Imagine going about your life, when a virus develops into a pandemic. Suddenly the rulers of your country are like "We're going to let the virus infect us, don't listen to the outside world".

Most people in your country are like "Awesome!", and ridicule you if trying to opt out

You hear about all these stuff like chronic health issues the virus causes, in different research papers available on the internet. It appears to be a serious problem, likely to ruin many lives. You do however never hear it mentioned in the debate in your country.

On the news you hear people with fancy titles, downplaying the virus, and ridiculing other countries for trying to stop it.

The resistance is futile, they say. We are all going to get infected in the end anyways.

You see the schools in other countries closing down, but in your own country they remain open. Parents are not allowed to keep their children at home. If they do, they are punished by the government, shunned as bad parents by those who think the herd immunity strategy is awesome.

You later find out that the people leading the response to the pandemic, reasons around how it is beneficial to keep schools open in e-mails with each other. They reflect on the benefits of open schools, for children getting infected, thus contributing to the herd immunity.

Throughout my early 20s, I struggled with depression.

Here are 10 simple habits that helped me achieve a better state of mind.

(thread) 🧵

0/ Disclaimer

I am not a licensed medical professional.

If you need help, please seek a counselor, therapist, or mental health treatment facility.

There are also plenty of free hotlines open 24/7 if you or someone you know needs to talk to someone.

1/ Journaling

Journaling is self-administered therapy.

You're having a conversation with yourself and sharing what's going well in life and what isn't.

It's free and available to anyone.

And just getting problems onto paper will help get them out of your mind.

1/ (continued)

How I journal:

I write out my anxieties, fears, etc.

I challenge those thoughts to see if they're justified or not.

I brainstorm ways to tackle any problems with action.

I record all the good stuff that has happened to me to remind myself life isn't all bad.

2/ Taking a hot shower

There's something incredibly relaxing and soothing about being in hot water.

Perhaps it's because the heat relaxes your muscles and thus relaxes your body and mind.

Also, being clean physically helps my mental state of mind.

18 PAINFUL TRUTHS EVERY 18 YEAR OLD NEEDS TO KNOW

When you're 18 you're free to live life however you want.

But the plan you've likely been given is a plan to keep you trapped in hell.

Read this *thread* to learn from my mistakes (I'm twice your age)

//THREAD//

👇👇👇

1) College is not mandatory

I know everyone around you makes it seem like it's mandatory but it's not.

Especially if your #1 goal is to make money.

Even if you STILL want to go to college..

Take a year off to work or travel

Get some LIFE EXPERIENCE

then go to college.

2) World travel is the best education you never had

When I was a kid I had no idea you could possible to travel the world long term.

I thought my path was College ▶9-5▶5 years on the job▶2 week vacation▶Retirement at 65

Reading the 4-hour workweek changed that path for me

3) Lifting is mandatory

You are at your PEAK Energetically.

Use that energy to get into the best shape of your life and the rest of your life will be FAR EASIER.

Everyone respects a physically strong man. No one respects a physically weak man.

No debating this one. Go lift.

4) Don't listen to your parents

Only exception is unless your dad is a self-made millionaire.

If your parents give you conventional advice like go to college, get a job, get married etc, IGNORE.

It's not their fault they've been brainwashed.

Love them but ignore their advice.

Constructivism is perhaps the most important idea that will shape the future of humanity. The ills of society are a consequence of the willful ignorance of constructivism.

There are two important definitions of constructivism, one comes from mathematics and the other from psychology. The mathematical definition leads rejects the law of excluded middle. It's relevant in understanding causation.

The psychological definition: "Humans actively construct their own knowledge, and that reality is determined by our experiences as a learner."

The models of causality that our brains invent to navigate the world is a consequence of our progressive development in the world we live in. Robert Kegan calls his theory constructive developmental theory to emphasize two important aspects of cognitive growth.

Cognitive growth is constructive as explained above. It is also developmental in the sense that our mental models of the world make abrupt changes as we grow in maturity. The symmetries in our models break and lead to new symmetries.

Today is my 36th birthday.

To celebrate

Here are 36 hard hitting truths about the world I've learned in my 36 years of living.

Warning: A lot of these are harsh and uncomfortable. Do not read if you are sensitive.

👇👇👇

This took awhile to compile.

If you want to wish me a happy birthday, please RT that first tweet above. It helps.

Thank you and let's get started.

1. You don’t go from A to B in a straight line. You go from A to B in a zig zag.

2. The smartphone took away your need to memorize information and replaced it with an inability to focus.

3. Everyone in their 20s thinks they know everything until they hit 30 and realise they really don’t know anything

Listening, *really* listening, is a rare superpower.

I was a bad listener most of my life.

Then I fixed that a few years ago.

Night & day difference in my leadership ability.

I learned that we can learn to listen well.

A thread on listening (and learning it from movies🎞️)
👇🏾

First, why is listening hard?

It’s because we have:
- the fear of being wrong
- an inability to be present
- a desire for validation
- a lack of curiosity
- the urge to impress
- a feeling of superiority

For an example of *bad* listening, let’s learn from this epic scene from the movie, The Darkest Hour.

The setup: World War II. There are disagreements among British leadership about whether they should pursue peace talks with Germany or an all out war.

Go on, watch the scene.

Really, watch the scene before proceeding to the next tweet.

So what can we learn from this scene about listening?

The superficial lesson is not to interrupt others.

But the deeper lesson is that most of us are like Churchill w.r.t. listening.

How so?

While we may not interrupt vocally, *we are interrupting others with our thoughts*

#AYA

1. Beloved Ones Of My Heart!

With A Breath Of Sacred Light, I Observe And Bow At Your Ongoing Perseverance To Find The Path Of Freedom! Since The Arrival To The Earth School, You Have Done Your Best To Learn And Grow Through It All!

When you have deep relationship problems with a woman, you fix it by love bombing her not through honest dialogue, because hurt women are selfish. They don't give a fuck about the pain they caused (hers matters more), and they don't want to hear an analysis of how they fucked up.

Women don't take accountability for the damage they cause. Trying to force them to be accountable for it just makes them less cooperative, because their low stress tolerance means any truthful examination of their mistakes will cause them pain and in turn further instability.

They will simply dismiss, forget or not really absorb what you say if you try being honest, and tell them in a straight way. If you keep pressing it and can prevent her from running away, you will at best get some weak excuses and perhaps an apology. THAT'S *THE BEST* you'll get.

If you can't prevent her from running away, she will just run away.

Women have no sense of honour in thinking "I've hurt this man, I need to make sure he will be alright"

No. She will absorbed in her own pain, you will not even be a consideration.

A woman can love you more than anything on this planet - and she will do this.

And you causing her additional stress by being mad at her and seeking answers only pushes her further away.

She will never meet your needs and right her wrongs.

See why they're beneath us now?

Be proud of who you are.

1/17
#activist
#socialist
#humanist
#environmentalist

Anyone who calls a socialist an enemy of ordinary people is an enemy of ordinary people – because socialism is precisely about protecting ordinary people.

Lie about that and what else will you lie about?

2/17
#activism
#socialism
#Kindness

My name is Itzik Yaakobi, son of Olga and Yaakov Elimelech, brother to Klari (all of blessed memory), survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, number B.11057.

This is my story.

#HowItzikSurvived

📸 Yediot Achronot

I was born in Debrecen, Hungary to an ultra-Orthodox family.

Under my father Yaakov Elimelech's direction, I spent my childhood studying religious and Jewish texts.

My fondest memory is studying the weekly Torah Portion with my father.

📸 @MakorRishon

This is my father of blessed memory who perished in the #Holocaust.

#HowItzikSurvived

While many of my childhood memories have been obliterated by the trauma I experienced during the #Holocaust, I remember Yulia, our non-Jewish housekeeper who I was very found of and who would give me double portions of Gefilte fish.

📸 The synagogue in Debrecen

When I was 13, the Nazis came to power in Hungary & forcibly moved all Jews into ghettos.

The conditions were unbearable. There was little food.

The Nazis purposely fed us pork (forbidden by Jewish law). My mother made me eat it because we were starving. I vomited it up.

30 things you can do that might help #autistic people in your lives.

A thread. Please read and share widely, and add to it as you see fit.

#autism #autistic

1. Let us decompress in quiet areas when we need to. Our desire to be alone is not judgement on you, it's simple self preservation. #autism

2. If you need us to do something, give us very clear, unambiguous instruction. Don't feel like you're being rude doing this, but don't sound irritated or patronising! #autism

3. Do not expect us to react to things in a way you would expect. That way lies disappointment. We often show our emotions in very different ways to what you might expect. #autism

4. Don't assume we aren't capable of thought and feeling if we're non-verbal. Don't assume we're incapable of communicating in other ways either. #autism

BURIED MY HEART IN A PIT.
Some heartbroken i can say talks of a helpless father.
A Thread by @tkwmag
I have mentioned few thing, hope you won't ignore.
Please share as much as possible

Mushtaq Ahmad Wani is the father of Ather Wani, a 17-year-old boy killed in an alleged gunfight in Srinagar by the government forces on 30 December 2020. Ather was buried at a desolate graveyard, more than a hundred kilometers away from his home in Pulwama. ++

The oppression dies — at last. The oppression has to end.
#ReturnTheBodies ++

On 30 December 2020, near 12 pm, I reached home to a group of people waiting outside my home. I rushed inside, anxious. “Your son has been martyred in Srinagar,” my elder brother told me.. I boarded a family vehicle with Ather’s mother and reached the PCR in Srinagar. ++

My son was lying inside the PCR but the police personnel at the gate didn’t allow us. “I’m his father. I want to see his face,” I pleaded. I pleaded more. And more. But they didn’t allow me, saying, “Wait till the higher officer calls them.” ++

Someone tried to seriously demotivate me today (Thread)🧵💔

Today, I went to someone's house with my mother.
Let's call this person mr. A-whole.

(Just so you know mr. A-whole and I met for the first time.
We know nothing about each other. )

After 5 minutes of conversation..

with my mother he asked me, "What do you do?"

Me: "I am a final year CSE undergrad."

Mr. A-whole: "So, does your university have On-Campus placements?"

Me: "Yes"

mr. A-whole: "That is good. You should definitely try to get a job though placements"

🧵

Me: "Well, I have a different plan. I am going to further continue my studies."

(Obviously the plan is quite elaborate and I wouldn't tell a person who have met me just 5 minutes ago)

mr A-whole: "So M. tech.?"

Me: "No I'll do self study for a while. Not a degree."

🧵

mr A-whole:

"You don't look like a person who is disciplined. Through my experience I can tell you can't do self study. You should definitely try to get a job...blah blah blah my collogues destroyed their career... blah blah blah.

🧵

And then he spent the next 5 minutes ripping my dreams into pieces.
Shredding away my capability without having the slightest idea of who I am, what I do, what I am going through right now (which is a lot).

He basically told me I can't do anything (from looking at me once.)

every teenager, open this

you’re doing better than you think you are. i’m proud of you, keep going, you’ve got this!🙂

don’t change so people will like you. be yourself & the right people will love the real you

be strong enough to stand alone, smart enough to know when you need help and brave enough to ask for it

worrying about things in the future doesn’t stop them from happening. it just takes away your happiness today

I'm so angry that when I was a kid, all I knew about Dolly Parton was the size of her chest. And her hair color, I guess. Imagine taking all that talent and decency and goodness and organization -Imagination Library!!!- and reducing it, dismissively, to jokes about her appearance

I don't even know where that impression came from - movies? comedians? other kids? -but I remember it. And yeah, she hadn't done everything then that she has now, but that kind of proves my point: you focus on appearance, you miss what someone has done AND what they're capable of

AND she had already written Jolene and I Will Always Love You among many others. Why wasn't her main reputation, the first thing you learned about her, that of a major songwriter like Dylan or Paul Simon or ..?

(I know why)

this makes me furious because it's such a clear example of what our society is CONSTANTLY doing to women, people of color, fat people, disabled people, anyone who doesn't fit the image that we're sold of what power, cool, artist, genius, look like.

and because those people who don't fit get dismissed, we only see that narrow segment of appearances representing those categories, that image is reinforced over and over again. I hope it's starting to change, a little.

I have a message to all you who told us to remain inactive, or those that told us to stand down when emotions were high THREAD

((thread))

as much as i LOVE girls, i also love boys? boys are amazing and pure and liking them is a wonderful feeling? i never see a lot of posts talking about cute boys so
some boy aesthetic i'm in love with include:

their tired grins? have you seen a cute boy grin when he’s tired? life changing

sleeves rolled up to forearms is all good and well but also when they have sweater paws in their hoodies or jumpers? Makes the tallest of them seem so smol? i’m in love?

when they run their hand through their hair and it sticks up in places and it looks so good

collar bones

soft pudgy stomachs they absolutely make me melt

when boys get flustered & A++ bonus points if he giggles boys giggling is everything

that small teasing smirk when they say something they know you like

falling on top of them when they’re asleep and they just very softly go oof

when the jump up some place high and sit and lean down to kiss you

cuddles their fucking cuddles man

messy hair

when they try to be tough but they're soft

getting so into a song that they can convince you anything is a Jam

when they get excited over a meal you cooked

kissing the back of your hand

when it’s an unknown number and they put on their phone voice

I am a wife.

You know why?

Because I’m a married woman.

So the controversy over the “gendered” language in the new House Rules is as follows.

1. The House Rules contain an anti-nepotism (you can’t hire your own relatives) provision.

2. To make that make sense, there’s a definition of who is included in the meaning of a relative.

/1

3. That definition is found in Rule XXIII, clause 8(c)(3). This👇🏻is what the definition said in the Rules for the last Congress (the 116th). It uses words like mother, father, wife, husband, daughter, son, etc. Words that convey gender. /2

4. The proposal for the new Congress (the 117th) was to change that definition to “non-gendered” language. Each new Congress adopts its own Rules at the beginning of its session, shortly after being sworn in. The *changes* to the old Rules are proposed in a House Resolution. /3

5. This year that was House Resolution 8. It proposed to change that definition of “relative” in section XXIII.8(c)(3) - & only in that section - to “non-gendered” language. 👇🏻

/4