I went to another country to meet my long-distance boyfriend for the first time. We spent an awesome weekend together affirming our relationship and making plans for the next time we're together

Please either clearly define "love" or taboo the word and ask the question again. It's a vague term and I think your meaning of it differs somewhat from the rest of us.

I don't know if being "in love" is a thing that actually exists, and if it does, what exactly it is, but in general, people seem to regard whatever the term refers to as somthign great and profound, so I am interested in it. I'm trying to figure out what's behind the word. So maybe you can tell me?

Anyone here who has been "in love", can you tell us what the characteristics were? I'd like to know if it corresponds to an internal state that I have experienced. In particular, how does romantic love differ from friendship?

I have outsourced some of my motivation to my boyfriend, in the form of asking him to put me to work when I want to work but find myself unable to prevent myself procrastinating. It's surprisingly effective so far. (Note: still in honeymoon period of intervention, do not take as gospel)

Existential angst and worrying a ton about your obligation to society and so forth almost always turns out to be a projection of your worries about yourself onto society at large. You're not really worried about some abstract duty or obligation, instead you have a low opinion of your own competency/worthiness and are worried that other people will come to share that view if you're not able to measure up to some abstract standard,

Wikipedia lists the safe upper limit of vitamin D as 4000 IU (100ug), so taking 10000 could be unhealthy.

I take 10 000 units of Vit D each day. Partly because I'm a pasty nerd who never goes out and partly because large doses are anecdotally helpful for mood.

I take around 1.5mg of melatonin each night. Would have preferred 1 or less but it's too difficult to find them in smaller quantities so I make do with halving 3mg tablets. When I take them I find it significantly easier to get to sleep.

This is a small one, but when I realised that I wasn't going to meet my Friday evening deadline, I emailed my advisor to let her know along with the reason I'd missed it, whereas in the past I would have not told her and then spent the weekend alternating between, stress about the missed deadline, extreme procrastination, and madly trying to get the work finished. She responded supportively and now I'm feeling much less stressed and procrastinate-y than I otherwise would have.

On another related axis, my efforts at being accepting and emotionally stable are starting to pay off in the form of massively decreased negative self-talk, increased comfort and emotional intimacy with friends, and decreased sense of pointless obligation and guilt with respect to other people's problems. My methods have involved medication for my anxiety/depression, reading a bunch of self-helpy stuff like parts of Scott's blog, Kate Donovan's blog, Nonviolent Communication, How to Lose at Everything and Still Win Big, and (still working through) The Charisma Myth, obsessive journalling, and spending as much time as feasible hanging out with, reading, and talking to people who embody the traits I want to have.

This appears to be the same claim as the "misplacement" part of the above theory (errors in patterns vs. errors in "abstractions" which in the link that was provided is referred to as "patterns").

The key difference which stands out now, though (before I see it applied to various forms of evidence and humor) is that this version appears to be less elegant, less clear, and has less connection with our common experiences and understanding of humor, so it doesn't fit any of my own criteria for what would make it better as a hypothesis. I also notice this a lot when it comes to Dennett.

Linguists tend to be a bit more specific than me. There may be a slight difference between /i/ and /j/, but they're really close. It doesn't seem to be enough to justify one being a vowel and the other being a consonant.

I tried listening to the recordings of /i/ vs /j/ on Wikipedia. /i/ just had /i/, but the recording for /j/ is /ja/, so it's hard to concentrate on the /j/. It sure sounds a lot like /ia/. Similarly, /w/ had /wa/, which sounds a heck of a lot like /ua/.

I feel like /y/ just means that you start out transitioning from /i/ to another vowel. You tend to emphasize the following vowel more. But since you could be transitioning to any vowel, it doesn't make sense that /y/ represents the transition itself. The only constant is it starts out as /i/.

A particularly interesting case is /jiː/ (Old English pronoun that is now spelled "ye"). It's clearly not just /i/, and /ii/ would sound identical. But it does seem to be somewhat of a palindrome. The /i/ at the end is extended longer, but the sounds are the same forwards and backwards. There's a slight change in the sound or emphasis between them, so it might be /ieiː/ or something where it moves to a subtly different vowel and back.