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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • My solution, which I honestly believe leads to a much more happy life consist of two things:

    Have a conscious relationship to what you can do something about. “Dog peed in laundry” is a great example. It’s already happened, there’s nothing I can do to change that, so I’ll just fix the problem. No point in getting irritated. The point is: Don’t get mad about stuff you can’t change/influence.

    Always give everyone the benefit of doubt. If someone says something hurtful, like "your mother is a fat asshole™ ", I’ll try to think “maybe they have legitimate concerns about my mothers health, and legitimate concerns about how she’s treating others that I should bring up with her”, rather than immediately thinking they’re just trying to hurt me. That me be disproven in later conversation, but I believe it helps me treat others in a better way, and helps me be a more balanced person.




  • To be fair, I’m a decent programmer: I spend a significant portion of my workdays programming all kinds of things. Writing a program to generate sudoku’s with a unique solution, without copy pasting a bunch of algorithms, but actually making it all up yourself definitely sounds non-trivial to me.

    (Read: That sounds like a really hard beginner project, and you should be proud for even trying, and you shouldn’t give up :) )


  • This may be old advice, and I can’t speak for music or languages (where I myself have the same issue) but for woodworking and programming this is my experience: Once I get some idea for something I want to build, that becomes the goal of the project, not learning the skill itself. It could be carving a small model boat, or writing a sudoku solver, but at least for my part, once I get caught up in some project, I have a hard time letting it go. That’s as opposed to if I sit down and try to systematically learn a skill.

    Some suggestions for projects off the top of my head:

    • Some kind of simple encryption/decryption method.
    • A nice wooden box to put something nice in (possibly without visible metal parts)
    • A sudoku solver
    • Model car (maybe with wheels and movable doors)
    • A little “river steamer” with a rubber-band driven “propeller” (don’t know what the wheel on the back of a river steamer is called)
    • A “peg solitaire” solver (because I was really frustrated at not being able to solve it)

    The point is just to find something else that interests you, that can motivate you to learn the skill you want :) good luck!


  • I think this response is great, because, while I’m on the other side of the fence (theoretical chemist that sucks at anything artistry related) I think it’s a common misconception that math/science/engineering isn’t creative.

    I find that misconception both with people struggling to learn it, and often with people teaching it. The reason I bring it up is that, in my experience, the “hard” sciences become both more fun and easy to learn, and more easy to teach, when creativity is encouraged. For my own part, I’m wildly chaotic in the way I solve problems, and my notes are typically a jumbled mess of drawings and scribbles. For my students part, I’ve seen stuff loosen for a lot of people when they’re encouraged to just let their thoughts flow out on their paper, rather than thinking everything through five times first.

    By all means: There’s a difference between math and art, but I think a lot of maths teachers and students could have a better time if they allowed themselves to think more artistically, especially those that are well inclined to it.