Ever notice how some stuff about life is just, well, tough to swallow? We’re talking about those real-talk moments that everyone kinda knows but pretends they don’t. Today, folks are spilling the beans on these “harsh realities” we try to avoid. Get ready for some straight talk about the stuff we all know but maybe don’t wanna admit. From personal stories to things we all see but kinda ignore, these tales spill the tea on the real-deal struggles we face. It’s like a reality check that’s both uncomfortable and strangely freeing. Brace yourself for some truth bombs, because we’re about to dive into those unfiltered moments that make us go, “Yep, that’s life.”
I believe that some people are simply not meant to be great, or even successful. not that those who aren’t are ‘wasting their potential’ but they simply don’t have what it takes: either the intelligence, the charisma, or the willpower. some people are simply meant to be working the checkout line, and that’s okay.
that’s pretty controversial in a society that believes everyone can do anything they set their mind to.
You can get good at something just by doing it over and over for a year or two without much thinking. But when you want to get really good, you need to start thinking.
Too often people want to get really good at something from ground zero and they can’t weather through the mundane things that you just naturally overcome with a year’s worth of experience.
Every selfish act you do is affecting another person (or another living thing) in a negative way. You cut in line, you leave a shopping cart in the parking space, and your litter makes another person’s life just that much harder.
At the firehouse, dudes are absolutely brutally honest. Some of them have absolutely zero feelings of discomfort when confronting a dude that needs to change his sh*t up, from being a sh*tty firefighter to needing to close your mouth when you’re chewing food. When it happens and I’m present to see it go down, it makes me want to melt into the chair or just get up and run out of the building. But it’s usually so goddam effective. Dude straighten out the issue most of the time.
People need to hear about their sh*ttiness, in specifics. I’m glad there are guys out there that aren’t afraid to do it.
Just because I know you or you’re from the same town as me doesn’t mean I have to support you, your business, or your sh*tty music. Put in some work and make people care about what you’re doing.
No, your kids running around screaming at the tops of their lungs is not cute, it is very annoying. Even more annoying is that you are not teaching them manners or how to be mindful and considerate of those around them!
When it comes to poor mental health or addiction, the person can only get better if THEY want to get better. you can have all of the love in the world for them but if that person doesn’t actually genuinely want to Be better and Be a better person, it isn’t going to happen.
Well… I have the guts, and I do it, but it’s the most hated part of my career.
Relevant information: I’m a college professor and I teach organic chemistry.
Here’s the thing: Not EVERYONE can be a doctor, pharmacist, veterinarian, or dentist. Not everyone has the aptitude. You’ll find out one way or another when taking organic chemistry. I have to tell students on a regular “Listen, you’re in this class for the 3rd time, you’re failing it AGAIN, and no medical school will look at you because of it. You need a new plan.”
Some take it well. Some were wishing someone had the conversation with them a year ago. Some get angry. Either way, it sucks. It seems there are a few colleagues of mine who are willing to make that statement.
No matter how low you’re feeling, no matter what you’re going through, no matter what toxic people you’re dealing with, there are always people out there who will love, appreciate, and welcome you, unconditionally.
It’s scary when you’ve been hurt, but they aren’t unicorns. Some people are loving and want to love and appreciate you, and they aren’t going to take it away when you don’t behave exactly as they want you to.
Being fat can’t be genetic. Low metabolism and diabetes can be genetic, but having a lack of motivation to go to the gym, or stop eating like sh*t, isn’t genetic, and it’s something every person can make a change with. This is why I hate the ‘love your body’ movement, and the ‘heavy is beautiful’ or whatever they call it. Do I think that we should hate fat people? No… I don’t. Do I think that fat people should be harped on and ridiculed? No… I don’t. Do I think we need to stop enabling fat people, yes, yes I do. We need to stop putting overweight people on the covers of magazines, AND ANOREXIC PEOPLE TOO, because I know there’s just someone out there that thinks I’m fat phobic. The main idea behind this is promoting an unhealthy lifestyle, and making it seem like ‘well if she is on the cover of a magazine and is overweight, it’s okay for me to be overweight”. If you’re okay with being obese, and you’re content with possibly shortening your life by more than 50%, I won’t be the one to stop you, you do you, but stop making other people think that this is okay, you can be fat, but don’t make other people think that this unhealthy lifestyle is okay. The people don’t understand the point of this post, and that is to expose a harsh reality that some people just don’t want to accept.
Video Games are fun, but they can take over your life if you’re not careful. A couple of hours can be a good escape after a long day, but 6 to 10-hour marathons on a regular basis can be detrimental to your health and happiness in the long term. I used to look at my logged hours of 1500 per year as a badge of honor. Now I wish I had focused more on my health, school, work, and most importantly my personal, IRL relationships.
My ex-roomie clearly had a binge eating disorder and I couldn’t keep any food in the apartment. I held it in for a long time and when I finally confronted her about how she’d been eating all my food on top of hers and I thought she needed help, she became extremely angry and defensive which tells me she knew I was onto her. She was used to getting whatever she wanted and was surprised that I called her out. She needs to learn boundaries. I feel sorry for the next person who has to deal with her.
Smokers need to grow up and stop throwing their cigarettes on the ground… Cigarette butts are among the most common trash found in nature and waterbodies, and they leach all sorts of toxic chemicals into the surrounding environment. They are also largely made of plastic, and so aren’t biodegradable.
We shouldn’t be sending everyone to college. Not everyone is cut out for it, not everyone is smart enough, and not everyone will get much out of it. We still need people to fix leaky pipes and roofs, mow the lawn, and drive your kids to school on the bus. If you want to go to a trade school to be an auto mechanic, and that’s your thing, more power to you. Do what you love and do it well. If you want to get a job out of high school instead of continuing your education, you should be able to do that, without scorn or unsolicited “advice” encouraging you to go study somewhere you don’t want to go, taking on debt you may not be able to repay. The push to send everyone to college no matter what is ridiculous. I believe everyone should have an equal opportunity to go to college, but they definitely shouldn’t be failures if they can’t or don’t want to.
“I don’t care if you hold a grudge against your father/mother for getting remarried after being a widow(er) after 50~60 years. Get over it–it’s not your life to live. You loved your mother/father–nobody is trying to replace them, and no one can, nor would anyone want to.”
Most of my mother’s family was P.O.’d when my grandpa got a 60-year-old g.f. a few months after my grandma died. He was severely depressed, and honestly, it was SO bad, that I thought he was gonna die of depression/anxiety in just a few months. But… that was 2016, and he is still well and alive. Last of his family too, about 83.
My grandmother knew about a year in advance that she was gonna die. I think, funnily enough, her last words when all their seven kids were crying over her in the hospital were, in anger, “Oh, stop cryin’! I never knew my mama and I turned out just fine–yeah, I wish I had known her sometimes, but I know it was for the best I didn’t (she had walked out when my grandmother was only a few months old.) So if I made it, I know y’all will too!”
Respect your body, sometimes you break something and it’s never the same. Ever.
I broke my ankle and thought it was a sprain, so I just threw an ace bandage on it and left it alone. I found out 2 years later that it was actually a broken bone, and it never healed back together. Now I’ve got a dead ankle socket. I used to go on daily runs, and do martial arts. Now I can’t even turn my foot. I went from 190 lbs of lean muscle to 145 lbs of squish and bones.
Human resources is not your friend nor do they exist to help the employee. If you’re ever in an HR office, tell them nothing other than name, rank, and serial number.
I can never go back to work for a certain high-paying Fortune 500 company due to saying something I shouldn’t have.
Tell your parents you love them while you can. Sort out your issues. If you don’t and they die, you’ll carry that guilt, anger, and all those unresolved fights with you. Every day.
This was something I, personally, learned the hard way. I realize everyone’s situation is different so to everyone who is getting their panties in a knot- please calm down!
Don’t get a dog with a significant other. Unless you decide from the start who gets to keep it when things go south, it really makes for a messy and even sadder breakup. I got a dog with my ex and I raised it (I’m a dog trainer). That dog came to work with me every day and slept at the foot of my bed every night. He took her during the breakup because “he paid for her” and now oscillates between telling me I can maybe drive two hours to see her while he’s away on business trips and ignoring my pleas completely. I get he’s hurt but that dog was like my child for two years and I haven’t seen her in months. I’ve never felt the kind of seething frustration that I feel when I think about him. In hindsight, I’m glad I got out when I did. I’m in an amazing new town and I’m seeing a guy I’m really crazy about and I have a bunch of amazing new friends but dammit I miss my dog.
My husband just learned that you don’t mess around when your oil light comes on your dashboard. The light would intermittently come on and go off so he thought it was just a loose sensor or something.
The last time he got an oil change, the technician told him he was about a quart low on oil. He didn’t put two and two together to realize his engine was burning the oil away until we were coming back from a wedding at 1 am and the engine seized up.
$4000 lesson. Don’t play with your oil warning light.
But when you are about to finish a job ask yourself, “Is this really the best I could do?” If (when) the answer is “no” then go back and re-do it until it’s better.
Then you will have done more than 98% of humanity and people will think you’re freakin’ amazing.
When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the blue flame of the heater’s pilot light at my great aunt’s house. I knew regular was hot, but I wondered if that one was the same, so one day I decided to stick a couple of fingers through a small break in the pane and found out that it was in fact really, really hot.
What didn’t I learn the hard way? When I turned 18 and made it to a great College, my parents were so stoked and happy that they agreed to pay my way. Room, board, car(s), the whole shebang. Within two semesters I had flunked out while deciding college “wasn’t for me”. My folks promptly told me a week after I slithered home that I needed to either pay rent in their house or GTFO. I thought they were kidding, and to my surprise, they were not.
I ended up staying at a friend’s house for a couple of days – possibly a week. After that, I searched for an apartment. I discovered I had no viable means of attaining one however, as I had a) no income, b) no security deposit, c) no job. I had about $6000 left in the bank account which was the remnants of the $56,000 I had originally from investments my dad had made on my behalf, money from birthdays and such, and my Bar Mitzvah. Yeah, very sad.
I ended up moving just outside NYC and renting a room in a really sh*tty place. I tried looking for work. I called my cousin who was in construction, and he hesitantly allowed me to come to work for him as a laborer (against his better judgment). I worked 18-hour days hauling concrete, and lumber, digging holes, carrying sheetrock, and generally getting my butt kicked around. About a month into it I stepped on a nail. My foot was in tremendous pain, and I told the guy who picked me up that day that I was not coming to work. That ended that.
I spent the next two months walking around most of Queens, NY. I scavenged for aluminum cans and made my rent this way. I would typically eat a slice of pizza to get me through the day. If I did really well on collecting, I might get McDonalds.
I was destitute and depressed, and I hated my family. I was living literally hand to mouth, and I had nothing. I searched through ads and ads every day looking for work, which I would find occasionally and make a few bucks. I eventually got a “full-time” job with a company selling stuff door-to-door. Cash and carry. I was horrible at the job, but the manager was awesome and helped me out. I ended up working inside the office and started doing better. I upgraded my situation to another room, and six months later got myself an apartment.
Six months or so after this, I applied to the CUNY college system and started taking two classes in the evenings. I failed these classes.
I worked at this same company for the next two years. Towards the end, I reapplied to the same school, and they allowed me to retake the classes. I started really applying myself but discovered that this traditional learning was a struggle. I had always liked technology, and I spent some time working on the computers at this job. I applied for a very general computer job (editing Realplayer videos and coordinating some sort of financial interviews), and I got the job (because it was shady probably). In the meantime, I took some classes at a technical institute (thanks to my new girlfriend who encouraged this). I finished the classes, took some of the tests, and looked for a better job.
I moved in with my GF at the time, and my new job paid well. I also performed really well in the (engineer M$) position, learning a ton and earning a decent salary (I think it was like $50-$60k\yr). We ended up moving into Manhattan and grinding out our jobs like rats. I went back to college for attempt #4, and I maintained a decent GPA. I worked like I did when I had to collect cans, and I was overjoyed to have a bathroom and kitchen. We even bought a car.
I am well, well past all of this today. The lengthy commentary was to give some insight into what I went through as a young adult. I learned a ton about life, perseverance, and success. I grew up in an upper-middle-class family with a 4-car garage, two parents who had 3 cars, a cleaning lady, and lots of disposable income. Yes, this is a sucky story. Yes, I would probably not subject my own kids to this (albeit I don’t live like my folks did). This really did teach me about life, and that life is what you make it.
That being teased doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being bullied, that being shy can be perceived as being rude, and that being a sore loser is just plain ugly.
This weekend I went to my girlfriend’s lake house in Tennessee. Their family is huge, with 50-plus family members. They have a tradition of picking on new boyfriends and girlfriends, and I ended up taking it personally. In retrospect, it was a sign of affection.
Because I thought they all hated me, I decided to stay to myself. I got out of the way, didn’t participate in activities, and stayed inside for extended periods of time. I thought this was a good idea because it meant I would avoid being harassed, but this greatly insulted the family.
Finally, this weekend was my first time water skiing, and I got frustrated with myself. Even though I kept it inside, it still upset the family that I was quiet and pouty.
The weekend was a disaster. My girlfriend (smartly) broke up with me, and now I’m left with very few friends. It’s hard to think about how many times doing these things has impacted both my personal and romantic relationships, but at least it’s a start. I’m speaking with a therapist this evening to start figuring out why I react in these ways.
I thought that if I said no, it would make me selfish. It took a mouthful from a “boyfriend” to understand that I needed to boot myself up and learn how to say No. Showing up to meet the parents, playing starfish with a poker face on instead. Not cool.
That anger is a normal emotion.
In fact, there are healthy ways of expressing them. Not feeling any anger is not normal. Constantly bottling your anger within is not okay and will lead to further problems down the road. I literally made myself sick – very sick- over this.
Movement is a gift. When you lose that movement, you finally appreciate it. As in when you herniated a disc in your back and can’t even roll yourself over to get to the bathroom, so you cry because you are like a turtle on its shell.
Your body is a machine. If you stop using it and you only feed it crap, it will cease working effectively. Unfortunately, we only get one, so we should take care of it. It will not be better overnight–fixing it means a lifetime commitment to yourself, but it’s so worth it.
Never date because you are lonely. Being single isn’t that bad. It’s better to wait for someone who actually appreciates you and will be with you through the hardest of times than to just jump into a relationship with someone who will eventually make you miserable. And NEVER have a joint bank account. I’ve seen too many soldiers overseas come home to clear out accounts and have absolutely nothing.
For the vast majority of people, it’s not a question of “Can my job be automated/outsourced?”, it’s “Will it happen in my lifetime?”
Most people seem to believe robots and automation are only a threat to the lowest retail and manufacturing jobs, but that’s being proven increasingly wrong every day.
You aren’t a hero because you were in the military.
You aren’t a hero simply by being a police officer.
Hero hates that title. They do what they do because they are truly selfless, because they put others first because they look death, dismemberment, fear, and things you and I would run from, right in the face and charge forward with no thought of themselves.
You see it’s a selfless attitude that makes a hero. Not some selfish need to be recognized and hear cheers and accolades.
Every soldier is not a hero. The one who threw himself on a grenade and sacrificed his life for the lives of the men in his company, he’s a hero.
Not every police officer is a hero. The officer who takes a stand against corruption within the department and exposes those who disgrace the uniform, he’s a hero.
We need to stop this pervasive thought that every soldier and cop is a hero. They aren’t. By and large, they’re either regular people like you and me or a gigantic moron who exploits the public willingness to kiss every soldier or cop’s butt and call them heroes.
Nobody will probably read this but anyway. Conscience and stuff.
Climate change is real. The bad stuff is not rising sea levels. Bad stuff is unreliable weather. Most of our crops still grow outside and are completely dependent on weather. Famine yo!
People wish that engineers would come up with something that saves us from climate change.
They did already, it’s called nuclear power. And if we invest heavily in nuclear power in the near future, it will save millions of lives.
We won’t because of Chernobyl. Its immediate death toll is in the hundreds because of radiation. Its eventual death toll will be in the hundreds of millions because of the freak-out and resulting famine.
I think the biggest, harshest truth that most people walk around and completely ignore due to our own human nature, sympathy, and idealism, is overpopulation.
Depending on which sociology expert you talk to, the world is overcrowded but by differing amounts. Some believe we should be populating the earth to correspond with the amount of people that could be supported by the earth naturally (a very small number). Some will accept some compromises in order to increase that number (modern farming, etc.), while others believe the limit is only seen at the limit of our technological development.
The pure, long, hard, and ugly truth of it is that technology is only advancing so fast, third world countries are constantly pumping babies into the resource market, and even in the first world people want a legacy. To top this all off we have this need to preserve all life as we know it. Normally in a situation where scarcity was related to our abilities, this sympathy trait would be a perfect trait to possess.
Now we live in a world where we will spend millions of dollars to keep a suicidal hobo locked up in a free hospital bed with medication and treat his self-inflicted injuries, and deny intelligent, sound-of-mind, elderly people who just want to die that very right.
Meanwhile, we survive off of a mostly service/research-based industry, and an economy that is truly based on inheritance, and we essentially feed off of the poverty of other countries. The majority of our raw and secondary resources are imported.
It’s a complex topic that there is no one answer to, but the harsh reality is that the world is already overpopulated. The worst part is there’s no real worldwide initiative to solve this problem permanently, by which I mean the expansion of the human race to new planets or environments, or just in space in general. No, we are more focused on refining medical treatments for incurable diseases so that we can worsen the overpopulation problem.
Climbing Mount Everest isn’t a real accomplishment anymore, Sherpas do most of the work. Climbing it without sherpas using no oxygen is an accomplishment and an astounding one. You have these rich people who shouldn’t step foot on the mountain just getting piggybacked and the worst part is they put their lives in danger because they aren’t physically ready for it, or they have little to no climbing experience. Ugh
Always tipping in restaurants/bars/other service stations – Most people do not realize this but tipping is not something which you do all around the world. I have lived in Asian countries most of my life and there is no such thing as a ‘tipping culture’ here. This whole ‘one must tip for every service rendered’ is a very Western, dare I say American phenomenon.
I don’t get it. I am a paying customer, I pay for everything I eat/drink (and often quite a lot too!) and now I am also supposed to pay for the salary of the employees because the owner is too cheap to give them a decent wage. Also, why would I ever tip mediocre or even bad service? And why should I feel guilty if I don’t?! Now – If you provide good service you may receive a tip; even quite a large one if the service is exceptional. But don’t take my tip for granted and if you are not getting paid enough, do something about it other than expecting me to make up the difference.
I think genetically modified foods (GMOs) are the future and people need to get over it. We have 7 billion people on this planet, with only the old industrial countries starting to SLOW pop. growth, not even mention the growing 3rd world countries are now starting to boom, and people are expecting to eat organic food.
I think extreme body modifications/plastic surgery that radically alters your appearance (like the dude who tried to become Justin Bieber) should require psychological screening before proceeding. I don’t think the line between self-expression and self-injury is well-defined enough.
I think tongue-splitting and scarification should be outlawed.
The whole “gamer girls” trend is really annoying. As an indie developer, I understand that developers in the industry have been trying to break the barrier between sexualized games and these clans/trends to keep them intact. Why does it matter what gender you are when you play games? Play games and have fun. That’s why we play games in the first place.
As an American from the North East, I feel we’ve “overreacted” to 9/11. People drive around with bumper stickers that say “Never Forget” on them but are clueless to the idea that more children die of starvation every day than were killed in the WTC, not to mention the 100,000+ civilians killed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a tragedy anytime any one person dies a death that could have easily been prevented, let alone 3,000 of them such as on 9/11. What I have a problem with is how Americans seem to use this as an excuse to continually look at the world in such a narrow way and fail to see how “lucky” we are that this is considered such a tragedy. People around the world face death every day and they could use our help.
For the cost of those wars (financial, let alone the human cost), we could have fed and clothed the poor of the world.
I’m realizing this might only be controversial in my area, but it certainly didn’t make me popular in college or make family gatherings easy…
You do not have a ‘voice’ in the US presidential election. Well technically you do, it just doesn’t matter. The cold hard truth is that your single vote in the grand scheme of the election does absolutely nothing. If you live in a safe state such as California, you would be better off just staying home. Why? Because the chance that you’re vote decides the election is literally 0%. This is coming from 80000hours.org btw, a website that promotes voting. Even if you live in a swaying state like Florida, your odds are still usually only 1 in 10 million. (The website was very vague with statistics like these)
Want to know something even worse.
Because democracy relies on a large number of votes the government needs people to believe that they have a voice in the election. Go ahead and look up “How significant is 1 US vote”. The only thing that pops up are articles on why voting is important and why ‘you have an impact on the election’. It’s actually kinda scary to see them redirect people away from the knowledge they don’t want you to have.
To all the people who disagree with me: Yes, technically not voting hurts democracy and if everyone thought like this then America wouldn’t work blah blah blah blah blah. You guys can keep getting stuck up on every little thing that you ‘supposed’ to do. I believe that absurdly minuscule details such as these are negligible. Basically, I don’t pick up pennies.
Plus I don’t have to waste mental energy on politics.
I don’t think anybody should get special rights or allowances simply because they were conquered hundreds of years ago. They were weak and couldn’t protect themselves. Tribals in North and South America, Africa, and elsewhere had just as much time to advance their civilizations as people in Europe did. Instead, they divided themselves into hundreds of different small tribes with different languages, cultures, religions, and societies in each of them. They were divided and could not stand up against European nations. Sure they should all have equal rights and freedoms and all that, but I don’t think they deserve extra rights and privileges just because their great-great-great-great-grandparents got their a**es kicked. I think everybody should have completely equal rights with no extras.
Why can no more than two people get married to each other? What’s wrong with three or four or even more than that? If they love each other, I see no harm in it. I don’t know if this is overtly controversial, but I bet many people would react to it negatively when confronted with these kinds of relationships in real life. If you want to affirm your love for two people at the same time, why not? Nobody seems to have this debate, but it makes sense to me that it follows out of the same-sex marriage debate we have been having in many countries for the past say, fifteen years.
You will not be happy once you get that job/house/car/partner/whatever. That kind of pursuit of happiness is a fallacy. There will always be new things to be unhappy about. That isn’t to say that you shouldn’t try, no, we should all strive to be better. Just don’t expect it to be a panacea for your issues.
I think about it this way: to live is to struggle but there are moments in life that you are truly happy, sort of like footholds in a swamp. The point is to reduce the amount of time between coming upon those footholds and trying to revel in them as much as possible. It helps you focus and truly enjoy even the little things in life.
Don’t focus on things to bring you happiness, instead accept the fact that this is how things are going to be instead, try to find happiness in moments and enjoy them before the next ugly thing comes along.
Billionaires as a group have never, in the whole history of their existence, acted in anything other than their own self-interest (and against the interests of the working people who make their money), unless they were violently compelled to do so. They “donate for philanthropy” to foundations in their name that exist for PR, employ their friends and family on extremely high salaries, and spend very little of the money they solicit or launder on the ostensible subject of the charity. They rarely pay taxes, and when they do it’s only because they’re scared of getting arrested. If you go up to a random normal working person and ask them genuinely for help with something important, most of them will say yes. They know next time it could be them. If by some incredible fluke, you end up in the same physical space as a billionaire and you’re a normal person wearing normal person clothes, just try asking them for help with something important. Watch their eyes glaze over, watch them turn their back and laugh at something on their phone while their security drags you away.
They don’t care about you and they never have. The only time they’ll ever do anything that’s actually in your interest is if they’re terrified of you (or more accurately, of people like you), and if allowed to they’ll absolutely take it back.
