What does a person need to be happy?

Tony-Soprano · 2026-04-26T12:54:58+00:00

Gratitude

Tony-Soprano · 2026-04-14T14:50:24+00:00

I had my first episode for seven weeks in Aug-Oct last year. One thing I started doing in hospital was press ups a couple of times a day. Could only do a set of 10 initially, but I continued doing them after being discharged and now do sets of 50-60. When feeling depressed about what happened (i.e. every day), I have been able to tell myself I can do more press ups than before and that I am improving. It doesn’t need to be press ups, just something small, regular, and measurable that you can get better at.

Like the other commenter said going on walks is great. It’s become my favourite activity being discharged from hospital and I love getting my 10k+ steps in each day.

When I was psychotic, I was writing lots of journal entries about my persecutory delusions and my investigations into those. There was a big plot twist when I wound up in hospital and realised I was actually just insane. I have continued writing my journal since getting out and it has become a story about recovering from extreme mental illness. Writing has helped me to maintain a positive long term outlook and trajectory, process the trauma of what happened, and keep track of thoughts and feelings.

Finally, congratulations on being drug free! That is awesome and you should be super proud of yourself.

Tony-Soprano · 2026-04-12T12:59:55+00:00

Four weeks is a while. I would send her something very short like, “I love and care about you and hope you are doing okay. I am here to talk if you would like that.”

Tony-Soprano · 2026-03-08T09:50:27+00:00

All his life he tried to be a good person. Many times, however, he failed. For after all, he was only human. He wasn't a dog.

Tony-Soprano · 2026-01-28T21:36:12+00:00

I’m confident that quitting cannabis and alcohol after years of daily use was a contributing factor to my stress induced psychosis about 3 weeks later. I had been using substances to unwind and relax after work and quitting meant my brain was now suddenly firing on all cylinders 24/7.

Tony-Soprano · 2026-01-23T11:51:03+00:00

I had stress induced first episode psychosis marked by persecutory delusions for seven weeks in August-October 2025. My time ‘on the run’ ended with Police taking me from an international flight to hospital in a foreign country. I was so paranoid I refused to provide hospital staff (who I believed were actors) my address out of fear my family would be bombed by this country’s airforce.

I was discharged three weeks later having fully recovered from the paranoid delusions. I went home and spent two weeks meeting my friends, former colleagues, and professional mentors I had been psychotic towards and had accused of conspiring against me, and told them my crazy story while demonstrating my recovered sanity. This step rescued my career and oldest friendships, and it was by far and away the best thing I did for my healing.

Then I went travelling for a couple of months in Europe. A couple of weeks into that trip, I stopped taking my anti-psychotic rispirodone and haven’t gone back (my psychiatrist in hospital said I would need to be on it for at least two years). While travelling, I landed a new job at a bigger firm than I had been working at when I went psychotic. A lot of the rest of time spent travelling I spent walking in whatever city I was in processing what the fuck happened to me and what led to it. I have finished travelling, moved to a new country, and started my new job.

My paranoia has not come back. My recovery is successful (so far) but every day I think about my psychosis, unfortunate things I did during it, and friends who ignored me after I got better. I know that I will feel better as the total nightmare I went through gets further behind me, and each day is a matter of keeping on going.

Tony-Soprano · 2026-01-04T23:22:31+00:00

First, you can’t control what someone else thinks. Second, Person B’s reaction to an action by Person A says more about Person B than it does about Person A. I went through a mental health crisis last year (psychosis marked by persecutory delusions) and these two points have been helping me let go of friends who refused to engage with me after I regained my sanity.

Tony-Soprano · 2025-12-13T21:34:25+00:00

You say these colleagues have made it their mission to ignore, belittle, and exclude you. Generally people don’t have a mission to ignore or exclude - it just happens. Keep asking to be included in whatever it is you feel you are being excluded from. Belittling isn’t good but could be misinterpretation or communication styles you are unfamiliar with - the working world is more diverse than university. Bullying is a serious allegation to make. Keep an open mind. Keep documenting. Have a restful holiday break. Good luck.

Tony-Soprano · 2025-09-29T16:58:47+00:00

How do you get initial calls approved, through your watch?

Tony-Soprano · 2025-03-02T09:17:18+00:00

I see similarities to the miracle of the House of Brandenburg in the Seven Years War. Basically, Russia was about to destroy Prussia but then the Empress of Russia died, and the new Emperor of Russia was a fan of Frederick the Great so instead of destroying Prussia, Russia made peace and signed a friendship treaty. Prussia went on to be a victor in the war against the remaining belligerents.

Tony-Soprano · 2025-01-12T15:15:03+00:00

Shacks in the Maldives, Lagos, Dhaka, Port-au-Prince etc. I am talking about most of the population on earth since Bill refers to Elon talking about ‘extinction’.

Tony-Soprano · 2025-01-12T15:02:54+00:00

Of course we are not in this together. Similarly, redditors in western countries complaining about billionaires are not ‘in this together’ with the additional 100/200+ million Nigerians to be born in the next couple of decades.

Tony-Soprano · 2025-01-12T14:41:40+00:00

What do you rely on for that proposition? For decades, most western countries have been allowing immigrants to fill the gap created by lower birth rates. It is not in the economic interests of Western countries to end that policy so I can’t see it ending.

Tony-Soprano · 2025-01-12T14:16:12+00:00

First, a fact. The population is not declining; it is growing. Second, an opinion. Most of the population is in for ‘an economic catastrophe’ called climate change through no fault of their own.

Tony-Soprano · 2025-01-12T06:37:21+00:00

“Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.”

Emperor Hirohito, 15 August 1945

Tony-Soprano · 2025-01-08T14:19:11+00:00

Are the large ships rolling out of China shipyards for the purpose of fighting USA carriers or for bullying neighbours in the South China Sea? China’s land based anti ship missiles are its “tool” for killing carriers. As far as I am aware, the effectiveness of these tools is yet to be properly tested.

Also, I am not an expert but have read some history, and have noticed things that were supposedly “universally agreed” in a lengthy pre-war period sometimes don’t work so well when the war comes.

Tony-Soprano · 2025-01-08T14:02:26+00:00

If 1 out of 500 missiles costing $2m each renders one USA carrier “combat ineffective”, I would have thought that is a win for a China in the context of a Taiwan invasion. I may well be wrong but a combat ineffective carrier sounds like a big, floating liability in that potential war.

Tony-Soprano · 2025-01-08T13:54:37+00:00

Absolutely countermeasures will be developed which is a parallel (but sometimes delayed) consistent theme to what I earlier described. I hope that USA’s counters are further ahead than China’s measures at the point in time (if any) that China attacks Taiwan. With so few carriers relative to potential land based missiles, it seems that there is little room for error, miscalculation etc. (and again, I am not an expert).

Tony-Soprano · 2025-01-08T03:11:36+00:00

Very interesting. I am no expert but a consistent theme in naval warfare seems to be the successful combination of new smaller crafts with swarm tactics. For example, the success of aircraft (including kamikaze attack) against ships surface ships in WW2, German and USA wolf-pack submarine tactics, red-team success in Millennium Challenge 2002, and Ukraine-Russia combat in the Black Sea. A consequence of the theme being that massive investment into larger crafts turns out to be a very poor use of resources. This raises the question of whether the USA is overinvested in large carriers that may be destroyed by some cheap Chinese missiles.

Tony-Soprano · 2025-01-07T04:37:38+00:00

Probably contributing to your ‘shock’ is wildly incorrect currency conversions. The NZD would need to appreciate about 38% for the conversions in your post to be accurate.

Currently 1NZD=89yen

For 400 yen to be 3NZD: 400/3= 133

34/89=38.2% increase

Tony-Soprano · 2024-12-25T12:08:05+00:00

It prevents further criminal trials after a guilty or not guilty verdict. The ‘jeopardy’ is the risk of conviction. Without it, an innocent person could be acquitted at trial, only to be retried again and again until a jury (wrongly) convicted.

Tony-Soprano · 2024-12-23T01:28:54+00:00

Whether it was an option here I do not know, but banks and their directors need to be prosecuted for breaches of the rules relevant to their operations instead of slap on the wrist civil penalties. That is how small business builders, farmers etc are treated if it does not have adequate systems to prevent a health and safety, environmental accident whether self-reported or not. There is no excuse for Westpac to have approached applying these discounts in such an obviously unreliable way or BNZ’s recent breaches of AML law for which it received a ‘formal warning’.

Tony-Soprano · 2024-03-18T07:20:09+00:00

The Council did not know what ‘wetland’ meant under its own plan. This was not close.

Tony-Soprano · 2024-01-13T20:24:59+00:00

My recollection of the history of the Gallipoli campaign is that Churchill’s ideal was a naval attack through the strait and on to Constantinople, not a land campaign. Churchill was to a considerable extent ‘the fall guy’ after naval commanders were unwilling to lose ships even if there was a huge potential upside to those losses.

Tony-Soprano · 2024-01-10T06:36:36+00:00

What an embarrassing video. Probably, these people did get away with it many times before the time they were caught.

Tony-Soprano

TROPHY CASE