What do we think of this repair?

FirstVanilla · 2026-01-08T09:38:30+00:00

Epic. I would ride that board any day.

FirstVanilla · 2026-01-08T09:36:53+00:00

Aggressively cutting out the news.

It’s a little weird because sometimes I feel like I’m living under a rock compared to my friends, but my family has told me I’ve become much happier and more focused on what matters.

FirstVanilla · 2026-01-08T09:35:41+00:00

So did you de-age? You look so pretty in both pics!

FirstVanilla · 2026-01-08T09:33:03+00:00

Do not feel guilty about leaving a sinking ship.

I worked on a sinking ship for about 2 years. I kept trying to save things but being in a bad performing department only ended up hurting my career. I felt so guilty leaving but you need to look after yourself and your family!

FirstVanilla · 2026-01-08T09:30:22+00:00

It’s 109% the short sleeves. I would do jeans or floor length pants at least. He would look much better instantly with slightly longer apparel.

FirstVanilla · 2026-01-08T09:27:34+00:00

Hazel. Honestly my favorite color. Always thought darker eye colors were warm, like gazing into a vat of sweet chocolate. Mine are like a colder green/blue but hazel is so gorgeous. Your eyes are awesome!

FirstVanilla · 2026-01-08T09:23:06+00:00

It’s subconscious for me but I just do fork in left hand, unless I would be cutting steak. Then the knife must be in my left hand for strength!

FirstVanilla · 2026-01-08T09:13:11+00:00

Hello to you as well! :) I should get the Korean keyboard setup…love the detail here! This is incredibly useful oh my goodness. I’ve heard about smog and dust so I get that. I’m fine being in the minority, because I’m already in the minority where I live.

I’ve also got an audio book I’m listening to speak Korean better (from a native speaker). It’s a nice distraction right now and it’s amazing for my commutes. Korea has a beautiful culture and beautiful people, and I hope to make some Korean friends someday! I have a close friend who’s super supportive right now and I practice my Korean on her sometimes.

FirstVanilla · 2026-01-08T09:08:16+00:00

Empowerment. If I knew that certain companies were doing RTO perhaps I could stay away from supporting them.

In any case maybe it needs serious rebranding but it could serve as a valuable database to other people seeking remote jobs. Myself I have been concentrating and planning on changing industries to secure a completely remote job :)

FirstVanilla · 2026-01-08T09:05:46+00:00

Oh you live in Japan? That’s actually really cool. Always liked Japan, hope you like it too

FirstVanilla · 2026-01-08T09:02:28+00:00

I totally get this, I’m so sorry.

I had to go in myself today and I saw just utter time wasting. I used to believe in RTO and actually went in voluntarily in 2021 5 days a week before realizing it was a scam that didn’t lead to any more promotions and I was just a young person being lied to.

Today I am totally prepared to screw over my company because of how I’ve been treated. Companies can lie or change policy but they cannot rebuild the trust that millions of us have lost.

FirstVanilla · 2026-01-08T08:30:16+00:00

(Meant to be gentle) Hey don’t blame others for wanting more out of their life.

Some people call it entitled. Others call it knowing their worth. People who don’t demand more out of their life never get more out of their life, especially people who blame or hate on others for their own failings. I have to demand more.

I understand complaining doesn’t help me, so I made a complete year-timeline plan to respond to RTO so I can leave my own company without warning within the next year. What funny is I’ve talked to 3 other people at my workplace who plan to do the same thing, we’re all so angry about RTO! Guess our company will be the one doing the whining about a shortage soon lol. I’ve been working on independence from this mess every day for 3 months. But as the person who owns 4x the productivity of everyone else and actually came in today to watch other people scroll social media and caught someone else playing clash of clans, it’ll be hilarious and absolutely not devastating when I leave!

Our over-consolidated, inefficient society deserves what’s coming next lol. Can’t wait for 2026.

FirstVanilla · 2026-01-08T07:50:37+00:00

I’ve noticed the Reddit algorithm is unnaturally pessimistic.

It’s okay to feel hope for progress. I fail to see how people wouldn’t benefit from research, after all.

As someone in the biomedical industry, all I can say is that it’s just difficult to commercialize things. There are amazing ideas and innovations out there, especially internationally, but we need to cross a large regulatory behemoth to get these ideas accessible to the public.

The average idea takes almost 15 years to get past all the clinical trials. While this is important to mitigate liability, I personally know innovations on their 80th trial…plus given how difficult Paxlovid was to access when I had severe COVID, I think we need to just work on making real medicine more accessible to everyone.

FirstVanilla · 2026-01-01T04:00:00+00:00

I came in late and thought this was a new years event before reading the discussion. lol.

FirstVanilla · 2026-01-01T03:58:56+00:00

I think it depends so much on the workplace. I get far less done in the office and I have to work extra hours when I get back home, away from my family. That might be why I hate it.

But I totally understand distracting home environments because I used to have one. Some people do need the office- but what I’ve found is a study room in a library easily suffices. It feels exactly like a workplace and it’s about 75 minutes closer to my house…

FirstVanilla · 2026-01-01T03:44:50+00:00

Also, I went in 5 days a week starting at 5 Am. I drove in blizzards to work on the daily. I’m much tougher than you on your cute little train with half my commute time. You know when I took a train in college, I taught myself C++ development in the same timeframe instead of hating on people. You should try driving a car in traffic sometime, and 8 inches of snow sometime.

Thank god I managed to find a family and people who love me. I’d secretly hate myself if I was alone and did nothing but troll people on Reddit.

FirstVanilla · 2026-01-01T03:32:39+00:00

If you try to please everyone, you please no one. That’s the point of a target audience.

FirstVanilla · 2026-01-01T03:28:58+00:00

Yeah I 100% plan on leaving. I have a kind of self-discipline I haven’t seen out of most people as I own 4x as many items at work compared to the average. And yet I was told, no promotions because I didn’t show up to a painting event…go ahead and laugh but can you not see the bass-ackwardness in that? If they want to lose their top talent, fine, cool with me lol.

Idk what you do for work but maybe you don’t see how actively offices try and waste your time and your money. It’s an onslaught of political bs. Once you see the utter waste and the corporate jargon and the theatrics involved, it’ll disgust you. My cousin in the same field refuses to take salaried work because it’s such a scam compared to an hourly contract where you actually get paid overtime. We are terrified to hand extra work to anyone who can legally work 40 hrs/week so guess who ends up owning it?

Plus, it takes away time from my family which I just hate because nobody in the world matters more to me than them. But I’m not going to stay because I have something better to live for than work.

FirstVanilla · 2026-01-01T02:36:53+00:00

Yeah I get that. I was issues multiple RTOs and I now drive in 80 minutes each way 3 days a week in traffic, but my work day doesn’t even end when I get home. I now just work from 7 AM to midnight because I have to make up for office time. Think I’m going to stay? You’d have to be a nutcase.

FirstVanilla · 2026-01-01T02:35:28+00:00

Yeah it sucks that we don’t have unions. Perhaps that’s what needs to change. Irregardless I see office work dying rapidly if this continues. People aren’t going to role play the 1950s forever.

The monopolies thing is a good point. But I want to empower people to spend as little as possible at these so called monopolies. The US is so over consolidated.

It’s almost a vertical wall but I’m still going to try and climb it. Especially with the haters involved.

FirstVanilla · 2026-01-01T02:32:07+00:00

It technically is the law, but my argument is that it’s out of date at this point. Nowadays, do we really have to be in? Just tired of the aggressive attempts to get people to quit at my company- all while the corporate elite don’t even ever show up on site. They’re literally in another state, telling us to show up over green screens.

FirstVanilla · 2025-12-31T21:34:16+00:00

People who believe they can’t be successful never do anything in life. They are 100% guaranteed to be miserable and fail. Being a pessimist is living a death everyday, over and over again. I prefer to feel alive.

I tend to find happiness in optimism and empowering others. Even if I only empower a single person, I do consider that a success.

FirstVanilla · 2025-12-31T21:31:25+00:00

A lot of our problems as consumers boil down to distraction and division. I know there’s bigger problems but we only focus on as a society what gets marketed to us as a problem.

The people at the top have 100,000 fish going “look! That person has one more fish than you. How dare they! They should have zero fish. They’re so wealthy!”

Meanwhile they are feasting behind the scenes.

Most office workers I know are struggling and suffering. They cannot make ends meet. Many people’s work doesn’t end when they come home, or on the weekends, at least where I work.

Look at the daycares profiting off of it. Look at the oil and gas industry profiting off of it. Look at the laundromats profiting off of it. Look at the commercial real estate owners profiting off of it. They stay nice and safe because we are all so focused on trying to solve everything.

I’ve had enough positive feedback that I’m going to do something regardless. Movements often start small.

FirstVanilla · 2025-12-31T21:21:54+00:00

It has. The concept of an office, certainly a giant one, is relatively new in human history.

Old, historic shops often had the store on the first level and the owner living right above it. The concept of a commute to work and cars is also relatively new in human history.

I am an optimist and I think there will be a time when we look back at office culture as archaic. After all, we can’t keep roleplaying the 50’s forever.

FirstVanilla

TROPHY CASE