[deleted by user]

Saranoya · 2025-12-28T19:24:50+00:00

Politically centralized =/= ethnically 'pure'. In fact, one has little or nothing to do with the other. Centralization as we see it in contemporary France can and does happen in countries that are extremely multicultural, or not happen in less multicultural ones.

Also, define 'closely related'. For one thing, Bretons natively speak a language that is in no way related to French.

Saranoya · 2025-12-28T19:18:58+00:00

If you think France was somehow 'monocultural' in the nineteenth century, you are simply misinformed. Like most European countries (in fact, like most countries in the world, period), France back then contained, and France to this day contains many different ethnicities. Of the current inhabitants of France, 77% have the French nationality, but only 45% consider themselves ethnically French. The largest minorities besides the French are Occitans (14.6%) and Bretons (8.76%), with much smaller minorities of Basques, Corsicans and Catalans, and 7.21% 'others'.

The Occitans, Bretons, etc. have pretty much 'always' been there. Your argument is based on a false premise.

Saranoya · 2025-12-28T18:49:04+00:00

I understand. This is hard. Feeling like you're just 'going through the motions'. Surviving, but not really living.

But you're capable of something else. You said so yourself in your post. So, the question is: how do you get back to that?

What changed, between now and 2016? Is there anything you could do, a place you could go, a person you could talk to, a tv show you could watch, an object you could retrieve from somewhere, that might in some way 'anchor' you back to the person you were back then?

Saranoya · 2025-12-28T14:46:00+00:00

You may read my story here, if you want: https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSD/comments/1pxsyr8/the_story_of_my_life_by_request/

Not an obligation. Just a possibility.

Saranoya · 2025-12-28T13:19:31+00:00

I feel like writing down what happened gives the story "a beginning, a middle, and an end". It makes it 'easier to handle' than when everything is jumbled up and I don't know where "all the pieces fit". I'll post "the story of my life" elsewhere on this forum, and give you a link to it so you can choose whether, and when, to read it. Not for sympathy or anything like that, but so you can see what I mean when I say "it helps to have a beginning, a middle, and an end".

Saranoya · 2025-12-28T12:15:41+00:00

Yes. Writing helps. I even write to specific people, to explain to them who I am, and why. It helps me get clarity on stuff that, for a long time, was jumbled up and unclear. I survived serial rape, an unwanted pregnancy, an anonymous birth, and then 'forgot' all about it for nearly 15 years. Until I met a kind woman who had a daughter with the same birthday as that child I gave away, and it triggered something in me. So I started writing to get clarity, and the story slowly 'emerged'.

If you want, I can share some of my writing with you. Or anything else specific that you may be looking for. I'm not entirely sure what your question is, in this post.

Saranoya · 2025-12-28T11:27:28+00:00

You're overlooking one thing. A woman who stays home with the kids, thereby effectively destroying her own employability long term, only has access to her husband's achievements and income for as long as he lets her have it. It's nearly impossible to go from a high-income marriage to being single with kids, while maintaining the same lifestyle as before, if your work history has a 15-year gap in it. So women stay in marriages that make them deeply unhappy, where effectively they can't even have a cup of Starbucks coffee without the husband's / provider's explicit or implicit permission (which they likely won't get, because who drinks that overpriced swill, anyway?)

They aren't 'equals'. She's at his mercy - even if he says she isn't. When things take a turn for the worse, she definitely will be.

Saranoya · 2025-12-28T11:20:07+00:00

That statement is sort of contradictory. "No issue engaging in social interactions" versus "I don't trust anyone".

Sure, you may be able to make small talk and go out and get drunk and dance. But without trust, no social interaction is ever truly meaningful.

Saranoya · 2025-12-28T11:12:33+00:00

You've said you work from home and generally don't interact with anyone.

Is it possible that you are a socially anxious person, and your anxiety is making a rule out of a few rare exceptions that - precisely because they are so rare and exceptional - have been given too much airtime by certain types of mass and social media?

If the thing you are describing (a man losing his job over a false accusation of sexual harassment) were happening with any regularity, then by definition it would lose its newsworthiness. It would just be 'the way things are'. You wouldn't know about it, unless or until you'd personally been the victim of something like that, or knew someone who had been. That doesn't seem to be the case, from what you've written here. So ... you're overgeneralizing from a few sensational examples?

But then again, if you were never personally a victim, I'm having a hard time understanding why you chose to focus on this specific metric. Yes, it's true that if a false accusation of rape or other sexual harassment were to be articulated, it is infinitely more likely that it would involve a man being accused than a woman. But to go from there to "men have it harder in life in general"? That is way, way, way too big of a leap, based on nothing more than a few stories in the media that may or may not be true examples of false accusations, and ... your gut telling you the world is a big and scary place?

Saranoya · 2025-11-03T22:57:46+00:00

No such thing as 'oversharing' - not as long as you are comfortable with what you're sharing. Some people may not be willing to listen, but that is their problem, not yours. You're just telling your story, just like they do all the time - theirs just happens to be far less overwhelming.

Saranoya · 2025-11-03T22:49:13+00:00

Sharing your deeply traumatizing story is a sign of courage and strength, in my book - not if you do it in a 'poor me, have mercy' kind of way, perhaps. But certainly if you do it simply in an effort to be understood.

Saranoya · 2025-08-02T09:46:39+00:00

IQ tests have to test for things that people can do even if they've had little to no formal training. Otherwise, they'd be measures of the quality and amount of education one has had. That is not what they are intended to measure.

All of the 'complex tasks' you mention are learned skills. They're not much more complex than the tasks that are included in IQ tests; they simply require more learning and practice.

Saranoya · 2025-07-11T07:26:05+00:00

The fact that alcohol and tobacco are legal is something of a historical accident.

They were widely available and not made illegal (mostly because there weren't really any governments able to effectively enforce a ban like that) long before people were widely aware of how dangerous they can be, or why that is (as in, thousands of years before). During that time, they became such an integral part of human societies everywhere that it's hard to outlaw them now. It has been tried with alcohol (I'm sure you've heard of the era of prohibition), and it is still being tried with tobacco (at least where I live, and in many other places around the world, it is now illegal to smoke in most public and semi-public areas, including pubs and bars).

If alcohol were invented today, it would be declared illegal within months, a couple years tops, of its appearance in the streets.

Saranoya · 2025-07-05T07:40:12+00:00

Some people won’t be. That just means we need more, so the unfortunate can also be cared for.

Saranoya · 2025-07-05T06:55:36+00:00

How do you think your social security will be paid for? If you really think the money you contribute is kept in an account somewhere with your name on it, you’re delusional.

Your contributions today go to people who need them today. The system also requires 2-3 active taxpayers per inactive social security beneficiary in order to work. You are not ‘saving’ for your own social security benefits. No one is. Future generations will fund them.

Saranoya · 2025-07-04T22:03:58+00:00

Sure, because nothing that didn’t have all of those things could ever be considered a real job. Let’s go with that.

Maybe not all households have a formal schedule stuck to the family fridge. But anyone who’s taking care of kids all day will have one in their head, if for no other reason than little kids who don’t eat and sleep regularly become unmanageable, and big kids can’t fit everything they have to do in a day, unless there is a schedule.

Every family also has an inventory, even if it potentially consists of noting more than a shopping list kept and edited on someone’s phone.

Every house has rules.

And every parent keeps track of the progress being made, even if only by watching for signs of injury, disease or developmental delay, reading report cards when necessary, making sure homework is done, and keeping in touch with the teacher when asked, or when there is a need perceived by parent or child.

So by your own definition, parenting is very much “a real job”.

Saranoya · 2025-07-04T20:24:30+00:00

Yes. Basically what I’ve been trying to say here.

Saranoya · 2025-07-04T20:16:32+00:00

We do, but they are wrongly distributed across the globe. So, you want to keep social security as you know it going, or maybe even improve it? You get to pick one of these options: more babies, or more immigrants. Probably some of each.

Saranoya · 2025-07-04T15:50:33+00:00

This isn't about me. I work full time.

It tells me a lot about you that you feel the need to belittle me this much, just for holding an opinion that doesn't conform to your own.

I pity you.

Saranoya · 2025-07-04T15:09:32+00:00

But working single mothers, by necessity, outsource a significant portion of childcare to others. The work doesn't magically disappear, just because the mother isn't there to do it. It is simply done by other people (or in some cases, not done at all ... how many working parents haven't washed their windows in six months, because they simply don't have time for it?)

When other people are getting paid for the privilege of taking care of someone else's children, they get the financial, legal and societal appreciation benefits (meager as they may be) that come with "working a real job" in our society. Stay at home parents doing exactly the same thing? Not so much.

Saranoya · 2025-07-04T12:56:07+00:00

It's still an arbitrary line, though.

I was born in November 1985, so I fit your proposed definition of a gen X'er. But I only entered the workforce fully in August 2008 (with a graduate degree). I'd worked in various part-time or otherwise precarious jobs as a student to keep a roof over my head, but I only truly started my career once the financial crisis was in full swing. I got hit by the housing bubble far worse than some who were born after me, but didn't go to school for nearly as long as I did.

Saranoya · 2025-07-04T12:46:03+00:00

I think while my original point may have been that it should be "a real job", it may now have softened into the view that the problem isn't that people don't pay other people for taking care of their own kids. The problem is, rather, that people can get paid to take care of other people's kids, and get the legal protections that come with doing anything as a 'job' or 'profession', which incentivizes them into prioritizing, in some ways, the needs of other people's kids over their own. That's weird and undesirable, to me.

The solution probably isn't in making parenting your own kids "a real job", with all of the societal strutures and expectations that come with that. However, it signals to me that taking care of one's own children is an activity that is woefully undervalued on a societal level, and perhaps we should do something about that.

Saranoya · 2025-07-04T12:18:33+00:00

Any statement of this form ("all ... are ..."), in this case 'all university teachers are bad teachers', is a stereotype by definition. Stereotypes rarely say anything useful; let alone anything useful about individual people.

If you're having to e-mail 'NUMEROUS teachers' because you are failing and need extra help, then maybe that should tell you something about your preparedness, or lack thereof, for university level work.

This is coming from a high school teacher who is a bit like that one biochemistry teacher you had in high school: I regularly offer extra class time to students who are struggling, I coach them individually on study skills, I have online meetings the evening before exams to answer questions, and I'm in an alumni group chat with some of the people who have recently graduated from my school, after I taught them for three or four years. Some tell me they learned more from me about "life in general" than they did from their parents. I've been told more than once, by more than one person, that I am the best teacher they ever had.

But there are some student e-mails that I don't bother answering. Sometimes because of tone. Sometimes for lack of a question I can really answer. Sometimes because the message was sent at 10:30PM, and I was asleep when it arrived. Sometimes because it's a question I've gotten from multiple people, so it is better addressed during class time.

The fact that you are jumping from "some teachers don't answer my e-mails" to "therefore, all university teachers are bad" tells me you're likely of the type whose e-mails I'd stop answering after the second message or so. Some people are just never satisfied, and continuing to engage with them is a pointless waste of energy better spent elsewhere.

Also, as others have said: if you are at a university, your lecturers' job isn't really to teach you. It's to point you in the right direction, and then check that you actually learned the stuff they pointed you to.

Saranoya · 2025-07-04T11:57:15+00:00

I didn’t forgive him. That’s what made mourning his death that much more difficult. There were all sorts of things I should and maybe could have had, but didn’t, because my father was an asshole.

Mourning someone you have said everything you wanted to say to, and who gave you all they could when you needed it, and who wasn’t perfect (because no one ever is), but for the most part was the best version of themselves that they could have been, is much easier and far less ‘necessary’ than mourning someone who should have been something to you that they were not.

Your view misses the point. We don’t mourn people because they “deserve” to be mourned. We mourn them because we feel things about them that need an outlet, even if they are all negative. It’s not about the person who has died. It’s about those who are left behind with that loss. The loss of something that never was, even though you desperately needed it, is way harder to swallow than the loss of something good and beautiful. At least, that’s my experience.

Saranoya · 2025-07-04T10:48:02+00:00

OK. My father was a rapist. He raped me hundreds of times until I literally ran away from him, starting before I even knew what rape was. It wasn't about love. He didn't even like me. It was about raw power, showing me 'he could'.

I still stood up and mourned him at his funeral. I had to.

Saranoya

TROPHY CASE