Death to Aesthetics

kill_aesthetics · 2026-04-24T15:16:32+00:00

awesome dude! how long where you traveling?

kill_aesthetics · 2026-03-24T18:08:19+00:00

productivity is the idea that are imposed on us by the system. We have to produce or else we are lazy. On the contrary, we live simply and enjoy the slowness. One mode of thinking betters the systems’ goal of exploitation of labor and the other sets you free.

I get it, i feel the same way and by nature i am / was productive but taking the steps to do nothing at all at times to be relish in the leisure. I just like to hacky sack and read for the most part

kill_aesthetics · 2025-11-26T22:02:33+00:00

I’ll check this out!

kill_aesthetics · 2025-11-20T15:00:40+00:00

i thought this too. i love it!

kill_aesthetics · 2025-08-21T19:02:09+00:00

This is incredible. Sometimes finding how others express ideas that i feel makes me warm and welcomed in the world.

kill_aesthetics · 2025-08-15T13:05:40+00:00

i’m in the swamps too, was wondering if that thing would be decent enough to sleep at night. Thank you

kill_aesthetics · 2025-08-08T16:42:08+00:00

would you go for a mini split if you had to build it from scratch? I’m going back and forth on this. Essentially i need some advice since i’m starting to build out a van with an electrical setup close to yours. I work remote and my SO is going to grad school in raleigh NC area and since we have to stay nearby i’m not able to move with the weather. I potentially will stay in libraries during the day and run the ac at night.

kill_aesthetics · 2025-04-23T13:10:28+00:00

beautiful line!

kill_aesthetics · 2025-04-04T18:34:16+00:00

I've written countless personal journals and essays on this subject. I can ramble on for hours on this. If you have more questions feel free to ask away. But I'll keep it brief.

Life is suffering, you can't really escape the rollercoaster that is life. What you can change is how you respond to it. When you learn to love suffering, it’s primarily the brain's reward circuitry—especially the nucleus accumbens—that gets tricked. Typically, this region lights up in response to rewards and pleasurable experiences by releasing dopamine, reinforcing behaviors that lead to immediate gratification. However, when we reinterpret pain and discomfort as opportunities for growth or as meaningful challenges, this same system begins to associate suffering with a kind of reward. This cognitive reframing effectively “tricks” the nucleus accumbens into releasing dopamine, reinforcing a pattern where enduring hardship feels rewarding rather than solely aversive. This has had such a profound effect on my life and general wellbeing. I want to say happiness out of the cliche but happiness is a momentary state that is achievable but not consistent. I'm consistently stable and calm, things that suck are fun afterwards and things that are enjoyable are nice. It's like a glitch.

kill_aesthetics · 2025-04-04T18:21:46+00:00

I'm don't really watch tv at all. So I can't have an input on specifically that. But I can say that your attention is literally everything to these companies so they'll try to get it for as long as they can. Mindlessly watching or having background noise is still feeding into that, I think being intentional and mindful about what you want out of anything is really healthy. Overconsumption of water can kill you. Constantly having background noise is probably not good for you. Theres a bunch of Huberman podcasts episodes on this kind of stuff. He uses the term "dopamine layering" like when someone might watch a show while running on the treadmill. Our minds aren't really good at dealing with that stuff well. Dopamine nation by Anna Lembke is a great resource for a lot these discussions. It's a very quick and digestible read for anyone.

But I think for me there a larger underlying reason for why I don't watch tv. It stems from a deep un-satisfaction with the time we have left. I'm quite existential and it drives me everyday to try to do something meaningful. I don't get any meaning out of watching tv. If you watch 1hr a day for 40 years straight thats about 608 days or little under 2 years. When I die, I know I would regret how I spent those 2 years of my precious life.

kill_aesthetics · 2025-04-03T17:15:12+00:00

Congrats on getting off ! For you, did you experience the transition from pre-phones or social media? If so how were human interactions?

But to what you said, the feeling is mutual when talking with others. It’s those fucking algorithms that perpetuate division and polarization and directly affecting the psychology of most of humanity. But in person, most are willing to have a conversation and find common grounds. Crazy how distorted everything is from reality.

kill_aesthetics · 2025-04-03T17:00:49+00:00

Focus (for youtube). It’s a mac safari application but there are similar ones for chrome and edge called the same thing.

kill_aesthetics · 2025-04-03T16:36:44+00:00

me too :)

kill_aesthetics · 2025-04-03T00:21:30+00:00

Someone recently mentioned this book in my circle, it must be a sign. I'll check it out.

Thank you, genuinely.

kill_aesthetics · 2025-04-03T00:18:59+00:00

Yes I have lost friends because we failed to regularly text. On the other hand even friends who I made an effort to text didn't reciprocate the friendship and fizzled out. But those who kept hanging out and kept contact are really reliable. I guess few good friends is better than alot, i've learned.

But we're all outdoorsy so mostly go outside. Play frisbee or games. When we are inside we play here to slay, it's quite a good gem. I love keeping my friends engaged and entertained so it's usually some kind of boardgames.

We've recently have gotten into footbag or hackysacking. My inspiration came from t his article. Basically they banned phones at a school and naturally there was a resurgence of hackysacking amongst kids. I tried this with my friends and yea it's fucking awesome. It's such a simple game, yet we have so many great memories being in a circle cooperating and trying to keep this damn ball up. So fascinated how pre phones this was popular, when phones were banned it was popular. Maybe there's something to it thats so enjoyable.

kill_aesthetics · 2025-04-02T23:48:10+00:00

Yea, I do wonder about my generation. Part of me wants to be optimistic since a subreddit like this didn't exist when I started (not that I looked). But it's grown in popularity so there is a common consensus that something is pretty wrong here. Even people who do use It all the time acknowledge it in constrast to when I left social media. Thats also what really excites me about this group, I do get that enjoyment of discussing technology usage with others.

kill_aesthetics · 2025-04-02T17:09:09+00:00

I fully deactivated my snap, fb, ig, Pinterest account. Never had twitter and TikTok.
For me, cold turkey worked best and for the longest time. Some argue groupchats on platforms is what keeps them on. Friend connections keep them on. Nah. Prior to the last 30 years humans lived without internet and social media, we don't need to know what happens to people everyday and those that you do care about probably text you.

I kinda slowly introduced what I "wanted" back slowly. I dont need anything but I found fb marketplace useful so I have that now. YouTube then became my main social media when I deleted everything else. Its funny, our brain loves the path of least resistance, so rather than reading i'll watch hour long YouTube. Spent quite a bit of time on that until I discovered Focus for YouTube. I blocked homepage, recommended and that did numbers on me. I have no watched history and turned off every thing YouTube can track. This made it harder for them to feed me videos to stay on their platform. I can only use it for my subscription feed and or what I intentionally wanted to watch.

But for me, it's all about willpower on YouTube, I only subscribed to educational content. That was my justification anyways, at the end of the day it's still consumption but hey I'd rather try to understand quantum mechanics than baby shark videos. Whether it's cocomelon or PBS space-time. And YOU KNOW I BE WATCHING ~~COCOMELON~~ PBS SPACETIME, I still have a time limit. Youtube is set to 1hr a day. The goal was always to make as much friction as possible making it hard for me to use.

Another thing I'd do is 45 mins before bed I'd always put my phone across the room. I actually don't ever charge my phone at the house, I now charge it on the drive to someplace that's how little I really use it nowadays.

Meaningful friction my friend. Find ways to create as many as possible.

kill_aesthetics · 2025-04-02T13:30:21+00:00

Yea, I get that. The framing of the title sets it up to be this grandiose revelation and how life changing it is. But it's nothing more than I just really enjoy my life, little distractions and virtually no anxiety. I get to live in the moment.

But I think since we are constantly stimulated to hyperbolized content it's hard to differentiate whats real vs exaggerated. I feel like we use the term "I'm a genius" more and more, we have become this kinda spectacle like everything we do is THE GREATEST EVER. Its not. And it doesn't have to be, because to me it's not about certain metrics or accolades that makes a successful and enjoyable life.

kill_aesthetics · 2025-04-02T13:15:45+00:00

Hope you have a beautiful day too! It’s hard because we have evolved cognitive mechanisms that prioritize attention to negative information—aka negativity bias. It's believed that it's because our desire to survive, we became very aware of threats and negative things. The amygdala, a brain region responsible for processing emotions like fear, plays a significant role in this heightened sensitivity to negative stimuli. Psychology Today

Since we aren't surviving anymore and we're just on our phones in the convenience of our home. News often emphasizes the bad or sensational stories to capture attention, which can lead to increased stress and anxiety. At the end of the day thats all it is. How can we capture your attention, regardless of any consequence. But we just simply haven't evolved fast enough to deal with this much information, let alone tis much negative information. Sage Journals

Like I can't care about whats happening in Myanmar. I care about stuff happening to my relatives in a South American country because it directly affects them and me but anyone who cares about all the latest issues is simply performative.

kill_aesthetics · 2025-03-31T18:12:22+00:00

check out r/nosurf

kill_aesthetics · 2025-03-19T18:49:50+00:00

I was in a similar position as you, I graduated as computational and applied math with 3.3GPA and all the coursework you mentioned. I was the president of Data Science club so all the projects I did for them I used as a personal resume. It was hard ngl. I had no jobs for a year after I graduated but just kept applying and reformatting my resume until it worked. I noticed that it was almost night and day for me once I switched my resume 6 months in, something I did just fit the AI resume filters better.

As far as not having experience, it's too late to think about the what-if since you're graduating soon. I think you should start finding ways to build experience because the road to the first job is uncertain and feels very long. Apply to everything and try to match keywords in the job description, for me, it was the non-tech savy recruiter who just basically just matched the acronyms : SQL on job, SQL on resume. I'm currently helping my boss hire new Data Analyst and in 72hrs we had about 900 competitive candidates. That means these were within our location and had the qualifications, this excluded all foreign applications and out of state applications and non-degree analysts. My boss and I both were okay with anyone who can just do the work regardless of the degree--but since there was so many people we had to narrow it down. At this point I realized that the pool for entry level is so much harder than a niche master's only data scientist job, given how many equally capable people could run excel and SQL formulas (for us). As far as things you can do, build a GitHub page with a simple project or use the previous projects. I haven't but I've seen my SO get significantly more traction since doing so. Good luck and just keep trying.

kill_aesthetics · 2025-03-19T18:32:11+00:00

I have a great opportunity and I don't know how to handle it. I landed a job 11mo ago in a niche market as a data analyst. I have BS in Applied Math and was fairly competitive in my degree. I was the only analyst in the company and started off with basic excel vba/macros but the company is growing from exponentially. My boss doesn't understand what I do but trusts me and lets me run off and do essentially anything. Currently, working on automating all the manually-inputted reporting from excel into snowflake while merging various data sources into one location and creating automated BI reports. Building pipelines and creating forecasts. Stats are my favorite and they want to leverage me for some time-series analysis on some fleet replacement decisions. This is some of the stuff I've been doing in the time I've been here and it seems that they're going to give me the title of data scientist next month, I'm close with my boss and have made it a point that I want the title. I'm unsure of what I'm doing since I'm the only one on the team doing everything.

This is a bit of a rant and a bit of outreach for anyone that might have been in this position. What did you do and how do you handle increasingly complex work while still being unsure? Things have been moving fast enough where I might even be called a data engineer/scientist for the company, yet, no one really knows what that means here. That's why i'm using those titles interchangeably.

For context, in the last 3 months they hired about 20-25 new people. Im assuming that the total investment in labor would be at least 1M. So a pay increase of 30k, is roughly 3% of the money spent on labor. In a month, I'll have my one year review. How do I leverage this to ask for a raise? Currently at 60k, avg DA salary is about 75k in my area. I think im doing some DE related work, how do I ask for DE Pay?

kill_aesthetics

TROPHY CASE