Hi, my name is ynthrepic and I’m a workaholic.

I have one of those jobs where holidays just mean double the work when you get back. None of the work goes anywhere, and there’s nobody else who can pick up the slack.

I actually love what I do, but…

I work in the public sector, and do heaps of unpaid overtime, to make life better for people who don’t understand the only reason we don’t do a better job is because the government keeps cutting our budgets, claiming it’s because we don’t do a better job with the money we were given the previous year.

We also do regular restructures which reduce morale and stoke fear, but the only people who lose their jobs are low level workers, or they just remove vacancies and claim savings on those, while moving middle managers sideways and not actually improving efficiency.

My job gets harder, I end up making more mistakes or have to cut corners to make shit happen. I complain I get in trouble. I have a kid.

I’m so fucking glad though I don’t live or work in the US. Y’all are so fucking fucked.

Good idea, but I don’t know how you stop people pooping in the pee toilets.

Centaur World is incredible. Best kids show I’ve seen as an adult. They need your viewership to make more crazy stuff.

I would be uncomfortable with my partner hooking up with a stranger. That’s a betrayal of our shared values, and creates risks for both of us (e.g. unwanted pregnancy, STDs, and general drama that could create a lot of unnecessary stress). I would rather know that she has fallen for someone we’re both know preferably, and who she loves and believes she can trust implicitly. I would still feel a healthy amount of jealousy, and be worried about thing going wrong, and her being hurt. But I would trust her judgment, and trust she won’t run away and leave me to raise our kid on my own. But yeah, the sex, and intimacy in this case, wouldn’t bother me too much.

What makes cheating, cheating, is the betrayal of trust involved more than any specific acts of intimacy. The reality is in monogamous relationships merely falling for someone else, even without then knowing how you feel, already feels like a betrayal in your heart as a loyal partner who wishes you only had eyes for your SO and nobody else. Even porn in some cases is a betrayal. It’s a whole lot of unnecessary suffering not to acknowledge how the overwhelming majority of us won’t mentally thrive under these conditions. Therefore, setting expectations appropriate for your situation is key.

For my part, my SO understands that due in part to her relatively low sex drive and complete lack of initiative, certain needs of mine aren’t being met, and we’ve talked about it. I still love her deeply, and we have recently had a child, and I have every intention of meeting my obligations as a father and partner for the rest of my life. But, there’s a real possibility I could fall for someone else one day. I already have friends who I can say I love and would jump at the opportunity to be intimidate with should they show that kid of interest. What interests me though, are loving bonds, not hookups (I mean STD risks and all sorts. Ew). I want to be close with those who I sleep with, and i want them to know I love my partner and will always be there for her and our child. But, there’s space for them too, if they want in. Ideally, my partner likes and accepts them too - and the more close they are as friends (or even lovers too) the better.

In any case, that’s the dream I guess. Nothing has happened yet, and I find with a baby to look after, I’m in no rush, and certainly even with everything out in the open, it’s still too much drama to navigate at the moment. But if it does happen one day, at least it won’t result in a litany of lies that lead to guilt and suffering all around. At least, that’s the idea. I know it will never be quite that easy in reality, but it wouldn’t be life otherwise!

People aren’t honest enough with each other and their own needs. Meanwhile we build other dependencies in long term relationships that have nothing to do with physical attraction, but are in most cases more important for all kinds of reasons.

Monogamy is the basis of a lot of unnecessary suffering because it’s resisting a very real need we continue to have even when our relationships become romantically stagnant. If we could all just be honest about it with our SOs without fear, and work together as we do anyway to maintain other commitments to each other, we could have a culture where there’s a lot more freedom to seek more intimacy and love in a way that isn’t dishonest, that isn’t “cheating”.

The good news is that if someone went back and changed the past, then events would transpire such that they never had to go back in time for that reason, and so they wouldn’t., i.e. nothing would change. Not unless the whole exercise spins only the time traveler off into their own new universe in which they’re the only one with a memory of this alternative timeline from which they came.

Work is fine, if it’s meaningful to you. Consuming is basically everything we do that isn’t “work”. And death is inevitable.

If we didn’t all have to do soul destroying jobs when we’re young, I think we’d grow up with less of a desire to waste our youths trying to die young taking stupid risks in the name of YOLO or whatever. It also doesn’t help most of us never stop do sounds south destroying jobs.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. More progressivism is needed to get us toward a post-work future. Check out ‘solar punk’. That’s a future worth wanting.

‘Something’ is what we abstractly call that which is both not nothing and has some significance to us beyond being merely anything.