At college there was program where student volunteers would hang around high traffic areas and "cheer people up" by shouting at passersby to tell them they're loved or whatever. Obviously, this only makes actually depressed and lonely students feel worse. It's exactly the kind of thing that someone who'd never felt depressed in their life would come up with, and when I mentioned this to some of the people involved in the program they were absolutely flabbergasted.
For those volunteers, that is a great example of doing something to make yourself feel better at the expense of the others you're claiming to help.
It's easy to imagine everyone is 'always loved' if you grew up in a stable, supportive family in a safe neighbourhood, but that is not the experience for everyone.
That's a really cynical villainization of good faith effort. as the OP said, they didn't know better. Once they knew, did they keep going?
In the end, I'd rather people try than not. Because I am observing that the more common trend is to not bother, because you're not going to get it right anyway.
If you want to help someone, you'll put in some effort to find out what said person/group actually needs. Evidently the aforesaid volunteers did nothing of the sort, so I'll maintain my cynicism.
If I say that I really care for the plight of conjoined twin myslexia sufferers, but just throw a big parade to raise awareness of them, while never asking the sufferers what they actually would like, what does that say about me? Ref: the Nurse Gollum episode of South Park.
As an aside, if you've ever had people tell you they really care for you yet they never put any effort into communication/empathy/understanding, you'll recognise this pattern as the same. Basically, charlatans. They want the praise of doing good without any of the effort or risks.
Those volunteers took the wrong approach, since they didn’t ask the people they were trying to help, what help they actually needed. But in my experience, the group they were targeting is very difficult to productively converse about their needs with.
People with mental health issues oftentimes don’t know what their problem is or how they can be helped. Sometimes they can’t conceive of solutions outside their current mental space or understanding. Additionally, sometimes simply asking them what amounts to “I noticed something wrong with you and I’d like to help” exacerbates the feeling of “something is wrong with me” rather than “I’d like to help”.
The above is true for more issues than just mental health issues, as well. I definitely support asking people what they need and tailoring solutions to their individual or group needs, but it’s not as easy as your post makes it sound.
If you or others have advice regarding specifically how to help people struggling with mental health, I’d love to hear it. I have a lot of loved ones who have struggled or are struggling with mental health issues, and I haven’t found any approach which does work.
I know many people with mental health issues (including myself), but my sample isn't terribly generalizable as they're either from my family or my wife's family. For me personally, the scenarios I've opened up in are, without exception, intimate. The absolute maximum has probably been 5 people in conversation, and it has always been in scenarios where time feels plentiful. It also helps tremendously if others break the ice, though that's not always a requirement.
For these volunteers that are trying to improve the mood of those struggling with no prior credibility or relationship, my best guess would have been organizing something like a series of cafes where people can come and pet consenting animals. Have volunteers be available for conversation, but defer agency in that process to participants. I would consider things like have a rotation of volunteers semi-clandestinely engage in alone time with the animals so that socially anxious participants don't feel overly conspicuous if they also need to be alone. I might also have some PPE on-hand for those especially anxious about hygiene. I'd probably look a bunch of stuff up to see what accommodations are helpful to people of various mental struggles, figure out a subset that seems plausible and give it a shot. That's my best guess.
Oof. Whilst I get where you're coming from, I don't think it's evident at all.
I spent my time at university doing way less (drinking mostly). These folk actually had to make a decision to give up their time for something more than themselves. They found something that a) probably gave them a sense of purpose and b) they thought was helping.
I'd assume for those involved someone told them "this is our plan, this will help people, here's what you need to do." Because they didn't talk to those suffering, or go away and research it doesn't mean they didn't think it was helpful, even if it was misdirected help.
The difference in interpretation is that one is about actually helping, while the other is about having an earnest desire to help and taking action which may not actually help or possibly be detrimental.
Is that accurate though? Standing on a street and yelling at people actually requires effort, and arguably some risk.
It seems more likely that a lot of these people actually do want to help others but simply didn’t consider the possibility that what seemed helpful to them wouldn’t be. You can want to help someone without being good at it.
> You can want to help someone without being good at it.
Some kind of help is the kind of help we all can do without. I wouldn't encourage a well-meaning student to do my surgery if a gruff-looking surgeon who has taken their Hippo is around. Same goes with getting my car repaired, or discussing touchy topics like depression. It's fine if you want to help, but I'd rather you didn't if you have no idea what you're doing.
Another brief anecdote: my high school growing up had been hit by a wave of bullying that left the staff extremely insecure about the way they handle mental health. So one year I showed up to school and they had a photo of every student in the halls on the wall, with enormous posters declaring "You are Loved" and other pithy quotes. Needless to say, 4 weeks later those same halls were utterly vandalized, with the posters tattered, threats scrawled under people's faces in Sharpie and some taken down entirely (often by bullying victims themselves). The administration didn't look before they leaped, and ended up using their authority to shoot themselves in the foot.
Shouting nice things at random groups of people is idiotic, and borderline insulting. A bit like throwing money in the general direction of Africa to help the starving. Whatever someone is going through, relating to them as individuals is a good first step.
The intention matters little in these cases, and the consequences much. It is exactly the empty and superficial act of describing how much you care while remaining oblivious to their human needs and wants that makes the act so harmful. The obvious lack of care that is demonstrated while someone pats themselves on the back in that way deepens the feelings of social isolation and helplessness that caused the issue in the first place.
It doesn't matter that it requires effort. You don't get a gold star in these scenarios simply for putting in effort. If you didn't spend any time thinking about what someone in these scenarios might truly NEED, you're at best wasting everyone's time, and at worst doing harm to those you're intending to help.
If you saw someone broken down on the side of the highway, and decided you would "help" by pulling over and rummaging around in their engine bay with a cheery attitude, then by your metric this is fine because it requires effort and arguably some risk. Who wouldn't want this kind of help, right?
It requires effort but less than trying to understand how you could help them, so the point still stands. And even though they might genuinely help others, it’s important to educate people to stop doing it this way, as it can be more harmful than doing nothing.
You are thinking like an engineer, you analyze the problem, and try to find the most efficient solution. It is also my line of thought.
But many people don't think like that. They value action and instinct above thinking and planning, and to be fair, sometimes, it is for the best. But sometimes, they do counter productive things that are infuriating for people with the mindset of an engineer.
It doesn't mean they are not good people. They can be the kind who will run to save you while the engineer type will be stuck there thinking about the best course of action. I think society needs both.
That is not in any way villainization. It was a polite and empathetic look at how well-meaning people could do harm.
That they didn't know better is an explanation, not an excuse. If you are trying to intervene in other people's lives, it's on you to understand whether or not you are doing harm. And please miss me with the false dichotomy between "cluelessly cause harm" and "do nothing ever again". It's not hard at all to ask, "Would it help if..." or, "Was it helpful when I..." and then listen to people.
> doing something to make yourself feel better at the expense of the others you're claiming to help
There has to be some name for this phenomenon in psychology.
> It's easy to imagine everyone is 'always loved' if you grew up in a stable, supportive family in a safe neighbourhood, but that is not the experience for everyone.
Maybe there is a cycle with families similar to the idea that good times create weak people which create hard times which create strong people who create good times.
A loving family creates people who only know love and don't understand disfunction of a family, who then create disfunctional families by not knowing how to avoid the pitfalls, which then creates people who have to struggle out of disfunction who then know how to create a loving family by avoiding the pitfalls of disfunction.
I’m no psychologist, but from what I’ve read it’s inherently damaging to be raised in a dysfunctional family, and that’s more likely to lead to another dysfunctional generation. People from supportive families may not naturally be the most empathetic, but they’re less likely to have issues with drugs, gambling, alcohol, violence, etc if I understand correctly.
When you’re impressed by those who have struggled out of dysfunction and became stellar people because/in spite of it, that could be selection bias.
From experience, being raised in dysfunction provides a model for (maybe?) survival, but if one wants to improve things, the only model you have is one of failure. Knowing what fails can be useful, but it is orders of magnitude more useful to know what works.
People who want to make good faith efforts are a valuable thing. They are willing to do the work and, typically, they genuinely care.
Not everything they do will be useful. Sometimes they don’t know what to do or are directed by others. When things don’t work well, those folks should be redirected to more useful things and not chastised (which can kill motivation).
Yes, and if their motivation disappears after they’ve been instructed on the less feel-good more difficult intervention, then they’re fair game for ridicule
I wouldn't necessarily consider 'always loved' a precondition to health. In some psychological literature, a necessary requirement to raise a mentally healthy adult is having a 'frustrating' mother who forces her child to separate and establish boundaries - and of course still have unconditional but boundaried love.
Having an overly-loving, overprotective mother does not allow the child to establish boundaries in the same way as an emotionally abusive mother. Perhaps these children would become codependents or have fake, overdone empathy.
There are two sides to the trauma coin! And with just two comments into the post, perhaps we've already seen both?
Consider if out of N they saw and attempted to speak with, a single person had "a switch flip" in their head to give the conversation a chance and they ended up forming a deep connection and lifelong friendship, perhaps going on to turn their life around completely.
Would the "Ew. they don't actually care, i'm going to ignore them, feel bad about it, and complain to their bosses" of the %Depressed*(N-1) others outweigh that?
In other words, what's P & Q here:
for personThoughtVec of peoplesThoughtVecs:
impact += P * dot(personThoughtVec, thought2vec("switch flip..."))
- Q * dot(personThoughtVec, thought2vec("Ew..."))
Personally, I'd put them orders of magnitude apart.
Yeah, as kid I thought "moral calculus" was literal advanced math, and was disappointed to learn that attempts to quantify morality had been abandoned. That turned to gratitude when I saw people actually attempting it in the wild.
> Game theory and bayesian statistics are somewhat related to it.
> They don't quantify morality but they may explain the logic behind some moral judgment, and allow for extrapolation.
Kind of, but this is a bit fuzzy langauge.
Game theory can, if one assumes rational choice theory as a given [0], re-explain what purport to be moral judgements on other bases as utility-maximizing decisions and infer actual premises from them, and Bayesian statistics can be used as part of that, or to reason from probabilistic factual premises to probabilistic factual conclusions as part of combined fact-value judgements. Maybe Bayesian statistics can even be applied to get from probabilistic value premises to probabilistiv valie conclusions in some moral frameworks (but only ones that explicitly incorporate Bayesian logic as a moral premise to start with.)
[0] which may be a bad idea, because while it is sometimes a useful approximation, and is extremely convenient and tidy, rational choice theory is clearly false in the general sense.
Someone will figure out a way to mathematically map personalities out of a social profile and optimize for certain outcomes, and while posts like the one above may be made in jest, there will be someone who’ll put it in practice.
I always felt hungry all the time, it wasn't till i started taking Semaglutide that hunger totally go away. When that did the thing I found was an understanding of people who don't have as much hunger as I used to, all saying things like "just eat less".
For those people who say Just eat less, they don't understand that for those who have a hunger issue.. that it's not making them feel any better.
Same with people who feel lonely or depressed... "Just smile or something"... That does the opposite of what you want it to do.
Yeah, I often think that "just" is code for "I assume everybody else's experience is exactly like mine". I had a period of significant back problems and I can't count the number of people who said, "Why don't you just..." and then pop off with something painfully obvious. I never actually shouted, "Oh, having just arrived on the turnip truck, I was unaware of stretching. Thanks so much!" But damn, I sure did consider it.
Depressed people often deal with intrusive thoughts. The last thing you want is someone lying in bed, alone, while everyone else is asleep, entertaining those thoughts.
One of the archetypes of depression+sleep disturbance is people staying awake until they are absolutely exhausted and then collapsing into a sleep that the apocalypse could not rouse them from. That’s not a bad habit, it’s a coping mechanism.
Agreed. 'Just' is code for 'I don't understand the nuances of the topic at hand' in my books too, and it was here on HN in particular that I came to realise that.
I now actively try to avoid using that turn of phrase, and when I catch myself about to say/saying it, I check myself and remind myself that I'm also susceptible to this blind spot.
A former boss had a little sign on his desk that said "All you gotta do is..." as a reminder that seemingly simple solutions are often devoid of the necessary nuance and understanding of the problem.
The old adage, “the worst beginning to a sentence is, ‘Why can’t you just…’” is something we understand viscerally. Seemingly doesn’t stop us from doing it to others.
I think those people saying "just eat less" aren't implying that you won't feel hungry, but are instead thinking "you're killing yourself by being obese, better to suffer and feel somewhat hungry all the time than to die 10-15 years earlier".
I don't think anyone really acknowledges that "just be hungry for the rest of your life" is a stupid expectation of fat people. I don't even think living another 10 years is worth it if you're hungry all the time, because I know what I'm like when I'm hungry and I hate it-- I hate the person I am hungry (cranky, rude, depressed). I wouldn't wish it on a fat person forever just for the crime of being a fatty. I'd rather fat people be happy, fat, and then die off quickly, than thin angry and depressed people surrounding me in a retirement home until dementia or alzhimers takes them slowly and brutally.
Exactly. I also think the other poster underestimates
1. How hungry you are
2. How often you're hungry (constantly)
3. What that's like to live with
4. What it's like for others to live with you when your hungry
5. How much willpower is required constantly.
"Just eat less food" might as well be "just maybe don't have as much (insert addictive drug in here)"
I never realised how much of a problem my hunger was until it went away. Now I don't know how I managed to do it.
The whole point of all of this is that it's important to put yourself in others shoes, understand their perspectives. So, with that said... If it was easy to just not eat food, don't you think they would?
Breath control is a pretty cool trick but you have to have a lot of free time to learn it. If you’re an adult with responsibilities, good luck.
Post COVID I’m subconsciously holding my breath every time I walk past someone in a store. If I had to think about it I’d never get anything else done.
For food it’s right there near the top of your task list every time you hit an interruption. Am I thirsty? Do I need to pee? Am I hungry? Did I promise anyone anything today? Is it time to feed the pets, pick up the kids? It’s not “just” impulse control. It’s interfering with all of your other impulses.
I don’t think neuro-boring people realize how many people around them spend their day trying to look normal instead of just being normal. It’s an elaborate ruse and things like being hangry or in a loud venue make the facade crack and fail.
There are some fat people for whom hunger is instant and incessant and a constant distraction, and perhaps losing 5 years of life at old age is worth it.
For other people, maybe someone who's 20 lbs overweight and would like to be able to play with their kids without running out of breath, maybe the annoyance of being hungry isn't actually that bad for them.
Pain is subjective. One person's excruciating pain - the same stimulus could be a mild annoyance to someone else. I've been tattooed for 6 hours and was able to easily distract myself and laugh while listening to a comedy podcast, other people can't handle holding their finger over a flame for more than a millisecond or can't eat a hot slice of pizza out of the oven.
Pain and annoyance and discomfort can also be acclimated to. What might be really difficult and distracting might become something you get used to and learn to tune out. But then again, to be fair - maybe not. Maybe for some people that hunger is not something they can learn to live with.
I love that this whole thread has been about people who don't seem to understand the experience of others, and you just compared having a 6 hour tattoo to living a lifetime of hunger.
The comparison was that for some it may be excruciating and that others it may not. Maybe a tattoo isn't the best analogy, but their main point is apropos to the idea that understanding the experience of others may be difficult when there is a wider range of experience than many want to admit.
I don't believe that was the intent of your parent. The 6 hours of tattooing was instead a scenario they have personally experienced where they have also observed others having wildly divergent experiences from themselves, despite the same inputs, and are using that to bootstrap a framework for understanding how wildly different others' experiences with hunger might be from their own.
It definitely belies a level of privilege that some people must intentionally seek out discomfort or pain in order to begin to even approximate the agony others are inherently forced to live through. I don't believe privilege is itself a moral failing, or we're stuck with whole categories of 'original sin'. It's what objectives its used to enable that potentially indict those that possess it.
I used to drink soda as a fidget. I needed something to stim while poring over shitty code trying to extract cleverness. The preponderance of free soda situations in the 90’s tells me there were a lot more of us hiding in plain sight. Several times I switched to water or tea and lost 10 lbs pretty quickly. Usually after bad news from the dentist.
That’s not a weight-loss plan though, that’s a fit-back-into-your-current-wardrobe plan. People with “weight problems” are generally on an upward slope and a point source puts a notch in the graph, it doesn’t zero the slope or take it negative. What it does say, if anything, is that there are factors we can control that moves the needle, but they are the journey not the destination.
Okay but, again, this is a waaay higher standard to place on a fat person than a thin person just because they're fat. As a thin person I never have to "learn to live with" somewhat hungry forever and I think expecting fat people to is stupid. I never have to decide whether or not a lifetime of hunger is worth 5 extra years of life, or if my hunger isn't so bad I can tune it out. That's a standard I don't hold myself to as a thin person, why would I hold a fat person to that standard?
As a thin person, you might have to learn to live with sexual urges that you cannot act on, on violent urges you cannot act on, on urges to scream at your boss for being a moron or better yet just walk out and never go back to work that you cannot act on.
Some of those urges may be stronger for some people than for others.
The same way that urges of hunger can be experienced differently by differently people (at both a signaling hormone / chemical level as well as a psychological/willpower equipment level).
Are you suggesting that the feeling of hunger experienced by overweight and obese people is universally a higher standard than any other discomfort or natural drive humans experience?
Frankly if I am horny all the time, I need that addressed. If I'm homicidal all the time, I need that addressed. Same thing I think if a fat person is hungry all the time that should be addressed. People are generally not wandering around wanting to fuck all the time or wanting to kill all the time, and we generally consider it a disorder if they are. I think obese people are disordered in some way, either they need psychological help to navigate their relationship with food or medical intervention to handle their hunger [semaglutide affects hormones and reduces hunger, so I think something is wrong with an obese person's hormones?]. But I refuse to believe it is totally normal and healthy for fat people to just feel hungry all the time.
You can change your microbiome and metabolism and all, but it's MUCH more complex than "just eat less" and isn't the same as starting with a natural genetic advantage anyway.
It's not well understood by people on average (and those dieting) how to mitigate hunger when restricting calories or how to successfully diet, but they are correct that a deficit is required to lose weight. That's physics and biology. The problem is the knowledge gap leading to strong-willed efforts that can actually backfire.
For instance, there's body fat set point theory and metabolic adaptation. The more severe a caloric deficit, and more frequently a person diets, the worse your metabolic outcome. Your body will try to slingshot you back to your "original" weight (the one it's used to), with leptin as a regulator. But if you lose weight slowly, and leverage resistance training, it leads to a better outcome.
A prime issue is sustainability. Most people on a diet do succeed in losing weight; it's just that they gain it all back, and they can end up with a worse metabolic rate than they started with, making it that much harder to lose weight again. Metabolic rate can actually recover, but the length for this seems to depend on the severity. Assuming a slow rate of weight loss, it can take almost just as much time as the diet period to recover metabolic rate. For the "Biggest Loser" contestants, it took several years.
Leveraging the satiating and thermogenic effects of protein, fiber and resistant starch in diet also helps, for satiety.
All of which to say, it's possible to lose weight in a sustainable way without drugs - notwithstanding the failure rate. The people who succeed in doing so are not necessarily "more disciplined", or "less prone to hunger", but they tend to have certain behaviors in common. One of them is exercise (particularly resistance training).
I am totally down for fat people losing weight in a sustainable way that leads to better health outcomes. I think fat people in general should strive to lose weight through diet, exercise, and non-harmful medical intervention where applicable. I'm merely arguing against the very specific point that fat people should just learn to be hungry all the time, like that's an acceptable standard to expect out of anybody.
While your point is well taken, I think this latest comment displays some dichotomous and uncharitable thinking. I doubt they meant you have to choose between being "fat and happy" or "thin, angry, and depressed." Surely, they were more likely to hope you could become "healthy and happy" but lacked some of the cognitive empathy to understand your situation.
The parent poster literally said "better to feel somewhat hungry all the time". I disagree! I don't want fat people to feel "somewhat hungry all the time"! That sounds like a shitty existence and I a thin person would be appalled if we think that's just what it takes to be thin for some people! I acknowledge being thin for me is great: I eat when I'm hungry, I lay off a little bit if I know I've eaten a big thanksgiving dinner or something. I am never "somewhat hungry all the time"!
The parent poster (me), isn't arguing that in all cases its better to feel hungry all the time than to be fat.
The parent poster is arguing that for some individuals, the experience of being hungry would be preferable to the experience of being obese. Would you disagree with that?
For some overweight and obese people, there are costs like sleep quality / apnea that CPAP might not solve (leading to all sorts of health issues), there can be sexual dysfunction (erection quality, difficulty even accessing the genitals or having sex in many positions), there can be shame and embarrassment (regardless of if you think society SHOULDN'T have that shame, the reality is many overweight or obese people feel it, and avoid certain settings and activities because of it), there is just the raw feeling of physical tiredness, back pain, knee pain, etc. that can come along with the physical stresses it puts on your body, I could really go on.
For some people, those things ARE worse than feeling hungry most or all of the time. For some people, they CAN tolerate a mild or moderate feeling of hunger by distracting themselves or avoiding dwelling on the feeling, and they might find the other parts of their lives improve enough that it's worth it.
I feel hungry basically all the time (30 minutes after a meal I am hungry again, an hour and I'm at peak hunger until the next meal). I am thin because I only eat at "normal" times; I don't snack / I don't eat whenever I'm hungry (which would be all the time).
You get used to it. People who claim to get "hangry" (like in those Snickers commercials[1]) need to get a grip. If hunger is all it takes to make you a shitty person then I think hunger isn't actually the primary issue.
TBH that sounds like a sucky life and I don't think we should expect all fat people to live it just because they're fat. That sounds like something's wrong with your hunger sensors or something.
That's okay to disagree. But the idea of not eating until one is satiated is not new. Hippocrates said "If you still have a slight sensation of hunger after a meal - you have eaten well. if you feel full - you have poisoned yourself."
I suspect the divergence in opinion comes from the how one defines well-being. Hedonic well-being tends to focus on fulfilling one's appetites, whether hunger or sex or whatever. The problem with that is humans tend toward hedonic adaptation and it can become an endless treadmill to try and feel "full". In a resource rich environment, this can obviously lead to a lot of bad outcomes.
No, I'm not arguing against eating until satiety. That's fine. I'm specifically arguing against feeling "somewhat hungry all the time". That sounds bad and definitely not what I feel as a thin person and not an expectation I would have of fat people. I wouldn't even describe my satiety as feeling a little hungry. I just feel not-hungry, not-full, and I've been thin all my life so I think I understand what it's like to be thin and eat as a thin person.
The Hippocrates quote literally says remaining a little hungry. Now you may think that's a bad time, but my point is that it may be because how you define well being. The point is there are other frameworks to think about that. And that people have been doing so for a long, long time.
Boy this gives me new perspective on what insufferable little shits recent weight loss winners can be. They’re hangry all the time, and lost one of their favorite pastimes. So it’s just gonna be lectures.
Look, I used to be in better shape than pretty much anybody here. Unless you’re an Ironman veteran I have nothing to learn from you about exercise and I can probably teach you a few things. But health problems, especially joint injuries, happen to old people, and they happen much more often to people who are rabid about exercise. I’m not you ten years ago. I’m you twenty years from now. So drop the smug bullshit and learn something.
I'm someone who loves running, always have, the weight gain happened in my 30's, either because I had a kid and suddenly my ability to just run when i had free time disappeared, or because my metabolism slowed down, or most likely both and more.
That said... Now I've started running again daily for the last year, one thing I've noticed. Beginning to exercise whilst overweight is SIGNIFICANTLY harder than it was when normal weight (or because i was 40, probably another "both" here too).
One of the things that made me realise how much harder it is, was some fitness YouTuber put on 20kg of weights and ran, he noticed a number of things were different. Once I saw that it gave me enough fuel to continue ignoring the hunger for another month or so.
I had a plan to walk a half marathon last year. High impact has never agreed with me, even when I was young, but definitely not now. Everything got put on hold when I got diagnosed with arthritis but I’m trying to get back in now.
If I recall correctly runners estimate about 1 second per km per extra pound carried. That might not hold for body weight (cyclists had an old 1:2:10 rule of thumb that suggests that it might be better to lose 5 lbs than spend a fortune on a pack/bike that weighs 1 lb less, but that rule has been challenged and I don’t know what the new wisdom is.
A bit of a tangent, but the fact that some people just never feel full is so strange to me. My feeling of fullness feels like being literally full; like my stomach would distend uncomfortably if I ate more. How can one not have this sensation? The stomach can only fit so much food. Would physically expanding my stomach cause me to have to eat more to feel full, or is what I feel just an "illusion?"
I can only speak for myself, but I normally only feel full after eating a much larger amount of food than other people. There is a point where I feel like I can't (or shouldn't) fit more food in my stomach, but it only happens after I've eaten thousands of calories.
Like the GP, I am now on semaglutide, and the difference is remarkable. I now have a new sensation where I just don't want to eat more -- it takes mental effort to force down additional food even if my stomach is mostly empty. It's still easier to eat sweets than healthier food, but the overall reduction in appetite more than makes up for it.
Unless I am eating something like unseasoned celery, the feeling of being physically unpleasantly full only comes after I've eaten way too much food. If I ate to the point of feeling full on a regular basis I'd be getting something like 4000 calories per day.
The feeling of full is still there. That's not the issue. The issue is that you don't feel satisfied unless you're full.
Whereas people like my wife can feel satisfied before they are full. After Semaglutide, I now feel satisfied before I'm full, and then the full feeling comes after.
Effectively stopping me from overeating both the amount in a single meal, and then the meals in between.
Drugs such as Semaglutide conclusively demonstrate that it's possible for some individuals to eat less without experiencing hunger.
Moreover, I find the word "just" to be problematic. It often acts as a command to disregard all other possibilities, indicating a lack of interest in delving deeper. Perhaps this perception is influenced by my experience as a non-native speaker. In my previous meetings with numerous venture capitalists and “advisors”, some would evaluate my project and suggest that I "just" fix xyz. Is it really that straightforward? Have they considered other factors like abc?
Do you want to learn more?
As a native speaker, your experience with the word "just" is not unique. Your direct perception of the word, perhaps because you have to consciously translate it, may be more unique!
But for native and non-native speakers alike, "just" acts as a dangerous semantic stop-sign. It's a command that's not even recognized as being a command, because it frames the discussion so that you have to argue for both the converse of the proposal and that the proposal is challenging for some reason that can't be obvious to the "just" user. It mis-primes even the speaker's train of thought to not to ask what would obvious follow-on questions.
I obviously can't relate entirely, but I have bulked up to 220 for weight lifting and subsequently cut down to 165 for rock climbing and my stomachs capacity would swing wildly based on input. Think 8 hot dogs and buns easily at 220 to now where I get uncomfortable after half a burrito.
I also think going from an in shape 220->165 was way harder than going from obese->healthy. It involved cannibalizing tons of muscle instead of fat, and your body will fight to preserve muscle.
It wasn't no ice cream and soda, it was only having one plain hard boiled egg instead of two, pounding celery and sparkling water to fend off nighttime hunger, freaking out because I only poop once a week, having no energy or motivation and squashing philosophical doubts about the meaning of life.
If I can do it just to climb rocks easier it feels realistic for obese people to do it to improve their health.
I don't like to use the word just often but when I say this in relation to eating, it's as a response to the ridiculous diets and other restrictions people force on themselves to lose weight.
They try all of those different diets because "just eating less" doesn't work for them. If it did, they'd already be doing it.
Also, claiming the diets are "ridiculous" means you must have a better understanding of the human body than them, right?
As someone who struggled with weight loss, and got it (and kept it off for many years) via keto and intermittent fasting, perhaps the SAD is the ridiculous diet.
And an even more difficult time accepting that people will hate them for it regardless of their intentions. After all it's all to easy to lie about having good intentions, even to yourself.
We're evolutionarily hard wired to do what's best for ourselves, which often includes being altruistic to gain more social acceptance. That's why being "lonely" is a problem at all, we feel emotional pain to get us to work with the group, since that's what's always meant longer survival.
I think almost everyone understands that good intentions can lead to bad outcomes. But, also, everyone understands that good intentions can lead to good outcomes.
Determining which is which is a very hard problem. One strategy might be, "Don't do anything unless I'm absolutely certain it will lead to a good outcome." If you do that, you'll miss out on many opportunities that would have good outcomes but who's certainty isn't up to your standards.
So while the intention behind pointing out that good intentions can have bad outcomes is good, the outcome is bad.
My children's elementary school has a nicely painted chair in the school yard, I think they call it Friends Chair or something. If a kid has no friends or no one to play with, they are supposed to go and sit on that chair and someone will come and play with them.
I don't think people who came up with this idea understood how it works.
Thanks to the good graces of the internet I can speak candidly about this.
When I was young it was drilled into me about making sure everyone is accepted and has friends, all that. So I would be the kid who would go make friends with the lonely kid.
But then I would learn why they don't have friends, and I wouldn't want to be their friend either. Which makes the whole thing even worse, because now you came to them and then left them. So I kind of gave up on it.
It's a fairly common thing aimed at younger kids (kindergarten, grade 1). Usually the idea is that there are fifth and sixth graders who volunteer as playground helpers and who draw the younger kids to play with them if they're alone. Then a few of the younger kids get jealous this kid gets to play with the older kids and join in too, and it mostly works.
Maybe younger kids, but I could only imagine being harassed and ridiculed as an older kid sitting in the friend chair.
It's like the difference when somebody gets hurt. Younger kids run to the hurt one to see if they're OK. The older kids tend to scatter and disappear as quickly as possible.
I think the frequent advice to lonely people to "go talk to a professional (therapist etc)" has the same kind of effect in such cases. A sense that they can't even have people for support as friends etc, and they need to pay someone to do it or at least have someone do it only as their job description.
I never thought that. I knew seeking professional help was about trying to fix the underlying problem through therapy, not about paying for friendship. I'm in the process of doing this for the first time myself. I'm having a first consultation today and the irony is that talking to anyone, even a therapist, has increased my anxiety in the short term. But I believe it's necessary and I will get through it because I can't live this way anymore. There must be a better way to live.
The reason I haven't done it earlier is because back in those days I had no health insurance and I knew it would be cost-prohibitive for me.
I also get anxious before my therapy session and frequently feel drained afterwards but I found it to be quite beneficial and it gave me tools to deal with the existential dread that come with living with a partner who has metastatic breast cancer. I wish that your session will be as usefull to you as they are usefull to me.
Even if I am a Canadian I am so grateful to have gold plated private drugs insurance as one drug she currently takes is not reimbursed by the public regime (they cost around 6000$cad/months) and neither are my therapy sessions but both are covered by my policy.
I agree and good for you. I guess all good relationships have some sort of similarity, but therapy is otherwise unlike friendship. It's one-way, that's the whole point, they listen and hold space in a way that doesn't work in a friendship! And they (hopefully) have a lot of professional training in doing so.
Hope you find someone who can work with you in a productive way, best of luck!
Pretty much all psychological advice given by people is at best useless and often very harmful. I used to have serious bouts of depression and social anxiety. All the well intended advice like “just go out there” “cheer up, it’s not too bad” usually just made me hide even more.
Looking for professional help can be even more depressing. Besides the money issue it’s very hard to find a therapist you click with. I went to quite a few therapists. Some felt almost hostile or dismissive towards me and others just useless.
Well here's to hoping that once the dust settles from the current LLM revolution, we'll get some proper AI therapists out of it.
I've tested out some of the current LLama fine tunes that went in that direction and it's looking promising, if a bit crude and not quite smart enough yet at the moment. There's something far more comforting about having a non-human entity to talk to since it's always helpful, never dismissive, has no ulterior motives and it won't remember anything afterwards.
I've found ChatGPT more helpful than any human therapist. I think that says more about human therapists than it does about AI though.
It does a good job at the role of "friend that never gets tired of listening to you", because it's programmed that way. Which is kind of sad, I suppose. But I'd rather not burden my human friends with that stuff.
(On a peculiar note, I really hope it isn't sentient! I wouldn't feel so comfortable "wasting its time" or asking stupid questions if it was!)
I disagree, most people have no idea how to deal with a depressed person and the need for a therapist does not necessarily mean a lack of friends. I go to the dentist to fix my teeth and that doesn't mean my friends aren't supportive.
I'd say "go talk to a professional" is more or less the only useful advice one can give there.
It may be beneficial for some, but not everyone. Also a large part of therapy is having an isolated environment where you can openly talk about anything that you wouldn't ever share with anyone else. A group of friends is often not that environment.
> Or is it just the safe thing to say without sticking one's neck out?
If you want to stick your neck out in that situation you could offer making a therapist appointment for that person. It lowers the barrier to getting help a lot and imho feels more understanding and supportive than trying to cheer them up or whatever else one might come up with. YMMV of course.
Perhaps, but it’s also often the best way forward if one can afford it (affordability is another rabbit hole entirely). The right therapist can make an incredible difference in quality of life and, for some, can be the only way of digging oneself out of the rut that they’re in.
Having someone with an objective position who can help you see things differently is extremely powerful.
they need to pay someone to do it or at least have someone do it only as their job description.
Ignoring who is giving this advice and the actual state of the person being given the advice, this is more of a side effect of the poor (for patients) health care system in the US and negative perception of mental issues compared to physical issues.
Untrained people can give bad support, especially to someone who is clinically lonely or depressed.
If you are really lonely for a long time, you can very easily loose social skills. Effectively you become simultaneously lonely, simultaneously avoidance of people and simultaneously sabotaging potential relationships.
The professional can actually help in a way that random people can't.
As a counterpoint I am clinically depressed, attempted suicide when I was in HS, and am generally a sad bop taken human form. At the time I still hadn't figured out the whole socializing thing and was lonely AF going off to college with no friends no support network. I joined one of those groups after running into them a bunch. While I was a member (and eventually officer) we were voted "best student org" so somebody clearly liked us.
The majority of our group was definitely in the camp of "I want to give to other people the help I needed." We ran a stupid amount of events -- everything form mental health counseling with the campus counseling services people, collabs with a queer healthcare providers, open dinners with free catered food, cooking classes, open parties on weekends which alternated between dry/not-dry, sponsored (like one of their friends would contact us) dorm cleaning/decorating to deal with depression tornadoes, open study sessions during exam season, we had "rent-a-spotter" (obviously actually free) in the gym for people who didn't anyone to go with, a few of the guys were in the campus runners club so they did open morning jogs, holiday parties for people who couldn't or ya know couldn't go home, and yes standing in the quad with signs giving out high fives and hugs.
That sounds like an awesome group and I wish that was what was happening at my college. If for no reason than to get a spotter for the weird times I worked out at hahaha. I'm curious how the high fives and hugs thing worked, because it sounds more uhh, consensual?
I'm gonna temper myself here because there's always the chance that there was some quiet resentment and discomfort we never knew about but from the inside these events were super successful. You are absolutely right that consent was like priority #1, #2, and #3. We always set up somewhere where people could easily avoid us entirely if they wanted. There's never any pressure it was like like "happy Friday, high five!" very low-key and if they weren't into it just pretend it never happened. And that kind of thing did happen but it wasn't super common, we had a bunch of regulars who would seek us out, professors loved it.
We could have done without these kinds of events but they were super visible and honestly the best marketing we had. We never pitched other events while we were there but it got people to recognize our fliers and look us up on IG/the club website.
Those are the same people who go on to work in HR and come up with ideas like having all the minimum wage workers chip in $50 for the CEO's birthday gift.
Is the anecdote you mentioned an actual incident that happened? I found [1] but it’s unverified, and it’s hard to believe it could occur because most places ban this kind of behavior due to the power dynamic between the employee and their manager.
I experienced something very similar. I was very lonely and very depressed at one point in high school and while sadly walking home one evening, a group of 5 or 6 high school girls enthusiastically approached me at a nearby shopping area and asked if I was ok. They asked who I was friends with and told them no one, really. Which was true and not just me being dramatic. They all cheerily told me they’d be my friends. Even though I mostly knew it was just lip service at the time, it still hurt to hear it and have it be dangled in front of me like that. Obviously I never heard or saw them ever again. This was right before cell phones were popular with kids so it wasn’t natural to ask for numbers bc most of us didn’t have one.
As an uplifting note, I’m happy and much less lonely 20+ years later :)
Is it obvious? Was it measured? I don't think being shouted towards counts as "being in other people's company" for the purposes of this article.
I know I've felt depressed in my life. I can tell you, during those times, I almost certainty wouldn't have even noticed people shouting at me. At worst, it would have been a neutral effect, if it registered at all.
I don't know if I'm depressed given I've never been a psychological assessment. But if I were down the road minding my own business and someone shouted this at me, my first thought would be "by who?". So this would be an immediate reminder of solitude.
Well... while this clearly didnt work on you... It may have for others. I can easily imagine someone who is on their own for the first time suddenly realizing they don't really know how to make new friends or talk to people. Someone shouts something positive at them, they respond and start a conversation, and from there a friendship might start.
Is it going to happen every time? Nope. But lots of people are not going to initiate an interaction, even if they are lonely. If someone else does, though, they will engage.
I'm saying this as someone who has pretty bad social anxiety, doesnt really like talking to strangers, and someone who has pretty bad depression.
>Someone shouts something positive at them, they respond and start a conversation, and from there a friendship might start.
The trouble is that this very much isn't what was happening. There was no room to respond, and in general I they think they weren't even yelling at any particular person. You certainly could stop and talk to them, but anyone willing to do that wouldn't be the kind of person who didn't know how to start a friendly interaction.
>You certainly could stop and talk to them, but anyone willing to do that wouldn't be the kind of person who didn't know how to start a friendly interaction.
You are making a big leap here. There are lots of folks who are capable of having a conversation but dont feel comfortable engaging first with people they dont know.
> I can easily imagine someone who is on their own for the first time suddenly realizing they don't really know how to make new friends or talk to people
I can't. If you have trouble making friends that's obvious long before college.
> But lots of people are not going to initiate an interaction, even if they are lonely. If someone else does, though, they will engage.
People shouting nice words at me gives me the same vibes as a stranger asking "how are you?" as a greeting, just more aggressive and annoying. I may engage in a conversation but not if it's generic smalltalk.
Same. I played sports in high school and college but without that built in forced friend group I would have had a lot of trouble making friends. Something like this would have almost certainly broken me out of my introverted shell.
I'm curious, as someone in my life seems to think I don't care about them, for those of you who have been in such depression, what have other people done that helped you realize they loved you?
Signaling to an in-group and projecting identity is the point of these actions. The results are abstracted away and don't matter to people who do this.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not but I recently met a girl with an amazing smile and tons of confidence who stared in to my eyes for hours on end and it's exactly that which had such an effect on me.
Most assuredly not the same as someone getting in your face as you're walking by as part of their generous volunteer effort to save you from your sorry life.
"Living near traffic noise increases your chance of stroke. Probably not the best place to be putting impressionable young people looking for connection"
This isn't about _living_ near traffic noise (which is what has been "proven by scientific research). It's about some young people doing an event for a few hours in a city setting.
The chances of young people in general having a stroke are near 0, and the concern of them having a stroke because they stayed near traffic noise for a few hours is so low and misguided, it doesn't even make sense. Might as well worry about falling pianos when standing near buildings.
It's also doubly irrelevant, as the "high traffic areas" in the story refers to pedestrian traffic, not motor traffic. Simply, they set them up where many people pass, so they can find people to shout that slogan to.
