This is some seriously dangerous information to be feeding me bro.

Now… to find magnets able to contain the antimatter…

I understood the joy.

I know this is just a thread to vent, but I really want you to focus on the fact that communicating how you felt helped the situation so much. Please don’t wait 5 more years to try that again.

If you’re really set out on doing this I’d gladly make the call

Ok ok. Unexpected comment. Respect.

Condolences. I have a rain sound app on my phone. With earphones and practice, I can sometimes focus on that sound instead of the tinnitus, and get some semblance of peace and sanity.

This is not advice, because if I had heard this posted as advice in my first year or two of tinitus I would have been pissed at the person giving it. Also, to a very large degree even your emotional reaction to this is not something you can control.

I was absolutely devastated and hated myself when I got tinitus. I and a co-worker teaching international folk dance were invited to a dance party / concert.

Amazing band, flown in from another continent, but I knew it would be too loud. I’ve always had minor hyperacusis and been very concerned about protecting my hearing. Before the party started I offered disposable earplugs to my co-worker, she declined. I had my own pair, in my pocket, the entire night. For some reason I never put them on.

At the end of the night I leave the venue and have terrible ringing in my ears. I freaked the fuck out, and kept everything as quiet as possible for the rest of the night and the next day to try to allow my ears to heal. Immense guilt and kicking myself. And fear.

The ringing never stopped. Saw an audiologist, who said it would definitely go away in a few weeks. It did not.

Tried supplements that did seem to reduce the volume of the ringing (Lipoflavinoid. No idea if it was all placebo or not).

Saw many more specialists and eventually met one (more than a year later) that told me (no idea if current studies back this up) that sometimes Tinitus is not physical damage at all, and that it’s damage in the way that our brains process the input from our ears.

He recommended that I “try not to think about it”. Said that sometimes even helps the ringing decrease. I told him that I was not the type of person who could ever not think about it. Nor did I want to be. Exactly the opposite, I had pledged to myself to never just not notice it. Saying that now doesn’t really make sense to me, but at the time it absolutely did. It was an integral part of my self-image.

So, I religiously took Lipoflavinoid every day for more than a year. Normally with my ADHD I would struggle with that, but every time I forgot it I would notice the ringing getting louder and remember.

Then, maybe two or three years in I would sometimes forget to take Lipoflavinoid and… Not notice. I still hadn’t heard a second of silence for 3 years, but I didn’t notice the volume increase.

Eventually I was forgetting it more often than not and didn’t want to keep the hassle and pay for it so I just stopped.

Work got difficult and I would have other things to think about than the ringing, and every one in a while there were days where at the end of the day I would realize I hadn’t noticed the ringing at all. (If I had that realization in a quiet room, I’d immediately start noticing it again)

I gave up trying to fix it. I managed to convince myself that accepting it did not go against the fiber of my self concept, and my experience got better.

It’s been more than 10 years since that concert and I can say that I haven’t been bothered by the ringing in years, and I’m in a relatively quiet room typing this out now and don’t hear it.

Again, not advice. I can’t tell you to “just ignore it”, and if you’re like me you can’t make yourself do that even if you wanted.

If you’re early in your experience with tinitus, maybe it will be helpful to hear that at least for one person, it got better. And that by “it” I mostly mean my experience of life with tinitus, moreso than the ringing itself “going away”.

If anyone has read this far, fun fact that kind of goes against the general gist of this narrative:

Once I had tinitus I realized that I could be a surprisingly accurate and precise human drcibal meter by comparing perceived volume of my ringing to perceived volume of the environment.

Could get within about 3db in the range from 40 to 75 without earplugs, at which point I would put in earplugs and know how much to adjust to get the same precision up to 100db.

I generally refuse on moral grounds to participate in activities above 95db without all participants strictly being required to use ear protection.

Anything above 80, I set up a small table with free earplugs, even if I’m not the organizer…

Also, I haven’t really tried to measure db this way in a few years. Don’t know if I still can or not.

It’s brutal. It also just kind of becomes normal, eventually. Do what you can to protect your hearing going forward to prevent it from getting worse. Good luck.

Yeah… Flatpaks are nice, but slow and sometimes broken (I guess mostly depending on how the rest of your system looks like.) On the other hand, I hate adding 3rd party repositories; it feels weird and messy. It’s a complex matter indeed.

Are you gonna divorce for your friend?

Oof.

I feel this all to well.

I highly recommend reading https://www.strugglecare.com/book .

It’s not self-help. It’s not going to “fix” you.

But reading it was some of the best therapy I’ve ever received. If you’re at all like me, maybe it will help you too. I am happier, as are the people I love and who love me, in large part because of K.C. Davis’ philosophy. (The people I love and who love me are also very empathetic and understanding, which I know is definitely not true for most people unfortunately).

It’s less than $20.

It’s short.

Buy it. If you can’t afford it, I might even be willing to buy it for you / venmo you $20 to get it.

Also available in your library / Libby.

Also available as an audiobook.

if it did work and made my family and friends proud then I could stop struggling.

Why can’t they be proud that you are happy? Why do you need them to be proud of you? It sounds like they are projecting their desires/dreams on to you. You could be honest with them and tell them you aren’t happy trying to make them proud the way they want. You want them to be proud of you for being you. Or you could ghost your family and friends who sound like they want you to be someone you don’t want to be.

This is kinda similar to the plot of the show “Severance.”

I have had chest discomfort for decades. I’m 46 and it started when I was about 25. Doctors never found anything. I’m lucky to have good benefits and have been going to masseuses for over 10 years.

A couple of years ago tried a new masseuse mentioned the tightness and she found a huge lump of scar tissue she massaged out. I’m still not perfect but I’m light-years better.

My point is, get a massage and never give up. You just need to find the right person to find it.

Yep. I even got this back when cleaners moved my mouse from in front of key keyboard spacebar to the right of the keypad, until I noticed what had happened.

I put my mouse between my body and the keyboard and it goes away.

Good luck!

Dude, that’s exactly what it is. I get the exact same pain when I’m editing on my laptop. I swapped out for a trackball myself. I can type all day long because I can get things set up to eliminate that strain, but editing takes a lot more awkward movement using the trackpad.

I like a trackpad, they’re convenient as heck, but they just aren’t good for sustained use imo.

rhomboid pain

I had this from having my shoulders curled in while working as well as sleeping on my side. I was picking fruit which requires lots of reaching. Try to be aware of keeping your shoulders square and get a friend to jam their elbow in there and grind it out.

I was getting something similar a few months back and it’s funny you mention a laptop because I started using one around the time my pain appeared, I think I was a bad knot in my muscle, I helped it go away by lying down on a tennis ball and massaging it out, hope ya find some relief dude.

I hope the new keyboard and mouse do the trick! I also was experiencing wrist/arm/shoulder pain after I started working primarily on a laptop. I got a split keyboard that i can angle in a more ergonomic manner, and that single change cleared my pain up. Repetitive stress injuries suck. and I hope you find relief with your new work setup.

Track pads suck, I hope this solve your problem

Do you keep your wallet in your back pocket when sitting?

People don’t understand how wonderful it is to have mastery over things.

I have so many areas of my life that I think in terms of a skill, one of which is Linux, which I’m using now. Another is coffee/espresso, cycling, writing, etc.

Basically all hobbies. But the point is that I can develop mastery at my own pace in so many different areas. Sometimes, it’s slow and methodical, like coffee: I’ll try something new maybe every weeks. And sometimes it’s breakneck speed, like Linux…just do a deep dive and come out knowing a bunch of new stuff.

I fucking love being alive.

I’m the kinda guy who’s aware of how cool Linux and system mastery can be, but also the kinda guy who’s too lazy to care enough about maintaining a dual boot Linux/Windows system so every other year I’ll install a new Linux distro I haven’t used before only to do nothing with it and delete that partition of my hard drive within a month.

Last week I installed Ubuntu!

Eh, time and effort is limited depending on what the matter at hand is. Sometimes, you are required to just impulse buy or not live at all.

… And yet, I know exactly what you mean. There’s a class of people who just live with a phone for nearly everything they do 14 hours of their daily life, day in day out, 12 months a year. No rest whatsoever. And yet, the moment they find any resistance anywhere in their life, not even on something related to the phone, they just. dont. google. They literally refuse to help themselves and will just do what they know and refuse to do or even concern themselves with better.

I’ve seen a 20-year-old who, when asked to give in their homework on Moodle, like normal people do, instead… wrote everything on a Mac’s Notes app, took a photo and then pestered people for the teacher’s phone number so they could send the shitty photo of their homework on a very popular chat application. When told that this was not going to count, they just shrugged and stopped caring. Again, they used technology daily. That was objectively the stupidest and laziest “functional” person I’ve ever met, a true sheep, and I fear ever becoming like them during onset of dementia.

I am in 100% agreement with you. I’m kind of in the same mindset in figuring out my homelab setup. Still learning docker and how volumes work 😢 haha

I’m in academia but I like to tinker with tech. So when my students or co-workers are surprised that I know so much about tech and how to navigate around most computer systems and troubleshoot (Mac/Windows/Linux) they are perplexed. They ask why I didn’t major in tech. I tell them that I majored in what I loved (history) and play with tech as a hobby to relax.

It’s why I selfhost my own Lemmy server. Gives me something to do with my hobby, keeps me focused on what’s new in tech, makes me learn to keep up with docker, Linux, editing CRON tabs etc.

It takes time and effort though, and usually that time and effort is spent elsewhere, especially if you’re an adult with two jobs and two kids. When you don’t have to think to better your mastery of your surroundings, making good hardware/software choices becomes increasingly disparate

Yeah. My appreciation for Linux has recently grown a lot. It just seems like the Web and tech companies really are going to shit.

I’m old enough that being free from ads and spying is far more important to me then anything windows can offer.

Solution: Become the better equipment.

You’re welcome for the extreme motivation that you just received. This was thanks to the free trial of my “extreme motivation course”. To access “full extreme motivation very hardcore”, buy my course for just $999.99.

You can’t borrow the money?

For everyone who immediately thinks ‘it’s most likely orbiting a point within the earth,’ here’s a diagram to help:

A Lagrange point or whatever?

This is actually something that people are intended to understand by design.

Same lmaoooo

Yeah…I get that. Solidarity.