We could have just looked inside to see what was there
Something that is mildly irritating
I own probably 10+ pairs of jeans which are all the same brand and which are all within a waist and leg size of each other. There's some variation on the exact style. None of them really fit. They are all too big or too small, but each in their own unique way. One of them has a button-fly, which was an innocent mistake that I'm now stuck with.
Problems like this can lead a person to believe that they are either mis-shapen, or just horrible at buying pants.
More daydreams
I sometimes like to imagine that I might be inexplicably good at something I'm never going to do. This is not, like, "career switch" style daydreaming ... it's just a weird what-if. Like, what if I was somehow really really good at being that guy who stands on logs while they are moving down a river and uses that big spear thing to slowly push them along? I don't really have access to the world of river log stuff to find out.
We all might be missing out on my incredible skills at doing something else. Maybe one of us could be changing the world with their hidden talents and we're all worse off for their not knowing.
An observation I'm probably borrowing from someone
There was a study recently about how women apologize far more often than men, and various implications of that. I decided that seeing the headline was enough and I didn't need to read the article. My suspicion is that women say that they are sorry for the purposes of empathy, and men say sorry for the purpose of admitting fault (in general, not all men, not all women, there are edge cases, calm down folks, geez).
So, because being empathetic is generally positive, women will view apologizing as relatively "cheap" in emotional cost, and be willing to say that they are sorry frequently. Likewise, because admitting fault is a relatively "expensive" emotional transaction, men will be hesitant to apologize, and reserve their apologies for times where they are truly at fault for something.
This difference probably leads to a ton of talking past each other as men view it as absurd that they should take ownership of something they didn't actually do, and women view it as absurd that you wouldn't want to express your common understanding of a thing that just happened to someone.
A thing they should do in schools
I will be disappointed if "memorizing stuff" is still dominant in schools in the near future. Teaching principles and methods of thinking in preference to teaching a list of stuff you can look up on your phone easily seems pretty obvious.
Something I learned from a podcast
The "hedonic treadmill" is apparently the phrase to describe that thing where human happiness will "level off" and return to some neutral state, even in the face of positive or negative changes.
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