That doesn’t involve either masturbating or going to the bathroom.
Mine is leaving Facebook. 4 days ago it has passed its permanent deletion date, so I can no longer recover it. I’ve been on it for 5 years and have been off and on it a little longer beforehand. Yes it sucks that by deleting my Facebook, I’ve closed off the connection to my locals who are on there, who I haven’t seen in 3 1/2 years because I moved.
However, I have tried giving them alternatives to keep in touch but they seemed glued to the platform. Not budging, not caring, though I didn’t want to be around anymore.
I was tired of the ads that I had to keep closing, I was tired of the YouTube shorts-ripoff always shoved in my face that I had to keep closing. I was tired of seeing notifications to things that either didn’t exist or was already read but I got a notification for anyways. I was tired of being recommended people I have had no intention of adding. I was tired of FB Dating, on my phone, making up a number to get me to use it again.
I was just so tired of all of this degradation that FB has become over the years to where it was outweighing whatever use I thought that there was with it.
Building up a good emergency savings fund. When things break I don’t even have to think about if I can afford to fix or replace them. I may have to make decisions on how nice of a version I can have, but I never have to worry I won’t have a car or may have to take a quick loan. Financial worries have become “how long can I be unemployed without issue” or “can I upgrade this thing” or “what’s our budget for a car/apartment/house”.
I took a week off work to burn some PTO I can’t carry over. I stayed busy the entire time, it was exhausting. But I was doing something ELSE.
It’s amazing what removing yourself from work for a week can do. Even though I was super busy the entire time, first day back at work felt calm.
Quit heroin. No longer a slave to my own body. 16 years down, more to come.
Also, fuck NA, I am my own higher power. I did that shit because I wanted to live a good life, not because I fear some JuJu man in the sky. All NA did was introduce me to more users. 12 steps is trash. At least for me it was
Switching from a car commute to ebike + train. I don’t get pissed off easily, but the traffic where I live can easily get you stuck for over an hour traveling 2-3 miles. And it was just inevitable that I’d finally get home in a shit mood. Biking and chilling in public transit is the exact opposite experience, especially if I manage to catch my usual train. I feel refreshed.
Quitting my previous job as an HVAC service technician. The pay was way better than I’m making now and it probably was a mistake, but I was miserable every single day…
I had no set schedule and my weekends weren’t my own because I was almost always on call. I live in an overpopulated area so every day was just sitting in hours and hours of traffic which just adds to the length of my day, there’s no 9-5, it was “if I need to be at X by 8 then I need to leave at Y” and the day wasn’t over until the work was done. Then add on the hours of traffic and worst case scenario pull into the driveway and get a call saying you need to go back out… Then there was the wonder of never knowing what’s coming up next. Start in Connecticut, ok next call is in Brooklyn NY… Ughh… Ok done in Brooklyn, ok surprise now go to NJ! Ughhh…
Now I work in a factory doing 8-4:45 and it’s so much better. I know what the day will bring and I know when I’m done. I’ll just never be able to afford a house lol
I can definitely relate to that. I thought I’d be happy at my old job because the pay was so good, but the hours were long and the work was exhausting. I convinced myself taking a lesser paying job would be a step down and make my life worse, but after a particularly bad month I took the plunge and left. I’m making less now, but the schedule is sane and the work hits the right balance between not too difficult but not too easy either.
What is the most relieving thing you’ve done for yourself?
That doesn’t involve either masturbating or going to the bathroom.
I walked 13 miles around manhattan while tripping on acid to show my former friend as much of NYC as possible in a single night. When I got back to the hotel, I laid flat on the bed and relieved all the pressure in my back. If a spine could have an orgasm, that would have been it.
hot bath.
getting over my weirdness and finally getting a massage. It’s comforting being naked in a safe place without sexual pressure. Also my neck was soo tight.
leaving TikTok. I miss being informed about nuance news and memes/trends, but I have more time to do other hobbies (which is just Being Bored atm)
I stopped reading the news, and I block any and all feeds that relate to politics.
I know, I know…staying informed and all that. Except I’m hard pressed to name a news outlet that informs. What I see is so driven by the engagement metrics, rage baiting, if-it-bleeds-it-leads mentality that any modicum of facts or truth gets lost. Journalists seem to have forsaken their obligation to hold leaders accountable and have become complicit in the problems they’ve created.
I’m old, I’m jaded, and my activist days are far behind me. I’m just done with that shit. My own mental and physical health are my top priority at my age and switching off the never ending River of Doom has improved both.
Same. Stopping following the news has been so great. The live 24hour news cycle is toxic and unnecessary. I’ve also come off all social media (other than Lemmy) and don’t watch/hear live TV or radio. I’m insulated from the immediacy of constant content updates. The content I do still consume, I’ve turned off all phone notifications; so I see it when I intend to open the app rather than having my attention stolen.
I connect to the world through podcasts, reading and specific subscribed YouTube channels. It’s refreshing to step away from the immediacy of having to know as soon as something happens. I find out on a podcast the next day or in a few days. I watch TLDR News on YouTube which does good explanations of current events a few days later (when information is available and the situation has developed). I’m going back to reading books and following a curated list of RSS subscriptions.
Tone down the immediacy of everything, avoid reactionary crap, avoid algorithm recommendations, be intentional in the content you’re putting in front of yourself. Ithas certainly worked out great for me and I would recommend it.
I really like More Perfect Union on YouTube. It’s definitely more journalism than news, so you get investigations into what’s going on.
TLDR News on YouTube
i watch this too and i can attest that it’s not much different than what you get on tv; it’s still beholden to the same forces that control abc, cbs, nbc, fox, cnn, guarding, skyone, etc.
democracynow is on youtube is the best you’re going to get in this country.
I’m in the same boat as you except that my activist days will NEVER get behind me, I’m ready and willing as soon as the first shot rings, and I will be on the right side of history.
But I too stopped following news. I have a window, one or two hours at night, where I turn off all electronics, and just sit and think, in silence. I can have pen and paper, I can have a beer or a spliff or I want, but no electronics.
And it has worked wonders for my anxiety and depression. Really, being constantly deflected from your own internal thought processes is just another cancer killing humanity.
I prefer to be minimally informed than wildly misinformed.
There is way too much and always has been, this tug of war of which angle is the most righteous than that angle. Until I see some honest and serious action towards a better tomorrow that’ll benefit
all(scratch that, how about the majority of those that just want live with as little conflict as possible), I can’t care too much about waving flags, playing labels, shouting buzzwords and brainwashing myself to think a certain way to appease some demographic.It is incredibly taxing and exhausting.
Went no contact with my Mom. Total weight off my shoulders. Sometimes a little part of still feels a tiny bit guilty. Internally the guilty voice goes “well people can change maybe give her another chance”? This is immediately met with deafening laughter from every other cell of my being saying “LMAO no she is such a piece of shit”.
If you’re considering going no contact with your parents or someone, maybe give it a try. You can always talk to them later. Cutting out toxic ppl from your life is a gift you can give yourself everyday.
i felt relief when i dropped all social media and tv news; including facebook.
then i’ve selectively adding in new platforms one-at-a-time ensuring that each one wasn’t controlled by the same forces that have gamified and/or manufactured narratives like facebook/reddit/bluesky/etc. does.
lemmy, rednote, and tiktok are the only things to pass muster so far, but i suspect i’m going to have to drop tiktok eventually considering its new ownership.
For me, it was giving up sports. About 30 years ago, I got laid off from my dream job, and it broke my heart. I was determined to never let a corporation do that to me again, so I decided to become self-employed.
I needed to carve out more time to spend on my new business, but I didn’t want to have to take time away from my wife and new baby. I realized how much time I spent on sports, and I wasn’t even a particularly big sports fan. I lived in a city with major league football, baseball, and basketball teams, so sports was a big year-round thing for my city, and even a casual follower like me ended up spending hours a week talking about sports, reading about sports, listening to sports on the radio, reading the sports scores every day, and of course, watching the games. Sports fanatics I knew spent far more time on it, morning to night.
And yet, none of it means anything. Win or lose, it doesn’t affect my life at all, except for a bit of a bad mood for a minute if my team lost. And yet I spent hours a week on something totally meaningless to my life.
Many people address that issue by making it “more interesting” by betting on sports, but I’ve always hated gambling, so I ended the sports immersion, and never looked back.
These days, sports is such a shiny commercial circus that it’s lost most of its interest for me anyway. It feels more like entertainment for billionaires, that they grudgingly let us watch on TV, just to shut us up. Gambling has made the sports environment even worse, and now it looks like the NBA is going to have their own gambling scandal to tarnish sports.
The only sports I watch any more is the Olympics. I can afford to make the sacrifice of time every 4 years.
Fitness.
I had been getting more frequent backpains and just a general feeling of being unfit. Walking uo stairs would leave me breathless. I couldn’t run for more than 200 meters without gasping for air.
Now I started going to the gym, 3 years ago and I feel fit now. Sometimes I still get pains, sometimes I even get pains because of cardio of lifting, but those arent as bad. I feel more alive and more comfortable because I’m fit now. I’m still fat and ugly, but also fit.
As much as I dislike what Facebook has become, the reason I left was because virtually nobody I knew was posting anymore. WhatsApp took over as the default amongst family and friends, so I basically just use that now.
Relieving things though… the only thing I can think of is helping get someone fired from my work. Socially they were fine, fun even, but in the office when it came to working with them, they were patronising, haughty and a bit sinister. Always a chore, never a pleasure to do work for them.
The day they left, my own days all felt 20% better than they had been before
