Masthminching

We have hit a new low. I overheard a person in a "spiritual growth" community talking about "habit stacking" - listening to spiritual course lessons while they clean, to get the max productivity out of the experience.

We want to live - we want to live comfortably - we have to make ourselves extremely uncomfortable in order to live comfortably - so we end up living uncomfortably our whole lives. WHOSE IDEA WAS THIS DAMN IT?!

I don't know who thought it was a good idea to put us on this planet and make us pay to to live, when we didn't ask to be here. We could have all just been chilling in nothingness, no bills, no war, no calories to worry about.

name 'kuzhali manickavel' on top, young south indian girl with a spiral for a head and a melting mouth

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Wow Charles was having a really rough few years

Imagine two cows having sex. Now imagine them wearing tiny hats. What's wrong with you?

A friend of a friend got pulled over for speeding and had to work very hard not to ask the state trooper if his mother knew he was playing with guns. I know exactly how she feels. Everyone seems far too young and irresponsible to be in charge of things.

I whipped up another learning related Skill! Smaller than Learning Opportunities, but very complementary: interactive guidance through a quick research-backed psychological intervention that helps improve learning plans, motivation and commitment



github.com/DrCatHicks/l...

I’m just here to see how we end.

As someone who moved from Texas to Berlin in 2016, I see this play out in real time. Americans are not particularly liked in Europe and protests have started in parts of Spain and Portugal already.

This is going to cause problems. As an American that lived in Europe for work with a lot of other American's;

We are in general terrible at adopting and assimilating culture.
There is no doubt the influx will disrupt local economies, look at the protests in Mexico over it.

I laughed more than I should have for this 😂

Being asked to join a group to help develop a product for AI wellbeing for educational institutions/students. I don't have much information about it yet, but not super well versed with AI product dev. What do I need to know? Can anyone help?

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A terrible thing about being 12 hours ahead of US time is that I wake up to a new horror every morning on the news.

They're raising the bar for torture so people won't be affected by less intense, yet horrible forms of torture. This is what normalising ill treatment looks like. If you haven't read The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich, it's a good time to do so.

Heads up folks: @thetnholler.bsky.social posted an AI-generated video this morning that was a deepfake of the captain of the U.S. women’s hockey team, and they seem to be promoting it as if it’s a real video. So watch out for that and don’t spread fakes.

‘If I knew what I know now’

The richest white men in the world apparently all just learned how to read words in 2026

In fact, most former colonies seem to fit this picture. I work with people in the Middle East (apart from Asia, Europe, and North America) and I see status as a strong motivator with them as well. It isn't just about the money, but the respect society affords to the wealthy.

That's a win. That itself is worth the exit.

Not a single person who was ever told to "calm the fuck down" has ever calmed down, let alone "the fuck down."

In every way for me. I've been getting so much real life stuff done, less anxious, more reading, more exercising. I absolutely love it!

Most Asian countries, the UAE (still a monarchy), African nations in particular seem this way. Add colonisation to the mix and the status signaling is heightened from a mix of historical scarcity and a need to prove legitimacy in the modern day. I'm sure I'm missing something. Wdyt?

I've been thinking about status signaling as a concept and I see some patterns. It appears to me that societies that were originally monarchies/clusters of monarchies, and were forced into becoming sovereign nations, still show signs of status as supremely valuable measures of success.

I quit everything else and this is where I hang out now. I don't think we need to know every unfiltered thought, and every filtered showcasing of cool life of everyone on this planet so I quit and am going back to life in the 90s as much as possible 😁

Hieeeee I didn't know you were here!

I'm also in India (we follow each other on Instagram and I did a thing for TGP 2 years ago) :)

Wow thanks! I'll spend some time on it. The more I think about it, the more I see conscientiousness, and learning trauma (maybe sociocultural factors as well) interacting with how a learner uses AI. Low emotional capacity is likely to predict heavy dependence. Learning design needs to change.

I think the issue is how do we design learning in a way that empowers and keeps the expectancy with the learner rather than outsourcing it to AI. There's a thin line between I did it with support and I used AI to do it. We still need to figure out process learning vs outcome expectation, I think.

A primer for non-psychologists: expectations play a central role in our motivational system. We calibrate our behaviors against where we expect to succeed. imho, technology that scaffolds our problem-solving can be transformative when it opens new horizons of self-efficacy.