This is probably related to the neural systems for olfactory fatigue, eg why you stop noticing certain smells that are constantly present like your own body odor and the smell of your home/room
There’s a very good Wikipedia article that explains it much better than I can. But taste and smell are closely linked and the sensory systems become fatigued from overindulgence somewhat quickly. Conjecture but the massive amount of flavoring and sweetener in modern beverages is probably a factor in hastening this process
The characters being ancillary and easily edited out/cut is by design so they can still use the movies in foreign markets that are hostile to lgbt rights
If the gay character is only identified as gay in one scene where they say “I’m gay” or kiss for 10 seconds you can just cut that part out and still screen it in Saudi Arabia. Disney doesn’t actually give a shit about lgbt issues, they give a shit about what will sell
Thus a prominent main character who is gay or a movie about a character coming to terms with queer identity is far less likely because that basically means they instantly lose out on much of the lucrative international market
I used my old ones a ton. I had the original nook and had been using it for 13 years. I finally upgraded to a newer one with a color e ink screen and I like it a lot. It’s a boox ultra tab c. It was pricey so I wouldn’t get it unless you really read a lot and like e ink
I use it for reading almost exclusively. I read 1-2 books a week and a few volumes of graphic novels/manga per week as well. I have poor vision and the e ink is much easier on my eyes than lcd/oled screens. I can read on this for hours but reading on a traditional phone/tablet/laptop gives me eye strain/headache after a few hours. It’s nice to have a screen you can read with no back or front light. I do use the front light at times but I usually have it off
It’s handy for taking notes and annotations. I’ve read it’s good for drawing as well but I am terrible at drawing so I don’t know. The stylus seems comparable to my friends Apple Pencil except you can use the back as an eraser like an actual pencil
battery life is much better to a traditional tablet - a charge lasts 2-3 days usually, can last longer if I keep the front light off and all the wireless radio stuff off. I’ve gotten it to last a week. It’s a bit heavy bc of the battery though
Wrt color it’s a mixed bag. It’s a very handy feature for manga and graphic novels. But the color panels are new tech so they come with issues; primarily ghosting/image retention. After some time I’ve found an ideal mix of settings to minimize the issue and make the color look as good as possible. The boox os also has a little nav ball that can quickly force a full refresh the screen at any point to remove any retained image. But the color is still not comparable to an lcd/oled by any means
Mine is based on a kaleido3 panel. There’s a newer gallery3 panel that has more vibrant color but with a trade off of noticeably slower refresh rates. It’s not actually an eink panel but something called acep; it was more meant for advertisements/billboards so quick refresh rates weren’t a priority. There’s also no real options for a device with it at the moment aside from one that has real mixed reviews and one that has an open preorder with no eta on delivery as far as I know.
It’s also a somewhat capable android tablet but I don’t really get this part. Like you can run YouTube and games and stuff. But i don’t know why you would bother? It’s workable but not nearly as good. The exception to this is web browsing depending on the site. Heavy text based sites work well in Firefox.
This is pretty much what I meant by that fucked up misinterpretation of stoicism
Like you have the actual Aurelius stoicism which has some very good value; everyone should read meditations once or twice. But then it’s been cliff notes’d and perverted by a bunch of people into to lose the message entirely from “be in control of your emotions” to what you’ve described: horrific rigidity to keep it all in at all times until of course it doesn’t work anymore and you break down spectacularly. Like somehow the message has gone from “control” to “emotional numbness”
A similar dynamic has happened with nihilism where some the writings on it are not so bleak and terrible; that it is an expression of freedom. But over the years it’s been perverted into nothing matters, why bother
That’s for long term medical leave, like if you need to go to rehab. I mean for being able to go to like a single hour long doctors appointment. There is no protection for that whatsoever. If you need to go to a doctors appointment during work hours your boss has every right to tell you to go fuck yourself; you are not entitled to time off for a doctors visit even if it’s unpaid
I am an actual licensed therapist and while there are a number of real actual creating barriers specific to men pursuing mental health treatment there are a few factors I’ve consistently seen that are ubiquitous across gender, race, sexuality, class, etc
Money, time, availability
Therapy is inaccessible. I am a therapist who mostly works with insurance companies. They pay me about 100-115/hr. My clients will often have a high deductible health plan which means they need to pay this $100-115 per session until they hit their deductible, which can be 5,000+ dollars. It’s a lot to ask someone to pay $100+ weekly. On top of that they still usually have a responsibility afterwards of (typically) 10-30% so $10-34.5 per meeting which is still a notable weekly cost for many people on the high end especially after shelling out $400+ a month for months on end.
Other clients have PPO insurance which is a fixed cost per meeting but this can vary wildly. More affluent clients have excellent PPOs where they might pay $10-20 per meeting which is not terrible. But that’s rare. We are often covered under the “specialist” copay and many PPO plans have tiered provider coverage now. So a copay for me might be $50 or more per meeting (the worst I saw was $125 which was absurd because it was actually $27 more than I’d get from the insurer in question).
So you have this on top of these plans taking hundreds of dollars out of each pay check. “Well budget for it”. Hard to do because the need for therapy can be inconsistent and many of these people are coming in fo(and specifically symptoms like poor money management). Then on top of that even if you do budget for it you have the inherent issue that the need for outpatient therapy is often not dire/acute so if something more pressing comes up (eg a serious dental/medical issue, car breaks down, short on rent) therapy might be the corner to cut if it’s already established because in the overwhelming majority of cases you won’t die without it; it will just lower your quality of life (sometimes significantly so)
Then comes the time portion. Even if you can get past the cost barrier you have the availability of the therapist and yourself. I’m a night owl and I work late but many of my colleagues don’t. I’m pretty nontraditional though, no kids and my partner is very career oriented themselves whereas many of my peers tend to value the traditional 9-5 much more so they can be home for their children and such.
So when you go to schedule with someone it’s often that you can only get seen during business hours. It’s one thing when it’s a doctors appointment that you have once every few months that you need to duck out of work for but a weekly hour long engagement is much harder to explain. This brings back in the masculinity issues - many men find this basically impossible to disclose to the workplace and basically wouldn’t even try to get an exception for weekly therapy. Even without explicitly saying so asking for 1 hour open a week consistently for a doctors appointment is going to be perceived as therapy by many. But stigma aside many of us simply can’t do that. I’m on the practitioner side and I know I’ve ignored my own physical health at times because it was inconvenient to schedule doctor appointments during my workday.
Our systems of employment (at least in the USA) simply do not provide or protect for medical leave, even when it’s very brief and especially when you are a low level employee (executives and admins tend to have less of an issue ducking out for doctors appointments in my experience at least). There is no legal right to paid or unpaid time off for medical appointments in the USA and that is completely disgusting in 2023.
The final piece is practitioner availability. I have a waitlist through October at the moment and am not accepting new clients. All of my colleagues are in the same boat. The old practices I used to work at constantly call me to see if I’ll take any referrals because their waitlists are so overloaded. The hospitals and clinics I have referral relationships with email me every week for updates. It’s extremely stressful. Every new client, especially adolescent, complains that they are happy to finally have someone after waiting 3-6 months. Even if someone wants a therapist they have to wait ages. It is not uncommon that I get someone and when I call them to start they say they don’t even remember why they called in the first place.
We need more people doing the work. Or ideally we need to make societal reforms so that there are less people experiencing mental health issues. I’ve been doing this almost 15 years now. I, and anyone who doesn’t exclusively work with the rich, can tell you that a significant degree of what we work with is people who lack resources and not proper mental illness. I mean, it is depression and anxiety, but it’s because they have been paycheck to paycheck for years or theyre under a mountain of student loans or credit card debt and the stress is just too much to bear. And their jobs won’t give them raises and there aren’t any other jobs out there that pay more. Not everyone is a software developer or investment banker that can jump ship to another 6 figure job with cushy benefits. Most people work jobs that pay 40-60k with shit benefits and little upward mobility.
To answer your question more directly:
In my opinion it’s a systemic issue based around that super fun phrase everyone loves, “toxic masculinity”. I personally do not subscribe to gender labels but I am amab/male presenting and get a lot of male clients as a result. Many of them tell me they hide the fact that they are in therapy from everyone but their partner. This is indicative of the problem; that being in therapy is weak. That being in therapy makes them a bitch, a wuss, all kinds of pejorative terms. It’s bad, is my point.
So part of the answer imo is not in having doggies and cool dude stuff in the office. Its far more complex and involves redefining masculinity to still including things like being a lumberjack or carpentry or whatever. From there though you need to shed the part where it means you have to be emotionally numb to everything, constantly display strength, embrace the fucked up misrepresentation of stoicism that has you shove all your feelings into your stomach, and glorify anger, rage, and violence as the only appropriate means of emotional expression.
this could also be extended to the stigma surrounding therapy itself and the tendency to associate therapy need with weakness. This is an issue that goes beyond therapy though; there are people who won’t see medical doctors for the same reason even though they’re in physical pain. Our pride is our downfall.
Tldr make therapy cheap and accessible, make protections for workers to seek medical care, increase the amount of practitioners (or decrease the need for them), and systemic reform to the societal concept of masculinity and pride. So probably gonna take awhile
Middle management has gotten absolutely out of control in America
Imo (and this is largely conjecture) it’s an end result of stagnant wages. It used to be that you might stay in the same position but get actual pay increases 50 years ago. Now you don’t get the pay increases really, maybe a 3% annual bump if you’re lucky. They need something to retain talent so a lot of places end up creating bullshit management positions out of thin air to retain staff that come with a slightly more modest pay bump.
So instead of the 3% bump you get a 5% bump and now you’re “director of clinical programming” or “associate manager of marketing and sales for eastern iowa division” and have 10 employees “report” to you but in reality you’re neutered and have no actual power to do anything to them but tattle to the actual boss. But then the company doesn’t have to give you a 7-10% bump that outpaces inflation and feels like an actual raise. They save the real promotions for nepotism.
But this happens constantly and now industries are jam packed with employees that just bother other employees all day and/or create systems that slow down employees en masse to “increase accountability” that are constantly updated and replaced without removing old ones.
Whenever someone goes on about fixing healthcare this comes to mind. I’ve worked in healthcare for years and it is absolutely full of this. Pharma, insurance, hospital admin, all of them are loaded up with tons of these kinds of staff. I can’t tell you how many useless staff I’ve seen get promoted to positions that were literally created for them to supervise a handful of people. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to fill out 7 sets of paperwork that takes 2 hours and is all redundant copies of each other because 9 middle managers from the hospital, insurance, and state administration are all constantly convinced I’m a fraudulent liar despite being a licensed professional with a decade and a half of clinical experience and absolutely no investigations or citations on my record whatsoever.
Single payer healthcare is definitely a great idea that should be pursued but this is a huge problem that also needs to be addressed regardless of who’s paying the bill if you want to see changes with actual costs, wait times, clinician burn out, etc.
I’d imagine it’s similar for other industries too. How much wasted resources are in middle management at tech companies, at food production, at basically anything? How much of rising costs are basically going to pay the glut of middle managers that being nothing to the table but resource drain? Who do nothing in terms of bringing in money, who do nothing in terms of providing value? How much cheaper could my cellphone, bread, wood, etc be without these parasites sucking up resources
But then the societal impact comes up. If you addressed this problem tonight that would mean millions of people go from comfortably middle class to jobless overnight. America isn’t known for great social supports as is, what happens when you throw a 7-8 figure number into the mix (with the reduced tax income from the loss of their job income).
Fwiw I genuinely think that point is a huge factor in why our government resists proper single payer healthcare; a true program would displace millions of workers overnight as it would make companies like Aetna, Cigna, etc largely redundant and reliant on their much less lucrative life/home/auto/renters insurance divisions. They would slash workers left and right. If we ever get one it will be a two lane system where the private insurers stay alongside it as a “boutique” option for the rich to receive better service, guaranteed. Plus you know, those companies literally own politicians lol and that’s the other much larger problem
What defines ultra processed? Are chicken nuggets ultra processed if I simply purée a chicken breast, add salt, shape, bread, and fry? I’ve turned it into something that is completely irrelevant to its original form. Is sausage ultra processed because I added nitrates? Is nitrate free sausage not ultra processed because I used the loophole where I added celery juice for its natural nitrate content instead of adding them directly?
When exactly does it become ultra processed? When a chemist gets involved and gives things proper names that freak you out?
Are you one of the kooky types that freak out when they see “sodium stearoyl lactylate” on the label of their sandwich bread even though it’s safe to eat and objectively makes your bread better and last longer? If so I’m sorry that you insist on eating bread that is not as soft and goes stale in 2 days