I gave up on meds because they made me feel unwell

I still remember when I saw the Mona Lisa in person. Everyone was facing the opposite direction, using selfie sticks to take a photo of themselves with the tiny painting. Just around the corner was an entire wall sized breathtaking artwork. I think that about sums up humanity.

Why not just put a trading card between your bike spokes like the good old days?

The actual spiritual karma (simplifying here) is more like, when you hurt people, you are also hurting yourself. These people "avoiding repercussions" as you said, they will never look inside themselves, or reflect on their lives. They're "blind" in a way. Poisoning themselves without realising.

It's not about good things happen to good people. In reality the opposite often happens. But these people, on a deep level, often know exactly all the horrible things they've done. If they ever stop and reflect, it would destroy them. They're far beyond saving.

Karma is about keeping your own inner world clean by doing good things, by your own definition of good. If you do something "good" but it has bad outcomes, your soul still notices. It's like training yourself to be a kind person. Where if you meditate and reflect, you feel calm and at peace. If you do something horrible, you can feel where that sits in your body.

But it's a really complicated topic and difficult to simplify.

I've had a lot of anger problems in my life. I've also been betrayed, lied to, treated like shit, bullied, etc. I'm a lot better now than I used to be but it's still a struggle.

Anger mostly comes from fear. If you trace back the anger to the "source" it usually goes something like:

"I'm angry because they're spreading lies about me. When that happens, my reputation is ruined. When that happens, bad things happen to me."

The worst part is that your instincts are correct, but your reaction won't always help. You can feel trapped and helpless and like there's no viable option left other than violence because nobody is listening to you.

You can't put out or squash this fire, it's a part of you. We're deeply wounded people, as you say in your post. You have to "transform" it into "cold anger" instead of "hot anger". In my above example, this could look like saying:

"No, you're wrong about me and I don't appreciate what you're saying."

Then either leaving, or putting up a wall and refusing to engage in a discussion until they're willing to meet you half way. Use the anger as fuel to burn away any guilt or shame or obligation. People like to play with fire, it's a fun game to them. Good luck with your anger management my friend.

Getting a virus from a wallpaper, just like the good old days lmao. What's next, custom mouse pointer viruses?

Yeah exactly. Village life is much different than modern life.

I grew up in a "village". Oh fuck did I feed the cows? Angry mooing in the background. The animals let you know your mistake. Loudly. The consistent routine also makes it easy to become instinct. You do the same thing every day for months, you don't need an app anymore. You walk past the shed, oh yeah I forgot to fix that roof, and you fix it right there. You see something, you fix it. It's all automatic in a way. Oh yeah the eggs, you go get the eggs and eat them.

Compare that to modern life. If you forget to send that email to your boss, nothing happens until 3 days later, you get in trouble, and that interrupts your current task, causing a failure cascade. You have to remember a million things every day that changes. But I bet you don't forget which bus or how to drive to work, right? And you always do the same things after work too without forgetting?

Edit: also of course the community. You have extended family and the rest of the village to help you and you help them. It all gives life structure. You work together on bigger jobs, and it just kind of happens. You don't need a planner, you just do it.

I'd say people with ADHD are actually really good at farm life. Just in modern life the cows changes buildings every week, the chickens lay eggs on a rotating schedule, you have to carefully schedule and co-ordinate roof fixes with a multidisciplinary team, and you have to constantly consult the calendar to remember what your actual job is today.

I like putting spaces around dashes — it looks nicer.

You're probably thinking of Guanfacine, it's used off-label for ADHD because it seems to help some people but the mechanism is unknown.

If you're in Australia like me, they recently passed a law that makes it so your GP can finally prescribe ADHD medication... So it might be worth asking again. Just a guess though because not many places are this brutal for diagnosing or treating our condition.

Also I had similar pill anxiety. I didn't like how the meds affected my heart or mood, it felt like I was slowly dying. In my case even though I stopped the meds, I've had a taste of what being "normal" is like, and can feel the shape of ADHD and how to adjust for it if that makes sense. I also found a job which is more suited to my condition and less reliant on memory and task management.

I'm in the same boat. I found that I just had to buy and play a bunch of games I didn't like. I only buy games on 70% discount or more for that reason.

For example, I love City management games, so I thought I'd like Against the Storm... But the roguelike elements completely ruined that game for me and I hate it. As a counter point I usually hate logic puzzle games, but I loved Artisan of Glimmith because it has a "check your work" hint system that doesn't feel too much like cheating. You really can't tell if you'll like a game before you try it unfortunately.

I finally am playing DOOM Eternal this week. Really good game actually. It's a bit exhausting though so I'm chipping away at it one mission at a time.

Yeah the whole thing feels a bit... Messy? Like it feels like when you get the tail end CC of a 40+ reply email chain at work and you need to figure out what's going on. In many ways it feels like email to me, actually. The text based stuff anyway. Searching is God awful, there's like 100–1000 messages per day you cannot possibly keep up with... But people are using it as a replacement for their entire community, which is just bad. I had to submit a bug report on a game's Discord once, it was even worse than doing the same through Twitter.

I like the voice chat functionality though. Wish that screen sharing / streaming worked on Linux.