This particular fantasy (one day I’ll get to reject the women who rejected me first and they’d never be able to handle it as gracefully as I did) seems somewhat common among young men who have trouble connecting with women.

But the false premise at the center of it is that the man is such a good friend to the woman, and the woman’s dating/romantic life hasn’t found anyone nearly as understanding or kind or empathetic. And part of that belief is some kind of assumption that life is an RPG where everyone is allotted the same number of points to distribute, and anyone who is maxed on charisma must be less intelligent or empathetic or something.

Realistically, men who are friends with women tend to do better with dating and relationships than men who aren’t close to women. The friends of friends angle is a great pipeline for searching for partners, assuming your personality makes your friends comfortable connecting you with their friends.

Just wait for that first time that you realize your doctor is younger than you.

Cable doesn’t have rules, other than each corporate entity’s own practices of what they’re willing to publish/broadcast. Part of it is appeasing advertisers, and some of it is them wanting to gain market share, but it’s all business reasons. And those same business reasons apply to websites and podcasts.

There’s a book I read, Range by David Epstein, that really reinforces the idea that lots of experiences that don’t cleanly fit into a CV are still very valuable. The core idea is that late specialization makes for better specialists, because very few fields stand alone. Having contextual background makes it so that you can better mix and match cross disciplinary skills, with your own experience and knowledge of yourself, to be better at whatever it is you’re doing.

The examples used in the book are Roger Federer (played many sports and didn’t specialize in tennis until much later than the typical pro), Django Reinhardt (never formally schooled in music but an amazing jazz guitarist even after he lost 3 fingers), Van Gogh (many failed careers before finding success as a painter), and a bunch of others.

But the core principle is the same: the real world is messy and doesn’t boil down to simple factors, so having breadth is important when the system you come up in changes underneath your feet. The book also uses the counterexamples of Tiger Woods and the Polgar sisters who were dominant chess players, to describe how the fields of golf and chess give immediate, true, and objective feedback in a way that most of the world doesn’t.

He was constructing his own languages and scripts in his teens, after having learned Anglo Saxon and Latin (and seeing how those fed into modern English), plus Esperanto.

He traveled all over Europe in the summers between university semesters, taking in the different landscapes, cultures, and languages.

He was a British Army Officer for World War I, leading units consisting of men from different backgrounds (class, education, trade) from his own. He devised a code system to bypass Army censors to keep his wife updated on his location and movements. And he experienced the horrors of being in the front lines of one of the most horrific wars in history.

Then after the war he became an accomplished academic, worked on the Oxford English Dictionary, specialized in Middle English and Old English translations, and translated several major works (including the definitive translation of Gawain and the Green Knight).

So by the time he started formally working on Lord of the Rings, he had built up such a rich set of experiences, skillsets, and knowledge that everything he knew was going into that world building.

No way a 25-year-old could have written Lord of the Rings. He needed 20+ years of adult experience to get to the point where he could write it.

The fact that everyone here is conflating sex with mental health support is the reason why men’s mental health isn’t being taken seriously.

The comments are taking the lead from the greentext that forms the basis for this post, and taking any greentext seriously is basically the original sin here.

among them only 24% talk to friends daily

I think it’s fair to infer that a big chunk of the 76% are still talking to friends at least once a week, at least 1/7 as frequently as the 24%.

I don’t mean to say that talking to friends at least once a week is the only way to be friends, or that it represents a majority of friendships (although maybe it might be). The part of the original comment that got me to weigh in was the idea that speaking once a week with friends was unusual or strange. That, I think, underappreciates how it can be feasible and maybe even desirable to keep in more regular contact with multiple friends.

I’m in my 40’s, and I have children. My wife and I both work full time jobs that require regular travel and responsibilities outside of normal business hours.

I have probably 5-10 chat threads in different apps that I maintain with different friend groups. Some are just stupid meme exchanges, but they’re also a regular way to keep in touch with people about their kids, jobs, families, hobbies, goals, etc. But I communicate with dozens of friends on any given day.

My mom also demands regular grandchild content on a constant feed so I actually keep in touch with my family better than when I didn’t have kids.

I have a standing neighborhood parent/kid meetup once a week where my kids get to play with their neighborhood friends while we parents hang out at some local restaurant. We text each other the day of to coordinate a place, and then maybe 3-5 of the families (out of a group of maybe 6-8 regulars and 2-4 fringe participants) will show up on any given week. This is on top of the occasional dinner party on the weekends. We don’t make it to every event, but we are averaging more than one meetup per week with our friends with kids near our kids’ ages.

I’m also friends with people at work. I have a standing monthly happy hour with work friends I’ve kept in touch with, even as people have taken different jobs or made other career changes.

I also do an annual camping trip in the summer with one group of friends, and an annual ski trip with another group of friends. It’s only once a year for each, but there’s also a lot of value in 48+ hour meetups, sitting around with downtime throughout, just catching up and talking around a fire or something.

My parents had church when they were my age. I don’t. But I still try to schedule regular things on the calendar to stay plugged into different groups. It’s important to me, and it didn’t come naturally, but these are things my friends and I implemented in our 30’s when socializing started requiring coordinating calendars. Especially once the friends’ wedding weekends dropped off and seeing out of town friends required coordination without an actual occasion to celebrate.

Is it normal to talk to friends more than once a week?

Yes. It’s very normal to talk to several friends per day, and to see several friends each week. Rotating through one’s universe of friends, that might mean that there are a few friends you talk to at least a few times per week, some that you talk to a few times per month, and a some that you talk to a few times per year. And maybe you actually meet up in person a few times so that you’re still seeing friends in person every week.

That level frequency isn’t necessary, but it’s kinda shocking to me that your comment suggests that you find it surprising that many other people are doing this.

I suspect the strictness isn’t with the procurement process where a contracting officer defines very specific criteria in compliance with acquisition regulations and submits the process to competitive bids. The strictness is in the mission parameters where NASA’s ownership of the thing has already been established, but the NASA employees in a strict hierarchical decisionmaking process need to justify why a thing that NASA already owns should be included in the packing list on a mission.

Don’t agencies have some kind of de minimis threshold for just running out to the store and buying basic stuff? I thought that’s why the DOGE freeze of government credit cards a few months ago was causing labs to cancel experiments and employees paying out of pocket to feed horses and working dogs.

So the military does have a strict procurement process for rocket fuel, but they generally refuel their civilian vehicles (vans and such) with a government credit card at normal gas stations.

At least that’s how I understand it.

it probably came in a 100 count

A 100-count box seems like an absurdly large unit size. Are you doing the very thing that the anecdote is intended to highlight?

Even if we could get a perfect DNA genome of a dinosaur, how would we go about getting the biological machinery that would’ve converted those blueprints into a living organism?

We can modify the genes of living animals by creating viable zygotes, growing them into viable embryos, and implanting them into living wombs, because we already have a factory that is configured to process blueprints of a very similar type.

We don’t have the ability to rebuild a dinosaur factory, even if we get the dinosaur blueprints again.

My wife and I are really good friends with our neighbors, a couple that are great social complements of each other.

One is an awkward extrovert who loves to socialize but isn’t great at reading social cues, avoids eye contact, tends towards dominating conversations and steering them towards his own preferred topics. He’s legitimately hilarious though, and is a good guy.

His wife is a charismatic introvert. She’s charming, engaging, a great listener, and really funny, too. But she admits that she needs a few days to herself just reading at home and being away from people after every time she socializes with people outside her family. She likes to leave early from social gatherings.

The two of them together make a great team, though. They really do bring out the best in each other, and are a ton of fun to hang out with.

Whatever phone it is, it looks like a color screen and a full keyboard. Zoom in and see that it’s more than the normal 10 keys on a traditional phone dialer.

That line of blackberries was no wider than a modern smartphone, but the little rounded buttons made it easier to precisely hit the right buttons without looking.

that cell phone is from like 1999

Probably closer to 2008. Blackberries didn’t get color screens until the mid 2000’s, and that looks to me like the Blackberry Bold, which had updates between 2008 to 2013.

1960s aspirational middle class

That’s still a higher social class than what the corn dog represents, though.

The executive summary for June 2025 says that visitation rates are down 11% YoY.

I agree. If this were a screenshot from pretty much any other app/site that isn’t 4chan, the response would be different.

Seriously, if someone were to create an account and tell this exact story on Tumblr or something, and screenshot it here on Lemmy, they’d get completely different responses.

Uncooked ham is pretty common in the U.S., too. Anything labeled “country ham” is dry cured, and is usually uncooked. Prosciutto generally isn’t cooked, either.

In terms of imports, the U.S. has approved the importation of some Spanish hams (jamón ibérico and jamón serrano) that are cured but not cooked, as well as uncooked prosciutto from Italy. The regulatory hoops are a little more difficult and hard for small producers to justify, but there are a handful of producers who have received the appropriate approvals to export to the U.S.