So for the record, to start out with I want to make clear something I should have made more clear in the article; I'm not a porn expert, if such a thing really exists. So this will end up being pretty conversational.
I think my first question for context would be how much in the hypothetical this is actually getting in the way, and then how "unusual" it is. I can confirm that even for people without significant porn problems, sex is not always a "holy shit I can't believe this is even happening" situation; it's not necessarily something that "runs off novelty", even if it's often good or very good despite that.
A guy with sunken cheeks goes to the barber. He explains to the barber that he's never gotten a really close shave because his cheeks are sunken, and it makes it hard to get them with the razor. The barber says "No worries! I have a solution for that!" and reaches into a drawer and pulls out a small wooden marble, which he then shoves between the guy's cheek and his teeth.
This makes the customer's cheek bulge out, and the barber shaves around the bulge, then has the guy move the marble around while he keeps shavingand eventually has one side of the guy's face as close shaved as a cheek can be. The guy is overjoyed, and as he moves the marble over to the other side of his face says:
"This is great! But I'm a bit worried I'll swallow the marble on accident."
"No worries!" says the barber. "If you do, just bring it back in a couple days like everyone else."
This is a message of support - I read your last post about stress and it hit pretty close to home. It's not really possible to read signs for an impending firing if you're not sure that your capacity to parse these signs is correct or biased by outlook.
It can be said and may be helpful to assess the magnitude of the stressor, if you are unable to assess its likelihood. For example, an impending firing. You know, from past experience, how bad life is in unemployed poverty, and also in employment with a truly shitty job. Threat of returning to either of those states should rightly induce stress. However, you are also able to state that you are capable of pulling yourself out of that situation - proof is that you'd done it once. Doing it once should make you both more confidence-biased in your assessment of your competence, and also provide a few real hard advantages should you need to do it again (at least contacts from the world of non-shitty jobs comes to mind).
Magnitude of the stressor should also be considered in terms of other mitigating factors, like having a family and church of people who can be counted on to keep the worst at bay if push comes to shove.
I hope you get enough supportive feedback to gently nudge you up to a competence-biased view of yourself and back on track professionally.
You seem like a relatively reasonable and pleasant guy, and are also probably the only conservative Christian I can communicate with outside of my dad, so I'll give this a shot.
Basically, I think I would identify as fully Christian if I didn't have immense discomfort with a few parts, and instead identify as relatively non-secular which makes me only mildly uncomfortable. The main things being: I think I'm pretty much wired to be a consequentialist, but living as a Christian who qualifies key Biblical passages to do whatever they want strikes me as being hypocritical.
I could be Christian and just acknowledge that some things I do regularly are sinful, but that has previously been a recipe for massive guilt and self-doubt. Not to mention, some key aspects of my life are basically incompatible with being a "true Christian" from my perspective (I'm bisexual and don't want to limit myself from dating one gender or judge others who do, so I've decided to not view it as more sinful than living like a straight person.) Part of this is because the people I've observed to disapprove of homosexuality tend to blunder their way awkwardly around the LGBT people in my life, whereas people who don't care strongly one way or the other appear more "moral" to me in that they make fewer people uncomfortable. (Oddly, other sins like premarital sex or lying don't stress me out as much, mainly because there seem to be way more Christians who don't worry about those and because they feel less like unchangeable parts of my personhood.)
Another part of it is that being consequentialist means that accepting the Bible as the "end-all-be-all" for what's good feels very strange. If what's moral is all written down somewhere, then what is the point of introspecting about it at all?
I guess I could see the point of being Christian if it gave me a community, but I have rarely felt all that comfortable in church environments, mainly because it feels like a coin toss on whether I can be fully open with myself. It feels like most Christian conservatives are not LGBT, and thus do not need to work as hard to reconcile their "less taboo" sins to fit into the "comfortable Christian" box. Hopefully that doesn't come across as too judgmental.
So I guess the overall question is: is there any hope for me being a Christian at some point? I think I would like to be, but when I sit down and try to say "okay, time to identify and be Christian now," I feel way too anxious within minutes.
So the rules of thumb here are "personal, not hobby". Does he have books he likes that aren't hardback, or you might be able to find signed copies of? Anything he likes that's regional/hard to find where he is? Something he likes from the past you can find memorabilia for?
The trouble here is that, basically, he can afford anything he wants and already has most of it. So your sweet spot is in "thoughtful, hard to find" items.
If you want to go weird/high risk high reward - egg cookers or other weird-but useful kitchen items. Raspberry Pi loaded with retropi and the emulators appropriate for his age. Old copies of magazines he would have read (pop science?). A 3" chrome steel ball bearing.
So, heavy qualifications are in order here, because I only got so far with it before I got a completely unrelated job, and I've forgotten a ton of it since. But here's sort of my three part technique, as it was when I had to stop and focus on other things:
1. Find and read some lists of standard SQL syntax elements in the SQL variant you are using/going to use. Almost any "learn SQL" site will walk you thought 10-20 of these.
2. Find a site that has pre-loaded databases you can mess with.
3. Find a site that has SQL problems you can either do on-site, or with the pre-loaded SQL databases you found in step 2.
4. If you can, find a SQL person who knows a ton more than you for unsolvable problems.
5. Grind.
The thing about learning SQL (or Excel, or really any job tool) is that no particular technique within it sinks in until you've used it several times. So you want to almost immediately be "playing with them", i.e. any time you read about a function go mess with it for 20-30 minutes, and then find problems/situations that force you to choose and use an assortment of what you already know.
I suspect that there's a hard diminishing returns effect at some point if you can't get into doing it as a job, both because you get bored and because no problem-set is really going to mimic the real world perfectly. But to the extent you can learn it outside of that, it's very much a "link everything you read into something you actually do with actual SQL somewhere" thing.
Cheers for quick reply. For me Python is the language I'm most likely to mess around with e.g. project Euler and that jazz. Aim is to bootstrap from a job as yes something quite sisphyean about programming ex nihilo
Hey man, this is in lieu of posting a reply to you in the comments of your most recent piece. I don't want to gum up that comments section more than I already have. Just wanted to say that my "just your opinion" comment was a bad joke that sounded good in my head but came out looking pretty stupid and non-sequitur-y on the screen. The post was really thought-provoking and I came up with about a thousand half-counterarguments but couldn't come up with a complete one that made sense. Which I think is maybe at least one person's definition of thought-provoking!
Hey, no worries. I almost suspected it was, I was probably a bit defensive for whatever reason so my apologies as well.
I'm glad you liked the article - they are never perfect, and I don't expect anyone to go "yup, changed my entire worldview forever" when I write them. You thinking about it a lot is a success state for me, for sure.
Do you have any recommendations of other newsletters/blogs to follow that are similar to yours? Especially ones written by conservatives or Christians?
So this answer is going to be a little bit lame, because I read much less than you might expect me to, and when I do it's often straight garbage pulpy fiction. I'll do my best though.
It depends a bit, in some interesting ways. David French is at least (I don't mean this sarcastically, as I'll explain a bit later) conservative and Christian. But so for that matter is, for instance, Andrew Sullivan. And I'm fairly conservative and Christian, as you noted. But we are wildly different from each other; both are good writers, but I haven't really seen any place where, say, neither French's conservatism and Christianity fail to mostly adhere to what would be acceptable to your average Clinton voter, for instance.
I said at least earlier because I'm really harsh on my internal takes on people; I have to moderate them after-the-fact. I don't perceive either of them to be genuinely conservative (in the current, common usage of the word) in any substantial way, but you might and both are fine writers.
I mentioned French's faith because "recommend a Christian" is a hard topic; I view a lot of modern Christian sects as deferential to society/unwilling to take views that disagree with it substantially, and those sects I tend to think of as "not really Christian" based on a lot of complicated theology stuff. The worry there is that I go "oh, this Christian writer is great" and I end up sending you to someone who leads you in bad directions.
So anyway, that long disclaimer to basically say "I'm actually really bad at this question, because I don't read and I'm judgy".
I do think William Collen's https://ruinsruinsruins.substack.com/ is pretty good, although he focuses a little bit more on art than I do. My friend Woah77's https://woah77.substack.com/ is broadly about a much more niche form of art, and he's Christian (in a significantly different way from me). Doctor Hammer's https://dochammer.substack.com/ is pretty damn good, and I think would appeal to you if you like my stuff, but I can't speak to his faith or even his politics for sure.
In terms of people who are *just like* me, in the sense that they both conservative and Christian in the same kind of way I am and write about the same kind of stuff, I'm not sure I know any. But I'm going to put out some feelers - I might have more on this later.
You can always try http://tofspot.blogspot.com. Flynn is getting up there in age and doesn't post as often as he used to, but he is usually a pleasure to read.
So then, what would you advise someone for whom pornography DOES feel like the sexual analogue of ice cream? Like it makes real life sex feel boring.
So for the record, to start out with I want to make clear something I should have made more clear in the article; I'm not a porn expert, if such a thing really exists. So this will end up being pretty conversational.
I think my first question for context would be how much in the hypothetical this is actually getting in the way, and then how "unusual" it is. I can confirm that even for people without significant porn problems, sex is not always a "holy shit I can't believe this is even happening" situation; it's not necessarily something that "runs off novelty", even if it's often good or very good despite that.
Tell us a joke!
A guy with sunken cheeks goes to the barber. He explains to the barber that he's never gotten a really close shave because his cheeks are sunken, and it makes it hard to get them with the razor. The barber says "No worries! I have a solution for that!" and reaches into a drawer and pulls out a small wooden marble, which he then shoves between the guy's cheek and his teeth.
This makes the customer's cheek bulge out, and the barber shaves around the bulge, then has the guy move the marble around while he keeps shavingand eventually has one side of the guy's face as close shaved as a cheek can be. The guy is overjoyed, and as he moves the marble over to the other side of his face says:
"This is great! But I'm a bit worried I'll swallow the marble on accident."
"No worries!" says the barber. "If you do, just bring it back in a couple days like everyone else."
This is a message of support - I read your last post about stress and it hit pretty close to home. It's not really possible to read signs for an impending firing if you're not sure that your capacity to parse these signs is correct or biased by outlook.
It can be said and may be helpful to assess the magnitude of the stressor, if you are unable to assess its likelihood. For example, an impending firing. You know, from past experience, how bad life is in unemployed poverty, and also in employment with a truly shitty job. Threat of returning to either of those states should rightly induce stress. However, you are also able to state that you are capable of pulling yourself out of that situation - proof is that you'd done it once. Doing it once should make you both more confidence-biased in your assessment of your competence, and also provide a few real hard advantages should you need to do it again (at least contacts from the world of non-shitty jobs comes to mind).
Magnitude of the stressor should also be considered in terms of other mitigating factors, like having a family and church of people who can be counted on to keep the worst at bay if push comes to shove.
I hope you get enough supportive feedback to gently nudge you up to a competence-biased view of yourself and back on track professionally.
You seem like a relatively reasonable and pleasant guy, and are also probably the only conservative Christian I can communicate with outside of my dad, so I'll give this a shot.
Basically, I think I would identify as fully Christian if I didn't have immense discomfort with a few parts, and instead identify as relatively non-secular which makes me only mildly uncomfortable. The main things being: I think I'm pretty much wired to be a consequentialist, but living as a Christian who qualifies key Biblical passages to do whatever they want strikes me as being hypocritical.
I could be Christian and just acknowledge that some things I do regularly are sinful, but that has previously been a recipe for massive guilt and self-doubt. Not to mention, some key aspects of my life are basically incompatible with being a "true Christian" from my perspective (I'm bisexual and don't want to limit myself from dating one gender or judge others who do, so I've decided to not view it as more sinful than living like a straight person.) Part of this is because the people I've observed to disapprove of homosexuality tend to blunder their way awkwardly around the LGBT people in my life, whereas people who don't care strongly one way or the other appear more "moral" to me in that they make fewer people uncomfortable. (Oddly, other sins like premarital sex or lying don't stress me out as much, mainly because there seem to be way more Christians who don't worry about those and because they feel less like unchangeable parts of my personhood.)
Another part of it is that being consequentialist means that accepting the Bible as the "end-all-be-all" for what's good feels very strange. If what's moral is all written down somewhere, then what is the point of introspecting about it at all?
I guess I could see the point of being Christian if it gave me a community, but I have rarely felt all that comfortable in church environments, mainly because it feels like a coin toss on whether I can be fully open with myself. It feels like most Christian conservatives are not LGBT, and thus do not need to work as hard to reconcile their "less taboo" sins to fit into the "comfortable Christian" box. Hopefully that doesn't come across as too judgmental.
So I guess the overall question is: is there any hope for me being a Christian at some point? I think I would like to be, but when I sit down and try to say "okay, time to identify and be Christian now," I feel way too anxious within minutes.
Whats a good birthday gift for a rich guy in his 50s?
So the rules of thumb here are "personal, not hobby". Does he have books he likes that aren't hardback, or you might be able to find signed copies of? Anything he likes that's regional/hard to find where he is? Something he likes from the past you can find memorabilia for?
The trouble here is that, basically, he can afford anything he wants and already has most of it. So your sweet spot is in "thoughtful, hard to find" items.
If you want to go weird/high risk high reward - egg cookers or other weird-but useful kitchen items. Raspberry Pi loaded with retropi and the emulators appropriate for his age. Old copies of magazines he would have read (pop science?). A 3" chrome steel ball bearing.
How'd you learn SQL?
So, heavy qualifications are in order here, because I only got so far with it before I got a completely unrelated job, and I've forgotten a ton of it since. But here's sort of my three part technique, as it was when I had to stop and focus on other things:
1. Find and read some lists of standard SQL syntax elements in the SQL variant you are using/going to use. Almost any "learn SQL" site will walk you thought 10-20 of these.
2. Find a site that has pre-loaded databases you can mess with.
3. Find a site that has SQL problems you can either do on-site, or with the pre-loaded SQL databases you found in step 2.
4. If you can, find a SQL person who knows a ton more than you for unsolvable problems.
5. Grind.
The thing about learning SQL (or Excel, or really any job tool) is that no particular technique within it sinks in until you've used it several times. So you want to almost immediately be "playing with them", i.e. any time you read about a function go mess with it for 20-30 minutes, and then find problems/situations that force you to choose and use an assortment of what you already know.
I suspect that there's a hard diminishing returns effect at some point if you can't get into doing it as a job, both because you get bored and because no problem-set is really going to mimic the real world perfectly. But to the extent you can learn it outside of that, it's very much a "link everything you read into something you actually do with actual SQL somewhere" thing.
Cheers for quick reply. For me Python is the language I'm most likely to mess around with e.g. project Euler and that jazz. Aim is to bootstrap from a job as yes something quite sisphyean about programming ex nihilo
Hey man, this is in lieu of posting a reply to you in the comments of your most recent piece. I don't want to gum up that comments section more than I already have. Just wanted to say that my "just your opinion" comment was a bad joke that sounded good in my head but came out looking pretty stupid and non-sequitur-y on the screen. The post was really thought-provoking and I came up with about a thousand half-counterarguments but couldn't come up with a complete one that made sense. Which I think is maybe at least one person's definition of thought-provoking!
Hey, no worries. I almost suspected it was, I was probably a bit defensive for whatever reason so my apologies as well.
I'm glad you liked the article - they are never perfect, and I don't expect anyone to go "yup, changed my entire worldview forever" when I write them. You thinking about it a lot is a success state for me, for sure.
Do you have any recommendations of other newsletters/blogs to follow that are similar to yours? Especially ones written by conservatives or Christians?
So this answer is going to be a little bit lame, because I read much less than you might expect me to, and when I do it's often straight garbage pulpy fiction. I'll do my best though.
It depends a bit, in some interesting ways. David French is at least (I don't mean this sarcastically, as I'll explain a bit later) conservative and Christian. But so for that matter is, for instance, Andrew Sullivan. And I'm fairly conservative and Christian, as you noted. But we are wildly different from each other; both are good writers, but I haven't really seen any place where, say, neither French's conservatism and Christianity fail to mostly adhere to what would be acceptable to your average Clinton voter, for instance.
I said at least earlier because I'm really harsh on my internal takes on people; I have to moderate them after-the-fact. I don't perceive either of them to be genuinely conservative (in the current, common usage of the word) in any substantial way, but you might and both are fine writers.
I mentioned French's faith because "recommend a Christian" is a hard topic; I view a lot of modern Christian sects as deferential to society/unwilling to take views that disagree with it substantially, and those sects I tend to think of as "not really Christian" based on a lot of complicated theology stuff. The worry there is that I go "oh, this Christian writer is great" and I end up sending you to someone who leads you in bad directions.
So anyway, that long disclaimer to basically say "I'm actually really bad at this question, because I don't read and I'm judgy".
I do think William Collen's https://ruinsruinsruins.substack.com/ is pretty good, although he focuses a little bit more on art than I do. My friend Woah77's https://woah77.substack.com/ is broadly about a much more niche form of art, and he's Christian (in a significantly different way from me). Doctor Hammer's https://dochammer.substack.com/ is pretty damn good, and I think would appeal to you if you like my stuff, but I can't speak to his faith or even his politics for sure.
In terms of people who are *just like* me, in the sense that they both conservative and Christian in the same kind of way I am and write about the same kind of stuff, I'm not sure I know any. But I'm going to put out some feelers - I might have more on this later.
Along these lines (very belatedly), I'd like to recommend Paul Kingsnorth
https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/
Cool! I'll take a look for sure.
These were recommended by others, although I don't know them personally: https://granola.substack.com/ http://darwincatholic.blogspot.com/
You can always try http://tofspot.blogspot.com. Flynn is getting up there in age and doesn't post as often as he used to, but he is usually a pleasure to read.