Personally I've been wanting to do a bulk ammo buy for a while, and realized there was going to be a run so I dumped 1000 bucks into some ammo for all the calibers I own.
I'm also in the process of building an AR-10, and have slowly been accumulating parts. Decided to pull the trigger on some of the more expensive parts this week because I caught some good deals.
I was going to put an order in cause I've got a couple shoots coming up. Everything was in stock Friday. I went to buy today and everything but some of the more obscure cartridges are sold out. It is pretty crazy.
I make good money (being a reasonably able software dev), and though physically attracted to women, am not interested in them, and haven't been for over a decade now. I was somewhat successful in my youth, but certainly no cassanova.
I find chasing and/or engaging in romantic relationships with women costs me far more than I estimate their worth at (the relationship, not the women themselves). And I'm not just talking money. I'm talking time, freedom, responsibility, cognitive cycles, etc. I think my time is best spent elsewhere on hobbies or video games or mindless entertainment or work.
Maybe you'll come across somebody where the relationship is worth it later if you keep your mind open.
I laughed at "I think my time is best spent elsewhere on ... mindless entertainment".
Not saying you need it, but the world can be a pretty lonely place if you don't have anyone to share it with. Maybe there is someone who you can enjoy the same mindless entertainment with. :-)
It's not, unless you want to start a family. Then the whole vetting process disguised as "dating" is kind of important with significant life-changing returns.
Personally I decided I didn't want kids decades ago, it drastically changed the distribution of priorities. I, like you, simply can't be bothered with dating now. It's just not worth the time and effort, risk of STDs, risk of pregnancy, risk of crazy, drama, etc.
Having said that however, there is something to be said for having a reliable partner in old age when hospital visits and navigating the healthcare system becomes a regular activity. It's problematic to be alone in a hospital, for a variety of reasons.
It's an illusion to any given organism, from the outsiders meta kind of view, sure, but in the context of your own reality, it's real. Your decision making depends in ways on believing you have decisions to make. Not having a sense of free will can have some negative consequences, whether or not you believe we are actually deciding anything or just a function of our inputs.
They used to but it's dwindling. A friend of mine is a dentist and he said when he first graduated from dental school some 15 years ago, his father and his practice dealt directly with the patient and had a list of all of their prices on their website and in their office. As customers increasingly wanted to have their insurance cover dental they had fewer and fewer people paying out of pocket and going through insurance. So prices went up due to increased complexity of the business.
At my dental office, they can tell you the total cost without insurance which is the maximum they would charge for any procedure. If you paid in cash in full, they would do a discount (for non-insured).
For those insured, it depended on the insurance you had but they would give you a rough estimate based on the plan you had (mostly because they can’t be 100% certain what the insurance will cover down to the exact dollar amount.
In my experience the estimate is often off but close enough that I am not worried I’d owe an insane amount afterwards.
That last sentiment is very prominent in the incel/red pill "communities". They have some inside-baseball names for it, but essentially they do express their extreme disdain for women who have sex with lots of men then decide to "settle down" with a provider.
Yeah it's absolutely an incel meme but do no means do I think that they invented it or that it's unique to them. I think almost all men have this feeling to some extent, I think it's a rare guy who is happy to know that every good looking guy in his office slept with his girlfriend casually. Proximity (time, location, social circle) is definitely an aggravating factor but it's all just a sliding scale. I like to think that I mostly don't care about a girl's past but it's definitely annoying on some level of the sliding scale.
>Luckily, I've been able to develop enough coping techniques to at least take care of myself.
I haven't unfortunately. Oh I've tried, in spurts and bursts, but I can never seem to make it stick. I always go back to that immediate reward cycle. It's really frustrating but I often feel simply incapable. I think it's co-morbid with an internet/computer/gaming addiction, which sucks because this is my job and hobby as well, but it's hard to pull myself away and do "maintenance tasks" as I call them.
I also have problems with falling into what I call “pleasure traps”... I like to envision my agency as movement along a landscape of discomfort, and I have a tendency to get sucked into steep local minima and have trouble getting out. I find it to be a very rich and evocative concept, and I’m curious if anyone else looks at human agency this way.
And yes, I also was diagnosed with ADD and given stimulants as a child (and more recently, as an adult).
We do, but what are we gonna do about it? We don't really have any ability to effect these kinds of changes as a common man. Our opinions have literally 0 effect on the legislative process. Our country is bought and paid for by corporate interests. Multiple studies have shown that our opinions count for nothing, and that lobbyists control legislation and policy.
We have now descended into the hyper-atomization of the individual as a series of micro-collectives, for whom we must fight among ourselves against others with different series of collectives. We now care not for whether our lives are good, merely that we see the other having a bad time.
Mourn for us, and learn from us - do not follow in our footsteps.
And? Like 2/5 of the people that voted for him regret it because he isn't doing what they thought he would. He campaigned for the common man, and is now fucking him over hardcore.
Trump's election provides a counterexample to the claim that the opinions of voters count for nothing, otherwise we'd be looking at Hillary Clinton's second term or first after Mitt Romney.
Many of the promises Trump made were absurd, irrational and couldn't reasonably be delivered on, and Trump himself was the easiest candidate to read in recent American political history. Voters being unwilling to exercise their power judiciously isn't the same as them having no real power to exercise.
I'm also in the process of building an AR-10, and have slowly been accumulating parts. Decided to pull the trigger on some of the more expensive parts this week because I caught some good deals.
It's not all panic buying.