It's not just about the stove. It's also about the state of the wood you're burning (humidity mostly). Very dry wood burns much more cleanly than less dry wood.
39 karma · joined July 24, 2020
why focus on parents? People who became parents have supposedly already reached a baseline of stability and security (otherwise they wouldn't have the resources to have children). There are plenty others who are struggling without a partner (or children).
Because much like you, I haven't really kept good friends along in life. I've had periods in my life when I had a "good" friend, that I could talk a lot of stuff with, share my problems, and generally do activities in common, but I moved around, I haven't really kept in touch.
Problem is, without a social circle, it's much more difficult to find a partner, and I'm at an age now where that's the main thing I think I'm missing.
But I understand the issue very well from a theoretical standpoint. At its core, it's about a disordered attachment style, a sort of fear of attachment, or a failure of the brain to regulate the affect resulting from interactions. A result of early developmental trauma. I'm also familiar with some techniques that are supposed to fix the problem (I was building a neurofeedback system based on ADS1299 at one point), but life got in the way. Which is ironic, since I think this is the most important aspect of any life, social functioning.
I've always wanted to live close to nature. I was burned out with my corporate programming job, and I was dreaming of starting out some life-style businesses/SaaS/ something of that sort. I already had some investments that allowed me to live there without financial stress (i.e. the passive income more than 2x covered my living costs).
I was within walking distance of grocery stores, ~1-2km from downtown.
Did it work? Hell no. The biggest issue was I think that I was single, knew nobody in the area, and basically the time spent with just maintaining the house and the surroundings would take more than half of my energy and time.
5 months out of 12 I had to take care of the fire for heating. The whole garden and vineyard were invaded (still are) by a few species of trees such as black locust, that were growing faster than I could cut them, but also oak, birch, basswood and so on. I had a chainsaw and still couldn't keep up. Even after I had a big stack of dried firewood, I still had to spend 40 minutes every morning with actually setting up the fire in the woodstove and so on. And then the snowfall. It was not like in my grandparents' time, when they occasionally had 50-80cm of snowfall, but if I didn't want to be completely stuck there, I had to shovel a lot. The house was about 3 flights of stairs and about 10 more meters away from the street, so it was a bit of work.
Doing the groceries, while not that far away, less than 2km, the return trip usually meant about 150m of ascending. I didn't use a car at the time, so it was a bit tiring. Cooking also takes a big portion of your time.
Then the house itself. I had to do a lot of repairs as the house had been uninhabited for a few years, after my grandparents passed away. The roof. Humidity problems. I had to do some concrete underfloor, that meant carrying tons of sand and bags of ciment uphill, again really hard tasks.
The house had electricity from the grid, and while all the other amenities were available, I chose not to connect to them. I was using water from a well.
In late summer, autumn, I was picking fruit, making jam, also spending a lot of time with that. I tried my hand with organic agriculture, planted vegetables such as tomatoes, potatoes. But then I had issues with wild boars that would come and ransack a lot of it.
I spent about slightly less than an year there, all in all. Did I accomplish much of my main goal (that is business-wise)? Not really. It was a nice experience that maybe I'll repeat some day, but probably only with a partner so that we can split some tasks, and not be almost completely isolated.
Going there for the purpose of having a really low cost standard of living so that I could focus on my priorities didn't really work, because I had to spend a majority of my time just to live there. I could have invested money to make it easier. There were a lot of things that simply made living there harder than it should have been and could be fixed with some investments. I decided that I would be better off in a bigger city at this point in my life.
Huh? I've been cycling for 15 years, many of those years doing 15k km a year, all year round. Mountain biking on mountains at -15C, down to urban cycling in 38-40C scorching summer heat. I've never noticed speed, effort, stamina changing with temperature as you suggest.
And I've done lots of road cycling at constant 35-40km/h, descents of up to 70+km/h.
In the investment world, anything close to 10% return is usually highly risky, speculative.
So it's downright unattainable, since the vast majority of the population which invests money gets returns that are 20x lower in a good year.
If you're in a similar situation I think you'll do a lot better in a bigger city, even though you may not think you need those things for the time being. Eventually you will.
This is what's happening here. Also, all the comments complaining of "whataboutism", "not true scotsman" and so on show a profound lack of empathy with this commenter. You're complaining that this commenter is not showing empathy to OP, when no-one is showing any empathy to his (or other people's) harsher circumstances.
This is for me a (as a fellow sufferer of some of these conditions, who has never received any state support and doesn't even have health insurance) an extremely shaky moral ground.
Because 95% of the homeless population and drug addicts are clinically diagnosable of most of these conditions under DSM IV definitions. And almost none of them receive anything.