which would imply that 66% of middle-schoolers and high-schoolers use drugs and I'm quite positive we're not that bad.

The largest drug-abuse risk in K-12 systems seems to be in the last few years of high school, both based on statistics and my memory (we don't call college students "schoolkids"; I could easily believe that 40% of U.S. college students have at least tried drugs, so long as "drugs" includes marijuana, which we'll get to again in moment). If the sample is only of the latter years of education then 40% seems at leaast not-totally-unfathomable (though that sure wasn't any of my schools).

Third, looking at the NIH's numbers, the big "abuses" are marijuana, alcohol, and nicotine products; though in those upper grades apparently opioids also have their teeth in alarmingly well (something like 10% of students; note that this number I do know varies wildly by region and I am not in one of the areas where painkiller abuse is a big problem). So we're mostly talking about the "softer" drugs, if it does come out to 40%; whether we get to include alcohol and/or cigarettes will change the numbers noticeably.

Though supposedly Marijuana by itself has about 40% share of 12th graders. Notably the same page that says this says about 70% of the same grade says smoking marijuana is a bad idea; this supports the notion that these numbers include people who tried it to judge for themselves and then and quit it.

TL;DR: Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

I imagine college drug use would be around there
E-cigarettes are popular yes but they’re being cracked down so I expect the trend to drop.

Agreed on both counts.

Somehow it seems tough to grow up there.

Is it difficult to grow up here? I think it’s not as bad as Asian countries where they send you to cram school and you have to study twenty hours a day. Is it difficult compared to the past? Certainly. Is there a lot of pressure to succeed? Absolutely.

As food for thought, anecdotally a lot of the high drug use schools I've heard of are in relatively rural areas where conversely the problem is that there isn't much to do, school has been dumbed down way too much, and everyone is "bored out of their fucking minds" (or similar).

The opioid epidemic likewise seems to be as much associated with areas that are depressing to live in (e.g. slow, steady economic downfall) as anything else.

Drug abuse seems to prey more on those who feel things are going badly, rather than those who feel just pressured or exhausted, mayhaps?

Edited by pokari, 10 June 2019 - 12:51 AM.

[penrosecat]

Unmatched

 

so anyway, here the situation is like a kid wouldn't dare even utter the d-word, and pretty much anything like marijuana or anything is 'druggy' and not good (or rather, shame to your family, a bit cliche, but very true still), also what is creepy is how quickly people in america get 'diagnosed' with add and adhd and some other 'notasgoodasotherpeoplesbrains' diseases, and have no problem getting started on what people here would call 'brain-addling' 'medication', whereas here were just told to put in more work without complaining too much. i know that has its own set of disadvantages and leads to unimaginative people, but its weird how america is just going the opposite way, so liberal that everyone becomes edgy (or at least seems to me). no parent here would ever get their kid 'tested' (because psychologists help = you are retarded, again shame from what others think, in fact, counselling help in general is seen the same way) unless of course its an obviously visible issue

 

the fact that you explain the drug statistic without any sense of 'wrongdoing' attached to 'drugs' is also not a common stance you would find here. like the terminology 'softer' drugs, mostly people here (and to a large extent me) have no distinction between soft and hardcore drugs, drugs are bad, stay away, thats it.

 

smoking/alcohol is popular enough, but not really in school, rather in college seniors. seeing senpai smoking/getting drunk is a pretty common sight, though it is banned, and they try to keep it under the radar. and still most of the kids have it drilled in their heads that its bad, and avoid it.

 

in rural areas here its 'poverty out of their fucking minds' so the moment you get addicted to something, there goes your entire existence and your bloodline ends. bad end.

 

---

 

as for cram school, it hasnt got that bad here yet, but i can see it happening soon. yes every hour a teenager commits suicide because of academic issues, but these are mostly brushed over by parents etc, the cramming guys have real good marketing, and this is not changing any time soon.

 

i do not think i will live to see a time where kids are told to 'follow their major of choice' or even have proper institutes of things other than engineering and computer science and some maths ones. whatever, personally dont care since i made it already, but i have seen some very very sad stories of people who gave it their all but simply didnt have the aptitude to begin with to clear these 'life changing exams', but they still havent given up etc etc boohoo

 

basically i'm tired of being sad so i ignore all the sadness around me, very privileged behaviour, i know, but it keeps me happy :^)

Edited by penrosecat, 10 June 2019 - 08:27 PM.

[PItiful Boar]

also want to point out that it's kinda normal to be addicted to legal drugs like oxycotin which require a doctor's prescriptions, especially for rural people who don't have much to do and there's no place for them in the new economy. Kinda too late to train 50 year olds into programmers...

 

good job making it so far... am pretty sure you'll get a decent middle class job to make your parents proud. also, do you plan to come to the US eventually for higher education, like your senpai sjoe?

vaccines

Edited by Feishy Pit Boar, 10 June 2019 - 11:17 PM.

[penrosecat]

decent middle class job 

 

only s tier jobs are possible from my college (and major), so dont worry.

 

 

do you plan to come to the US eventually for higher education

 

im not really feeling it right now, considering the animosity in general towards outsiders and the expenses of living, and losing out on family, homecooked food and generally the comforts of life so early, but who knows. certainly not doing any thinking now, these are for the future me to get depressed over. besides a year is no longer short, and things change easily (not quickly though) so i could be singing a different tune a couple of years later, (like i was last year?) 

 

 

like your senpai sjoe

 

>w< sjoe where

[pokari]

Xylitol

so anyway, here the situation is like a kid wouldn't dare even utter the d-word, and pretty much anything like marijuana or anything is 'druggy' and not good (or rather, shame to your family, a bit cliche, but very true still),

[...]

the fact that you explain the drug statistic without any sense of 'wrongdoing' attached to 'drugs' is also not a common stance you would find here.

[...]

in rural areas here its 'poverty out of their fucking minds' so the moment you get addicted to something, there goes your entire existence and your bloodline ends. bad end.

To be clear, as a kid it was made clear to me that if I did drugs my entire life would end in ruins.

We don't have the "dishonour on your family" thing here as strongly, of course; our (over-)emphasis on individualism has that societal benefit, at least. Because society at large believes you're supposed to be independent from your family once you become an adult, anything you do as an adult isn't assumed to reflect on your parents as much; if your kid does drugs as a kid, it's more complicated and my impression is you'll get an overwhelming mix of conflicting sympathy and scorn from others.

As for our overall differences in attitude—a lot of that's due to stuff that happened back in the 60's and 70's in particular (and then our reaction to that a decade or so later, and then our reactions to our reaction in another decade or so, etc. e.g. presently culminating in stuff now about how we've put waaaay too many people in prison for drugs to the point where it's stressing our prison infrastructure, at which point you start asking things like, "okay, but did we really need to stick them in there for multiple decades just for being a dumb kid, if they never really hurt anyone but themselves?")

But I digress—Pertinently to myself, one of the things that happened in the 60's and 70's was the hippie movement; a generally anti-establishement movement formed of an amalgamation of both wise and foolish, smart and stupid people, deciding for a mix of both selfish and selfless reasons, that we should all love each other, free ourselves from various arbitrary-seeming restrictions of our culture (on love, sex, drugs, clothing), seek peace and the end of conflict, take care of the planet, enjoy simple pleasures, seek truth and deeper meaning, and persue both individual and communal spiritualism. A complicated mix of enlightened altruism and thinly-veiled hedonism, which apparently can get along amicably enough.

And the university I went to never has quite left that movement behind. Effectively, it was established in 1965 by a bunch of folks who were more on the "enlightened altruism" side of things, and while U.C. Santa Cruz has become much more of a traditional university since then—it's no longer clothing-optional, teachers now give letter-grades for classes instead of just giving you a note telling you how they thought you did in class, etc—and while the engineering divisions I was in were less-effected—the culture still lingers tangibly (my eccentric psychology prof, an old hold-on, would tell us at the end of each lesson, at least half-seriously, that we should remember to go run naked in the woods). That too is true with the students—and alas, as part of that, a visible cloud of marijuana smoke can be seen drifting off the campus every 20th of April.

While I won't even touch alcohol myself, one of the things that happens when you're in university with so many "druggies" in a relatively drug-casual environment is you get introduced to a bunch of them without knowing who is who, and only after you've learned that they're competent engineers who you can trust your back to on an assignment, do you learn dropped in casual conversation that they smoke pot and do magic mushrooms. It sort of deflates the narrative that these substances are all mythical evils that will consume you alive.

Though the flip-side is that some of them actually will. So in the end, the "softcore/hardcore" drug people are on to something to some extent, it seems, but...

like the terminology 'softer' drugs, mostly people here (and to a large extent me) have no distinction between soft and hardcore drugs, drugs are bad, stay away, thats it.

smoking/alcohol is popular enough, but not really in school, rather in college seniors. seeing senpai smoking/getting drunk is a pretty common sight, though it is banned, and they try to keep it under the radar. and still most of the kids have it drilled in their heads that its bad, and avoid it.

No, that's pretty much the same as it was for me growing up, except for different details; I mean I vaguely knew in theory we had the "softcore" and "hardcore" drugs but they were all forbidden things that bad, sad people take.

By softer vs harder here I actually just meant alcohol and tobacco and coffee vs. everything else; except marijuana has sort of become half like that in popular consciousness around here over the past ten years (which makes some sense; it's hard to argue that it's much worse than heavy smoking or boozing based on studies of it's effects, though, god, it smells terrible, which is unfortunate because it's basically as common as cigarette smoke here now).

I'm not done responding to everything in prior posts but I'm posting it now because this is on my phone and there are various ways I could lose what I've already typed at any point in time
The rest is as follows:

also what is creepy is how quickly people in america get 'diagnosed' with add and adhd and some other 'notasgoodasotherpeoplesbrains' diseases, and have no problem getting started on what people here would call 'brain-addling' 'medication', whereas here were just told to put in more work without complaining too much. i know that has its own set of disadvantages and leads to unimaginative people, but its weird how america is just going the opposite way, so liberal that everyone becomes edgy (or at least seems to me). no parent here would ever get their kid 'tested' (because psychologists help = you are retarded, again shame from what others think, in fact, counselling help in general is seen the same way) unless of course its an obviously visible issue

Keep in mind that there is such a thing as school psychologists here (though they're mostly invisible to most of the students most of the time), so "problem" kids may be diagnosed as ADD or ADHD even without their parents taking them anywhere.

I don't remember how I got diagnosed as such, personally; I was genuinely a weird, hyperactive, stubborn kid, so I think I'm more glad I was here—where I had to take medicine I didn't want and which made me slightly depressed—rather than being, say, the nail-to-be-hammered-flat in a society that still beats children who constantly stray out off line—but it's hard to say ~w~;

My gut feeling is that we now do over-diagnose people as being "ADD" where in olden days we'd just call them "distractible" or "absent-minded" and accept that as a personality trait that, while perhaps not desirable, is what it is—instead of trying to "fix" it which seems, I agree, a bit creepy. Especially so when we're possibly so focused on these disorders that hurt "productivity", moreso than others... But I digress.

There is a very interesting million-dollar question as to whether ADD and ADHD levels have actually been rising, or whether just diagnoses of them have. It is possible, given our changes in habits, diet, etc, etc, that we really do have a rising number of distractible kids; it's also possible we're just going manic about diagnosing them as such, and no one has a way of measuring one way or another. And so people just arbitrarily decide for themselves which of the two is the problem and act accordingly.

As for whether, in general, my generation in this area have become weird people, because of our not-well-tested, progressive upbringings—nobody knows yet, really, I think (that is, the casual relationship is difficult to establish. From the point of view of previous generations, we are definitely weird, I think, though perhaps that's normal). But, if you're getting your impressions from the media and from talking to people on the internet, you will get a bad/overemphasized example of how strange people are (as always :'p).

How that relates to edginess in particular, I couldn't say. ~w~; I'm almost tempted to blame prevalent internet access at younger and younger ages for that, moreso, honestly, but that's just a gut feeling with zero real basis.

only s tier jobs are possible from my college (and major), so dont worry.

To the extent that that's not sarcasm, I'm glad :'3

like your senpai sjoe?

>w< sjoe where

Indeed, I wanna see sjoe-senpai again uwu

Edited by pokari, 12 June 2019 - 06:30 PM.

[PItiful Boar]

add is on the rise because of a lot of factors - intense pressure, information overflow, competition with robots, social networking

yandere

[penrosecat]

man, a lot of 'overexcited' kids i know probably have add etc then

 

honestly i still think its a huge scam, basically ask enough questions and everyone's 'abnormal'

 

call a kid stupid enough times and he will believe it, same with anything else

 

 

intense pressure

 

but the diagnoses happen when they are kids, right? not when they are crazily studying for some exam? 

 

Zip

[PItiful Boar]

actually severe add is pretty noticeable - like they do some crazy shit like run head on into red lights; and it is literally impossible for them to focus on a thing for more than a few minutes. 

they usually get depressed because they realize they're different than most of their peers, and have to be segregated and hang out with different kids

i guess i was thinking more of non severe add 

[pokari]

Yeah, this conversation (and most conversation around ADD honestly) is about the "are you sure this is even a disorder" ADD, not any blatantly debilitating variety. I don't know that I've ever known anyone with symptoms like you describe, and I've known scores of ostensibly-ADD folks (as one does).

With regards to possible over-diagnosis, my mom pointed out last night (wasn't even my fault the conversation swung this way, was my sister's) that it used to be that basically everyone was farmers and you don't really notice fidgety kids whose minds are prone to wander a bit, on a farm, in the same way you would in a city school.

Bellicose

Edited by pokari, 21 June 2019 - 07:02 PM.

[pokari]

Cryptid

A quiet couple days on Vatoto ~w~

I didn't think I'd be the last one standing on the site, but lately it seems not out of the question that it could end that way. owo;

I am reminded of the impossibility of predicting the future.