I’ve been married to someone with severe depression for a very long time. It isn’t necessarily a 24x7 experience. During the good times, she is an incredibly happy and fun person to be with. During the bad times, it is really hard on both of us. Medicine has helped, but isn’t perfect. We do our best to get through the hard times and enjoy the rest.

Not even a little bit true for me. I listened to pretty much only country at 14 and I don’t listen to any country now, not even the stuff I liked then. By 16 I had switched to mostly rock & alternative. I will still listen to that occasionally, mostly for nostalgia, but it isn’t on any of my playlists. I suspect most everything on my regular playlists came out after I was 30, but it continues to shift forward over time. I suspect eventually most of my current playlist will age out too.

I’m in the process of (very slowly) migrating my household from Windows to Linux and am currently testing Nextcloud as a replacement for OneDrive. In my case, I set it up using pikapods.com because I want offsite storage. The server part of the setup was incredibly easy because the host did all the work.

Getting my Linux client setup was kind of a pain (especially compared to the Android and Windows clients), but everything seems to work ok so far. Of course, I’m only backing up a small amount of data so far, so I can’t comment on the efficiency or speed for a major backup.

I use it to help me come up with better wording for things. A few examples:

• Writing annual goals for my team. I had an outline of what I wanted my goals to be, but wanted to get well written detail about what it looks like to meet or exceed expectations on each goal and to create some variations based on a couple of different job types.

• Brainstorming interview questions. I can use the job description and other information to come up with a starting list of questions and then challenge the LLM to describe how the question is useful. I rarely use the results as-is, but it helps me to think through my interview plan better than just using a list of generic questions.

• Converting a stream of thought bullet list into a well written communication.

I use a budget app for tracking income and spending on a transaction basis and then keep the rest of my finances in spreadsheets.

https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/how-to-survive-midlife-blues

Depending on how old you are, you might just be hitting the normal midlife low point. It hit me hard in my late 30s and I spent a lot of time reading about it once I found out it was typical. I think a lot of it has to do with the rate at which you’re experiencing milestones and life changes. It feels like you are constantly progressing in your life up to your 20s or 30s and then the time scale suddenly shifts. Things take much longer to advance - saving enough for a house or retirement, that next promotion (assuming you even want one), major family changes, etc.

Understanding that helped me recover somewhat, though it still took a couple of years. I’m still in that lull, trying to figure out what I really even want to do next, but I don’t feel sad about it anymore. I don’t know if this applies to your situation, but I found it really helpful to learn about it.

If your main concern is the US currency or just wanting your money to be out of US-based assets, I believe Interactive Brokers provides a lot of flexibility to move your money between assets and currencies. You’re still going to pay taxes and be subject to all US laws.

If your concern is US involvement in your personal financial affairs…good luck. The US has tremendous influence over the global financial system and no legitimate foreign organization is going to work with you unless you have substantial assets. The few countries that do not respect US influence are not particularly trustworthy and trying to do business with them will put you at significant legal risk.

You could also try converting to physical gold, but the US has confiscated gold before, so that’s not a sure bet.

It’s common in the U.S., especially in apartments, to have rooms with no light fixtures. Instead, there will be one outlet that is wired to a switch by the door. That outlet is sometimes upside down to distinguish it from the other outlets. That gives you the option to connect a lamp to the switch to get the same result as having a light fixture. I would generally prefer that every room has a light fixture on the ceiling, but this is marginally better than having to walk across a dark room to turn on a lamp.

Wow, 1st class, I didn’t realize out of context comics paid so well! :)

I’m really impressed with how quickly you’ve made such a huge life change, that takes some serious courage for you and your family. I would love to follow along behind you, but have no path for it, so I’ll have to stick things out and hope for the best (or not worst) here.

Oh, that sounds like a sweet deal. I should have been aspired to be a corporation instead of a normal person.

I don’t really understand how Walgreens is still in business. I only go there when I need something that the grocery store pharmacy section doesn’t carry and I’m not willing to wait 1-2 days to have it shipped from Amazon. Every time I go, its a ghost town with more employees than customers.

Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas, and Mass Effect Legendary are my favorites that I come back to repeatedly. Of course, they were all probably perfectly playable on your old PC.

Hitman World of Assassination was good and not playable on your old PC. I have not replayed it yet, but it is definitely repayable with the option to approach every level in different ways.

I’ve gotten bored with the Assassins Creed games, but the newer ones are very pretty and they’re open world with lots of story and tons of things to do.

You mentioned Far Cry 3, there’s also 4, 5, 6 New Dawn, and Primal. I haven’t played 5, 6, or New Dawn, but 4 plays the same as 3 (just a different story) and I actually like Primal quite a bit.

The Just Cause series is really over the top mayhem, but I enjoyed them. Lots of open world destruction for a…just cause (or maybe just because).

The Saints Row games are ridiculous, childish fun. Very similar to GTA, but makes GTA look classy by comparison. I think Saints Row 4 and Gat Out of Hell are the best ones. The first 2 are quite dated at this point. There is a recent remaster of 3, I liked the original, but haven’t played the remaster yet. There’s a newer one that’s just called “Saints Row”, I’ve only played a little of it so far and its pretty bland.

I don’t know a lot about the Amish, but possibly. From what I know, it seems like they embody some of the core principles in terms of contributing to the community and managing a balanced, relatively equal society. I don’t know anything about their religion, so I don’t know if there is a level of control from church leaders that might be more of a centralized control structure. But they might be an example. You can also search for examples of hippie communes or artist collectives.

There have been many groups that form communes within a larger system. Sometimes its built around a religion (or cult), sometimes around various ideals, like artist communes. In my opinion, what makes these work is that they’re small (your reputation matters), people join it voluntarily, and people can be kicked out if they don’t uphold the ideals. So, you don’t need a state to enforce the rules aside from a mechanism to remove people who don’t participate fairly. And because they are within a larger entity, they don’t have to deal with things like national security or foreign affairs. I don’t think that model scales to a national level.

I’ve blocked as much news out of my life as I can manage with the exception of some financial news. That includes blocking all the news communities on Lemmy. Things still slip through, but I also push myself to just ignore the bits that I still see and move on with my life. I’m much happier as a result. In terms of being aware of big news, if its a big enough deal, the fine folks here at Lemmy will create memes to let me know.

I have clothes that I keep out of the dryer, but I’m willing to put pretty much anything in the washing machine (aside from dry clean only stuff). I will hand wash my workout clothes, mainly in the summer, when they are drenched in sweat and I don’t have enough dirty laundry to make it worth putting them in the laundry right away. I just put a little splash of laundry detergent in the sink with some cold water to wash them, then hang them to dry. But I do that to keep them from getting stinky, not to prolong the life of the clothes.

Same. I’ve tried LEDs and they really don’t cut it for christmas lights, so I stick with incandescent, at least in the house. LEDs outside might be fine, but I rarely get around to putting up outside decorations.

If travel time and cost doesn’t matter, I would always pick Hawaii over Florida any time of year. If travel time matters, then I’d look at the Caribbean before Florida for anyone on the East coast. Florida would be my last choice if I needed to keep things cheaper.

If you use this equipment frequently, try to quantify them on your resume to show you have experience. You can ask chatgpt for better wording, but you might have something like “unload 20-30 trailers per week using an electric pallet jack.”

Create a list starting out of everything you might want to tell a future potential employer. The original list can be messy and have awkward wording, but try to list all of the useful skills you have and wherever possible, quantify your impact. Once you have that, then go to your AI of choice and practice some different prompts to see what kind of results you get. You’re not going to get a great or even necessarily accurate resume on your first try, you have to put in some effort to edit and re-prompt for improvements. Here are some possible prompts to play with starting out:

• “You are an experienced recruiter helping me craft a resume to get a job in a warehouse. Review this list of experiences and recommend better wording to show that I have the skills to be an effective warehouse employee.” <paste your list that you created>

• “For this experience, recommend how I can quantify my impact to show that I added value.” <paste a bullet that you want to improve>

If you find a job description that represents the kind of job you want, you can also provide that to your AI friend to get even better results. Something like this:

• “Using the following job description recommend changes to my resume that better reflect the role.” <paste the job description>

Once you’re done editing your resume to fix any errors the AI gave you or to change the wording to be a better reflection of your writing, you can paste the resume in again and ask for a final review.

• “Review my revised resume to improve readability and recommend any changes to better fit the job description.” <paste your updated resume>

The first time you do this, you’ll probably think “wow, this is so much better than what I started with” or possibly, “this is garbage, it’s making things up that aren’t even true.” Either way, if you keep playing with it, you’ll start to get a feel for a good balance of words that reflect your experience, but also connect well with job descriptions for jobs you’re interested in. Or maybe you’ll get lucky and get a job offer right away and not have to think about it again for years!

Some bonus prompts for when you get an interview:

• “You are an experienced recruiter helping me prepare for a job interview. I have an upcoming interview with a <recruiter/hiring manager>. Based on the job description, what are 10 questions they are likely to ask me. Explain what the purpose of the question is.” <paste the job description>

You can take it another step and provide your resume and ask it for suggested answers to the question. Careful here though because you don’t want to try to memorize the answers. And finally, you should always ask questions in an interview (ALWAYS), try this:

• “What are some questions that I can ask in the interview to show that I am engaged and very interested in the role?”

Good luck with your job search!

Worst book I’ve quit is Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. What a horrible book!

Worst I’ve finished is Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, immediately followed by Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. I’ll throw in a special mention for The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby. All terrible books that I finished only because they were required reading in school.