in the USA therapy typically isn’t available unless you have $500+ or more a month to spend.

Even if you can find a therapist who takes insurance, you will wait a year and it will still cost you $200-300.

one of my friend has a pretty elaborate garden setup.

he has a groundhog execution chamber too. he has to gas and kill about 6 of them each year.

I am a successful gardener.

You can’t and don’t want to eat 20lbs of tomato in a week. I use maybe 2-4lbs and the rest of it rots or has to be given away. I’m lucky if consume 1/4 of what I produce.

And that’s how crops come in, all at the same time in abundance. It’s not like you can pick 4 tomatoes each day and they just hang out for weeks on the vine. There is about a 4-6 week widow in which all the stuff you have spent 5 months growing, is edible off the vine. You start in April and then you don’t really get anything until August, and then by Mid Sept, the plants stop producing and are dead by Oct.

And if you want to preserve it, that’s a lot more work and you need the space and equipment to store dozens and dozens of jarred/canned veg. And at that point it’s no longer a small kitchen garden.

oh and by the way if you give me that ‘community sharing!’ stuff. no. literally everyone’s crops are also coming in at the same time. that’s why you see people leaving baskets of veg on the stops all around and nobody takes it, because they already have their own from their own gardens.

That is very different from a commercial farm who is able to have dozens of rotating crops and crop varieties with the expertise to manage it and also the ability to distribute it commercially.

Sometimes he is spot on, other times the guy seems like is just shrilling the therapy industrial complex, but hard to see how he couldn’t given he’s an influencer.

I think of it like physical therapy. If you do the work you eventually won’t need the therapist, that is the goal.

But a lot of people just refuse to do the work. But at least with a PT they won’t waste your time on years of PT if you aren’t trying to make progress.

You’re just paying too much money to vent at someone.

This is what a lot of folks in therapy want. They don’t want change, they just want someone to vent to and validate themselves.

I also notice… those are the same people who go around demanding and claiming everyone also needs therapy and that if you aren’t actively in therapy you are in denial about your issues or something.

Because I don’t want to hang out with weird and immature people. That’s why.

They will also eventually blame you if you become close to them. Because nothing is ever their fault.

Yep. She also tried to convince me I was abused as a child. I wasn’t. She was just trying to maximize my vulnerability to weaponize it so I couldn’t leave her, because she was one of those crazy co-dependent types.

No she was. On the surface. She was the only girlfriend I ever had who cooked, or bought me gifts, and who didn’t hate me for my hobbies and friends. Most women I meet on first dates reject me straight up for my hobbies and interests and many of my other girlfriends hated/resented me for them, and never in a million years would ever do something nice for me like buy me a gift.

I’m much happier being single. Since I went through therapy my salary has tripled and lots of other great things, but I still exclusively attract horrible women. I just don’t date them anymore. The biggest red flag now is I have a dog and a cat, and almost every woman who is interested in me HATES either dogs or cats, or both. On dating apps I regularly get messages like ‘oh hey would you get rid of your cat/dog if we hit it off?’ It’s wild. But at least now I spend my money on myself, and not trying to make some emotional black hole of a person ‘happy’ by buying them crap.

Yeah, that’s a good one. I’m usually not snappy enough to have a comeback when it happens.

But it is a good flag that I don’t want to interact with that person anymore, and they probably don’t want to interact with me anyway. I def have had a few relationships that ended over that type of response… and usually when you break up with them they start screaming and threatening you…

It was a decade ago. I moved on.

The big kicker, is this woman was a professional therapist. And the therapist I saw two years later… basically walked me though how she had violate every professional ethics code of therapy, and that was basically when I really was like ‘oh wow’.

She had repeated try to diagnose me to win arguments and manipulate me. The funniest part is when I would take the tests she gave me for whatever she thought i had and score way outside of them… because I was not anything, she was a terrible person trying to control me and freaking out that I wasn’t controllable. Hence why she resorted to violence finally, because that’s what abusers do once their abusive words stop working.

She also talked shit about her patients and colleagues in vivid detail. But at the time I was like 27, I had no clue about the ethics of therapy professionals and how fucked up what she was doing was. I was totally in love with her too, wtf did I know. What sucks is was the nicest person I have ever dated, still too this day. Every other woman I ever dated basically hates me overtly rather than tries to manipulate me.

Yes, a lot of people internalize things as their fault. I had that issue with relationships. I thought if my ex cheated on me, it was because I had failed or not tried hard enough… I was wrong.

Similar with abusive relationships. If you had been a better child dad/mom wouldn’t have beaten you… moving on is realizing that you had zero control over that situation and the fault was entirely your dad/mom. But a lot people can’t dissociate emotionally to begin to see things that way, esp if they are still hung up parental approval.

I’m in my 40s and it’s terrifying to me how many people I meet who are still hung up on parental approval or angry at their parents for not doing more for them… it’s pathetic.

You can’t change your past.

People who incessantly dwell on ‘what could have been’ or ‘should have been’ will never move forward. Often it’s not even trauma, it’s just that they feel like their past-life was ‘unfair’ because someone else had it better than them and they are aggrieved.

And my favorite part is when you are relatively happy and have let it go and they fault you for it, like you’re some asshole for not dwelling about someone did to you 20 years ago. A couple of years ago I met this girl from my high school randomly and she would kept bringing up all these things and people I had zero memory of that she was so mad about and was angry with me that I barely remembered any of it…

Oh man. My ex physically attacked me in broad daylight, full on slapping and pushing, then kept texting me how she didn’t really do it and I had imagined it and if she did it wasn’t that bad. I broke up with her, obviously.

Then months later when I had a new girlfriend she kept calling me and leaving me voicemails how I was a cheating bastard and a terrible awful person for lying to her and betraying her trust and love…

And anyone who hears that story basically tells me I am exaggerating and there is no way a woman would ever hit a man, but if she did, I must have done something awful to deserve it.

because it’s a condiment in Japanese cuisine, not an ingredient.

because soy is such a dominant flavor, that’s why. it tends to over power everything and all you can taste is the soy sauce.

the issue with salt is not salt in cooking, it’s salts in processed foods used as preservatives.

Unsolved Mysteries made me terrified of being abducted by aliens. I had night terrors a few times from it and anytime a weird light flashed through my bedroom at night I screamed my head off.

Salt. people don’t use enough salt.

wanted reddit from 10+ years ago when it was a smaller more chill site more interesting in being nerdy and curious than being political grandstanding. used to be such a fun place to kill time and learn cool shit and read interesting stories. it was glorious until 2016 and started going downhill rapidly, IME. I was first banned from reddit in 2020 for ‘inciting violence’ by talking about my cat hunting rabbits. thought it was insane, and a few months later I was randomly unbanned. OK. Stopped using it in '22 entirely as I constantly being reported for random comments as ‘racism, violence, hate speech’ when I was often pointing out those behavior and attitudes.

fediverse cool at first but now it’s rapidly growing into another reddit with a ton of people here who are just to be crappy and spam their weird agendas and go around endlessly self promoting themselves and hating on anyone who isn’t like them. it’s increasingly just a site for people to dump their insanity and delusions and seek validation for doing so. I have blocked so many people in the past few months it’s insane, my block list is 100s now, and in '25 it was maybe a dozen.

That said there are still some pretty good thoughtful threads on here about various issues, usually for the first few hours they are up, but once they get some traction the crazies come out to harass anyone remotely thoughtful and call them names. I’ve seen some wonderful empathetic and compassionate discussions get completely derailed by shitheads, who also mod-report these thoughtful and interesting things as ‘hate speech’ because it doesn’t align with their simplified black or white view of the issue, and their missions is simple to shut down any discussion that isn’t a catchphrase or other bumper sticker takes by calling it hate speech, just like my comment about my cat killing rabbits was ‘animal abuse’.

dumb people ruin everything because they basically throw a tantrum when they can’t fit the square object into the round hole and declare that the square space must therefore be a hateful bigot, because all the world must be round holes and only things that fit through them should be allowed to exist.

my favorite is the ‘love to travel’ types. point out that their trips to antarctic are toxic for the environment there and they lose it on you. because cute pics with penguins are worth it!