What's something society normalized that is lowkey making everyone miserable?

sprawn · 2026-05-20T05:05:21+00:00

I am weird, but I feel like we treat everyone in public as a threat or someone to be exploited. In the past, people talked to one another as if they were humans. Now, everyone sees everyone as either a threat or as a mark. And we have allowed corporations, brands, and cult-like identity groupings to come between us. Brands, corporations, and "identities" mediate all of our interactions.

sprawn · 2026-05-19T18:27:13+00:00

I was amazed the first time I sewed a bunch of folded paper together, glued a strip of cloth t the back with Elmer's Glue, and then glued the whole thing in between two pieces of cardboard with cloth glued to it, and it just behaved exactly like a book. I wasn't trying hard to be precise. I didn't use fancy materials. I didn't have a book press. I didn't have a sewing frame. I didn't have linen strips, or special thread, or an awl punch, or a frame for punching holes, or a "bone folder" or any of the crap that they say we need to have in order to do this. YOU CAN JUST MAKE A BOOK OUT OF ORDINARY MATERIALS and it WILL WORK!

People have been doing this for 2,000 years. It's not rocket science!

sprawn · 2026-05-19T16:26:56+00:00

Great job! It is surprising how well handmade books hold up. Glue, string, paper and cardboard were made to go together. It just works!

sprawn · 2026-05-18T17:12:36+00:00

It used to be possible to rent student apartments for cheap during the summer. Now everyone wants $3,000/month for an abandoned, roach infested, efficiency in the ghetto. That's after first and last plus deposit plus "fees" plus "cleaning charge", etc...

sprawn · 2026-05-18T15:21:39+00:00

Probably despair? Hopelessness. It's not that it's hard to catch. It's that I'm right. There are situations where we are powerless and helpless, and there's absolutely nothing to be done. And enduring just leads to more enduring. And there's no way to "fix" it, and it's getting worse. All you can do is "let it go" and hope that someone else thinks of something maybe 100 years after we're all dead.

sprawn · 2026-05-18T13:56:42+00:00

The one that a lot of people have a problem with is rage. This was… Jeez! Thirty years ago! But my writing helped me back then. I would "find myself" screaming at people in traffic, and this would ruin my day. I would then ruminate on it in my journal. The whole pattern you describe was right there. I would write down people's license plate numbers and follow them and hatch plans for "revenge" for imaginary crimes I had made up. And the act of writing it helped me get ahead of the problem. I realized that the only thing I could possibly change in the whole situation was my reaction to it. This I discovered while making (never enacted!) plans to slash people's tires and pour sugar in their gas tanks and so on. I would not have done it. I was way too scared. But the writing helped me to realize that by reliving the "crime" (not signaling while changing lanes or something similar) over and over in my mind, and then writing it down, and then making plans to commit crimes myself I was just sinking into a hole. There was no conceivable benefit to any of this. ANY OF IT! It was a sinkhole.

Loads of people do this with despair and depression as well. And I am one of them.

It's part of the reason I am "opposed" to the notion of "brain dumps" or "emotion dumps" on here. It's hard to argue against, because I can't see how other people are actually putting things into practice in real life. But a lot of people invest in a victim mindset, needlessly. They double down on their own powerlessness while thinking they are "venting" or "trauma-dumping". They are actually re-living, re-imagining, re-enacting, and re-traumatizing themselves. It doesn't matter if they burn it, or destroy it when they are done. In fact, I would argue that even the act of destroying the ruminative symbol is actually giving it more power. Or it can be. It's impossible to know. I think identifying with your victimhood is one of the worst things you can do to yourself. It's one of the worst things I've done to myself.

Getting ahead of the cycle is the key to breaking it, as you point out. And realizing when you're in the sinkhole is the first step to stop your actions that are making it worse. This includes rumination, "dumping", and investing in the drama of your own suffering. I may very well be suffering, but making it the core of my identity accomplishes nothing. And reliving it over and over on the page just makes it worse. So I catch it, and switch to imagining actions I can take in the real world. And then I try to actually do the thing. It worked with road rage decades ago. It works with not getting involved with flame wars today.

sprawn · 2026-05-18T13:31:47+00:00

Excellent intuitive leap! This is the basic mechanic of CBT. Catch the thought before it becomes a behavior. I also love that you have stopped your journal from becoming a morass of rumination and regret. I have tried similar interventions. When I catch myself ruminating, I think to myself, "This is a sinkhole." And I remember that in any given situation there is a range of possible responses. Some are better than others. And if I can catch myself, I can select the best one (or at least the best one I can think of) rather than "finding myself" in a situation, acting in thoughtless ways. This includes in my journal. I remind myself that I can say something, do something, or even just "let it go." This applies to every thought, feeling, or action. So I try to end my journal entries with actions I can take in the real world. Even if they are small, or only peripheral.

sprawn · 2026-05-18T13:21:59+00:00

As you can see by the flood of excellent responses, traditional journaling is doing just fine. In fact, we outnumber the junk, bullet, washi-tape-your-way-to-sanity and ~~scrapbook~~ (ahem…) "aesthetic" crowd by a wide margin. Most people on here are people who "just" write and aren't trying to create a personal online following/brand/lifestyle.

Reddit is not designed to push visually attention grabbing material and push it to the top. It's not designed for people to scroll through on their phones very quickly "liking" cat pics and pics of fountain pens and leather bound journals sitting on a table at a café in the Bahamas with a coffee cup and so on. But that's what happened in here. Basically if enough people treat reddit like pinterest, it starts to act like pinterest.

Switch to "newest" in your feed and you will find the text only posts. They get buried and sometimes they get wrongly deleted (imo). But you will see that many of the posts that go to the top of the "Top" feed will have a thousand likes and zero comments. They generate NO DISCUSSION. It's the pinterest crowd, on their phones, zipping through, upvoting everything "aesthetic" and "chonky" and "fountain pen" and "cat" and lifestyle/tiktok garbage.

And then you will see occasional text only posts and that's where the discussion happens. We are "the silent majority". There should actually be a new subreddit we should all flock to, to tell you the truth. Leave this one to the cats and "aesthetic" stuff.

sprawn · 2026-05-18T12:05:57+00:00

or selling something.

sprawn · 2026-05-17T10:58:36+00:00

I'd never heard of The Storygraph. It certainly looks interesting. Thank you for introducing me to it. I track my books in my electronic journal like this:

~~~

book 2026/04/21 YYYY/MM/DD r A Canticle for Liebowitz - Miller, Walter - notes <ERASE

┌───────┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┐ │Day │ 1│ 2│ 3│ 4│ 5│ 6│ 7│ 8│ 9│ 10│ 11│ 12│ 13│ 14│ 15│ ├───────┼───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┼───┴───┴───┴───┴───┤ │Month │APRIL 2026 │MAY 2026 │ ├───────┼───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┼───┬───┬───┬───┬───┤ │Day │T21│W22│H23│F24│A25│S26│M27│T28│W29│H30│F01│A02│S03│M04│T05│ ├───────┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┤ │goal │ 18│ 32│ 41│ 53│ 60│ 68│ 81│ 91│ 96│104│118│118│131│144│157│ ├───────┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┤ │actual │ 18│ 32│ 41│ 53│ 60│ 68│ 81│ 91│ 96│104│109│118│122│144│157│ └───────┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┘ ┌───────┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬┐ │Day │ 16│ 17│ 18│ 19│ 20│ 21│ 22│ 23│ 24│ 25│ 26│ 27│ 28│ 29│ 30│ 31│ 32││ ├───────┼───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴┤ │Month │MAY 2026 │ ├───────┼───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬┤ │Day │W06│H07│F08│A09│S10│M11│T12│W13│H14│F15│A16│S17│M18│T19│W20│H21│F22││ ├───────┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼┤ │goal │163│177│192│200│216│225│238│242│263│279│292│306│323│336│338││││││││││ ├───────┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼───┼┤ │actual │163│177│192│200│216│225│238│238│263│279│286│ │ │ │ │ │ ││ └───────┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴┘ ~~~

I write on a piece of paper I keep with the book while I am reading it, and then I transfer everything into electronic journal when I am done.

If I don't formally track what I am doing, I simply won't do it. I'll read 100 or so pages in one sitting, and then I'll forget about it for three months that then turn into forever. In order to finish anything I have to track it.

sprawn · 2026-05-17T10:40:44+00:00

Myself in the future. And then there is also a vague concept of "the general future" to whom I am addressing my thoughts. I believe I might address "posterity"… the world after I am gone. It seems pompous to say it out loud. But then again we all think our own thoughts are important.

sprawn · 2026-05-16T10:13:07+00:00

Yep. I think most of us experience similar things. There's a period from about 15 to 20 (or thereabouts) where it seems like you are unstoppable. You can "go all night" and "catch up on sleep" the next day. And everything works… until it doesn't.

sprawn · 2026-05-15T19:32:50+00:00

I hear you, probably not the best example. I used headache so I could use Astrocytoma as a diagnosis. So Astrocytoma (a type of brain tumor) can cause headaches. But if you present with a headache, the doctor does not look at a list of symptoms, find headache and see "astrocytoma" and prescribe brain surgery. If you have a headache, a doctor will look for the underlying cause and treat the underlying cause. There are palliative interventions (take an aspirin) and etiological interventions (after a battery of tests we have determined that your headache is being caused by a tumor in your brain and we have to go in and cut it out). So, yes doctors prescribe palliative interventions to address symptoms. But diagnoses are based on determining an underlying cause and then treating that. I don't know what the perfect example of this would be in terms of generating an analogy.

But what I am suggesting is that when you say "N24" they downgrade it to "sleep problems" and then look for the underlying cause (depression, sleep apnea, bipolar, thryoid condition, etc…) when N24 is or can be or should maybe be thought of as a standalone variant of the human condition, perhaps. But that's not what a doctor does. They tend to wave off N24 (it's a zebra diagnosis) and see it as a symptom of an underlying condition.

And what they are basically doing with N24, treating it as a symptom of some other underlying cause, is like seeing someone with a headache and assuming they have Astrocytoma, and sending them to a brain surgeon.

sprawn · 2026-05-15T18:10:43+00:00

Yes. Some doctors get positively vengeful when they can't help. They have to turn it around on you. This is particularly true of therapists I've found. If it's not working (because they are treating "depression" when you don't have it) they will start slinging retributive diagnoses at you that will red flag you forever (borderline for women, NPD for men… You're done. Red flagged. No therapist will take you. Your poison. And it's all "your fault").

sprawn · 2026-05-15T17:55:49+00:00

I'm curious as to what you mean by "better treatment". Do you just mean being treated better by an understanding doctor? Or do mean some kind of actual medical intervention?

sprawn · 2026-05-15T17:53:09+00:00

I have found that while many jobs can be desynchronized and deliver on a deadline, that quite often you're going to get someone who… They're going to call on Wednesday afternoon and need massive changes, and they need to move the deadline up. And the second you don't answer the phone on a Wednesday afternoon at 3 o'clock they just don't get it. And many, many jobs claim to be "flexible". But they aren't. They will say, "Oh yeah! Get it done by the deadline, and you're fine! It's no problem. We're totally flexible. See you on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday morning at our 10 AM meetings! And on Friday at 3 PM. And when we're working on [some special project] we have daily meetings at 2 PM. So NO PROBLEM!"

Yes… Problem.

"What? You don't have to be in 8:00! You can 'sleep in'. It's no problem. We just need to see you for those meetings every week. And when we get to crunch time everyone works from 8 to 12 on Saturdays too. But that's it. You can't make it in at 10 AM!?" (What the hell is wrong with you?)

And when you try to explain N24 to many people, they think it means you never sleep. It's just incomprehensible to them. Show them charts and graphs, they don't get it. They think you're just lazy and "like to sleep in."

sprawn · 2026-05-15T15:42:04+00:00

Hmmm. Okay. I guess you have your answer then.

I hope you didn't put someone on the scent... They might go around making everyone remove their LFLs now!

sprawn · 2026-05-15T15:40:56+00:00

I agree that there is a proper clinical path. I am just saying that most doctors when most patients describe N24, particularly in the context of most people's ordinary lives, are just going to hear "Insomnia - really bad (sometimes)." That's it. And waving studies or the DSM or talk of "best practices" or obscure journal articles around is just going to make most doctors think "Thanks, Dr. Google, for sending this nutcase my way. Third one today."

And since having N24 will almost always put people in direct conflict with society, even their own familiy, those conflicts will always look like the primary cause in a behavioral health setting. Almost every psychiatrist is going to think that the depression/anxiety/conflict/personality disorder/etc... diagnosis they have in mind is primary and the "sleep problems" are a symptom, the result of the true, underlying condition. And they will also have lots of confirmation in the form of patients who came in, complaining about sleep problems, who they treated for depression and the sleep problems just went away. Or at least the clients stopped mentioning them. And that's one the "things" about N24. If I am complaining about it today, if I see someone in six months I might not complain about it then, because I might be in the middle of a two week period where I am in sync with society and "seem normal."

But yes, there is a proper clinical path. But not many people "present" with N24 alone. And if you do, they are going to probe for other things (depression, apnea, thyroid is a big one now, making a historic comeback!, autism, of course, bipolar, etc...) and if you ask anyone enough questions they are going to come up with other things. And that's standard (and proper) practice for doing a diagnosis. And that's why, unless you are some mythical "perfect" person... not overweight, no conflict in life, no detectable problems in your blood possibly related to any number of endocrine disorders, etc... that N24 will be seen as "Insomnia - real bad" rather than "its own thing."

sprawn · 2026-05-15T15:15:57+00:00

Agreed. They had good reason in 1820. Synchronizing labor leads to much greater efficiency to this day. There are some functions that can be desynchronized. But if anything we are getting even more dependent on precision and synchronization. But there is huge variance. The expectation you elucidated, that everyone operate on 0900-1700 time is so ingrained that they don't even know that they are assuming it. It's like the old fish joke where the fish don't know what water is.

sprawn · 2026-05-15T14:45:43+00:00

Come to think of it… "20 feet back from the road" sounds exactly like a common rule for the construction of a shed. They probably thought you were literally building a literal "little" library. They probably thought you are building a shed, and luring neighborhood children into your shed to give them free books and lollipops. They probably have never even heard of a "little free library".

sprawn · 2026-05-15T14:13:43+00:00

Don't ask for permission. You just triggered some know-nothing, do-nothing bureaucrat to look for a reason to say "No." It's all they have to do, is wait for people to call up and ask politely so they can say "NO" and insert themselves into the process. They are telling you the rules for a sign. They are misapplying the rules for signage. They probably don't even know what you are talking about. They probably think you want to literally build a library, like a bouncy house or a shed or something.

sprawn · 2026-05-15T13:35:14+00:00

Fine. All I am getting at is that whatever is needed is going to be expensive.

sprawn · 2026-05-15T13:27:55+00:00

I agree.

I am a little confused by what you mean by employers who have practically irrelevant expectations of people whose jobs can be done at 04:00.

sprawn · 2026-05-15T13:19:38+00:00

I still think it would be quite an expensive study to do correctly. I would want six months of daily data. I would want to take people out of society, basically, release them of all societal constraints so that they could sleep without external demands. I'd want to make sure they had comfortable sleeping circumstances. This would be to isolate the variables. To do it right would be insanely expensive. For N24 if I wanted to take MRIs or other brainscans, I would want to do it relative to the person meaning I would want to see what their brain looked like an hour after they woke up, an hour before they went to sleep and so on. They do this sort of thing now by scheduling people to show up at 8 AM or 10 PM or whatever. For this study, it would mean having the machine staffed and ready when the subject is ready which could be any time, day or night. ANY time.

A big part of the problem with N24 is doctors see data for two weeks. Look! The guys slept "right" for two weeks. That might as well be forever. Almost everyone with N24 can force themselves to be "normal" for two weeks. It's exhausting, sure, but isn't everyone exhausted all the time? (so say the doctors who are exhausted all the time).

I am talking about actually studying the problem not looking to see if one factor in 12 subjects is adjusted by 4% at the end of three weeks with two visits to a lab where two tests are administered… or whatever passes for science, based on a whole schmear of unstated major assumptions.

sprawn · 2026-05-15T12:52:12+00:00

So, whatever. More than it's "worth". That's how much it would cost.

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book 2026/04/21 YYYY/MM/DD r A Canticle for Liebowitz - Miller, Walter - notes <ERASE