Lasting happiness? There’s always going to be downs as well as ups in life. Stoicism will teach you how to handle the pitfalls in life without dwelling on them and helping you to get on in life. Buddhism will help you to understand that life is full of sorrow but that the journey is it’s own reward and that joy can be found anywhere.

A perpetual state of satisfaction can be reached that’s liberally peppered with happiness. Happiness is not an end goal. It’s the after affect of a effortful life that invites playfulness and new experiences.

The key word here is effort. Happiness should not be the main goal. Living your values. Finding a process and journey that meets your values and challenges you slightly will bring satisfaction.

Be carful of self help books and systems. Many are designed to put you on a perpetual wheel of needing more and more books to buy and classes to take. They are money generators that will tell you they offer the golden cure. And if you didn’t succeed with the system in a few months then here’s part two you can buy.

I do like THE HAPPINESS LAB podcast as a starting point. There’s a free Yale course too. The teaching there can get you to examine some stuff.

Be kinder to yourself but do put some challenges in your way. Happiness is not about having a placid life.

Curious if someone in an abusive relationship could use this trick if their phone was being monitored. If the abuser was just monitoring them with the phone’s parental controls this would work but if there was an app probably not?

Seven Samurai is an amazing movie. It set the groundwork for so much more to follow.

Harold and Maude Silence of the Lambs Thor: Ragnarok Singing in the Rain Unforgiven

Silly to hold us to five but those were the first to come to mind.

I nearly spit out my drink. Relatable and funny.

Porteus is cool. I messed around with it when trying to set up an idiot proof browsing pc for a relative.

Pop or Mint are fantastic. They are my go to.

I just read a good article about big tech is never a friend to decentralized stuff. You can find it here.

A big shout out to Lemmy.one. I signed up not knowing but love the fact now. Down votes don’t add to the discussion. And posts and comments that are in poor taste should just be reported. Ignoring poorly made comments and posts is the best way to extinguish them. It forces the writer to improve their input if they care about the up votes. Down votes just make the user give up in wanting to contribute at all. Lemmy is about contribution. For now it is anyway.

Magic can McGuffin any answer you need but it sounds like you want a non magic means to keep people away.

Have a guarded door, be it creature or armed guards. The room that is guarded is not the real room, just a place to hold private meetings. It’s used on the regular to keep the focus on the guarded room.

The real room is in the town’s bizarre. It’s passed by all of the time and is curated by the most hated man. No one likes going to his shop. He’s rude and his wares are over priced. Within his shop is the real room that is visited by the few who know.

My wife is a teacher at a small district. She’s watched student’s abilities drop over the past twenty years and the time of covid left them severely lacking. Yes. Their writing skills are practically not there. It’s truly sad.

The negativity is definitely less. Sure, out of say fifty comments to a post there’s maybe two disgruntled souls. Overall it’s conducive to discussion.

Over on reddit I kept to just hobby subreddits for the most part to make comments. Only way to not come across the trolls.

Yes, the clean UI is wonderful. It’s good to have something simple. It’s also fun to watch something grow.

I’ve seen two built in dog kennels and they’re such a good idea. Yours looks great.

Wasn’t that labor ward responsible for mixing babies some time ago?

Sorry, I don’t follow the rules. wild card

This obfuscation of who works for who via a series of subcontracts is horrible. I personally know of the janitorial BS that got started by Winters Cleaning and the cinema industry in the 90s. There’s an article that Variety did on it some years back. It’s about removing responsibility from the company benefitting from the labor. It increases the likelihood that impoverished, desperate people will be taken advantage of. When problems are noticed the last company in the line of subcontractors just fold up. No one is held accountable.

If Amazon has deep control of operations due their contracts, then yes, Amazon is their employer.

SURELY YOU’RE JOKING, MR. FEYNMAN is a good autobiography.

I bought Joey for Reddit and had no obvious ads. Lovely experience. I won’t be visiting reddit without the choice of removing the obvious ads.

Agreed. I can’t tell you how many times in business I’ve seen a matter of fact text or email set someone off thinking the sender was some sort of monster. Try to add any humor and it can be 100% worse when it comes to interpreting.

I never had an issue with the /s used. Yes, I could read it as sarcasm 90% of the time before it appeared. But to me the written word should always add clarity. If the one commenting felt it should be used then so be it.

This.

(I said sarcastically.)

Google Pay and iPay are the only ones I know of that carries an instance of your card around with you. Downside is that if a location does not have a chip reader (a problem in the US sometimes) you’re out of luck.

Like you said, the security is much better with either one instead of carrying your card. Even if a security breach happens on the retailer’s side they won’t have your card numbers.

If OP is truly nervous they could get a preloaded debit card to carry along with their phone.