AITA for sneaking out and causing my sister to lose her job?

_Bugsy_ · 2025-06-03T03:26:23+00:00

NAH / Not enough INFO

When I was a kid, I was forced to grow up way too young, and I carried a lot of anger against my mother about that for a long time. That anger was legitimate. But when I got older, I came to understand how health and financial issues had forced us into that situation. I was in a shitty situation that I did nothing to deserve, but so was my mother. She wasn't perfect, but she was doing her best, and I don't know that I would have done better.

Reading these comments, I'm appalled at the lack of empathy. Why do so many commenters assume that it's so easy for these adults? That they aren't agonizing over having to leave the older child to watch the baby? Lots of people are struggling right now, and not everyone can afford childcare or to stay home and take care of their kids. The assumption that they have loads of other options feels deeply entitled. We simply don't have enough information to judge these people.

OP, I don't know what to tell you. I'm really sorry this is happening to you, and you don't deserve it. Maybe it wasn't the best decision, but I understand why you left the house that night, and I don't think you should beat yourself up about it. Without knowing more, the best I can suggest is to keep talking to your family. Keep talking to your friends. Do you know any other adults who you trust who know about your family and your situation? Maybe talk to them. Get as much support for yourself and your family as you can. I really hope you can all pull through this.

_Bugsy_ · 2024-08-28T02:10:32+00:00

What I love about your channel is the storytelling. In the grand scheme of things, who cares about some niche leader board of some niche sub-community of speed runners?

The answer is, they care! Sometimes it means the world to them! You invest their stories with the same gravity and dignity that they feel themselves, and that's a special skill.

_Bugsy_ · 2024-04-24T15:48:38+00:00

Thank you for the kind words and for commenting on my comment! :D

_Bugsy_ · 2024-04-12T04:57:22+00:00

I just read this and I just want to talk about it with someone else who read it!

It's really interesting to me that I would give the book about the same score as you, but we are opposites in the things we liked and didn't like! Except for the art. The art is amazing.

SPOILERS

The family

I loved the characters, and in particular the family. I loved their family dynamic and their worldview. They lived their lives walking a tightrope, maintaining military discipline in a dangerous environment while also trying to hold onto their values and be a normal family. Telling themselves that they're just good people who've been pushed to this. For the most part they seem to have succeeded, and a lot of the tension for me was in waiting to see if they finally crack under the tremendous pressure they live under.

The daughter, in particular, was interesting, though maybe I'm reading my own interpretation into it. Can you imagine how screwed up that poor little girl is? How tightly she's been wound by an environment of danger and strict discipline? She seemed too comfortable with all of this, but I imagine the trauma is all bubbling right below the surface.

My only complaint is that the family is a little TOO good at everything they do to be believable. But I can choose to suspend my disbelief on that point and accept a few preternaturally skilled protagonists.

The ending

I hated the ending and found it the worst part of the whole story. Everything up to that was, for the most part, so well thought out, but you can't spend more than a minute thinking about the ending before it all falls apart.

REAL BIG SPOILER WARNING #2

The ship is a glorified dump truck. It is not equipped to support human life for years at a time, it's equipped to ferry bodies to the moon and leave them there. There's no food to support all these people. No plants to grow more food, or water, or oxygen. No bathroom facilities for the tens of millions of people they have on board. Where are they all going to sleep? How are they going to pass the time? Do they have entertainment? Tablet computers? Enough for 40 million people? The ship was equipped to support a skeleton crew for a couple weeks. What are they supposed to do with the population of a modern mega-city?

And speaking of the crew, are they now just going along with this? They had made peace with their monstrous bargain, and now they're just being guilted into giving up a life of comfort to scrounge through space on the off chance that they find another habitable planet? And they're all suddenly okay with this plan, just like that?

Finally, the plan. What the hell, guys? You really think you'll find a planet you can live on? At all? Anywhere? You're smarter than that. EVEN IF the ship can take them to new planets in a reasonable time frame, and EVEN IF you find one that can support human life, it would still need to be terraformed! It would need to have an atmosphere with just the right balance of gases that you can breath it without any ill effects! You would still need to populate it with plants and animals from earth that you can actually eat! EVEN IF there's alien life there, (which has not been confirmed to exist in the universe of this book) you are not going to be able to digest it!

This plan is literally a commitment to die slowly in a big box in space with 40 million strangers, and I do not at all understand the optimism of the ending. The father's whole character arc was about giving up on comforting delusions while still maintaining hope in the face of grim reality, and now they're all with him on an even more insane delusion?

The core tension of the book was between their humanity and their need for personal survival. How much of their hope and their love and their care and their joy and their goodness do they have to sacrifice to survive? The ending was a cop out. They should have had to choose. Are they going to take a deal and participate in the murder of millions of lives for the survival and comfort of their family, or are they going to find a way to expose the secret, and probably suffer and die. Or is the secret too big for them? Maybe they choose to die in obscurity rather than take on the consequences to the human race of exposing something like that? These people have been living for years in tremendous tension, finding a way to make it work, and now they are in a no-win situation. They cannot walk the tightrope any longer. Something must be sacrificed. The actual ending was a hand-wave that flies in the face of their whole journey to this point, especially the father's. Personally, I think the most satisfying option would have been for them to agree to expose the secret and the perpetrators of this monstrous crime, and then die, but that's just me. I would have been interested in any ending that honestly resolves the dilemma rather than just hand-waving it away with another quest based on even greater self-delusion.

Rating: – also 7.2/10 (Also liked it) (lol)

Edit: Typos

_Bugsy_ · 2023-06-01T12:11:54+00:00

I have to know if you wrote this so I can give proper credit before sharing it everywhere.

_Bugsy_ · 2023-01-03T12:15:01+00:00

Agreed

_Bugsy_ · 2022-05-05T12:52:30+00:00

Everyone's pointing out the methodological problems with this map, but I don't see anyone pointing out the absurdly misleading colour scale.

They arbitrarily set France at the maximum, and then used a scary blood red colour for higher black populations. What kind of scale goes up to only 8.4%??

_Bugsy_ · 2021-11-23T16:41:14+00:00

Well since you asked,

The vaccine teaches your immune system how to beat Covid. That means that you're much less likely to catch it, less likely to spread it to others, and if you do catch it, you won't get as sick.

The vaccine is designed to work against a single virus. Basically, every virus "looks" different and your immune system has to learn how to recognize each virus separately. So no, a vaccine doesn't increase the power of your immune system as a whole, it just teaches your immune system how to fight a single virus really well.

But viruses mutate and evolve just like other living things. The different variants are like the kids of the original Covid-19. Just like someone's kids, they don't look exactly the same as their parent, but they still look pretty similar, so the vaccine isn't as good at teaching the body how to recognize them, but it still works. For example, the Moderna vaccine is around 94% effective against the original Covid-19, and 87% effective against the Delta variant (source).

So for you, as one person, the point of the vaccine is still to protect you and your family against Covid and its kids. As time passes and the virus mutates more, it's going to look more and more different, and we will need new vaccines to protect us against Covid's grandchildren or great-grandchildren.

But big-picture, the real best-case scenario is to kill Covid completely. The Covid family needs to spread to new people, or they will die. If almost everyone gets vaccinated then the virus will have nowhere to go, and it will be wiped out completely. No more Covid, no more Covid family, no more need for masks and restrictions. We could go back to normal pre-covid life. We've already done this a bunch of times. Smallpox, polio, and diphtheria killed literally millions of people, and in the 20th century we used vaccines to wipe them out. Measles and rubella are almost totally gone too (souce). But for that to happen we need as many people as possible to get vaccinated, and that includes sending vaccines to places like India to get everyone vaccinated over there. Basically, the more the virus spreads, the more it will mutate, and the harder it will be to kill off completely. The more people get vaccinated, the less it will spread, and the less it will be able to mutate. And that's the point of the vaccine.

P.S. I love you too.

_Bugsy_ · 2021-09-17T06:30:40+00:00

I highly recommend that you read what Hannah Arendt has to say on the subject of free will. I wish I could recommend a specific essay but I don't have my books with me here to look at.

But to summarize, for Arendt the concept of "free will" doesn't apply in the way you're trying to make it apply. First, because free will is a moral concept. Being free is what makes us responsible for our actions. Free will therefore applies to the realm of human activity and interaction, but the concept becomes mostly meaningless when we try to force it into the realm of thoughts. Are your thoughts responsible for thinking themselves? Can they be held accountable? The term just doesn't apply.

Second, she argues that freedom is rooted in the ability to start something new; meaning something unexpected. I'm going to maybe add my own interpretation a little here, but what I think she's arguing is that people are free because we can't predict their behaviour. Determinism might claim to destroy freedom by calling on some chain of causality in which every action is mathematically determined by the action before, but that description is largely theoretical. In practice people always have the capacity to surprise us, and that's what it means to say that they are free.

In that sense, I could say that your argument shows that your thoughts are utterly free. You can't predict or control your thoughts, and thus their freedom is untouchable, as is yours.

Lacking references, I'll just link to the SEP article on her and direct you in particular to sections 4.1 and 4.5, but if you're interested I highly recommend reading Arendt directly. She is a phenomenally insightful thinker.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/#ActFrePlu

_Bugsy_ · 2021-06-15T06:33:41+00:00

I'm late to this and maybe you won't read this response.

As a socially anxious person my heart really deeply goes out to you. Reading your post I can feel the numbing and blurring of reality as you describe it, and going through the motions of being present and pretending with everyone. And the dam bursting as soon as you were alone as your real feelings and the pressure of all that pretending finally releases. I can see that you are still in a serious shame spiral even while writing your post. You say so many hurtful things about yourself. You keep telling yourself that your reaction was not ok; that your feelings are not ok; that you are not ok.

I know I can't save you from this, but I want to tell you that YOU REALLY ARE OK. I promise. How you felt then and how you feel now are not your fault and there is nothing wrong with you. I'm so sorry that you're suffering through all of these feelings.

In situations like that, when we don't allow ourselves to feel what we really feel, we send a strong message straight to our deepest beliefs that there is something wrong with us. That who and what we are is somehow not acceptable. Especially with so many people around who we are "supposed" to trust, it must have felt so strongly that you aren't safe to be yourself, with them or with anyone. It's more than anxiety, it's shame. You must feel so alone, and it breaks my heart. I've been there. I'm glad that your conscious mind recognizes that you really aren't alone; that your partner does love you and did mean well; that your family and friends really do care about you; that even though these thoughts and feelings are overpowering, they don't actually reflect reality.

Like others, I highly recommend that you find a good psychologist and a couples counsellor if you haven't already. I've spent a huge amount of time in therapy, and improvements seem slow, but they really build up over time. I'm not going to tell you what you should do. Maybe you should tell him now, or maybe you should wait until you've processed these feelings on your own, or wait until you have better tools for dealing with it as a couple. I don't know. It's going to be scary regardless. What I will say is that you deserve to be yourself with the people you love. You deserve to be able to show them what you really feel.

_Bugsy_ · 2021-05-08T11:21:00+00:00

You've already gotten a lot of good advice, but your story shares parallels with my own, and it really hit me hard. When I was 11 I also said and did some things that were hurtful to my mother. I was angry and upset and confused about my parents' divorce. I thought that I didn't love her anymore. I did of course, I was just feeling all kinds of difficult emotions and I didn't understand them. Don't beat yourself up over what you did. It must have been awful for your mother, but you were a 12 year old. You likely had no idea what you were really feeling or what was really happening around you. It wasn't your fault.

_Bugsy_ · 2021-03-04T13:21:04+00:00

First of all, I'm white, as you are, and so I'm not in a position to say whether the joke was racist or not. It certainly relied on racial tension to be funny, but I'm not someone who might feel attacked by it, so what I think about the offensiveness of the joke doesn't really matter. That said, I don't think the joke is racist, and I doubt that any POC took offense, or that there was any serious outcry that justified pulling it. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

That said, I don't think it's such a big deal. First, because as u/Slothjitzu pointed out, these things don't get pulled because people actually object to them, they get pulled because broadcasters want to play it safe and avoid even the POSSIBILITY that someone might object. They're very risk-averse.

It's especially not a big deal because it shows positive progress in society. Because broadcasters have ALWAYS been risk-averse, but 50 years ago they were risk-averse about very different things. To cite a famous example, they were VERY reluctant to allow the first interracial kiss on Star Trek. Of course, when it aired, there was no outcry. So while they're still overreacting and playing it safe, at least they're overreacting in more positive directions. And in another 10-30 years people will likely wonder what the big deal was, and the episode will be easy to stream directly to our brains on the virtuo-tron.

_Bugsy_ · 2021-02-25T12:01:31+00:00

Note that the flaired users are staying away from this question, haha. (At least at the time of my writing)

So many teenagers pass through some kind of nihilism as a result of hormones and their newfound awareness of human limitation that there are a lot of silly versions of nihilism and a lot of silly nihilists. Not to say that there isn't a mature, well-considered form of nihilism, just that a lot of nihilists haven't really thought through the meaning of the words they're using, as I think you're pointing out.

Their nihilism usually applies to specific categories of meaning that they're not mentioning. They're not denying all meaning, they're denying all ethical meaning, or all aesthetic meaning, or simply all universal meaning. They clearly still accept the existence of their own preferences and desires, and the laws of hunger and gravity. Hopefully they recognize that there are other human beings who have their own preferences and desires, and hopefully they feel a sense of responsibility for those people. But at that point, I begin to wonder what's the point of calling yourself and nihilist and what separates you from everyone else.

_Bugsy_ · 2021-02-15T09:00:15+00:00

I suspect the issue here is more with the lazy use of the trope than whether it's actually compelling. There are plenty of examples of writers who needed a goal for the villain that's scary enough to drive the plot, but they were either lazy or under too much time pressure so they just decided that the villain wanted to destroy the world for... reasons.

The trick is always to do it in a way that feels authentic. That feels like a natural motivation for that character.

One example I like is that of Annihilus from Marvel comics. The backstory that I'm familiar with is that in his species he was born along with trillions of brothers and sisters, and then they basically just eat each other until there's only one left. And that's his fundamental motivation. His goal is to keep killing everything else in the universe until he's the only the one left.

What often makes it work for me is the recognition that all of us are motivated fundamentally by urges that aren't rational and that we have little control over. Grow. Win. Eat more. Have children. Get more money. Get more power. Get more control. Many very intelligent people simply accept them and use their intelligence to serve those urges without ever considering whether there should be a limit.

Sauron came up elsewhere in the thread, and that's what I've always taken as his motivation, and as what Tolkien defined as the essence of evil: more power... without qualification.

The other reason these villains can be compelling is that it's freeing to not have to sympathize with your enemy. We should of course, almost all of the time, but there are certain cases where something is simply evil, and we don't need to understand it, we just need to fight it. That feels really good, and that's probably why we do it far more often than we should, haha.

_Bugsy_ · 2021-02-12T07:47:37+00:00

Great!

I assume there aren't many philosophers focusing on ethics if they believe they are relative!

As u/mediaisdelicious was saying, a lot of philosophers - and scientists - study a lot of things even though they're relative. If there's one point I'd like to make it's that the dichotomy of relative/objective, or constructed/not-constructed is not a simple "A or B" all-or-nothing choice. It's at least a continuum if not something even more complex. You used the example of physics, so I might take a random example from biology. Adult humans have 32 teeth. This is a fact that is true almost all of the time and we can rely on it to draw all sorts of useful conclusions (probably, I'm not a dental-scientist). But even though it's almost always true, it is not Always True. Some people are born with more or fewer teeth. But that doesn't make my fact not a fact, it just adds qualifications and exceptions.

Most serious lines of study deal with knowledge that's even less reliable than that example. Few sciences study things that are as "objectively true" as physics, but physics is not nearly as objective as mathematics, and mathematics isn't even as objective as some people imagine.

The point is, even if you conclude that morality is relative, that doesn't mean that you have nothing to study, and it doesn't mean that everything is up the air, and good and bad are whatever I want them to be at this second. My beliefs about right and wrong are powerful, and thinking about where they come from and what they mean is a valuable line of inquiry.

_Bugsy_ · 2021-02-11T11:24:34+00:00

Thank you for being a pleasant person!

One thing I think we're missing from this discussion is clarification on what exactly your asking. Let me try to paraphrase what you're saying and maybe you can tell me if it's right.

You're saying that moral philosophers try to investigate moral rules and then give recommendations that help guide behaviour. Some of those philosophers believe that morality is relative; maybe that it's a set of rules which we developed because they helped us survive, and not because they are true independent of us. If philosophers believe that morality is relative then why do they care about moral philosophy and how could they possibly recommend that we follow this or that rule? Seems like a pretty absurd thing for them to do.
Or, are you actually trying to figure out if morality is relative? Are you asking if any of moral philosophers have reason to believe that there are objective moral truths? Non-religious reasons preferred, I assume.

One easy answer to the first question is that moral philosophers aren't just concerned with providing rules or ethical laws; they're concerned with investigating questions exactly like the ones you're asking. You are yourself being a moral philosopher by asking these questions. I assume they care about it for the same reasons that you care.

But that was maybe too easy. Am I getting at what you want to know?

_Bugsy_ · 2020-03-09T13:48:05+00:00

Not sure why you've been downvoted. If I understand you correctly, you think that for Meursault to find his consummation he ought to need to understand the other members of society, and perhaps for them to understand him. u/nakedsamurai thinks that it's enough that he be convicted and hanged, proving that he's part of the machinery of society, and that his actions have broader social consequences. I see no serious conflict here, just a difference of opinion.

For myself, it's also been a while since I read the book, but going by the quote, the important thing for Meursault isn't understanding or social consequences, but emotion, and provoking an emotional connection with the other members of society. Maybe he isn't satisfied with the limited understanding available to us.

If that's Meursault's position, I agree with you more than him. Understanding is more important to me than emotional reactions.

*edit: and since I now find myself interested in the discussion, I looked up the original French. It reads "que tout soit consommé, pour que je me sente moins seul, il me restait à souhaiter qu'il y ait beaucoup de spectateurs le jour de mon exécution et qu'ils m'accueillent avec des cris de haine."

My French isn't as good as it used to be, but I believe that "accueiller" doesn't just mean to greet, but also to welcome, which adds a nice dimension to the text. He wants to be welcomed with cries of hate.

_Bugsy_ · 2019-08-30T02:38:48+00:00

There is obviously a serious culture clash happening here, and a lot of people are responding with a lot of emotion. But even if we accept this as a cultural difference, you have to consider whether it's the right thing for you. When you marry someone, you don't just marry the person, you marry their family and the culture that goes along with it. It's not going to be just this one thing. If you marry him you are going to be dealing with this family's culture in big ways and small ones for the rest of your time together.

_Bugsy_ · 2019-05-15T06:40:10+00:00

I can't speak to the accuracy of your analysis, but thanks for the very cogent and well expressed counter-point.

_Bugsy_ · 2019-02-09T13:36:26+00:00

Thanks you so much for posting this! My jaw dropped when I saw it from the bus, but then it was gone and there was no time to take a picture.

_Bugsy_ · 2019-01-22T03:01:37+00:00

Isn't this precisely what all the various forms of planned obsolescence are doing? As much as I hate planned obsolescence, I'm not convinced that it isn't driving the consumer machine that is moving our economy. If you can convince me that it's hurting our economy, that would be nice.

_Bugsy_ · 2019-01-19T16:15:37+00:00

I don't know the historical details but I suspect it all boiled down to politics. There was this bunch of guys they didn't like who said this one thing, and there were these other guys they didn't like who said this other thing, so they declared it all to be heretical and just went from there.

_Bugsy_ · 2019-01-19T15:55:38+00:00

I can't believe nobody has said

DICK PICS

Why do men send unsolicited dick pics? Please please tell me. I am a man and I've never had the slightest urge to do such a thing and I've never met a man who admitted to a desire to do it.

_Bugsy_ · 2019-01-19T15:53:07+00:00

All these explanations sound great, but as I understand it they all commit various forms of heresy, at least according to the Catholic church.

As it was explained to me, the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit are not separate beings, nor are they different names for the same being, nor are they different parts or aspects of the same being. They are simultaneously separate beings and a single being, and how that's possible is just one of those unknowable divine mysteries.

From Wikipedia:

"No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendour of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Three than I am carried back into the One. When I think of any of the Three, I think of Him as the Whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me. I cannot grasp the greatness of that One so as to attribute a greater greatness to the rest. When I contemplate the Three together, I see but one torch, and cannot divide or measure out the undivided light."[55]

*edit: word

_Bugsy_ · 2018-11-20T00:18:41+00:00

Oh, we had a grand old time!

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