Markimus

Regularly and intentionally spend time considering the opposite.

This helps you to check your paradigms.

It also helps if you search for content which contradict your current thinking rather than support it, just to get that perspective.

For example, if you're super organised, a book like A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits Of Disorder may help you to see things in a different light.

Oh ok, sure, I didn't think of it that way 🤷🏻‍♂️

I'm delighted when people text back and we have a conversation, though I don't find it frustrating when that doesn't happen.

This is mainly because I keep track of important conversations in some external system, messages I'm waiting for, etc.

You never want to be sitting there waiting for a response, the only reason that's annoying for you is because you have that tug on your mind and you're not able to do other things until that tug has resolved itself. Keeping track of it externally means that you're not having to keep track of it internally. That's what you're really frustrated at, that pull at your attention that means you're not able to focus on other things.

Consider another market: businesses looking to identify current topics of interests / discussions that are relevant to what they are doing.

The AI could summarise the posts and offer suggestions on what to post, when to post, where to post, etc., with references to the posts / threads that they're basing this information on.

This is all bundled as an online marketing tool, targeted towards small businesses focused on growth.

To add to this, “Where is the missing sheep?” is an example of a leading question. The question is based on the assumption that there is a missing sheep, when in fact there isn’t, leaving you flustered as you try and reconcile that.

This assumption is emphasised by framing the erroneous 29 you’ve created (where you’ve added this random extra 2 sheep) against the original 30.

If you paired up the actual number (27) against 30 instead, you would have the total number of sheep given back to the shepherders (3).

All sheep are accounted for here, as long as you do your maths correctly.

Everything is fine, up until this bit:

Twenty-seven plus two is twenty-nine.

The total amount given to the troll and sons were 27 sheep (25 and the sons kept 2).

Where it gets confused is saying "The trolls kept 2" as if this were 2 more sheep on top of the 27 sheep. This leads to you erroneously getting to 29 sheep somehow. The 2 sheep are part of the 27, you can't do this.

The 3 other sheep out of the original 30 are now with the shepherders after the sons came and returned them.

Yep, it says things though has no understanding of what it is saying: much like strolling through a pet shop, passing the parrot enclosure, and hearing and recoiling at the little kid swear words it cheeps out.

It was thought that sodium ions and lithium ions couldn’t be used together in a single solid-state electrolyte system due to their chemical qualities, but the AI system indicated that such a material was possible. When the researchers tested the idea, it turned out to be true.

Hey, that’s okay, it’s something I learnt the hard way and am dealing with catch-up at the moment.

In the book How to Win Friends and Influence People, it talks about how you should apologise after some wrongdoing as soon as possible.

This is a similar concept, following this concept the apology is the boulder. It would be uncomfortable talking about nonsense / small things when this hasn’t yet been cleared up.

In the news recently there was this talk about two long-lost twins who found each other on social media for the first time, and they then had to confront their adoptive parents on that big boulder there. For the step-parent, that boulder would have had to have been sitting there for 19 years! Imagine the relief and the safety / comfortability that would arise when that boulder was finally lifted. They could finally talk about the more nuanced things without that weight on their shoulders, that filter. It opened a whole new channel of conversation.

It feels like you're avoiding talking about those big boulders, and the symptoms of that are spiralling out with you feeling the need to look at her Reddit in order to try and understand her and connect with her a bit better; not only that, she's there having to go to Reddit to get relationship advice instead of you. There are some weird secrets going on like with the car switching.

All of these symptoms could be resolved if you just talked to her.

The reason you two are staying casual is, from my point of view, because you're too afraid to talk about the big things. You are "not wanting to be caught in the middle of anything;" you've communicated that she can't really talk to you about the things that are bothering her because it makes you feel uncomfortable. That's not a good set-up for anything more than a casual relationship.

From now on, in every interaction with her, you should be thinking, "What is the biggest boulder here?" That will then inform your decision on what you need to talk about. (It's a little more nuanced than that, though this is the main thing.) I would say the biggest boulder right now is the Reddit thing; she knows you saw her Reddit, and with the deletion of that post I'm sure she feels you at least might snoop, though she doesn't want to bring it up as she's scared of having that conversation. I feel like you need to admit that you snooped there, admit that you should have asked her first, how that was a mistake, how and why it's not something that will happen again, resolve that and then move on to the medium-sized boulders, and then the smaller boulders.

The biggest boulder might not be the Reddit thing, though that's for you to decide; make sure it actually is the biggest boulder.

The medium-sized boulders are probably to do with what's happening in her life with her ex-partner, those sorts of conversations; you need to clear the air there. If she finds out that she can talk to you about the big stuff, your whole relationship dynamic will change.

I don’t think you should break up, though I do think you need to spend some time having a deeper conversation with her about how she feels and just spend some time validating that, as well as going over what happened again.

I think telling her while she was angry / upset with you was probably not the greatest of moves.