I’m exhausted. At this point, the best I can do is stay out of the way.

Imperfect as it may be, I still want to try to at least not be too much of a bother for others… Don’t think I’m beating myself up about it, I just see it for what it is and am planning around my imperfections.

As for said belief, the one thing which is certain is that people can react in unpredictable ways, I’m just preparing contingencies. I’ve had people blow up in my face for much less and people I’ve wronged severely but didn’t much care.

And, believe me, it’s not an obsession. I’m well past that age, I’ve been around for three of her relationships so far, that’s not an issue. I’m generally not a jealous person and have accepted the situation as-is. As long as she’s happy, I’m happy. If not, I’m there for her. That’s all there is to it. She already knows I’ve had at least a thing for her, thought it fair for her to know where I stand so she can react however she’d see fit. This happened a considerable amount of time before the sex bit, too. We just kept on keeping on.

Edit: to add, I’m not holding out hope, or anything. I’m minding my own path as she does hers. If we can occasionally meet up and walk together for a bit, that’s good enough.

He took an hour-long break and went home if it was bad, but he generally paid a lot of attention to what he was eating. That stopped happening when the tables turned, we’d both grab greasy and heavy fast food.

I’m ad-libbing my ass off at this point, there is no script. There is just myself and the knowledge that I have no place in the world as it is now, nor do I want a place in this circus of hatred and fear.

Thank you for your reply, and, to tell you the truth, that’s exactly what landed me here.

I’ve genuinely been working on myself for over a decade now. I’ve explored the darkest depths of my mind, scaled the peaks of any hint of ambition I could find in me, and I have the answer to the question of “who am I.” I know it’s hard to believe, but I really am there. I know my values, I know my principles, I know what I want and what I don’t want. For some reason, nobody seems to want to accept this about me, but it is what it is. I just stopped responding when faced with it. Whatever, not the point.

The point is exactly as I’ve said, I’ve become so concrete in my own perception of myself, so clearly defined as Me to myself, that I’ve come to understand that I have nothing to want from the world as I’ve come to know it, as it has presented itself to me thus far. I am filled with hate as a response to the hate permeating the world nowadays - I hate the hate, and the bigger the hate, the stronger my hate toward it. I am filled with anger because it is a response to the profound, the abhorrent injustice which has (yet fucking again!) reached critical mass across this whole rock.

And, yes, I don’t have any hope for things anymore. I don’t see us changing course any time soon (or, at least, not in however many years I have left) enough for me to want to dig my roots into things. It feels like every other time when I’ve tried to have unjustifiable amounts of patience with people who only wanted to spread their shit around, hoping that one day maybe they’ll see that I love them and that there is no need to stab me preemptively, or to try to control me, or simply to take their frustrations out on me.

I don’t want to be Sisyphus and just smile at the pointlessness. Hell, that’s a dumb comparison in my opinion, as Sisyphus’s rock deal absolutely had a point: it was punishment from the gods, the point in it was to make Sisyphus suffer. And I’m sick and tired of suffering at the hands of this bullshit… I’m sick and tired of seeing everyone else suffer, too. I can feel the pain of the world and it makes me angry. And I’m tired. And I’m done.

Did and done with it. I worked so much on myself only to have reached a point where I no longer fit in.

Edit: and, honestly, I don’t think I want to anymore. What’s the point of fixing up the place when everyone’ll just drag their mud all over it once the doors are open, y’know?

Edit 2: to add, I’m just repeating myself at this point. Meditation works because there’s no concrete thought to be had at this point, it’s just angry screaming. Journaling feels like copy/pasting yesterday’s entry, over and over and over again. And my trains of thought have all reached the depot.

Oh, I didn’t mean the content, I meant the purpose of it. In my experience, it wasn’t just about testing the interviewees, it implies having to ‘sell’ the company as well, to give the interviewees reasons to want to be hired. That’s the bit which generated the guilt.

Having to hold interviews was the worst part of the job, by far… Brings about a certain kind of guilt, to sit there and try to sell battery acid as ice-cold lemonade.

Oh, no, I’m so very sorry, that sounds awful!:( I can’t even begin to imagine what it must be like, but… Jesus, like you’ve said, we’ve been in the XXIst Century for two and a half decades now, it’s beyond disappointing that this is still happening… I’m genuinely sorry…

I’m genuinely sorry you had to go through that, it really seemed to be a very unpleasant time for my buddy, to say the least… I mean, I have an apparently milder form of IBS (primarily diet and stress-based) and it’s bad enough as-is…

But, truthfully, I don’t think there’s anything of which to be ashamed. I mean, we’re being fed crap, we’re stressed out more often than we’re not, and we’re living in environments fit more for industrial equipment than for biological life. It’s no wonder our digestive systems are going haywire.

If anything, I think what my former colleague did was 100% reasonable, it’s just a repercussion of the conditions in which we’re meant to exist. Pairing that up with this social contract of “Thou shall not fart because it’s, like, awkward for the rest of us” is pure hypocrisy. Farting, thus, is an act of justified rebellion!

There genuinely is no drama quite like workplace drama.

Used to work with a really diligent and thorough dude doing Data Analysis around overall Ops performance metrics, we got along really well in terms of work ethics, so we became work buddies pretty fast. Trouble was, the higher-ups set up the original databases in Google Spreadsheets and the people who worked on those docs before us botched them beyond belief. We kept trying to convince Management to let us redo all databases in SQL, link them with our tools to make things dynamic, and pull them through Power BI to get some nice visuals going, but they realised their asses would be on the line if the data started showing accurate values (plus they were too cheap to actually pay for viable software), so they kept stonewalling.

One day my guy gets fed up with our manager and decides to go nuclear. Thing is, the dude had a very, very nasty case of IBS (no wonder, honestly…). So he started taking advantage of it. He’d come in, tell me to keep an eye on him, and if I saw him getting red and sweaty I should use the facilities within the next 30 minutes then stay away from them. I can tell you that I made the mistake of not heeding his words only once. The dude literally bio-bombed every washroom in that building (small office, start-up type deal), and it would linger for hours due to poor ventilation. He did this without a predictable pattern, so that nobody would figure out who was to blame. This happened for several months. I cannot begin to tell you how much respect I had for the guy.

Well, to be fair, the whole thing has become a sick joke, although nobody’s laughing anymore…

The freest speech of all!

If this joke emitted radiation, it would be measured in kiloDads per second.

But… that doesn’t really… what?

I’m 75% anxiety.

Agreed, and it wasn’t that type of situation, it was as I’ve described, they were trying to “teach me a lesson,” as it were.

To be clear, I don’t push decisions on my peers every time, there simply are times when I have no preference. Plus, like… I was at theirs, we were chatting, I didn’t feel the need to change the activity, they, instead, tried to force me to do so, after patiently explaining to them that I was fine with things as they were. After which the yelling started.

There’s a difference between being easy-going and being a damp towel…

Edit: plus, in all honesty, what you’re describing sounds more like a dynamic mismatch, in which case the best direction (imho) is reevaluating and adjusting expectations accordingly. People can be however they want to be, and it’s up to us to decide whether or not we want to accept and continue interactions.

That’s when you slap the “one per date” card on the table;)

What, cubes ain’t cool enough anymore, we’re doing triangle fractals now?

Oh, of course, there will always be exceptions! And I do believe some level of decency/empathy is intrinsic to human beings, it actually takes work to become a knobhead. Plus I suspect a lot (if not most) of us who dive deeper into online socialisation are a form of refugees, precisely because that shark stuff doesn’t float well with us. I’m generalising, but it’s my suspicion.

As for trying to get me to be a dick, it was little things, chipping away at my behaviours and approaches with pointed observations, stuff like “I don’t understand why you’re so polite, I would’ve blown up in their face” when attempting to defuse an argument with patience and communication, repeatedly hammering home that my being polite is a weakness to be abused and nothing more, talking shit about people with whom I’ve had minor disagreements, telling me to stop caring about others, and so on, and so forth. And there was a time when I almost started believing them, because so, so many people told me the same story. I almost gave into it, because I was deeply unstable in my faith in myself back then. Gotta say, feel ashamed that I questioned my values for… that…

As an extreme example, one of my closest friends once got pissed off with me - and I mean to the point where they were yelling - because they were insisting that I select an activity (they were trying to get me to acknowledge my preferences in a way, I guess), when I genuinely didn’t have a preference. I’m easy-going, the company is more important than the context to me, but it’s like they simply couldn’t understand or accept that about me.

I’m geuinely sorry to hear that… It really does feel like a lot of people are trying to drag others into the mud with them, especially out of envy… I can say with 100% honesty that, while I understand exactly what’s happening, I simply… don’t, can’t understand what’s happening. It feels like one of those not-quite-nightmares, where things look the same, but make no sense.