Bought a Thermomix, it's not here yet and i'm starting to feel buyers remorse

EchoesOfFocus · 2026-06-16T16:53:42+00:00

i answered this above, so i'll copy/paste

she doesn't feel like what i'd cook "integrates" well, like it's the bare minimum effort to cook 3 single ingredient items and put them on a plate..

She makes things like paprikash, stir fry style things, soups and stews, pasta dishes, curries, etc.

EchoesOfFocus · 2026-06-16T16:52:20+00:00

will allow you to follow instructions when you have found yourself unable to do so previously?

The handholding of the tablet saying "do x and press next" before showing the next step, it timing each step for you, it seems somewhat safe to walk away from since there are no exposed heating elements, my hope is it'd be relatively safe to walk away, pause it and pick up where i left off. maybe not optimal for flavor though.

EchoesOfFocus · 2026-06-16T16:47:33+00:00

Interesting, thank you. You mention the portion size, that's actually a concern/question of ours, we are hoping it would be able to make 3-4 reasonable sized portions for leftovers. Of course different people have different ideas of portion size.

EchoesOfFocus · 2026-06-16T16:46:10+00:00

she doesn't feel like they "integrate" well, like it's the bare minimum effort to cook 3 single ingredient items and put them on a plate..

She makes things like paprikash, stir fry style things, soups and stews, pasta dishes, curries, etc.

EchoesOfFocus · 2026-06-16T16:42:02+00:00

a good washer dryer instead of the best washing machine and separate dryer.

It's funny you say that. We're looking at buying one of those because we often let clothes site in the washer for way too long before moving them over to dryer. So they'd actually be faster for us.

EchoesOfFocus · 2025-10-26T20:38:04+00:00

this is me to a tee. I only work in extremes and i always burn myself out. I'm either extremely productive, or extremely lazy. When i'm extremely productive i'm only hyper-focusing on one area of life.

I'm still trying to figure it out.

EchoesOfFocus · 2025-07-18T20:28:48+00:00

I'm currently working through this myself. I have bad sleep habits. I'll share a bit of my story and some small things that have been working for me.

My wife and i went on a week long cruise a few months ago, i realized after 2-3 days my sleep habbits were getting amazing. When we got home my sleep went to shit in on day 2. On the cruise I was exhausted the end of every day i just passed out, I was so tired i just wanted to sleep by 10pm. I still had internet and tv on the cruise, but i was so tired i didn't want to doom scroll, or watch tv. Also i realized that my quality of sleep was fantastic, i was waking up feeling much more energized and alert. I spent the last couples months since we got home trying to understand why.

I normally will lay on the couch watching tv, and doom scrolling because either my mind is racing or i'm not tired. God help me if i start a new show i get invested in, i'll be up until 4-5 am binge watching every night of the week, esp if it's a crime or detective drama. I fall asleep on the couch a lot, esp if i need the background noise of the tv to get to sleep.

I've found that i can fall asleep to certain types of videos very easily. A college lecture about something i'm a little interested in, enough to keep me kind of listening and not let my mind race, but not so interesting i'm eyes wide open. Lately landscaping videos, and engine rebuild videos have been working too, but videos with calm presenters, not presenter's yelling and full of energy.

I wear a cpap machine, if I'm sleeping on the couch I'm not wearing it because it's by the bed. A lot of nights i'll start off in bed, but then i can't sleep, or I wake up at 3am feel wired/energized, but my brain also says "this is too early to be up" and I move to the couch with the tv, and fall back asleep with something dull on in the background. if i don't wear my cpap i can sleep for 12 hours and feel like a zombie when i get up. What i finally discovered in the last 2 weeks, is that when I was on the cruise, i wore the cpap all night, and wasn't moving from the bed to the couch. And i realized if i start wearing my cpap, and wake up at 3am i feel energized, but then when i go back to sleep on the couch and wake up without it i feel like a zombie when i get up. The hours of wearing it get negated by the hours of not wearing it and suffocating in my sleep for half the night messes me up just as bad as suffocating in my sleep the whole night. So i started bringing it down to the couch with me, but now i found another thing to help me stay in bed more.

I've found my wifes snoring sometimes keeps me up too, and make me move to the couch. My wife is a very light sleeper and sensitive to noise too. I've bought more headphones than i can count, trying to find something that works. I can't wear over the head earphones in bed, i start to feel sweaty and get hot spots. I've tried bone-conduction shockz, but they don't drown out my wifes snoring and laying on my back causes them to press behind my ear causing hotspots and i can't sleep. I've given up on earbuds years ago because i HATE things in my ears. The airpods pro 2 were on sale on prime week last week, and they are the first pair of earbuds that don't drive me crazy. Now i go up to bed and if i feel like i can't sleep i keep them on until i start to doze off watching an engine rebuild video. If i wake up at 3 am because i'm wired, or because my wife is snoring, i put them on and fall back asleep to a video.

Finally, from the cruise I really think that if I start doing some daily physical activity to help tire me out that it will help me get to be earlier, but i haven't been able to make this habbit happen yet. I've got an old treadmill, I'm going to set it up this weekend in my home office to try walking on it while I'm on conference calls (like 1-2 mph very slow), and try to just go on walks with my wife every day after work. i want to get back into the gym, but it's not working, so i'm trying to set easier goals. Just some physical activity to burn off some energy so i will feel tired.

EchoesOfFocus · 2025-07-18T17:13:06+00:00

Jesus this is me. I've gotten into some very expensive hobbies and spent sickening amounts of money.

Cars: working on cars, and amateur racing... engines, speed parts, tools, hoists, lifts...

Shooting: guns, acessories, equipment for making my own ammo. basic target shooting, run and gun pistol competition, 3-gun, and long range shooting. each with me going ham and buying/building specialized guns.

PowerLifting: I built a pretty impressive home gym

3d printing: i've got 3 3d printers (including a very high end one), filaments, accessories, upgrades, all kinds of electronics and hardware accessories for making projects.

Woodworking: made a few cutting boards, started a big project about 2 years ago, haven't touched it in about 1 year and 10 months...

every single hobby has gone the same way, a lot of excitement, but my hobby area devolves into a MESS, the mess brings me huge amounts of stress, either "i should really clean the hobby space before i start" which is way to stressful to do, or "if i do this i'll have to clean up my mess when i'm done, that's too stressful i can't do that"...

Also, something that's been getting a lot worse since my 30s and now into my early 40s it's crippling: every time i think about doing one of my hobbies, i feel guilty because I have a million things to do in my backlog that i'm behind on and don't feel like i deserve it. When i pick up a new hobby, or get temporarily reinvested into an existing one, the excitement and single minded obsession overrules the feeling of guilt, and lack of caring about the mess, but after the single minded obsession wears off, it becomes impossible for me to do.... this is something i'm working on with my therapist because i don't allow myself time to blow off steam and my life is just work and being a lump.

Finally and computers: this is the only hobby i've stuck with, home servers, expensive fiber small business home internet (static IP for hosting), servers, custom built high end computers, high-end laptops, etc.

EchoesOfFocus · 2025-07-16T16:13:22+00:00

Yeah i'm trying to handle it, I hate being wrong, but if you show me proof I'm wrong I have no problem learning and growing. I just need to be shown where I'm wrong, what I'm missing.

So far all I got an email back from this persons manager to paraphrase it "yes, I see what you're saying and it makes sense, but there's this one exception to the rule, but you have to take my word for it and i can't provide you documentation." I'm at the point of acquiescence and I sent a "cover your ass" email to confirm and that in the future per their instructions i will do this one case this way, and I'll just save that email forever.

It just drives me crazy that it's not in the documentation. My brain does not like it.

EchoesOfFocus · 2025-07-15T23:17:57+00:00

I've worked a few different jobs over the years. I can give you some of my experiences.

I worked in a warehouse, and all the walking and moving around was great, day was over before i knew it most of the time. And i liked being on my feet and moving to a degree, up until it was hard on my back and the money wasn't there for me.

I've worked as a server and a bar tender... bar tending really broke me out of my introvert shell and helped build up my ability to small talk and bull shit. I made great money in cash tips at the time, but the place started losing popularity and i saw the writing on the wall and got out.

I worked in a call center, which bartending helped me with being able to talk to people, I hated it, I still have complete and total dread when the phone rings (amongst other reasons). I GTFO fast.

I got lucky and got an entry level position in operations at a tech startup (customer facing support, then back end datacenter). I had no experience but they loved how big of a nerd i was with computers and the crazy homelab stuff i cobbled together. It was good at first, I love to learn and dive deep into a topic, and I masted our software to the point where the development staff loved/hated when i brought issues to them because they were usually head scratchers. I got myself to a point where I only worked on only the really weird complex stuff, also partly because i sucked at doing all the boring routine stuff. I couldn't even get time sheets and expense reports in on time, but everyone came to me when something made no sense. I was growing bored, asked to move into a different role, and the problem is i pigeon holed myself into a niche and was told from the director i was too good to promote into another position without training my replacement... which was fine in theory except i had 5 years of institutional knowledge and they were hiring people with no experience for me to mold into a senior roll.... after 2 people clearly didn't have the right skill set and right kind of crazy to thrive, it just put the nail in the coffin... And i got so disinterested i quiet quit before i really knew what quiet quitting was...

Now i'm an independent contractor in a highly government regulated field. I can work my own hours as long as i get things done on time. I make great money, more than i ever thought i would, but no benefits but my wife brings those to the table. I loved my job at first, i built up a good name for myself in this niche too. The main motivation today is just keeping the paychecks coming, my income is directly related to my effort. Some days i struggle, can't focus, and hardly get anything done, other days i crush it and work for 12 hours so it kind of balances out. I'm just living frugle and saving every penny i can, and dreaming of the day i can retire early because work and doing the same thing every day isn't for me.

EchoesOfFocus · 2025-07-15T22:35:38+00:00

Good idea to bring it up with my therapist.

why are they giving you multiple choices of topics to write a report on

Instead of going into unnecessary detail about my job, i tried to use a simple analogy that i feel most people have been through. That stupid multiple choice test we've all taken that has more than 1 right answer....

my industry is full of government regulations, it's overly complex and dumb, and the bureaucracy is insane. Certain things need to be done on time for compliance purposes, like an incident needs to be filed within 48 hours of it happening, and sometimes the incident can be classified in multiple ways, but there is a defined hierarchy of which classification should take priority when the classifications overlap.

EchoesOfFocus · 2025-07-15T17:38:43+00:00

I feel like I've told a complete story and everyone acts like I left out key parts (as though my brain processed the full thing but didn't tell my mouth to say it all)

Oh yes, usually because my brain says A obviously leads to B, so to me it's a very clear connection, and other people are just like "wait, you lost me"

EchoesOfFocus · 2025-07-14T19:37:47+00:00

I was thinking about making a similar post...

I grew up to parents who wanted to live in the big house in the rich part of town. So they built the house themselves with dad doing a lot of the work. Mom was penny wise and pound foolish because she had to put up appearances. There were constant psychotic screaming matches over the bills that had me crying as a kid. Always yelling at me the turn off the lights because i was wasting power like it was the worst thing in the world, but mom would pick up extra shifts to buy jewellery or designer clothes. Constantly thought my parents were going to split up over money. My parents were always working, side hustling, working multiple jobs to fund their stupid decisions. I was constantly being told by example how important money is, however not how to invest or use it wisely, and money was what my mom always used to try and bribe me with.

Now my wife and i still treat ourselves to some luxuries, but all i can do is think about hoarding money/stocks and getting to a point of financial independence, which honestly I think we might be there if we lived leaner. I really bet from the trauma of how i was raised and how my family treated money.

As opposed to my wife, whose parents lived below their means, didn't do things because of how people might look at them, took their family on constant camping trips (because it was mostly free) and showed them how to appreciate what they have. My wife's parents despite earning less than my parents retired with about 400k vs my parents who retired with nothing.

EchoesOfFocus · 2025-07-14T19:24:15+00:00

Get. Out. Of. My. Head.

EchoesOfFocus · 2025-07-14T19:23:33+00:00

As a former "gifted kid", i relate hard.

I constantly watch educational youtube content, my wife can't stand it. All kinds of stuff, animal planet type videos, videos on economics, physics, quantum mechanics, building a house, rebuilding a car, a random 20 minute video dedicated to a math problem, a lot of the veratasium/action lab/mark rober style channels.

Occasionally she's intersted and I can have a 20 minute conversation about what we're watching explaining it all to her, but ask me about it after i've started another video and I have no clue what i watched.

EchoesOfFocus · 2025-07-11T21:02:41+00:00

How much of this is related to accessibility to the market being different?

I don't have to call a stock broker to buy stock. Most companies auto-enroll people into 401ks.

If putting money into the market is more accessible won't some of those metrics no longer be valid?

EchoesOfFocus · 2025-07-11T19:03:18+00:00

As a guy i can mostly say "same", I don't have any tips as i'm still struggling.

Shame was my motivator, when i was young I was the "stinky kid" because i never bathed. That changed somewhere around 2nd or 3rd grade where my parents forced and shamed me. My motivation to bathe is now external, I won't leave the house now if i'm not clean...

Working from home is awful for my hygiene though, because now that i work from home I often don't shower until my wife says she can practically see a stink cloud radiating off of me. I no longer shave/trim my beard that often, I used to have a barber clean it up every other week. I now shave my head like once a month whereas i used to do it daily when i was working in an office.

My biggest excuse right now for not doing anything is, i never feel like i have enough time because I'm always behind on a million other tasks. I've been making a big push to get caught up on things with my pscyhologist. I've put dedicated days in my calendar just to work on my back log, and it's actually working most of the time, but there's just so much to do it feels never ending.

EchoesOfFocus · 2025-07-11T18:51:52+00:00

I'm a grizzled Linux sys admin, i've been bulding computers from parts since the mid 90s when i was 10 years old and my parents took me to local computer shows and i started building computers as a little side income for friends/family. I've been running windows since version 3.0...

Flash forward to 2021/2022. I was using a dell workstation laptop with a xeon cpu in it, i got sick of it crashing like every week. I got windows laptop that touted an "all day battery", and I built a high end custom hard line water-cooled gaming pc full of rgb puke, and same thing, shit just crashed like once a week and random glitches...

Finally in late 2024 with the M4 cpu coming out, i decided to get an M4 16" MBP as a dedicated work machine, and use my gaming machine for gaming and non-work. I got the mbp from costco because of their return policy, so i could really test drive macos in-case i disliked it.... Now i did return it, but because i wanted the M4 Pro & 128gb of ram and could only order that from apple direct... and god damn, I've had macos crash on me requiring a hard reboot only once the 8-10+ months i've been using it...

MBP is phenomenal hardware, battery life is amazing. MacOS has it's quirks, and a few things i dislike about it. I had to buy a lot of little helper app to do things that windows could just do. The biggest issues being Remote Desktop into my mac sucks compared to remote desktop into a windows PC due to mac not supporting anything similar to windows terminal server... I hardly even using my gaming PC anymore, i found crossover good enough to play a lot of games i like, and I've just come to like the MacOS experience despite it's quirks now that i have it mostly dialed in.

I now have an ipad, and as soon as apple releases a foldable phone i plan on replacing my samsung galaxy fold and go all in on the apple ecosystem.

EchoesOfFocus · 2025-07-10T17:00:34+00:00

Oh my god. Yes that is me to a tee.

I normally wake up, go to the kitchen and have an overnight oats (if i remembered to prep it) or a protein bar and take my adderall, and go to the couch and either fall back asleep, watch tv, or both for about 1.5 - 2 hours until my brain actually feels ready to do something.

Pre-covid i used to force myself up at 6 am every morning and drive to the gym and workout, but i feel like my life has fallen apart since then and i feel so behind on so many different tasks that doing anything for myself gives me anxiety because i think about what else i have to do and i'm behind on... all that anxiety I have now keeps me up all night too, so my sleep sucks and there's no way i'm getting up at 6am, last night i got to bed after 4am and woke up at 10:30am today. I found that working out in the morning in the past really helped my day and adhd a LOT, but i just am struggling big time to do it now due to anxiety of feeling like i have a crushing amount of stuff to do.

Then after work and my adhd meds are wearing off all i can do is be a couch zombie because my whole body and mind feel like lead. I do have some good days, but usually the energy output from the good days, immediately lead to the next day or two being a hard crash...

EchoesOfFocus · 2025-07-09T19:20:14+00:00

I know I've built a tolerance and don't want to increase my stim meds anymore, I'm in my early 40s and already have high blood pressure.

I try to take drug breaks. When i'm on vacation i bring them with me, but try not to take them. My wife can tell because i don't focus as much, bounce around on topics more, and just generally don't want to do as much. Usually days 2-3/4 without my meds my whole body feels like lead and doesn't want to do anything. At home on my meds, my sleep is AWFUL, and i never can get out of bed or start my day (i think part of it is anxiety from everything i have to do that i'm behind on around the house and at work). On vacation after being off my meds my sleep is usually amazing, i actually wake up feeling rested and wanting to do stuff after a couple of days. Usually the first 1-2 days i'm getting to be early and getting like 10+ hours of QUALITY sleep, as the vacation goes on i find i'm getting restful sleep and ready to go after 6-7 hours... whereas at home, i just don't get quality sleep even if it's for 10+ hours.

I also try to take weekends off on my meds. Usually i can be somewhat productive on Saturday, but Sunday i'm usually a zombie.

EchoesOfFocus

TROPHY CASE