work/life balance! I have visibility of more stressful responsibilities of colleagues a few rungs more senior and think I would very happily progress to a certain point but not beyond, and live my life without the trouble.

I came here to say this too! The other one that springs to mind is Threads. Nuclear conflict as opposed to ‘traditional’ warfare but very illustrative.

Yeah this is the thing, I really enjoy kids and I love my nieces/nephews to bits. However, the structural support seems so lacking for something that’s such a massive responsibility. Lacking for parents/families in general, but particularly mothers IMO. Unfortunately, I genuinely don’t think I’d be able to cope with everything all at once. e.g. I’m lucky to finally be able to afford housing for myself, let alone a child. And they wonder why young people aren’t having kids… 🤷‍♀️

I suppose it probably seems strange to an outsider but in a country where it’s the norm for every school, it didn’t feel like that to me at all. I see it more as an equaliser? In a way I also kind of miss not having to decide what to wear every day.

Honestly, my main concern about school uniforms is that I think they ought to be standardised and subsidised, because the expense can sometimes be a problem.

I thought so too! I just thought there could potentially be other places in the world that looked very similar that I don’t know about. I’m a Londoner 😆 and that many wheelie bins instantly makes me think it’s houses divided into flats… a landlord special round here.

(For some bizarre reason when I first looked at the picture, I did not see the green bit as green at all. It looked grey and the road looked red-purple, not unlike some bus lanes). Now that I see the green, bike lanes down here are indeed green, but they might also just be regular tarmac with the white painted bicycle painted every now and then… unless it’s a ‘cycle superhighway’ of course, in which case it’s blue 😵‍💫

not to be pedantic but is this the uk? 👀 on the right it looks like there’s the grey back of a road sign. plus the houses, wheelie bins, the cracked concrete paving and red-purple tarmac all scream british to me

I looooved K’nex when I was a young girl, would recommend

Whatever happened to ‘people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones’?

that sounds very sensible, but really tough for you that not even the vaccine helps. for me (and for now) it’s not worsened my symptoms so it’s given me quite a bit of peace of mind to get a booster every ~six months. I do wish my otherwise healthy family/friends would consider getting regular boosters though, in the hopes of lowering the chances of this ticking time bomb. each time someone tells me on the phone they’ve got a ‘chest infection’ or ‘nasty cold’ etc. it just fills me with dread that they’ll end up in our boat. 😵‍💫

(I was completely fine after my first infection, it was the second one that got me)

I still have long covid symptoms 2.5 years later 😅 I don’t even think it’s even got better, it’s just the same symptoms being managed. it freaks me out that, with each passing day, there are probably more and more people falling victim to the same chronic pain and exhaustion that I’ve experienced, and potentially with no end in sight

😭😭😭

Even though I have a free student subscription, I uninstalled all Microsoft Office last month because the constant ‘do you want to use copilot???’ was infuriating.

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I feel so similarly. It feels so insidious and normalised. I’ve been engaging more with anti-consumerist, minimalist, repair and mend etc. spaces online, and that’s helped me feel more hopeful. There are like-minded people out there! My latest obsession has been moving away from big tech because I’m fed up with having my privacy invaded just so I can be sold more useless crap.

I’m not American, and the only exposure to him that I had the misfortune of coming across was him saying that he’s anti-abortion, even for child victims of sexual abuse. It’s horrible enough to force a grown woman to carry a pregnancy against her will, but a little girl that’s been raped?? That’s indescribably heinous.