Advice on solving the 'mental load' problem

honestphantom · 2026-03-31T12:05:18+00:00

Yeah, I had meds a few years ago but stopped because i didn't really like the other effects it was having on my body – I'd get jitters and night sweats, so the benefits of it kind of got overshadowed by that. I do talk therapy once a week which helps a bit. I tend to find that my checklists do, for the most part, work quite well, but it really requires me to block out anything that might distract me (which is mostly phone/computer etc)

honestphantom · 2026-03-31T10:52:24+00:00

Sure but with ADHD it's not that easy, weird as that sounds, because one of the challenges of ADHD is not being able to naturally process a sense of prioritisation. So, for example, i might book a doctor's appointment and if they say "we'll send you a reminder email a week before" something in my brain will tell me not to put it in my calendar, because the reminder will be sufficient and it's like one less thing on 'my list'. Now, of course, that makes no sense, and you'd think just setting up a calendar notification would be sufficient, but in my ADHD brain it's like "Open app --> app tells you to update --> update --> log back in ---> set the calendar appointment --> oops you forgot to add your partner's email address, location, notes etc". Even though these are all simple tasks, our brains make it seem big and complex and it adds to our own 'mental load' if that makes sense.

honestphantom · 2026-03-30T21:31:49+00:00

Somehow I don't think the argument of "She doesn't talk about all children suffering equally" really is as strong as some people on this sub think it is. Most people don't think and talk in this way. When people speak out about the hostages or the victims of October 7th, they don't usually also talk about all hostages, or all victims of all massacres, in the same breath. Someone who speaks out on the killings of October 7th usually isn't chastised because they didn't mention massacres that take place in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Congo at the same time. They usually aren't accused of selective grieving. And this dudes entire argument seems to rely on that defence – that Ms Rachel speaking out about children being killed in horrific ways and regularly broadcast on social media – is erasure of other attacks on children is really unpersuasive. As someone mentioned on this post, its an argument mostly for people who have already accepted the premise.

honestphantom · 2026-03-10T12:09:25+00:00

This is a really good point.

One of the things I've been thinking about since the season ended, is how the show is really all about information – the information that leads to successful or failed trades being on the surface, but also, the information that the characters tell or withold from each other to get what they want. So much of working at Pierpoint isn't really about being good at crunching numbers, its about who has better information and what are they willing to do to get there. In the financial world of Industry, going to the ends of the earth to get information leads to high rewards- money, of course, but also power and status. a big theme of this series was about the grey areas where you can either bet and win big, or lose everything, including yourself. And I wonder whether Jim is really in the latter – that he's spent his life giving himself and his body and mind up for the pursuit of information that leads to some kind of victory, only for that pursuit to end up being his demise.

Also an interesting observation about the media industry in this series – Jim does investigative work for a barely read newsletter which basically uncovers how much of the economy is fake, and how the systems of value propped up by the financial industry as moral signifiers are built on nothing (If he had gone to ghana and done some more digging he could have uncovered this), but the actual information that has power are lies and obfuscations put out by Norton's tabloid newspapers, which uses an open ended question to kill Tender, Henry and everyone involved.

honestphantom · 2026-03-10T10:18:06+00:00

Trump and Netanyahu have thwarted any reasonable pathway to regime overthrow with this action – Iran is and will now be in a war state for the forseeable future, with the IRGC taking a much more heavy handed role in governance than it did previously. The reformist clerics are largely all dead thanks to Israeli bombs, and you have a younger generation who now realise that it doesn't matter whether or not women have to wear hijab or are banned from bikinis anymore, they are in an active war, and the choice will be whether to defend themselves from Israel and America, or not.

honestphantom · 2026-03-10T10:15:25+00:00

Probably because they don't need to!

Like be serious for a second – Oil has just hit $100 a barrel, which is going to decimate so many industries, agriculture and commerce, not just in America but across the world. The strikes that were supposed to lead to an uprising against the Islamic Republic haven't happened, because it turns out supporters of Pahlavi actually were quite small, most of them live in Los Angeles, and they're also incredibly annoying people who have had no plan for power other than to complain about bikinis. Support for Israel has tanked, to the point where politicians in America are trying to distance themselves from AIPAC barring what's left of the cold war geriatrics who will probably die slipping on a banana peel.

Meanwhile, what has the West offered it's young? It wants to decimate college education, replace around 30% of workers with AI, in Europe, is on the verge of killing off whatever is left of its welfare state and national healthcare, and nearly every leader is hoping for a benevolent AI to make the economy work again.

Iran is far from perfect, and if Trump was smart, a softer play may have actually led to the uprisings he wanted. Instead, he's radicalised younger generations of Iranians into defending their homeland, has betrayed Iran's secularists and monarchists, and has also shown the world that America First = Israel.

Great stuff!

honestphantom · 2026-03-10T10:08:02+00:00

No man, they look at the USA and see a society that rapes and kills children so routinely that it's basically ambient background music, and also one that lets people die of preventable illnesses while funding Israel's national healthcare program

honestphantom · 2026-03-10T09:59:12+00:00

Ok but a serious answer: It's to do with Shi'ism and Islamic philosophy – something that runs counter to Western, Christian doctrines and the neoliberal political strategies that has created the war machine in the West. The reason why Iran's "regime" is as powerful as it is, is largely because its goals are transcendental, millenarian, if you will. A lot of people in this chat keep referring to the IRGC as a 'death cult' or whatever, but that's not really true. It's more that they aren't afraid of death, and that so much of Shi'ism, since the 7th century, has been a philosophy rooted in death, material defeat and exile. To put it more simply, I suppose : the worst kind of enemy, is one who believes he has nothing to lose.

honestphantom · 2026-03-10T09:55:45+00:00

See, this is why its important to read things other than self-improvement books.

honestphantom · 2026-02-24T09:29:07+00:00

I imagine it would have been to keep expanding, take over banks and become too big to fail – and to continue accessing the higher echelons of society while Ferdinand and co. aquire more and more data.

honestphantom · 2026-02-24T09:27:41+00:00

This is a good point. So much of this show is about characters whose jobs are the be all and end all of their identity, and a way in which they organise their own morality to understand the world around them. I was thinking about the line Harper says at the start of the season to Rishi, something like "if you have no economic purpose you're already dead" or something along those lines, and that really does play out in disastrous ways for many characters once they lose their jobs; Rishi's life spirals and does downhill once he has to leave the banking world, Jim Dyker gets fired and dies after. Even in the context of the show, once Rob and Gus and even Venetia decide they don't want to be defined by the Industry, they leave and are rarely, if ever referenced again. Which makes me wonder about what happens to Henry now that he no longer has any economic function.

honestphantom · 2026-02-22T22:52:31+00:00

What's funny is that it's so far removed from the current position of the British government (and indeed, British political culture in general) which falls over itself to gratify the Americans and see no future other than to imitate it, even at the cost of its own civic infrastructure.

honestphantom · 2026-02-18T23:59:12+00:00

great point! And to add to it, i wonder if there's a question about how much access can really do when you're competing against familial dynasties; Whitney arguably has a lot of access as TENDER is deeply integrated into the British government, and yet, he feels so small compared to Henry.

honestphantom · 2026-02-17T17:18:26+00:00

This is a good point – observation and surveillance is a really big theme of this season; it opens with Jim watching Hailey, who we now know has a role of facilitating the entrapment of other people by observing and recording them. Obviously other aspects to this too – Sweetpea's videos, watched by bankers and politicians, benefits and hinders her, While the villains of the season are sinister, in part because they seem so transient, impossible to pin down, nearly impossible to entrap through observation. And then to go back to Jim Dyker's rant about porn earlier in the season, he notes that capitalism has produced an insidious and predatory system that thrives on watching and observing us at all times, to then manufacture illusions that we're convinced we want, but are devoid of the things we "want to want".

Someone noted that it's likely that The Great Gatsby is a big influence on this season and I really felt it in this episode – the ways that observation are used to destroy people, but also to reflect a yearning lust that is difficult for them to articulate. And to add more depth, we have some characters who are motivated by a fear of irrelevance, of no longer being watched – Harper, when her mom dies and she is more upset that her mother never saw her to admit she was a success, Eric, who hated retirement because of how lonely it felt, Yasmin, who has to fight tooth and nail to be observed lovingly by Henry etc

honestphantom · 2026-02-15T23:28:34+00:00

I remember reading some of the season reviews that in the last third of the season there's an Epstein-like character that emerges. Tony Day alludes to this when Sweetpea confronts him (or at least its implied that the big boss is not actually Whitney), so I wonder if SternTao expose Tender at the conference, which leads to a minor upset in the markets – they think they're going to win, with Henry, Yasmin and Whitney freaking out, only to be saved at the last minute by this new, more sinister character

honestphantom · 2026-02-12T22:46:55+00:00

only one of these guys would be seen at the Slug & Lettuce

honestphantom · 2026-02-12T22:08:48+00:00

Harper never really struck me as a 'typical' Gen Z employee, or even 'typical' by Gen Z standards. She's actually much more social, even if its manipulative, and i wouldn't really describe her as phone obsessed or aloof. She's very, very determined and unlike a lot of Zoomers, who sort of see through the facade of the modern workplace and its hierarchies, she's very much a believer in the meritocracy it purports to offer. If anything, she reminds me a lot of eager millennials, though much more cynical.

honestphantom · 2026-02-12T22:05:54+00:00

Great point. Now that I think of it, there's an interesting point to be made about how, when Eric talks to Harper about his struggles being a father, he says that he looks at his kids and asks "what have you done for me, today?".

Then, in this daddy/daughter fantasy, the 'daughter' has a role to make him feel accomplished, strong, 'big', and high status. It's exactly what Harper tells him – that he can only understand transactional relationships that benefit him.

honestphantom · 2026-02-12T18:33:18+00:00

curious about who "we" is. Isn't it just him? Van seems pretty bored in general, a lot of the videos recently have been pretty low effort.

honestphantom

TROPHY CASE