• 11 Posts
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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: March 14th, 2025

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  • The engagement bots constantly peppering my comments with inane remarks to draw a reaction is what drove me to Lemmy. I was there early on, and it was awesome. As its popularity grew, it became less nice, but I still enjoyed going there. In the end, I didn’t feel like commenting because I knew that I’d just get hit with stupid responses calculated to draw a response. It just felt harassing.





  • It’s a personality cult. He plays to their emotions and they lap it up, oblivious to the fact that he’s just using them. Expect the insanity to continue to escalate, until the Trump train runs into the brick wall of reality and the fantasy world he’s created collapses. I think the weakest link is the economy, in that he’s teeing up economic collapse. I figure we’ve got a year or two max before it all comes unglued. Things are going to be brutal.







  • N0t_5ure@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldEmpath
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    5 days ago

    You may technically be “reading” emotions, but you’re not doing it on a conscious level, and the way it tends to surface in you is through emotional mirroring - i.e., you feel the emotion the other person is feeling.

    To illustrate, someone I know has significant social anxiety, and I saw her in a social situation standing alone. Her facial expression and body language immediately kicked in my own discomfort, so I went over and talked with her and her face lit up. I could feel her relief as plain as I could feel her discomfort before. It’s easier with people you know, as you have a lot of baseline data, but even total strangers give off the cues you pick up subconsciously. What is interesting is that I’ve found that some highly manipulative people are fairly adept at masking their external emotional cues, especially facial microexpressions. I would guess that professional poker players are highly adept at not only intuitively reading microexpressions, but also at concealing their own.



  • N0t_5ure@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldEmpath
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    6 days ago

    “Empath” is a colloquial rather than clinical term, but it is useful. For people who grew up in an abusive household with unsafe parents, being hyper-attuned to their parent’s emotions was an important survival skill, as being able to make yourself scarce at appropriate times can save you a beating. People give off all sorts of cues to their emotional state, including facial microexpressions, vocal tonality, body language, etc., and children raised in these environments have honed their ability to inutit emotional states from scant external cues, usually without realizing that they’re even doing it. Unfortunately, most tend to disregard the “gut” feeling they get when doing it, because their abuse profile also typically includes emotional invalidation, which has taught them that their emotions are “wrong”. So the cruel irony is that most “Empaths” don’t trust their intuition, and tend to associate with abusive people like their parents, which feels comfortably like “home”.




  • I think there is a bit of cultural narcissism underpinning it all. It’s the mindset that they are the special ones chosen for preferred treatment by the omnipotent ruler of the universe. No matter the issue, we’re the good ones and the other guy is bad, and leopards won’t eat our faces. It’s only when the cruel grifters they’ve voted into power casually do something that directly harms them do they begin to wonder if something might be wrong, but they assume it must be some oversight or unintentional error. “My exalted master, President Trump. You’ve deported my wife and sent my children to a Nicaraguan gulag, and I’m thinking that there must be some sort of error. We’ve followed all the rules, and hate everyone you hate. Surely we’re ‘the good ones,’ right? Right!?!”


  • Caffeine was the hardest addiction for me to kick, and we are wired for sugar addiction. Sugar triggers an insulin spike, which is the fat storing hormone. In the late summer and fall, when fruit ripens, our genes caused our ancestors to gorge on fruit and store fat for the long, hard winter ahead. Now that we live in abundance, with a surplus of calories available everywhere we turn, this storage of fat for the winter is unnecessary. Worse, food companies recognize that we are wired to want sugar, so they add sugar to virtually everything to make it more addictive. This is why I minimize the highly processed foods I consume and when I consider any food with a nutrition label I look and see if there are added sugars (which there almost always are.)