Since posting, I’ve actually re-evaluated. With the benefit of hindsight, I think it’ll be lucky if it’s three stars.

I dunno, I think it will end brilliantly.

To add one thought that others haven’t mentioned, inattentiveness to the early warning signs of volatility in the moods of others can often leave us suddenly surprised when others express emotions such as anger or frustration or irritation.

For me at least – and I have friends who say the same – this often leads to codependent people-pleasing behaviour because these emotions and situations catch us off guard and can make us fearful of finding ourselves in such a position. As a result, we might develop a maladaptive pattern of pre-emptive management of the feelings of the people around us, where instead we might just learn to accept being uncomfortable, or develop boundaries around the culpability we accept for the circumstances leading to others’ moods. In friends who have had abusive or unsafe childhoods, the maladaptive pattern seems especially pronounced because it’s an important part of survival.

What this looked like for me before a butt-ton of therapy is that I felt stressed when anyone around me started to express any negative emotion, but even before then, I was orienting my behaviour to give attention to the more volatile people in my life as a top priority. My task selection wasn’t really focused on achieving my goals most times, but on doing things that others wanted–or things I perceived others wanted or needed–in order to make sure their days went well and any potential bad emotion dissipated before it got very strong.

For instance, if my (perfectly loving and kind, but ‘normal range of human emotions’-having) wife had a bad day at work, I might come home, make them their favourite meal, make up their bed, and then watch a show with them until they fell asleep.

And on the surface, sounds nice! Sounds like caring! But it’s done primarily out of fear, not out of caring. There is caring in there, no doubt in my mind, but it’s not the first motivator.

And I’ve seen this pattern play out in me in different contexts and in different ways… with my wife, with my kids, my parents, and in the community; in hovering, fawning, in leaping to ‘be useful’…

I think over time, this sort of behaviour leads to an external focus that does make you feel like your job is to help everyone. Throw in a soupçon of impulsivity and then you’re telling strangers in the grocery store that the bouillon cubes they’re looking at are on sale at the store across the street.

Therapy’s helped. It’s such an ingrained pattern for me that I fall back to it and it’ll be my life’s work to remember that I’d rather act out of true love and kindness rather than fear of discomfort.

Absolutely. Capitalism categorizes all people as ‘useful’ and ‘useless’, the former really being ‘exploitably productive’.

Lots of folks with tons to offer the world are shunted off to the side because what they can offer isn’t valued by capital. Either that, or their challenges are perceived as too substantial for the accumulationists to bother to see what accommodations could be made.

But why bother when humans-go-in-money-comes-out is the depth of all thinking and concern? It’s not the company’s job to care that people are starving three houses over! Why don’t they just get a job—

Hey, I just finished my own search for a good Linux-compatible PDF editor. I wound up choosing Master PDF, which works on both Linux and Windows and has a demo available. It’s about $100 for a license which I’ve very much found worth paying.

… I’m sure that there are also methods out there for getting it to work if you find yourself unable to pay the license cost.

As for dual booting, it’s a bit of a learning curve but the software has gotten so much better over the years that I think you’d be easily able to do it. Find some YouTube videos if you feel anxious or if you have specific or unusual needs in your setup and just go for it!

Edit: but back up your files, just to be safe!

I’m a principal backend engineer routinely writing Ruby for my day job, so I’m familiar, lol. But you can’t do it for local variables and that just sucks. Definitely a +1 for Elixir.

jealously weeps in ruby

As a person who homeschools his three kids, it is tough but it is possible to find folks. We’ve lived in some pretty remote places and there’s usually at least a few families within a half-hour drive. In cities, it’s a lot easier.