If you’re really set out on doing this I’d gladly make the call

Condolences. I have a rain sound app on my phone. With earphones and practice, I can sometimes focus on that sound instead of the tinnitus, and get some semblance of peace and sanity.

This is not advice, because if I had heard this posted as advice in my first year or two of tinitus I would have been pissed at the person giving it. Also, to a very large degree even your emotional reaction to this is not something you can control.

I was absolutely devastated and hated myself when I got tinitus. I and a co-worker teaching international folk dance were invited to a dance party / concert.

Amazing band, flown in from another continent, but I knew it would be too loud. I’ve always had minor hyperacusis and been very concerned about protecting my hearing. Before the party started I offered disposable earplugs to my co-worker, she declined. I had my own pair, in my pocket, the entire night. For some reason I never put them on.

At the end of the night I leave the venue and have terrible ringing in my ears. I freaked the fuck out, and kept everything as quiet as possible for the rest of the night and the next day to try to allow my ears to heal. Immense guilt and kicking myself. And fear.

The ringing never stopped. Saw an audiologist, who said it would definitely go away in a few weeks. It did not.

Tried supplements that did seem to reduce the volume of the ringing (Lipoflavinoid. No idea if it was all placebo or not).

Saw many more specialists and eventually met one (more than a year later) that told me (no idea if current studies back this up) that sometimes Tinitus is not physical damage at all, and that it’s damage in the way that our brains process the input from our ears.

He recommended that I “try not to think about it”. Said that sometimes even helps the ringing decrease. I told him that I was not the type of person who could ever not think about it. Nor did I want to be. Exactly the opposite, I had pledged to myself to never just not notice it. Saying that now doesn’t really make sense to me, but at the time it absolutely did. It was an integral part of my self-image.

So, I religiously took Lipoflavinoid every day for more than a year. Normally with my ADHD I would struggle with that, but every time I forgot it I would notice the ringing getting louder and remember.

Then, maybe two or three years in I would sometimes forget to take Lipoflavinoid and… Not notice. I still hadn’t heard a second of silence for 3 years, but I didn’t notice the volume increase.

Eventually I was forgetting it more often than not and didn’t want to keep the hassle and pay for it so I just stopped.

Work got difficult and I would have other things to think about than the ringing, and every one in a while there were days where at the end of the day I would realize I hadn’t noticed the ringing at all. (If I had that realization in a quiet room, I’d immediately start noticing it again)

I gave up trying to fix it. I managed to convince myself that accepting it did not go against the fiber of my self concept, and my experience got better.

It’s been more than 10 years since that concert and I can say that I haven’t been bothered by the ringing in years, and I’m in a relatively quiet room typing this out now and don’t hear it.

Again, not advice. I can’t tell you to “just ignore it”, and if you’re like me you can’t make yourself do that even if you wanted.

If you’re early in your experience with tinitus, maybe it will be helpful to hear that at least for one person, it got better. And that by “it” I mostly mean my experience of life with tinitus, moreso than the ringing itself “going away”.

If anyone has read this far, fun fact that kind of goes against the general gist of this narrative:

Once I had tinitus I realized that I could be a surprisingly accurate and precise human drcibal meter by comparing perceived volume of my ringing to perceived volume of the environment.

Could get within about 3db in the range from 40 to 75 without earplugs, at which point I would put in earplugs and know how much to adjust to get the same precision up to 100db.

I generally refuse on moral grounds to participate in activities above 95db without all participants strictly being required to use ear protection.

Anything above 80, I set up a small table with free earplugs, even if I’m not the organizer…

Also, I haven’t really tried to measure db this way in a few years. Don’t know if I still can or not.

It’s brutal. It also just kind of becomes normal, eventually. Do what you can to protect your hearing going forward to prevent it from getting worse. Good luck.

if it did work and made my family and friends proud then I could stop struggling.

Why can’t they be proud that you are happy? Why do you need them to be proud of you? It sounds like they are projecting their desires/dreams on to you. You could be honest with them and tell them you aren’t happy trying to make them proud the way they want. You want them to be proud of you for being you. Or you could ghost your family and friends who sound like they want you to be someone you don’t want to be.

Oof.

I feel this all to well.

I highly recommend reading https://www.strugglecare.com/book .

It’s not self-help. It’s not going to “fix” you.

But reading it was some of the best therapy I’ve ever received. If you’re at all like me, maybe it will help you too. I am happier, as are the people I love and who love me, in large part because of K.C. Davis’ philosophy. (The people I love and who love me are also very empathetic and understanding, which I know is definitely not true for most people unfortunately).

It’s less than $20.

It’s short.

Buy it. If you can’t afford it, I might even be willing to buy it for you / venmo you $20 to get it.

Also available in your library / Libby.

Also available as an audiobook.

This is kinda similar to the plot of the show “Severance.”

This is some seriously dangerous information to be feeding me bro.

Now… to find magnets able to contain the antimatter…

I understood the joy.

Yeah…I get that. Solidarity.

Solution: Become the better equipment.

You’re welcome for the extreme motivation that you just received. This was thanks to the free trial of my “extreme motivation course”. To access “full extreme motivation very hardcore”, buy my course for just $999.99.

You can’t borrow the money?

Highly unlikely for an individual isn’t the same as highly unlikely across a population. 0.1% is only one chance in 1000 - rolling the same number 3 times in a row on a 20 sided die has a probability of 1 in 8000, but you’ll find loads of stories of it happening because there’s a lot more than 8 thousand people who play D&D.

Your chooks are rolling along the edge of probability, but there’s more than 1000 chickens in the world so the probability someone will hit that jackpot is close to 100%.

Same lmaoooo

This is actually something that people are intended to understand by design.

There are a lot of analogies but they all fail in some way. I think PBS Spacetime does the best in general, with good graphics to back up the words.

My layman’s explanation is probably all stuff you’ve heard before. Massive objects “warp” spacetime and things that get stuck in those “wells” eventually fall to the bottom due to drag (from a variety of sources).

You’ve also probably seen the rubber sheet with a bowling ball in the middle used to represent that warping. To visualize that in 3D, I like to imagine a 3D grid of nodes and edges (like a jungle gym of joints and bars) where the whole thing is flexed inward towards a center point. More warped near the center, less warped further out. That kind of conveys the acceleration from gravity felt by things around that center mass.

I’ve heard some people say the gravitational fields push instead of pull. I still don’t get it either.

Hehe guess what… Nobody exactly knows how gravity works.

So let’s start with Newton. According to his equations, gravity is a force. Why? Well, according to the first law of motion, an object stays in motion in its original direction till a force is applied on it. Newton said, “Gravity is clearly actively changing the direction of an object. Hence, gravity is a force”. As Newton establishes that gravity is a force, we say that it “pulls” objects. However, he couldn’t explain the mechanism behind this pulling force.

Then came Einstein. According to general relativity, gravity is not a force. How’s that possible? Doesn’t gravity change the motion of a given object? Nope! Wait, whaaaaa?! Okay, so according to special relativity, all things in the universe are on a “spacetime”. What’s a spacetime? Well, it’s a four dimensional fabric like thingey that all objects are present on. The four dimensions are time and the three spatial dimensions that we experience. Mathematically, there is no difference between time and the spatial dimensions. However, all objects move only in one direction through spacetime at c, ie., lightspeed through spacetime. If an object moves at c through space, it moves at 0 m/s through time and vice versa. This is how you get the time dilation magic. Cool. Now what if we bent this said spacetime at certain points? The object traveling on this spacetime would be traveling in a straight line always. Hence, no force. Hence, no pulling. Hence, no pulling mechanism.

Cool! So we solved gravity, right? Sike! GR doesn’t work at the quantum level… Aaaaand most of the best models that we have for quantum gravity use a particle called the “graviton”, which has a field that results in an attractive force. How does this force work? The answer is “go fk urself”.

Hence, in conclusion, noone knows whether gravity even “pulls” in the first place, let alone HOW it pulls. Aaaaand we’ve been trying to answer this question for almost 100 years… Cool…

That’s a pretty massive problem.

It takes time and effort though, and usually that time and effort is spent elsewhere, especially if you’re an adult with two jobs and two kids. When you don’t have to think to better your mastery of your surroundings, making good hardware/software choices becomes increasingly disparate

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Eh, time and effort is limited depending on what the matter at hand is. Sometimes, you are required to just impulse buy or not live at all.

… And yet, I know exactly what you mean. There’s a class of people who just live with a phone for nearly everything they do 14 hours of their daily life, day in day out, 12 months a year. No rest whatsoever. And yet, the moment they find any resistance anywhere in their life, not even on something related to the phone, they just. dont. google. They literally refuse to help themselves and will just do what they know and refuse to do or even concern themselves with better.

I’ve seen a 20-year-old who, when asked to give in their homework on Moodle, like normal people do, instead… wrote everything on a Mac’s Notes app, took a photo and then pestered people for the teacher’s phone number so they could send the shitty photo of their homework on a very popular chat application. When told that this was not going to count, they just shrugged and stopped caring. Again, they used technology daily. That was objectively the stupidest and laziest “functional” person I’ve ever met, a true sheep, and I fear ever becoming like them during onset of dementia.

I’m the kinda guy who’s aware of how cool Linux and system mastery can be, but also the kinda guy who’s too lazy to care enough about maintaining a dual boot Linux/Windows system so every other year I’ll install a new Linux distro I haven’t used before only to do nothing with it and delete that partition of my hard drive within a month.

Last week I installed Ubuntu!

I am in 100% agreement with you. I’m kind of in the same mindset in figuring out my homelab setup. Still learning docker and how volumes work 😢 haha

I’m in academia but I like to tinker with tech. So when my students or co-workers are surprised that I know so much about tech and how to navigate around most computer systems and troubleshoot (Mac/Windows/Linux) they are perplexed. They ask why I didn’t major in tech. I tell them that I majored in what I loved (history) and play with tech as a hobby to relax.

It’s why I selfhost my own Lemmy server. Gives me something to do with my hobby, keeps me focused on what’s new in tech, makes me learn to keep up with docker, Linux, editing CRON tabs etc.

Are you gonna divorce for your friend?