I’ve been abused (physically and mentally) by my parents and bullied at school. I can obviously only talk about myself, but maybe my experience helps you.

Understanding, that those people will never care or feel guilt, is hard. Especially when you were abused as a child and hoped for a happy end. Actively trying to get over it also didn’t work very well for me. For me the best thing to do was focus on other things: find friends, find hobbies, do whatever you always wanted to do (I started wearing clothes I was forbidden to wear and practicing hobbies that were ridiculed).

Just fill your life with things you like and the bullies and abusers will become smaller and smaller.

Therapy is a good start to help you with this and question yourself, who you are and who you want to be.

A pocket knife and a houseplant in a pot.

No, it didn’t cover anything, it was really just the lines for the character. I don’t think you could cover much under it other than a very tiny tattoo.

Maybe not quite as dumb as others here, but I once saw a woman in a sauna who had a GIANT 女 (woman) on her back. It went from the shoulders to the ass. I get finding Chinese characters cool and wanting them tattooed, but why on earth would you just tattoo “woman” instead of something meaningful and why so large it covers your entire back?

If they only mimic me and have some knowledge based on what is on my phone/online, they probably don’t speak the same foreign languages as I on the same level. So I could authenticate myself by proving that I speak those languages.

That’s not true everywhere, my city has a pretty good meetup scene for various hobbies. However the amount of people who sell their useless courses as “meetup, but I will ask for a 20€ fee from everyone” or shady “we will talk about investing/crypto…” groups has gone up.

Tom Cruise I just don’t like anything about him

Will Smith, because he’s annoyed me in every role after Prince of Bel Air

I’m forty, so a different generation than your parents, but I still grew up and had my first dating experiences before the internet. Online dating wasn’t really a thing here until I was in my early twenties.

At least where I grew up the guys who randomly approached girls to ask them out were seen as creepy even back in the 90s. I and everyone I knew met partners through activities like sports clubs, parties, bars etc. (I’m not from the US, so people from my school started going to bars pretty early). While there wasn’t a big discourse around men approaching women in public (or none that reached my little town), we did have some guys in town who’d just walk up to girls on the street and ask them out and the consensus was that they were weird and should be avoided.

I met all my partners so far through activities. My first boyfriend was a regular at the same student café and we ended up sitting next to each other during quiz night. I met guys I had dates with in uni - sitting next to each other during lectures and talking about the Prof, going to the same presentation or cooking night etc. None of them “approached me” in the sense of coming up to me and asking “can I have your number” with zero context. We chatted, had an interesting conversation. At the end we exchanged contact information to meet for a coffee, usually without any expectation of it being a date. When coffee went well, someone would ask the other out on a proper date. No approaching, no deciding within a few seconds wether you want to date someone. Just casually getting to know each other before asking for more.

I also met my husband that way. We went to the same event, talked, had a lot in common. We met the next day to continue a discussion about a certain topic we were both interested in. That’s when things started getting flirty and by the end we made plans to meet for a real date. I don’t even remember who asked whom, we were both heavily flirting with each by the time we talked about seeing each other again so it was very obvious the next meeting would be a date. He didn’t ask me out out of nowhere or hit on me, we were just getting to know new people and eventually we started flirted somewhere along the line.

I’m a bi woman and have always preferred women. But I ended up falling in love with a wonderful man who is now my husband. I’m currently really grateful for that. Loving a woman in this climate would be so stressful. I’m very scared for my trans best friend though.

The straight-A student who could have gotten into any course at any university with her grades ended up getting a degree in art history and works at a museum now. She was never much into art in school, mostly focussed on chemistry actually and thought about studying medicine or biochemistry when we graduated.

Another straight-A student never left our 900-inhabitants village. Everybody thought he’d surely make it big, study medicine or engineering or something like that and work for a big company. He’s working at the small local bank.

On the other hand, one of the girls who was always very anti-school and didn’t care much for grades (I don’t actually know how good her grades were, but definitely not among the top students) is a lawyer at a large law firm now.

1. Breaking Bad. I liked it at the beginning, but it had too much violence for me. Or more specifically, violence being done as a crutch. Yeah, I get it, the character is ruthless and brutal yadayada. Lots of fake blood. Can we get back to the story?

2. A lot of the most popular Anime. I found One Piece pretty boring after the first few episodes. Same goes for Naruto. I do like Anime, but I mostly stick with shorter series that conclude the story in 20-30 episodes.

3. Black Mirror. The first couple of episodes were great, the rest was mostly the same with slight variations.

I feel like there is also a pathologization of being single. I was a teenager in the late 90s/early 2000s, so before most of social media. I’m also from a village where most people knew each other.

There were a couple of nerdy, shy guys who never had a girlfriend by the time of graduation. I only had one boyfriend at 16 for 6 month before his friend told me he was only dating me as a dare. I was “ugly” and “not a real girl” because I didn’t wear makeup and mostly wore jeans and Tshirts. Stupid village kids.

Anyway, similar things happened to the nerdy guys. But no one started crying about all men/women being awful and no one became an incel. Several girls and boys in my class never dated by the time we graduated and that just wasn’t a big deal. Nowadays everybody’s being told there’s something wrong with them if they’ve never had a partner by age 17.

I was always so confused by the tongue areas because it never seemed to work for me. Especially sweet, I tasted sweet far more at the back than on my tip.

I feel you. I’m allergy to all nuts (that are tested for) and soy. Dairy, eggs and nuts sounds like a shitty combination because a lot of the vegan stuff is nut-based.

I meow to find my husband and he will meow back.

Maybe just really good intuition and knowledge of human behavior. You could probably make a lot of money as a psychic.

Have you read The perfume by Patrick Süskind? You sound like a real-life Grenouille. Without the murdering, hopefully :D

I’m a 5 :) Thought for way to long that all this “Picture in your mind” stuff was just a figure of speech, not that people actually SEE pictures on their mind.

We need stricter social rules again in a lot of areas and children need to be brought up stricter again. Now I don’t mean we should get back to being in other people’s business in regards to what they wear or who they love. But let’s go back to shunning people for littering. Teach kids to sit still and be quiet in certain spaces like public transport or restaurants. Ostracize people who are loud and disruptive in public. Let’s just implement some stricter social rules again.

“Just do it” is helpful in some cases, but mostly not. E.g. you think that a hobby is cool but you don’t feel like you could start it? Just do it, take a course, try it out. It becomes unhelpful quickly when the realities of your life are just different. Telling in unemployed person with debt who is fascinated with flying to “just get a pilot license” ignores their reality. But telling a business analyst who’s interested in manga but feels like this hobby would destroy his image, to “just do it and buy some mangas” is totally valid.

I have been struggling financially for most of my life and have received way too often the unhelpful advice to “just do it. Live a little.” Just book that 100€ flight to Italy and see Rome. Just get a smartphone, everyone has one now! (That was when smartphoneplans were very expensive here and I couldn’t justify such a high monthly cost. Yes I’m older.)

There is way too much “just do it” advise by people that live in their nice little bubble of a well-off, supportive family system and never realize that the only reason they can “just do it” is because they never had to eat rice with tomato sauce for 3 days in a row because there were only 10€ on the bank account by the 26th.

On a similar note, “just get a job, just learn something more profitable/in an industry with high wages” is also an often unhelpful advice. Not everyone can be good at everything. And not everyone can just uproot their lives and go back to school for a few years. Yes, some people can do amazing things like get a masters degree while working full-time and having kids. But this advise, too, ignores the reality of many people. If you have no support system or if you simply aren’t cut out for the currently profitable jobs, you can’t just magically switch careers. And even if you do: things change so quickly and there is no guarantee, that the currently well-paid job will still be like that in 5-10 years.