When I casually said to my dying partner in the nursing home “I look forward to when life is back to normal.”
By that stage I had been ‘living’ with her in the palliative room for about two months I think. (They had no limit on visiting hours so I took a fold up bed and only left twice a week for showers.)
Her reply “are you trying to make me cry” stays with me for ever.
Damn, what a crazy moment in your life. Genuinely thank you for sharing. I know there’s nothing I can say that will help but I hope you find a way to not guilt yourself over it too much. We all have moments, especially when we’re emotionally exhausted like you must have been, where we’re not at our best. That’s just being human. That was thirty seconds out of two months and however much time prior where I’m sure you more than made up for it.
Thank you.
My fall back on this one is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7mQ26YCsho
(Nobody’s perfect.)
When my kid was growing up I told him “Look, life is like levelling up in an RPG. Your first job is going to suck. Your first car is going to suck. Your first house is going to suck. Just recognize that and work through it, it will get better…”
Well… his first job was straight to Intel.
His first car was a new Lexus.
His first house is a million dollar home on a hill.He’s out there now making the AIs that freak everyone out.
That’s on you, you created the monster that created AI. You must travel back in time, to kill you grandparents.
J/k great for your kid, I hope he transitions to something more sustainable later on.
Dude… Your kid’s a supervillain.
(I joke, but still… AI? Wish it was something less destructive.)
He built his first LLM in high school to do debate prep. LOL.
Out of curiosity, is his work on any of the “frontier” models? Or is he developing the small, open-weight models you can run on sufficiently beefy personal systems? There’s a world of difference there in terms of ethics.
I work with a few AI engineers myself, and I don’t think I know anyone who hates companies like OpenAI and Anthropic more than they do.
To be 100% honest, I don’t fully comprehend everything he does. He had a hand in at Oracle but left to work for a series of start ups and does consulting.
Mostly he goes around the world, writing papers and speaking at AI conferences.
God I wish life was like an RPG. Imagine getting sufficiently rewarded for the time you put in
You do for some things. The more time I put into growing food the more weeds I have to show for it! Might be lucky and have a leaf of kale by next month though.
When the waitress said “Enjoy your meal” and I responded “You too.”
Heavy.
I do.
Answering my own question: “You’ve become a fascist, despite how I raised you. I don’t want anything more to do with you.” Said to my son, who is now 24 years old. I’m planning to reconnect with him at his grandfather’s 80th birthday in a few months. I won’t excuse his behavior or condone it, but hopefully I can reconnect enough that we can agree to disagree.
I admit, I’m judging you by that comment alone, but something irks me about that comment.
I’m not arguing that your son might not be a fascist, but “despite how I raised you” and “I’m planning to reconnect with him” are (to me) both indicators that your son has been growing up in an environment where he is often told what to do, while ignoring what he thinks or wants.
Thus, a fascist environment might suit him, because he might find comfort in being used to navigating such environments with clear hierarchies.
So, have you asked yourself why it has come to this? Why did you disconnect from your son in the first place? Was it truely pure Anger, or did you hope for a certain reaction?
Why did you write you are “planning to reconnect”, not “hoping to reconnect”? Why do you need or want your son back in your life? Why would he want you back in his life? Can you accept him as he is? Is he allowed to say “no”? How would a “no” make you look and/or feel? How would a "yes"make you look and/or feel?
Why did you tell him “This is not how I raised you” (“I don’t want you to be like this”), instead of helping him get to the bottom of why or why not he might think fascism is a good thing? Can you understand his decision, even if you might not share his morals? How do you think he feels? Does he deserve an apology?
That’s a lot of questions.
I’ll give you some more context. I only came to this decision after driving with him for 10 hours up to Portland, where he worked for 6 months, and then driving him back down for another 10 hours. All the hours of which we talked quite deliberately about our differences of opinion. This wasn’t a spur of the moment thing.
My son is a lot like me, and all my other children. We are opinionated but rational. Indeed, I am planning to reconnect, and I hope he feels the same way. But that’s not up to me. It depends on how it goes.
In the end, he is my son, I have made choices, and I indeed regret quite a few of the ones I’ve made. I hope to rectify this one, this one that has severed my connection with my child. I talk with my other three children regularly.
You might think about how much you are thinking about other people’s comments on the internet though.
Why should he worry about how much he’s thinking about your comment? Isn’t provoking reactions part of posting something like that publicly or was it mainly meant as venting?
I actually agree with his sentiment but wouldn’t really be able to explain what exactly irks me. I think there can be value in reflecting on how relationship dynamics or social environments contribute to people drifting toward more extreme views. That doesn’t mean it’s your fault or that you’re responsible for his choices. But your first comment came across as if you saw yourself as having little or no role in the dynamic at all and I don’t think that’s true.
I think it actually makes sense to think about some of the questions posted by @Ediacarium@feddit.org. You might be able to better understand why you reacted so strongly.
I wish I had my current experience of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time 20 years ago. But how do you learn without fucking up?
deleted by creator
On the one hand, the thinly-veiled homophobic joke in front of a bunch of dudes who I had no idea were gay is something I’d like to take back, but on the other, if I hadn’t done that, I might not have taken steps to be a better person since then.
This does not mean I’m the best I could be, but because of that and a few other things, the fact I’m not bothers me a lot more.
(If you want to know how the initial scenario panned out, it was awkward. They didn’t explain why they weren’t laughing, and then later introduced me to one of their more flamboyant friends. I was polite and confused at what was going on, which lead them to understand that I was just ignorant, not actually hateful. It took me a lot longer than it should have to put it all together.)
I’m 56 and in all my years there is only one conversation I would like to redo and that was when I was 17.
My eldest brother was in another state helping his dad fix up a house. He called home around midnight and was going on about how I should take care of myself and a bunch of other stuff, he was mentally ill and it was obvious he had gone off his meds. He kept calling till like 3 in the morning and I was sick of hearing it and just wanted to go to sleep so I could make it to work in the morning.
So last time he calls he is going on for 15 min or so about “hey 1d10 don’t worry about anything, dad will take care of it, my dad will take care of it” so I kinda snaped and said "good, can I sleep now? I hung up the phone and went to sleep, less then a hour later my mom wakes me up to tell me my brother killed himself.
I didn’t go to work that morning, I didn’t go to work for a year. I just went fishing. My brother loved fishing and always tried to get me to go but I didn’t fish and never went with him. After the funeral I took his fishing gear and went fishing almost every day from dawn to dusk for an entire year.
There’s been too many. At this point taking back one would just make another more glaring. I’m just like this. Starting EMDR on Monday and hoping they’ll be able to program out the random crippling guilt over literally everything.
I said something mean to a big guy at school when I was 14, just because I thought it was funny. I recall the hurt, sad look on his face and felt instant shame and regret. That was 34 years ago, and the memory still occasionally pops up in my mind. I wasn’t even trying to bully the guy—I was just trying to be funny to mask my own insecurities.
I shouted at my partner yesterday. I’d take that back.
I was trying to serve dinner and she decided that’s when she needed to start cleaning stuff. She complains why did I call her over if dinner isn’t ready, except it is ready, the stove is off, the food is cooked — I just physically cannot move the food to the plates because she’s decided to clean in front of the stove and I don’t want to scald her with a hot pan. If she wasn’t there, the food would be on the plates, but I’m stuck.
I just need the kitchen clear for 20 more seconds. I don’t know why loading the dishwasher or bending over at the front of the stove to wipe the floor is urgent, and it’s that combination of “why did you call me if dinner isn’t ready, I’ll come back when it’s ready” mixed with the only reason it’s not served is her placement inside the kitchen that frustrates me so much. And it feels like she doesn’t acknowledge that she plays a role here, and that makes me so angry.
I did apologize but it still makes it feel like I don’t appreciate her, and I do.
“Help me.”
