Monthly Bragging Thread July 2015

elharo

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining the most awesome thing you've done this month. You may be as blatantly proud of yourself as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself the coolest freaking person ever because of that awesome thing you're dying to tell everyone about. This is the place to do just that.

Remember, however, that this isn't any kind of progress thread. Nor is it any kind of proposal thread. This thread is solely for people to talk about the awesome things they have done. Not "will do". Not "are working on". Have already done. This is to cultivate an environment of object level productivity rather than meta-productivity methods.

So, what's the coolest thing you've done this month?

I've only interacted with you briefly, and I always feel quite condescending when I use the phrase 'proud of you,' but I'm super proud of you! You're a badass!

In fact, since you speak of working while attending university, I am now curious about your socioeconomic class, if that is not too forward. I'm viscerally interested in people who rise above the limitations of class. Now that I'm reminded, I'm also curious about those class-related things about which you had been thinking that were related to the things that I said in that comment. PM me anytime if that's something you care to discuss.

I think being rich usually kills motivation because very few people have positive dreams, people are usually motivated by necessity. Take necessity away and you got yet another lazy upper-class cokehead "party animal", with few exceptions. There is a very fine line of middle-classery to walk, to be rich enough to throw resources at your goals, but poor enough i.e. "staying hungry" enough to actually have goals.

What you say about the soft skills are true for class but not money. As they are not the same thing. For example people who have... (read more)

11sixes_and_sevens11y

Not that much of a rags-to-riches story, I'm afraid. My parents both have working class backgrounds, and neither went to university, but my upbringing would probably get coded as lower-middle class. I had one attempt at university already, fifteen years ago, but dropped out after one year of an Astrophysics degree. Also my jobs for those six years were mid-range software dev/tech professional tybe jobs. It's not like I've been shovelling coal or anything. Some of the things I was thinking about class in relation to that comment were on this sort of topic. I dropped out of my first degree in part because I was a feckless 19-year-old who didn't know any better, but also in part because I didn't have any academic role models and all the education I'd received up until that point had lulled me into a false sense of security. On a fundamental level, I didn't know how to study at a university, and there wasn't anyone in a position to show me how. Your talking about class-based memetic toxicity rang some bells along these lines. Education has a bunch of "soft skills" that parents can pass on to their kids, and presumably stuff like relationships, money management, interpersonal conflict resolution, etc. have similar sets of soft skills which you simply won't learn unless they're in your environment. Also, this is going to sound like a bit of a non-sequitur, but I'd been thinking about Game of Thrones, and what feudal lords must look like to serfs. If you're well-fed, well-groomed and well-educated in a malnourished, dirty and illiterate world, you're not only going to look like a qualitatively superior sort of person to Pete the Peon, but you will operationally outperform him in a number of ways. I wonder to what extent this sort of pattern is prevalent in contemporary Western class systems.