I’m not exMO, but exJW, so oddball fundie evangelical cousins. I look at it this way. If we can keep religion from impacting broader secular life through legislation, it’s a win.

The work of pushing these religious institutions to internally stop using their belief system to be bigots, will take place on the social front. Give the religions their little safe space so they stop using their numbers to pressure legislators to fuck up the laws for the whole country, and then take them to task in the court of public opinion for how their bullshit ideas hurt people regardless. It’s a battle these religious institutions are slowly loosing and they will either have to change or die off.

God damn, I just was telling one of my friends “I think I’m okay dying alone, if I get to live the life I want.” But really, there’s no fucking way I don’t touch enough lives between now and then that I end up entirely alone. I love having friends and being social, I’m not a hermit, I just enjoy my freedom.

There’s people I’d drop everything and go see if they needed me, and likewise. In fact, the more financial and time freedom I can create, the more space I create for that sort of thing.

The part of us that we fear having uncovered and exposed to others, so we shame and deny it out of existence? The part that truly wants this, but not that, but had been told what it “should” want instead and so we try to uphold that standard. For some people, that part of themselves is so deeply pushed down and ignored that they forgot it exists, and then they wonder why it is so hard to engage with life, and hate themselves for not being able to do what they “should be” doing, and it’s like, this is someone else’s life you are trying to live, that’s why.

Darwin used his rational mind to pursue a hunch. From what I’ve read of Einstein he was much the same. He had a sense of an idea, and then had to set about figuring out how explain it and ways figure out how to prove whether it was right or wrong.

I’ve heard Lawrence Krauss talking about the same thing being a driving force with many great theoretical physicists. Their mind get ms hung up on a possibility or an idea, and can’t quite figure out how to lay it out in a way that it can be tested, but eventually they or somebody else does figure it out. Sometimes they are proven right and sometimes wrong. Either way, our understanding of the world progresses.

The guy who had an “aha” moment and figured out the double helix structure of DNA, was tripping on Acid when it first occurred to him.

If you have an air compressor, with a few fittings, you could blow out the pex line when done. Between burying it and blowing it clear, should be minimal likelihood of freezing solid.

Reminds me of this this George Carlin bit.

Artificial scarcity and massive amounts of marketing. De Beers has stock piles of diamonds and trickles them out at a steady pace to keep the prices from dropping.

A little over 60 years ago, they paid celebrities to wear diamond rings. Specifically chose engagements and wedding rings as the thing to associate with diamonds, because people lose all common sense when something is attached to romance and love. The image of a woman breathless when the box is opened and the guy proposes, goes straight into the emotional brain because we pick up cues about how we should feel about things, based on other peoples reactions. They paid media outlets to talk about the ‘new diamond trend’.

Lastly, after convincing people they had value and are also an ‘investment’, they turned around and said ‘a diamond is forever’. Well then, who wants to buy a used engagement ring from someone who’s marriage didn’t work out? That’s no symbol of eternal love anymore. So they hampered the resale market as well.

Ouch. There’s definitely been a few experiences that left me worse off afterward. I sometimes think maybe the only way we will learn what not to put up with, is by putting up with it until it hurts so bad we no longer can. Still, I’d have preferred to learn the lesson some other way instead.

I appreciate the sentiment, but I think we have to look at it more like pushing out of comfort into “discomfort” but not “distress”. If we bite off more than we can chew and get too overwhelmed, we pull back into comfort, catch our breath and go back out into discomfort again. In time, as we adapt, the comfort zone gets bigger and bigger and the things that once were uncomfortable are now comfortable, and so we push into discomfort again.

I don’t think it’s as simple as pushing past fear straight into growth and opportunity, but more like gradually decreasing what makes you fearful and gradually finding growth and more opportunity through this process.