Language: English

Mistrusting love

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Find someone who looks at you meme - AhSeeit

As I see it, there are two types of romantic love:

  1. One in which you admire the other person, you put it on a high place and look up at it; in here, you offer everything but require nothing back;
  2. One in which you’re equal but require trust and equal rights for equal pay.

I’m not much of an expert in this, but I do think 1. is preferable.

There are some memes on the Internet with „Find someone to love as much as person/entity X loves/looks at Y.” And they show a photo of someone/some animal looking at something with a lot of interest.

The issue with this unconditional, not require anything back, type of love is that it might be a symptom of something deep – not being loved, not knowing what being loved is, not understanding love.

Some say that you need to feel loved in order to be able to love others.

While this certainly sounds nice, I don’t view this as a requirement. Good to have? Sure. Mandatory? No.

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On newsletters

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The Focal Project - Email Marketing

Adding temporary offers in a newsletter is not, to me, ideal. As a reader, I tend to read newsletters once every few days.

Opening a newsletter and noticing an expiring offer – that doesn’t sound so good.

Also, if you tell me, „Write to me, this is a personal message,” I do write back, and then you don’t reply – that’s not very nice.

As far as I can tell, newsletters are more difficult to read than a blog/news site via RSS.

Some people add this text: „Subscribe to my newsletter to download X.” There are two major drawbacks to this:

  1. You decrease the trust others have in your brand, as you do a rather shady thing as a general principle; you ask for people’s mail without them being sure they’ll be treated nicely;
  2. Your audience will mostly consist of people who are too lazy to unsubscribe. I wouldn’t want an audience formed mostly of these people.

Why end your newsletter with a quote? If you have a lot of links in your newsletter, some people might open them all in tabs (perhaps using an extension like Snap links for Firefox / Chrome). While they wait for the tabs to load, they could read your quote and reflect on it.

It matters a lot to have a good subject line. People focus a lot on crafting a good newsletter, but the subject line matters a lot.

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Desperados / Desperate housewives / Desperate times call for desperate measures

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Wojtek Gurak - Education Department

Sometimes, I go on buses in Romania. And it strikes me to see how desperate people can be:

  • Bus drivers to start going, waiting for just a little for people to get back to the bus, sometimes being in a hurry to close the doors, at times not checking things.
  • People who want to get down from the bus to be on time.
  • People who want to get onto the bus do not leave enough room for people to get down or immediately start to go into the bus without waiting first for people to get down.

If you get down and leave some space between the person in front of you and yourself, people who want to get up into the bus want to occupy that space.

„Empty spaces, what are we living for?” (Queen – The Show Must Go On – YouTube)

Also, once I wanted to get down from a bus, but I had quite some luggage and there was a big dog without a leash in front of me. People started entering the bus without allowing me to get down. The bus started, and I specifically yelled at the bus to stop at the first crossroad so that I could get down.

I’m not sure where this desperation comes from.

They say Romania has issues with infrastructure and corruption. I want to add an element that’s even harder to overcome – education. As a population, we’re rather uneducated.

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Answering questions

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Ikhlasul Amal - Questionnaire

If you take a question in a written form, you can look at it, analyze it, and debate it.

Verbally, as far as I notice, people answer a bit strange – if the question is detailed, people tend to answer to just a part of it.

If I have a question, and the answer is complex, a lot of time, in a verbal manner, people reply to just a part of it.

The solution, as far as I see it, is to try and give a complete answer, even if the communication is oral.

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Annoying prayers

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Adam Y Zhang - Good Kisser

But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, … (Matthew 5:44, New International Version)

If someone annoys you (I won’t use the word „hate”, I think it’s too much, in my opinion, most people are annoyed by others, they don’t hate them deeply), you can try and make good gestures for them. Show a sign of good fate and behave nicely.

But such occasions tend to be rare – to do a small sacrifice, to do good, to actually act on your intent.

Yet, there’s a simpler way to love those who annoy you – pray for them.

It’s a placebo effect – if you wish the good of the other, you will get past their annoying behavior much more easily.

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Some dark patterns

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Marcin Krawczyk - After your 40's you know right from wrong

You open a chat with a website, and you see that „the operator is typing”. But sometimes you talk to a bot (computer Artificial Intelligence), and to mimic human behavior, they are also typing.

Sometimes, websites introduce waiting times and screen loaders just to increase the time a user has to wait to get to the page and make the page more desirable.

Some TV Shows in Romania are shown online one week prior to TV, just for you to buy online access.

Some social media websites don’t show you options to navigate in a video, you are forced to watch start to end.

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Crosswalks

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Adam Y Zhang - Attention

Crosswalks are only from place to place. On a road, there are portions just for cars (typical roads), and special places (the crossroads) where pedestrians and cars meet.

Assigning special places for crosswalks makes it easier for drivers to focus a lot when seeing a crosswalk and focus much less on other portions of the roads.

It’s the same with social media – you should generally try and block social media from your life and avoid being connected all the time. Then, from time to time, access it and get immersed into it. Separate the attention by grouping „lots of focus attention” and „no focused attention.”

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