mortalglowworm

You decide on who you are and anybody telling you who you are can ef right off.

Hey, girl. I am 40, and cis-male. My experience might not be reflective, but I prefer to offer some support instead of just reading this and leaving it alone.

Please know that we all do feel down, we all feel trapped, and beaten, and defeated time to time. I had a very dark period in my 20s, only solved in my early 30s.

Please know that, even if that's not apparent, there are people that do care about you. Try to be around them more often.

Sometimes financial insecurity creates these kind of thoughts, and if that's the case I have no easy advice. But just know that, it is not failure if you decide to put a pause on your PhD, take care of yourself, then come back to it.

Sending love!

I would read the hell out of this Wikipedia.

A father to a 2-year-old here. We have a very strict "no screen" policy. If she watches something, it is with her mother, and it is generally a short clip of a kid doing some kind of activity with a caregiver. It is less than a few minutes a day tops and never every day.

I am super anxious about the smartphones and similar as well. I am not sure how my child is going to handle the peer pressure to get one, and how will we (as parents) be able to manage her wanting of a smartphone. I think I will follow a similar pattern to my childhood and will allow access to the internet only through a computer for a while, and there will have several restrictions to what she can access, maybe except for group-based online games, which we will screen who she is playing with and what is going on.

Jonathan Haidt is proposing a return to a "play-based childhood"^1^, and I am very positive about that approach. However, I am not sure if we will be able to get a buy-in for "no screens, no phones" policy with her school(s) and the parents of her schoolmates. That is to be seen. But these policies would probably affect the schools we will be choosing.

1 - If interested, check After Babel.

For clarity, he says:

Just like we entered Karabakh, just like we entered Libya, we might do similar to them.

Türkiye didn't "enter" into either of those countries with its own troops. Rather they used Syrian mercs, and provided technical support, including "selling" their drones.

I don't think what he means is sending in troops in this situation as well. Türkiye (or rather, maybe, Erdoğan's ruling party) has existing strong ties with both Hamas and Hezbollah.

So my assumption on how this translates would be arms shipments to Lebanon. I don't think they can get anything in to Gaza. And I don't think either Lebanon or Palestine would welcome Syrian mercenaries.

But let's see.

This is a great reminder regarding class: the rich do not die in the wars. They can only lose a bit of money.