#sounds like the pusblisher is

[rotationalsymmetry]

Welp, this is bad.

this is why demanding flawless representation from every piece of media, and trying to police who writes what based on identity is a huge fucking mess

source

[thisdiscontentedwinter]

A long-ass response to nonnie dude

First of all, you said nothing about what made this cute guy accomplished. So he’s cute and has married rich? So what? What are his actual accomplishments? Has he mastered a difficult skill? Has he made himself a better person with more integrity or self-discipline? You need to rethink the definition of success. “Not to mention, I feel like a failure since I thought I had been doing better for a whole year” Doing better doesn’t mean “doing better than other people” or “doing better than random people on the internet who only portray the things that they want you to see,” it means doing or being better than you yourself were before. Congrats, you have succeeded! You’re right, time isn’t stopping. So you have two choices in life: 1) follow your passions and do what makes you happy 2) not do what makes you happy, and live and die miserable, regretting your life as you live it, and regretting it when you’re dying, and all the while you will be inflicted by guilt, regret, anxiety, and depression, etc.

And you’re saying that it’s too late to do number 1) because you’re already 26 and can’t earn money from it right now? (As if it’s not possible to earn money from it later!) I can’t formulate it into words how ridiculous it sounds to me that you can’t do what makes you happy if you can’t earn money from it. Is happiness only worthwhile if it comes with money? Lol, what sort of nonsense. “Reading and looking at beautiful works of fine art makes me feel elated and alive, but I can’t do it because it doesn’t make me money!” You see how nonsensical this is? (How many fics - or traditionally pusblished books - do you think would exist if people only wrote for money, not for the love of it?) You’re going to die one day, so what the fuck do you have to lose by doing what makes you happy? You have your life to lose by doing what makes you unhappy, btw. So you’re 26. Let’s say you live until 66, ‘cause I slept 2 ½ hours and did 3 hours of taekwondo today and don’t want to do any math - so you have 40 years left. 40 years (and you’ll probably live longer, if you take proper care of yourself) is enough to master several skills, or several instruments and several languages, if you wish to stick to only those two. Even if you only master them by age 65, you spent your life doing the things you love doing, so wtf did you actully lose by doing them? Also, why do you measure success by money? Isn’t doing what you love and developing yourself as a person, whether you ever get money for it or not, a much better measure of success? Or do you consider all the artists who were ahead of their time and died in poverty failures, or think they should’ve done something else since they never earned money from their art? If not, why do you have this double standard for youself? “I’m 26 now, but I feel I can never get away from my parents’ rules & influence.” That’s literally nothing but a feeling you have. It’s not actually stopping you, which you’ll notice if you actually do something outside of your parents’ influence. People are always justifying how they can’t do things because of some feeling or other, but it’s possible to have the feeling and choose to work from another part of you - a part that’s courageous, for instance, or passionate about music or languages. Feelings are irrational as shit, and you’d do well not to think you are your feelings, but look at them logically and as moods that will pass. I was really jealous a couple of months ago, but I looked at it objectively, deemed it bullshit, had several good laughs over how dumb my own feelings were, and did nothing about my jealousy except logic it away. I didn’t take it to heart - it’s just a feeling, a fleeting thing based on the experiences I’ve had in my life. It doesn’t really have much to do with reality. Your parents aren’t stopping you here with feelings - you are. Idk what your living or financial situation is, but if you’re only able to do what you love secretly, then fucking do it secretly. If it helps, I took until 30 (I’m 32 now) to figure out what I want. I absolutely wasted my 20s. I could now throw in the towel because of my age, and my life thereafter would be a fairly meaningless passage of time, going from one thing to the next. But time (my life) will pass regardless of what I do with it, so I can waste it or do something fucking useful with it, whether it brings me financial success or not. And let me tell you, I’m far happier broke and uneducated than my highly educated saving-for-a-house friend who lets her parents’ and society’s bs get to her, and determines success by external markers - marriage, owning a home, etc. She doesn’t like her job despite being educated for it: she chose it for financial security, which she isn’t even getting like she thought she would. She has so much anxiety and depression and feels like a failure because she’s not married and doesn’t have her house, despite her being way more successful than I am in all of these external ways. Measuring success this way will only bring discontentment, because there will always be people richer and whatever - but also because it’s external. I believe that real, lasting happiness comes from internal things - such as sense of accomplishment by skill acquisition, i.e. mastery; growing as a person via self-reflection, or devoting yourself to a cause bigger than you, such as a charity or art, etc. I think you know this, too, because you said music and languages instead of money and a good-looking partner! (Speaking of looks - you will be far more attractive when you speak several languages, sing, and play an instrument or two, whether you make a penny for it or not. If you live a bitter, regretful life, even if you’re a rich engineer, you will be less attractive, 'cause it absolutely shows. If you want to be more attractive, do what makes you happy.) Also, you are FAR ahead of most people because you know what you want. Most have no clue and thus spend their lives passively consuming and ignoring the fact that they’re wasting their lives in meaningless mediocrity. Your problem now is that, having achieved this knowledge, you can’t waste away your life and make-believe that it was well spent - you’ll know it wasn’t, because you know what you really want. So you can choose a life of increasing anxiety and physical & psychological sufferings, or simply do what you love. It’s that simple. Here are a few of my favourite quotes to end this long thing (whoops, sorry) with: “Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, in all the small uncaring ways.” (Stephen Vincent Benet) “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” (Marcus Aurelius) “Your task is simply to find the one or few things that you can excel in, and then make it your primary business in life to excel in those ways. To do otherwise, to disregard the treasures with which you are at least potentially gifted, is simply to waste your life - a path to nothingness.” (paraphrased from an Academy of Ideas video - I highly recommend them, the self-improvement playlist is a wake-up call after wake-up call. I listen to them regularly and take notes. You can find Academy of Ideas on YouTube.) “You’re no longer a child but an adult. If you’re negligent and lazy, keep delaying and making a collection of one good intention after another, naming day after day on which you’ll start to take care of yourself, you’ll just go on without getting better, and you’ll live and die miserable.” (Epictetus) “We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it.” (Seneca) “If you plan on being anything less than you’re capable of being, you’ll probably be unhappy all the days of your life.” (Abraham Maslow) “If we delay the changes necessary in our life to truly live a fulfilling life, awareness of our mortality will give rise to nagging and increasingly intense feelings of guilt and regret. We will have chosen the safe road - the road of death, and we’ll spend our remaining days fleeing from the fact that we’re wasting our life.” (paraphrased from an Academy of Ideas video, or from The Way of Individuation by Jolande Jacobi) (All of these quotes I took from Academy of Ideas, actually. Good stuff.)

DW: I think there’s some great advice in here, and--so importantly to the original anon--there are a bunch of us out here who think you’re doing an amazing job at turning your mindset around and learning to become more forgiving of yourself, and more proud of your accomplishments! 

[blerdsunite]

#williamwellsbrown #abolitionist #novelist #playwright #historian #TheBlackMan #Clotel William Wells Brown was born into slavery in 1814 in Montgomery county Kentucky. He freed himself in 1834 by escaping to Ohio. He settled in Boston where he started doing work as an abolitionist, he also became a prolific writer there. Although he has a rather interesting story that I'll cover later, like his beef with Frederick Douglas, right now I'm going to focus on a book that he wrote in 1863. The title of this book is of interest to me due to a meme that a lot of misguided black people in America pass around. According to this meme, "we" never called ourselves black prior to the 1960s. Yet he has a book called "The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements". Some of you misguided clowns have also said that no one black person was writing on the history of black people before Melville J. Herskovits and Franz Boas. The former wasn't born (1898) when Brown started writing and the latter was 5 when "The Black Man" was pusblished. Get these conscious clowns out of here. We have to stop letting good sounding bullshit fly among us. Prior to the first book that I mentioned William Wells Brown had wrote the fictional novel "Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States" in 1853. It was about Clotel and her sister, fictional daughters of Thomas Jefferson. Thomas and Sally anyone...Brown had to publish this book while in London. He was there on a lecture tour in 1849, then the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 came about, and he decided to stay in London with his two daughters. Even though he was living in the North he still would've been at risk if he went back to the US. In 1854 a British couple purchased his freedom and he came back to the States with his daughter. https://www.instagram.com/p/BzRBjI0BJcb/?igshid=1oosm1v7xnntd

[blerdsunite]

#williamwellsbrown #abolitionist #novelist #playwright #historian #TheBlackMan #Clotel William Wells Brown was born into slavery in 1814 in Montgomery county Kentucky. He freed himself in 1834 by escaping to Ohio. He settled in Boston where he started doing work as an abolitionist, he also became a prolific writer there. Although he has a rather interesting story that I'll cover later, like his beef with Frederick Douglas, right now I'm going to focus on a book that he wrote in 1863. The title of this book is of interest to me due to a meme that a lot of misguided black people in America pass around. According to this meme, "we" never called ourselves black prior to the 1960s. Yet he has a book called "The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements". Some of you misguided clowns have also said that no one black person was writing on the history of black people before Melville J. Herskovits and Franz Boas. The former wasn't born (1898) when Brown started writing and the latter was 5 when "The Black Man" was pusblished. Get these conscious clowns out of here. We have to stop letting good sounding bullshit fly among us. Prior to the first book that I mentioned William Wells Brown had wrote the fictional novel "Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States" in 1853. It was about Clotel and her sister, fictional daughters of Thomas Jefferson. Thomas and Sally anyone...Brown had to publish this book while in London. He was there on a lecture tour in 1849, then the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 came about, and he decided to stay in London with his two daughters. Even though he was living in the North he still would've been at risk if he went back to the US. In 1854 a British couple purchased his freedom and he came back to the States with his daughter. https://www.instagram.com/p/BzRA_v5hmR8/?igshid=1l43fuuts5k0g