meatball times
@meatballtimes
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ferret on a quest to learn about people. DM me to make a new friend!
New York City
Joined November 2022
When my parents divorced and remarried they continued to jointly raise us with their new partners. I had 4 parents, and they ominously referred to themselves as "The Parent Council". In hindsight I'm incredibly grateful for it. 1/.
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At different times in my life I have needed each of my 4 parent's strengths, and without their support I have no idea what I would have done instead. It literally takes a village - or a council - to raise a child, and it's tragic that we have lost sight of that.
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The Parent Council was like a supreme court. You were raised primarily by whichever parent was in the house, but big decisions or problems got escalated. They met ~weekly. "Mom I want to have a car"."Hmm ok, let me ask The Council" 😅.2/.
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They covered each other's strengths and weaknesses, and when my family had mental or physical health crises all 4 of them worked together, and it was *still* hard to support all 5 kids. I cannot imagine doing it with 1 or 2 parents!.4/.
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Each of my 4 parents has a very different style;.My dad is playful and supportive but not super emotional,.My stepmom is caring and emotionally intelligent but not practical,.My mom is intellectual and kind but very soft,.My stepdad is strong and grounded.3/.
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@OGTaylorB Oh I didn't even mention the adopted sibling . or my dad being best friends with his ex's sister's husband . or my cousins being like de-facto siblings. Or how half my siblings are furries. Or constantly arguing about corn subsides at dinner. My family is weird as hell.
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"Lmao they reinvented the bus". Ok but consider if they can profitably run this route that means *buses are failing to serve a brain dead obvious route that everyone uses* and something has gone horribly wrong with bus transit.
Uber's launching shuttles in NYC to take people from Manhattan to LaGuardia. • 14-passenger vans.• Trips every 30 minutes.• $18 to and from the airport.• Three pick up/drop off locations (Port Authority, Grand Central, Penn Station). It makes a lot of sense, 15% of bookings
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I've been feeling very under-nourished in my male friendships recently. I think there is something just kind of wrong with the default mode of male socialization/communication, something men aren't taught about relating to people. for instance --.
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my male friend's response to me crying on his sofa? "dude, I'm sorry, that's crazy. What topping do you want on your pizza?". what the fuck? friends for 15 years, this is his response? not all guys are like this, but could you imagine literally any woman doing this?.
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being in a relationship is like building an enormous imaginary castle together. it starts as sketches and blueprints, but over time you will inevitably create a shared, beautiful monument to the life you'll have growing old. but tragically:.
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I mostly just pity men at "not sure how I feel about my divorce" levels of emotional intelligence. they're not dumb, they're confused. they lack the tools to introspect. they were never taught. the emotions are just gonna sit in the pressure cooker in their heart, maybe forever.
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I realized several years ago that I could spend hours talking to my male friends and not learn a single thing about them. I always am the one that has to ask personal q's. and when I ask guys about their divorce or whatever, a solid 1/3 of them, like, shrug??? hello???.
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men unable to feel their feelings live confused lives, inflicting others, *especially women*, with the burden of feeling things *for* them or compensating for their total lack of self-awareness. we need dedicated spaces for men to build emotional intelligence. where are they?.
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I've known this guy for 15 years. I was his best man at his wedding. I told him recently about a suicidal episode of someone I love recently, and also a close family friend *lying about having cancer for two years*, and how it was killing me. crying.
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people kept shouting "LISAN AL GAIB" at this guy at union square eating an entire bucket of cheese balls
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society tells men to suppress their feelings. women demand "go to therapy" but female modes of expression are alienating to men. all the other men in your life are just as confused cuz if talking about the NBA isn't helping, they are out of ideas. no wonder guys feel nothing.
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where can men go to learn how to feel things and support each other?. fraternal orders like the Masons or Elks? dead.church/religion? dead.strong, vulnerable men don't exist in media.clubs, third spaces, military, dead, dead, dead.
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ok fuck yall, i'm writing a meta-contrarian pro-therapy thread. yes 90% of therapists suck. the other 10% are life-changing and most of you need one tbh. you people aren't special. most of you have straightforward emotional issues. some common objections:.
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@jadrobe Having a unified front was very important to them. Behind closed doors they argued *a lot* but it never came up when we were being raised, especially when we were young.
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One of the things that sucks about entering your first long term relationship at 28 is you have to speed run through all the stupid high schooler feelings you never got to have at the right developmental stage.
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each commitment makes the castle a bit more real, but no matter how much of it is built, there's always risk that it is abandoned and destroyed. you two may not even have the same blueprints! you want 2 more bedrooms than I do. uh oh. no monument lasts forever.
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I had no idea that having a spare bedroom would be such a hugely influential way to support my community. In the month my apartment has hosted 4 people dealing with breakups and enabled several people to visit NYC when they wouldn't otherwise. Huge alpha in spare beds.
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every breakup leaves two copies of the ruins; 8 billion people, so 16 billion unfinished castles, trapped in our collective unconscious, floating around, invisible, like ghosts. an endless sea of crumbling towers, bridges to nowhere, invisible stumbling blocks of the mind.
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they're nice ruins though. the foyer looks good covered in vines. her decor is immaculate even when in rubble. I'll sometimes visit this place, full of empty juice bottles and printed airplane tickets. then I will sigh, smile, and wander away to find another castle to build.
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@lilastories 1) they would never marry anyone who didn't prioritize their children as much as they did.2) no other children - my dad and stepmom had the 5th but she's not raised by council really.3) mom and dad married, divorced, then both remarried to other ppl.
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now our castle is in ruins too. its no wonder why. we built the foundation in the middle of a swamp. the struts would never have held the roof. we used hubris instead of plaster for the walls. im a novice architect and it shows.
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once I was wandering in our castle and stumbled across a grand bedroom that nobody ever slept in. oh. she was building a big one here. the carpets aren't her color, the moldings aren't her style. who built this with her?.
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Ok I figured it out. you have to try your hardest and then become detached from the outcome. now it's over for you fuckers.
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@ThomasA25514390 I have another more controversial rant about how the nuclear family is a huge mistake and we need to bring back broad kinship relationships.
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I told a guy it would be nice to finish reading this book about the byzantine empire with her. it was our thing, part of our castle. he said: "better bury that book in the ruins, man.". i suppose the byzantines would understand some beautiful works of art deserve to be destroyed.
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I was once at Yellowstone marvelling at an enormous jet of water shooting into the sky and a girl behind me angrily mumbled "what a waste of energy 🙄". This girl wanted to build a hydrothermal plant on top of Yellowstone????.
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"I'm too smart, or my trauma is too esoteric, for a therapist to help". respectfully, you're wrong, most of you are broken in ways that therapists would find pretty mundane. everyone is unique but the human psyche has common types of dysfunctions.
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Japan has an insanely hardcore work culture and extremely efficient govt/infra and their gdp is nearly flat for 40 years. very little exported innovation. America has none of those things and .our economy is incredible and literally everything is invented here. How??.
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People don't appreciate enough the crushing demoralization that comes from TWENTY EIGHT YEARS of being unhappily single . How it tears at your soul and makes your insecurities fester. And how hard it was to get out of that.1/.
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first of all: .the first step of therapy is finding a good therapist. like finding friends or partners this is *really hard*, actually probably the hardest part. consultations are free. be very quick to "fire" your therapist if it's not working.
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@michaelcurzi I absolutely need this too! There's a time for feeling and a time to stop circling . But I was pretty explicitly making a bid for "please, as my oldest friend, help me process this" and he either didn't care or immediately went into "stop circling" mode when I needed him.
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"therapy is just life coaching or a gateway to pills". no. therapy is not (directly) outcome-oriented. therapy is pulling out the big tangled ball of yarn in your heart, putting it down on the table, detangling a knot or two with some help, then putting it back inside.
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I'm going to get cancelled for this but I think we should get rid of "autism" as a diagnosis. The diagnostic criteria is a mess, it ranges from "likes trains" to "60 IQ nonverbal" -- it just doesn't feel helpful to lump such diversity into a single bucket. Split up the word.
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@ricardoalatorre yes 100%. I get the impression women have no trouble finding hot, charismatic, cool guys who are nevertheless totally emotionally unavailable and that's the big filter for lasting relationships.
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"my friends or my own introspection is just as good as a therapist". bro you have mommy issues!!! you can only see your own mommy issues. your therapist has seen thousands of mommy issues. they are an expert in mommy issues. use their metis!.
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starting to suspect the average life coach is worse off than their clients at the skills they claim to preach. they spend so much time dealing with crisis in their personal life they think they're experts when really the crisis is evidence that they're failing at it.
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in short: none of you have found an actually good therapist and you all think you're too smart/clever to benefit from one. and frankly having met a lot of you IRL, I can say many are emphatically wrong and broken in typical ways that any good therapist would be able to help.
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"therapy exists to perpetuate itself, it never ends". my brother in christ you are the one who started therapy! have some goals for your therapy. when you accomplish them, stop going. self realization is a lifelong, unfinishable project anyway.
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"90% of therapists suck" yeah. so do 90% of doctors. but we all have to go anyway. that's where all the therapy horror stories come from, the (unfortuntately common) bottom 90%. dont let the shitty ones cloud out the (rare 🫤) good ones.
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@samswoora Imo that is an absolutely amazing tradeoff and literally everyone should take it.You can always do the fulfilling startup thing after you retire at 36 or some shit.
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"therapy medicalizes my issues and thus reifies them". you are having Problems. when Problems cluster together, sometimes we invent a new word to describe them because that's helpful. if it's not, just stop using the word or get a new therapist with a different lens.
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man poverty is so pernicious . at critical moments you're forced to make a 0.8x instant-payoff decision over a 1.2x long-payoff one. for instance, marriages of convenience:.
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@ruth_hook_ it's culturally mediated? E.g. I'm left handed but in early elementary my teacher insisted I use my right. Some cultures push on conformity more than others and handedness is somewhat plastic, so.
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@octopichael I learned to program at 12 in this extremely esoteric branch of Assembly for the Super Nintendo. As a kid I didn't know that would be hard! You have a healthy disregard for the impossible.
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@pragueyerrr Similar with tolerance. True tolerance means peacefully coexisting with things and people you deeply deeply hate. That is extremely difficult to do! If it's easy it's not tolerance.
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The dream of the french revolution has been realized. The age of Reason is upon us. Actually good plane boarding methods
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I guess what I'm saying is that finding a partner is perhaps a person's most sacred journey and I have felt supported exactly zero by society. and I'm not the only one. We need to build a society that helps people find love.
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@GirardHolistic I think there's no major downside towards people other than bio parents taking a vested interest in the raising of a child. Could they fuck up? Definitely! But that's just the current state of affairs but with less alternatives 😢.
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lmao this prompted a contingent of haters to go through my account looking for evidence I'm secretly a woman or a trans man, because there's no way a man could write this.
I've been feeling very under-nourished in my male friendships recently. I think there is something just kind of wrong with the default mode of male socialization/communication, something men aren't taught about relating to people. for instance --.
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Swiping through a sea of women who "love a glass of wine 🤪" is not just a chore, it actively sabotaged my faith in humanity. It was the most demoralizing thing I've ever done. I had to take monthly breaks because I could tell it was turning me into a misogynist.
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@michaelcurzi you're absolutely right I won't get that from him, and I don't expect it. I love him anyway. but it's frustrating that it's such a common situation for men. after 15 years you'd think some sort of emotional rapport would form, right? I'm his closest friend!.
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somebody who is having several life-changing insights about their personal growth every week is probably *actually* having zero.
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wtf is a love language. that's just being human. who tf is like "I hate spending quality time with you. stop doing acts of service they piss me off. stop gently touching me." . ?????????.
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@AstleDsa large amounts of practical problems are actually downstream of emotional ones. I agree that this advice is not gonna apply to someone dealing with lower layers of Maslow's hierarchy tho for sure.
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once I was subletting a room and went to get breakfast and my roommate stopped me; "hey sorry man we are doing naked co-working here, can you take your clothes off so people don't get uncomfortable" . right of course wouldn't want to make my naked coworkers uncomfortable.
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What about that sense that you're not worthy of love, which creeps in around year 2 and really hits in year 6?. All the people you love, all the people you hate, all in relationships of *some kind*. Apparently Death Threats Jimmy deserves a girlfriend but I don't.
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experiencing INSANE gender euphoria because I correctly rotated shapes in my head to help a pretty girl fit a bookcase into her apartment.
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ok hot take posting "gm" in the group chats is spammy and pointless at best and culty and weird at worst. it doesn't feel personal. It's the online equivalent of a grocery clerk asking how I'm doing when we clearly both don't care.
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you're platonically cuddling with someone. you kiss them on the forehead. a bit later they kiss you on the neck. Who escalated the situation past platonic cuddling?.
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OK I get why the haters don't believe I'm a man because of all the feelings poasting. would you believe that I am actually extremely masculine in real life and had nearly 0 female friends (or feelings) until last year?. I have hugely changed as a person recently, let me explain:.
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in 10 years, it'll end in divorce, you'll throw your son's life into chaos, and you'll be run ragged unable to bring all your love into your next relationship . but the alternative was to let poverty keep chewing your toes until you bled out. you're fucked.
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@catholic_notes thank you!!!. in general I think wandering around ruins is bad tbh (i'm guilty of it too). put a plaque somewhere, make a shrine, and then come back only rarely and with intention.
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So you subject yourself to rejection on dating apps, exposure therapy, you get used to that part . But subduing my personality to conform to the format, surrendering to the system? 10,000 fake conversations and the mask starts eating the face.
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Of course there's the crushing loneliness, feeling like you're having to bear really difficult burdens alone. You feel cosmically unmoored, untethered. But at least that builds self reliance. No, the other stuff is much worse.
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your son's school is 1hr from the nearest affordable apt. But you've found a mid guy who is nice and has a steady HVAC job who lives near the school. if you pool your money, you could live a comfortable life together. credit card bill is due in 3 weeks.
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Sometimes you need to feel, for orientation and to stay honest to yourself. Sometimes you need to be strong, and act, and damn the weakness of feelings. But a well-rounded person will explore both, and right now I'm going through a feelings arc. As should every man.
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You ask your friends what's going wrong and they're just puzzled. "You're such a great guy! Why are you single?" Is something I heard at least once a quarter. It's kind at first but that comment starts to grate at your soul after a while.
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I was mostly deradicalized by writing down my predictions about world politics in a document and coming back and scoring them and repeatedly realizing I was hella wrong and the world is way more nuanced than it seems.
"what deradicalized you" is far more interesting than "what radicalized" you bc the former is usually about waking up to ones participation in mob behavior and the latter is almost always some turbo normie npc bs.
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I realized I wasn't going to be a good partner to this girl, or a good friend to anyone going through hard shit, if I couldn't access and express my own emotions. And, I was denying myself a huge piece of the human experience.
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I'm writing this because what finally *did* start working was uprooting my entire life and moving to a city where I knew nobody *twice*! And countless hours spent putting myself out there.
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Exmormons are most dateable people on the planet. All the high agency, great life outcomes, and husband material of Mormons, except with better takes on gays and more flattering underwear. Perfect specimens tbh.
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I know dating and women arent actually like this. I'm talking about how it *feels*, not how it actually is. I'm not writing this for sympathy. I don't want to blame anyone. I don't care. I want out. I want a solution.
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You know in your brain you aren't unlovable, but in your heart every day spent alone makes it a little truer. What other explanation can there be?.Every woman I've ever met has judged me and found me wanting. I have plenty of vague sympathy but that helps basically none at all.
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Finding a partner has always been a deeply lonely journey for me. It's just get exploited by dating apps or work up the courage to get rejected in person. Nobody should have to spend a decade and reset their entire life *twice* to finally land a single relationship.
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Finding a partner is hard, I get that, but I'm spending hours meeting people, swiping, going on dates, and I'm at *zero*? Zero relationships, at all, by 28? Either I'm not trying hard enough, which cannot be, or I'm just *unlovable*.
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asked a promiscuous gay guy how he doesn't catch feelings all the time and he said "gay guys have ways of shutting that down".
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having sex with girls is like playing one of these with an insane 50 move sequence you have to memorize. and EVERY GIRL HAS A DIFFERENT SEQUENCE AND YELLS AT YOU FOR MISSING A SINGLE MOVE
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Saw an elderly couple eat their meal in total silence. Is that universal?. Have they failed? Have they lost that spark? Has age worn them into shells of their former selves?. Or is it that after 50 years you know every last detail about someone, and there's nothing left to say?.
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contemplating my gf's beautiful stomach and just holding space with that and feeling the power in that.
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what should you do when you hear that a casual friend has acted shitty in a romantic situation? confront them? stop talking to them? pretend everything is normal because you will never interact with them romantically?. I'm really having trouble navigating this as of late.
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In my 28 years I had never really felt big emotions, and that was fundamentally stunting my ability to relate to and support others. I actually did a lot of damage this way. I failed to sympathize with the intensity of other people's emotions and behaved callously/naively.
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I have somehow assembled a council of women constantly criticizing my fashion and interior design and aesthetics and hobbies. They won't let me get a marble bust of Marcus Arelius or put up REALLY TASTEFUL video game art or wear plaid. they are unironically fixing me.
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saw my weekend packed with fun things to do with friends and it made me cry. I think I might be starting to live the life I always wanted.
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my first relationship was extremely crazy from the start. and the intensity of emotions, good and bad, was like nothing I'd ever felt before. I realized I wasn't being a good stoic all this time, I was simply *not able to access* my feelings.
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I have a friend who found this girl he really liked, with one catch: . she has Ben Shapiro's face tattooed on her waist. Whenever she was naked, there was Ben, staring, taunting him. To this day I don't know if the tattoo is ironic. They've been together a year.
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@PrinceVogel the good news is every child born after 1995 has a very negative view of copyright law and once they get into power the preference cascade will probably be pretty quick, like gay marriage was.
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it feels absolutely incredible to have friends invested in my romantic success. holy shit. finding love has always felt like a desperately lonely journey of dating apps and sympathetic shrugs from family. so grateful to those helping me find and keep love.
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