As far as I know, everyone dreams every night…it’s part of the sleeping process…but you usually forget it ASAP so it seems like you didn’t dream.

As for dreams I remember…less often as I get older, I find. Although I do get a few vivid dreams when using magnesium supplements, but I also acclimate to those quickly. And if I’m woken prematurely, sometimes a dream sticks around a bit more than it otherwise would.

The Big 5 is the only “personality” test used in actual scientific studies, if I recall correctly.

I began using Freetube exclusively to watch YouTube when YouTube complained about my ad blocker.

I’ve tried pretty hard to search for relevant examples of this online, but I can’t seem to find the right search terms for any of this. The closest I’ve seen is “object permanence” in the ADHD research, but I’m pretty cautious to start self-diagnosing as I’m not a professional.

So, there’s always going to be the “script kiddies” of the psychology world out there, who throw around words and jargon without actually understanding what they’re doing or playing with. Just like there’s know-nothings in tech who do the same with IT stuff.

But if you’re a measured and logical person, you’re not immediately going to become one of them if you start looking deeper into psychology and mental health stuff. You’ll start out as a newbie, sure, but your brains aren’t going to suddenly leak out your ears just because you’re wondering if you have this or that, and in your case you literally told us in your post that the issues you are having are affecting your work and mental health, which, to me, suggests you wouldn’t be researching to be trendy or to look cool, but because you’re hurting and in distress and want to figure out what’s going on.

That’s a very valid reason, IMO, to start researching this stuff. You’re hurt, you’re in distress–time to research, even if that might on a superficial level make you look like you’re chasing trends. (But I don’t think you would be, necessarily.)

Anyway, your whole post makes me think researching the mental health stuff is actually a good direction to go. What you’re doing with tech (not committing, searching for greener pastures) reminds me a lot of some of my mal-adaptive habits.

I grew up in a traumatic home, and I figured out (eventually, ha!) the reason I (for example) restart video games instead of playing to the end is because my stress response is messed up, and my solution to a fun game going sour is to “reboot” and seek a redo (just like how I left home, or quit some jobs to get away from stressful people!).

And I have other habits that were once useful for managing anxiety in fear in very high-stress environments, but which work poorly once one is in a more normal environment. It’s very easy to pick up an adaption to stress or to something else in your past that is useful initially, but then starts misfiring when you unconsciously apply it to a totally different part of your life.

Therefore, as others have suggested, I think it might be good to take a look at the rest of your life. Are things stressful with your parents? Any boyfriend/girlfriend issues? Is work or school being a dick to you? If you are getting stress from those areas, you might be immersing yourself in tech stuff (and vacillating back and forth) as an unconscious reaction to that outside stress.

I’m a writer and I often submerge myself in writing when I have other stressors going on. So I look super-productive and happy to people who like to read my stuff, but it’s usually masking everything else going to shit. When I was younger, I did something similar when making webpages and learning tech. Stuff was stressing me, and I found relief by throwing myself into learning something new. Set up entire websites and message forums just to get away from IRL stuff that sucked. The more going on at home, the more I was trying new things with my website.

One skill I found to be VERY useful to develop when trying to figure out my own psychology is learning how to kind of…stop and identify and name what I was feeling when I got out of sorts (anxious, fearful, upset, irritated, angry, hyper, manic, etc.). Try to name it and follow it back to its roots. WHAT am I feeling? Can I actually name it? And WHY might I be feeling it? What happened just before I suddenly felt this thing and switched tracks?

It’s not going to be easy at first, it’s a skill you have to develop like any other. But I found once I started being able to stop myself in moments when I was doing something impulsive/avoidant, I got a better handle on what I was feeling, and why, and that sort of gave me the opening I needed to control it, instead of letting it control me. Once you can touch and name something, it’s easier to make it work for you instead of being hauled along by it.

For you, I think it might be worthwhile to do a bit more reading on ADHD, but also look up OCD (it’s not about being a “neat freak” in practice, it’s more about people having fears and anxieties and coming up with rituals in an attempt to control the fears and anxieties), and also look up maladaptive perfectionism. Even if none of this actually applies to you, becoming more informed doesn’t hurt, and sometimes by following links from one topic to another you can stumble upon something that actually does help or apply to you.

You sound like you’re in tech, maybe a programmer, and I’ve noticed several of my friends in this realm struggle with maladpative perfectionism, btw. (I do sometimes too, but to a lesser extent).

Basically, due to having parents that expected much of them, or their own internal sense of competition, folks can end up kind of breaking their “learning mechanism” or their ability to complete projects because tiny humdrum “mistakes” trigger the same sense of failure as true disaster. Things turn black and white–either everything is absolutely 100% perfect, or you’ve failed and you’re going to burn in hell with all the other failures!

Like, for someone with maladaptive perfectionism, sometimes ANY mistake is a world-ending nightmare emotionally, and stress-wise. So one ends up being hugely stressed when small errors happen, stressed and anxious out of proportion to what’s going on. And when you have that shit going on inside, that can snowball into other behaviors. Some people stop learning and stop trying new things (if you don’t try, you can’t fail, basically). Some people avoid things (if I don’t engage maybe it’ll go away). Lots of different ways people can respond, but it’s often in order to get away from the pain or stress that happens when a “failure” happens.

It seems possible to me, from reading your post, that you might be switching back and forth because you’re scared of settling on something imperfect. But–I could be VERY off-base. Which is why you should dig a bit more on psychology topics yourself. See what YOU think, given that you know your brain and history much better than any of us do.

Anyway. I don’t know if this will help at all, but I hope it does.

If you take anything away from this, I’d say you have this random internet person’s “permission” to go look up articles on psychology and things like ADHD or anxiety or the like. You won’t magically turn into an idiot because you looked up a topic once or twice.

Is this a nostalgia thing? Like how people who grew up without records now get vinyl for the looks or nostalgia of a time that was better or something?

The downside of optical disks for me was how easily they got scratched, plus you have to store them somehow (a big physical library takes up actual physical space, like the wall of a room), plus you have to get up and physically move something to play it. If you’re a super-neat person, perhaps this won’t be downside (I am not, and still have rips of a CD that used to be in my car and got scratched, so the rip has a part marred by skipping).

Also, are ordinary blu-rays kept in ordinary home conditions (that is to say, not archival and not climate-controlled or pitch-black) going to hang onto their data for 20+ years? Or is continually moving it to new SSDs and thinking about raid setups a better defense against data loss for an ordinary home media user? I remember vividly having old CDs and floppies that would not run years later due to becoming corrupted by physical media decay.

Anyway, I have no answers, just want to put some thoughts out there.

Out of curiosity, how would a homeless person in your country accomplish the same things?

I’ve had good experiences with Namecheap for domains. Some of their support people are also in Ukraine, so if you’re of a mind to support them, giving them your business will do that at least a little.

One word of advice–it can be smart to have the domain name with one provider, and the hosting with a different one. That way if your hosting situation goes bad for whatever reason, you still have control of your domain and can point it at a new host as quickly as you can buy space and they can provision it (with time for DNS to propagate of course).

Basically, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. When I did webhost support, I saw WAY too many small business owners get into pickles because they had hosting AND domain with the same provider, and when something went wrong with that provider, it was just such a huge PITA to get control of the domain.

No recs for hosting, I don’t currently have a webpage up (just email) and my knowledge is way out of date, from like 2008 when I worked for a webhost as support.

It seems to go either way, depending on all the little local variables. Strong communities, or dog-eat-dog.

Also, you can have situations where if you “conform”, you’re protected by the growing-together, but if something makes you different, that community comes after you, out of fear that you being different will bring even more hardship down on everyone’s head.

My social group is made up of basically goths, queers, nerdy weirdos who grew up in fundamentally conservative and religious towns and families, and are (now as adults) generally very supportive and chill with differences–but we got a hell of a lot of bullying from our natal families/cultures growing up. Based on individual personalities, there’s honestly little reason we were rejected…we don’t go out committing crimes, or bully, or be mean. But the differences we do have seem to scare or make our families feel ashamed of us–so, rejection. And so we lose the protection that the community offers others.

I recognize communities supporting each other is important–but the bit where perfectly good people who are kind and smart and aren’t committing crimes are just thrown on the curb like trash because we don’t believe in religion like others do, or because we ask questions when things don’t make sense…I struggle with that bit, for obvious reasons.

Yeah, desperation in a community does seem to break down a lot of social niceties, make people meaner, smaller, crueler. So focused on surviving personally that there’s no effort left to give to help anyone else or make things better for everyone.

(An aside below–but it’s related to survival turning people selfish and cruel.)

I follow Kamilkazani on Twitter. He’s a historian of Tatar descent (a minority in Russia), and I think did most of his scholarly studies on China and Chinese history originally, but when the Ukrainian war started, he did a lot of threads about Russia, and how we got here today from a historical standpoint.

He’s been very eye-opening for me, sort of demystifying what happened, and more importantly, laying out the historical and CULTURAL reasons behind it happening. Like, there’s cause and effect, even if it’s not the sort of cause and effect that I’m familiar with in my own country and culture. (His thread alone on “salt” is really astute.)

He looks at things from a very pragmatic historical background, and had a long thread that was the first thing that adequately explained to me why Russia was doing/saying the things it did, things that seemed quite bizarre if you’re looking at it from an American cultural lens.

Part of it is that there’s (and I’m paraphrasing my understanding–you guys should go back and read his threads for the original as I might have misinterpreted) an exaggerated individualism, far beyond what Americans do, in Russian culture.

Like, there’s a lot of “me and mine got ours, so you’re on your own”, or things like “sure, that guy is lying, but it’s MY guy lying so it’s ok.” Hyper-focused on the individual and their family and their local in-groups. And probably an artifact of how brutal the government has been for centuries.

And that “sheer struggle to survive turning people cruel, petty, and mean” has sort of been circling around my head, over and over.

I found I had some backsliding when I went back to my original hometown too.

I expect it’s the same mechanism where even if you know you’re adult and might even have grown beyond where your parents were, you still feel like a little kid around them sometimes? Even if they don’t DESERVE to have that sort of power over you these days?

I wouldn’t consider it proof of anything bad beyond our little monkey brains sometimes doing the things monkey brains do, like hold onto bad stuff and bad memories.

Internet Explorer tried real hard to do that. Pages were literally built only to run “properly” in IE.

Curious what round 2 would look like.

I follow some Canadian van dwellers. I like Foresty Forest best. He just goes around Canada and sometimes the USA climbing mountains with his dog, and living in his van.

His videos are chill.

A lot, mostly porn.

I’m not morally opposed to porn–but like 99.9% is aimed at straight men, or is the Disney-style furry art, and it does NOTHING for me. It’s like being drowned in, I dunno…football communities. It’s boring as shit and I Just. Don’t. Care.

I never quite got into the tea ceremony part, I admit. (Maybe because I live alone and don’t have anyone to share it with.) My first teapot was glass, and I like viewing the color of the brewing tea. Plus, the gaiwans/yixing are so small…I’d rather brew a big pot and have it last than have to go back to re-steep teas.

I know I’m probably missing out on the experience of the tea changing flavors subtly as it’s steeped and re-steeped…I just can’t give up my big glass pot, haha.

There’s a small tea retailer in the UK, What-Cha.com, and the owner does a “mystery tea” option which he uses to get rid of slower-moving teas, or teas he might have had to buy to get a better choice on a tea he wanted to get from a wholesaler. Or sometimes teas he just wants people to try.

“Mystery tea” sounds dodgy, but it did a great deal to expand my horizons, because even these mystery teas were really, really good (far better than ANY grocery store tea in the USA) and opened me to teas I might not have otherwise tried.

I’m TOTALLY a snob importing teas from the UK…but what can you do? America is a coffee-culture country, not a tea-drinking place, and the local stores just have tisanes or crappy bottom-tier tea (basically, tea dust from processing higher grades of tea is packaged into teabags and sold in grocery stores–and people don’t know how crap a tier of tea that is!)

When Teavana still existed, I bought a teapot and some “teas” (Teavana was mostly herbal tisanes…but still.)

I don’t drink coffee, so I imagined the teapot wouldn’t ever be used…but somehow it ended up being a big hobby for me. Bonus: fancy teas from online stores are cheap to ship, because they’re basically dry and lightweight. Like, if you want to become a food snob about anything? Tea really is the way to go.

The one learning curve I had (as an American) was learning that you DON’T steep the tea longer for stronger tea. You use more tea leaves/more tea bags. Steeping too long turns the tea bitter. (I thought I disliked tea when younger b/c I’d only ever had cheap tea bags left to steep for far too long.) Also, when brewing a green tea, they’re really reactive to boiling water, so you REALLY don’t want to use boiling water or it’ll be a bitter mess. You want to either boil then let it cool, or get a fancy electric kettle where you can set the temperature so it’s appropriate for green tea, oolong tea, or black tea.

The thing I liked about Twitter was following:

• Writers
• Academics and scientists
• Artists

Basically, following INTERESTING content creators was my jam. As someone who never made it all the way through college, but is basically a big nerd anyhow, Twitter was basically my only exposure to academic nerds who had a lot of interesting things to talk about. YouTube makes you sit through videos (which is nice sometimes, but too long other times for a fast reader like me), and people’s websites are never updated, and science papers I may or may not have the background to follow, but on Twitter, even academics had to learn how to convey their ideas in an understandable concise way. It was able to expose me to knowledge and social circles I never would have crossed in real life.

Reddit (now Lemmy) gives the same fix, but from anonymous people who contribute knowledge to a general pool instead of being a singular person to follow for a given topic.