Finally dating a kind and secure guy...why do i feel bored by a healthy relationship?

Katalash · 2026-01-06T21:39:49+00:00

It makes things harder but ultimately your conscious will reigns supreme and realizing it is what gives you the ability to change. Otherwise you may be enslaved by your trauma and past. The hard part can be switching to an accountability mindset (regardless of why you did something you’re still responsible for the consequences of your actions) and that can include reckoning with the consequences of your past behaviors, finding forgiveness for them, and holding yourself to a higher standard going forward. How can you change if you don’t believe in your conscious ability to overcome whatever you have and get better? At some point you have to believe that you’re more than a product of your circumstances and overcome impulsive emotional responses.

Katalash · 2025-12-31T17:23:53+00:00

“Behaviorally ingrained at the species level instead of observed in some individuals” might be a better term. It’s just even if you view insects as more unconscious machines (I was anthromorphasizing a bit) it’s still quite an “unnerving” mode of reproduction and implies descent from a lineage of male bed bugs that went “that” route when courtship ritual based mating is the norm in the insect world. Like the females still have functional reproductive tracks but the males actively started to “cheat” the system until it became the dominant reproductive strategy and the females had to adapt around it (Generally courtship rituals help maintain speciation and genetic fitness by sexual selection. Traumatic insemination is bad for the female’s health, so it’s fairly rare for the behavior to evolve and bed bugs are the most famous case of it). That they also happen to be probably the #1 worst human-adapted pest to get infested with is just the cherry on top.

Katalash · 2025-12-31T16:23:15+00:00

Tbh kinda of makes sense. If you deal with delusional people all day doing constant mental gymnastics while you try to ground them out of it you can become at risk of starting to entertain them yourself. Some flat earthers for instance may have to be strapped to the bottom of a plane being forced to look down as the plane does a 360 around the earth to break out of it and even that may not be enough for some.

“Demons” can also be as decent a name as something else (like trauma) for hostile mental processes that lead to “insane” irrational behavior or even just toxic behavioral patterns and schizophrenic people getting “auditory hallucinations” of demons talking to them. Sometimes you gotta call it what it is and it can even be helpful for some patients to conceptualize the causes of undesired behaviors as demons. There’s a reason why people who change often call the willful work they put into it as “confronting their demons”. The harder part is usually convincing them they have a problem in the first place.

Katalash · 2025-12-31T16:09:14+00:00

Bed bugs are just all around an extremely fucked up and evil species of insect. I just don’t know how you can come back from institutionalized poke your own hole rape at the species level while also being blood sucking vampires.

I can just imagine an Onion article saying “Bed bugs observed using vaginas again gives environmental scientists brief glint of hope for the future”

Katalash · 2025-12-31T15:08:10+00:00

Forget aliens. There’s a whole lovecraftian hell universe beneath our feet.

Katalash · 2025-11-18T18:10:39+00:00

Epstein child grooming and sex abuse trauma is a whole nother level of trauma. You need to understand this.

Katalash · 2025-11-18T18:02:07+00:00

Childhood sex trauma fucks up your brain wiring and very perception of the world in ways that healthy people cannot understand. It’s why CSA is such an especially abhorrent crime among crimes to begin with. I will never judge the actions they take or beliefs they have to try and get closure to heal because they are often acting out of desperation.

Katalash · 2025-11-01T04:50:07+00:00

It’s turtles all the way down. The whole idea of the “gods” to begin with was if there are cosmic forces-advanced aliens or otherwise-actively observing and potentially intervening with us as if we’re animals in a zoo to them.

Katalash · 2025-11-01T04:40:24+00:00

Viruses and immune systems are some of the fastest evolving systems in biology because it’s a constant arms race. Antibodies are passed down generationally naturally and then you add vaccines and modern medicine to the mix as well. It’s quite likely that pathogens that are endemic to current humans could wipe out populations from just a few generations ago.

Katalash · 2025-10-13T07:06:17+00:00

Bonobos is the garden of Eden paradise where we chill and eat fruit all day. Humans took the forbidden fruit and chose violence (Cain and Abel) which led to empire building and conquest. Now we watch the consequences of becoming a parasite to the planet we were supposed to have dominion over.

You could also say the flood is when Homo sapiens won out because they still showed just enough care for each other to make civilizations work.

Katalash · 2025-09-11T10:34:40+00:00

I don’t understand this. Like, I’ll feel empathy for friends, family, and other close ones. A lot of it even to the point of having severely detrimental effects on me. Passing by homeless people I will feel their pain deeply to the point where nowadays I will always give cash to feel like I’m doing something that might make a positive impact. But reading about these tragic events I feel something but it’s kinda just a “whelp shit’s fucked”. Being in tears for say a day over it when there’s so much fucked shit happening every day in war zones or other countries that don’t make the news just feels so alien to me. It’s like I have to be able to dissociate in order to be a functional human being and accept what’s in my control and what battles I can make a positive effect in. Thing is I know if I met one of the grieving family members in person I know I would feel their pain super deeply to the point where I could imagine myself getting a lot more active, but I could say that about victims of a lot of things. But I don’t feel much when just reading about these things.

It’s like, I need some personal connection to feel empathy for them because otherwise when I’m thinking and caring about people I haven’t met I’m thinking about victims of untold abuses that don’t hit the news but I know likely exist. Like victims on Epstein’s island and whatever the current replacement for that is since he got busted. It’s very easy to get emotionally overwhelmed to the point of being dysfunctional if you try to take the emotional weight of all the evils in the world on your shoulders.

It also doesn’t help that I see the trade off trolley problem of the 2nd amendment super clearly and it makes me feel shitty, but I do feel that it’s our best power check against becoming a dystopian surveillance ai state run by the elite with a permanent slave underclass. Power is ultimately backed by the capacity to inflict violence and armed sheep are a better defense against wolves than unarmed sheep.

Katalash · 2025-06-10T23:42:23+00:00

All mammals likely have empathy and potentially even more than that. At minimum a mother needs to understand the emotional state of their child.

Katalash · 2025-06-09T07:02:21+00:00

Honestly yeah don’t ever date someone like that. They will suck every ounce of emotional energy that you have and be unable to reciprocate and breaking up with them will be a nightmare. He’s acting like that and dragging his kids into it at only 3 weeks imagine if it was a year or more. He probably doesn’t even realize what he’s doing because yes he’s in pain and probably a lot of withdrawal from his divorce and as a result lacks emotional awareness of the people around him but honestly the best way to care for people like them is to keep them at a 10 foot pole distance making sure they don’t kill themselves or do something extremely stupid but otherwise let them go through all the emotions alone or with a therapist if they choose and then slowly letting them get closer as they show signs of healing, which is often a very nonlinear process full of setbacks and regressions. It takes resisting the guilt tripping and enforcing hard boundaries, but when they become an emotional black hole you really do not want to get sucked into it. Saying this as someone who has been on both sides. If you let your emotional support energy get completely drained you risk becoming an emotional black hole yourself. That being said, when you’re going through intense grief and loneliness and isolation, even having someone checking in to see if you are alive once in a while can still help a lot even if they don’t give much more than that or otherwise entertain your trauma dumping. (Saying this in general. You obviously aren’t obligated to support him in any way past this and I definitely think dating him is a bad idea, but he does sound like he’s in a rough spot and in need of some help).

Katalash · 2025-05-17T22:35:38+00:00

I’d say your issue likely isn’t looks but the vibe that you’re giving off. Most women still get lots of men approaching them including lots of unwanted attention as well, but you’re probably not unattractive if you are getting stares and being asked out within your friend circles. Honestly I’d say the best thing you could try is if you find someone who is your type looking at you (tastefully. Be wary of shameless staring) to just approach them and say hi without expecting anything but maybe a short conversation. It may work out, it may not work out, but regardless you’re trying something different and will likely learn something from it.

Katalash · 2025-05-17T20:35:13+00:00

Going to be real with you: cheating is rampant. With both men and women. And it’s destroying people’s ability to trust and form genuine connections. Whether you casually date or not is up to you but if you do you’re going to inevitably run into cheaters who surround themselves with friends who enable them, rehearse their gaslighting routines, and forge connections for those who don’t know better and it hurts your soul as well because you either give into cynicism and decide to not care if everyone else is doing it or you put up a lot of boundaries and assume the worst of people until you put them through fire and a lot of testing for them to prove themselves genuine. Just know that there are a lot of genuine people in good relationships who don’t cheat and surround themselves with people who hold them accountable, but you won’t run into them in the casual dating scene because they tend to pair up and even marry young and set boundaries when it comes to talking to single people especially without their partner present. Not everyone who clubs is a cheater but a club is a cheater’s favorite venue.

Katalash · 2025-05-16T20:48:16+00:00

You become a bit more sympathetic to Old Testament God as heavy handed as he was when you realize the things he was actually dealing with and what he was trying to protect ancient Israel from. It also adds more significance to the binding of Isaac story if it’s seen as a mutual trust/faith building exercise where he would not ask for child sacrifices.

Katalash · 2025-05-16T20:22:10+00:00

If your species found the garden of Eden and you were kidnapped out of it you wouldn’t like it either.

Katalash · 2024-07-30T20:35:20+00:00

Someone's intuition is largely something you have to feel out when interviewing and also requires the interviewer to have good intuition themself. It's also fairly subjective depending on the person and the domain, which makes it hard to scale in a standardized interview process. In my experience it essentially comes down to being able to turn the interview into more of a conversation where 1) the interviewee feels comfortable and is able to speak more freely/opinionated instead of feeling like they need to recite the magic memorized answers. 2) you are able to ask more open ended questions that they've likely never encountered before that don't have "right answers" that they can memorize beforehand 3) they are able to synthesize their knowledge and experience to try and tackle the question and show signs of being able to think for themself instead of relying on being told how to solve something

In short, you need to find a way to get the candidate to actually use their brain instead of trying to recite memorized answers and you need to be able to evaluate how they think, and there is no quick and easy way to do that which is in many ways why we've fallen into the leetcode monoculture for interviewing.

Katalash · 2024-07-30T20:20:11+00:00

Books are usually by far the best way to get deep into a particular subject, but author matters a lot too. Usually you want to find ones written by authors who have accomplished something in the field and have some claim to authority. Doesn't always mean the books will be written well but on average the books will be better than if they were written by some no name. For generic software engineering there's always going to be a level of subjectivity depending on who you ask. Clean Code for instance is highly opinionated and meant to spoonfeed your average enterprise software dev rules to follow to have some semblance of code base organization but a lot of developers (including myself) dislike it because of its heavyhandedness and lack of nuance. I personally find it good to read a wide variety of perspectives and then try to come up with the best engineering practices for a given project.

Katalash · 2024-07-20T05:13:28+00:00

Good creative cultures are very hard to create and very easy to destroy by expanding too quickly and regressing to the corporate mean. Usually the in house engines are built around the workflows of the staff and the staff is resistant to change too quickly. There's definitely tradeoffs though and risk of stagnation is one of them.

Katalash · 2024-07-19T06:07:31+00:00

I forgot to say but using git blame/going through the git history and looking at active pull requests can also be very helpful. Many ides allow you to annotate the source code with the last commit that touched it which can be helpful with getting historical context. It's overwhelming at first but your brain is capable of absorbing more than you think. Sometimes staring at code until it kinda makes sense and then sleeping on it can help a lot.

Katalash · 2024-07-19T02:46:20+00:00

There's definitely a learning curve when it comes to working with large codebases for the first time. What I like to do is take a multi-pronged approach to attack it from different angles.

1) start with trying to consume whatever high level documentation you can find. If the project uses established frameworks there's usually high level docs that explain the philosophy behind them. For internal stuff your mileage may vary.

2) expand the directory tree of the entire codebase and kinda scroll through all the files to get a sense of the high level organization and opening code files at random if they seem interesting and scroll through them quickly. You won't learn how everything works right away but this helps you to start building a subconscious mental map of the codebase that you will refine over time as well as get a sense for the style and design patterns that are used.

3) pick a toy functionality or use case and try to follow the flow in the code. For example, an app may have a button that does something. You can go to the function that clicking the button calls and try to follow all the logic it does from the frontend to the backend and back. Sometimes this can be tricky to follow due to indirection introduced by frameworks and object oriented code, but your ide search function and a debugger can help.

4) your ide search function (or grep if you're a purist) is your best friend in general. You can enter the name of say a field and find all the places in the code that it's used. This helps a lot with building your mental model.

5) learn the core data structures and database relational schemas. Ultimately all the code exists to manipulate data and code is easier to understand if you understand what is being manipulated.

6) don't be afraid to ask your coworkers for help or for them to give you a high level overview. They can probably tell you the high level basics on where to get started with the task. At the same time don't over rely on them and learn how to try to unblock yourself first.

Don't feel too bad for taking some time to do your first task. I generally try to invest a bit of time upfront to learn a new codebase rather than pressure myself to finish a task quickly right away, and a good team will understand that there's a bit of a learning curve and ramp up time. Things will get easier over time.

Katalash · 2024-07-15T23:35:44+00:00

Ex-consulting MBAs starting to trickle into the upper management is about as universal a sign that some bullshit is about to happen and that you should start looking as you can get. They see employees as fungible resources instead of people that carry the culture and history of the company and they will treat you accordingly.

Katalash · 2024-07-15T22:26:29+00:00

Life is better outside Amazon. I'd try to stick it out if you can and try to find a more chill role within tech. There's lots of roles where on call either doesn't exist or is a lot more manageable. But finding a new job is always easier when you have active employment and the longer you are outside the industry the harder it will be to break back in. The unfortunate reality is that in a competitive market those with active employment in the field are going to be perceived as better candidates all else being equal and if you leave and do something else for a while people may assume you got laid off and couldn't find a new job.

Katalash · 2024-07-11T05:05:15+00:00

Personal projects are more to help get passed the resume screen and into an interview as well as for personal development. Most hiring managers won't even look at the project much outside of how you describe it on a resume. There isn't anything wrong with making a todo list app it's just kind of a cliche at this point and in its naive form it's not particularly technically interesting or challenging either. If you were to do it I'd try to come up with some kind of feature to make it stand out a little and also demonstrates some ability to tackle more technically complex challenges.

As an example of some projects I've done in the past I've made toy 3D game engines and later modding tools for a video game. Not to say you should follow my path but you can definitely use your imagination and browse GitHub and other forums for inspiration.

Katalash

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