It is day 2 of the 16 day Owl of the Year tournament at !superbowl@lemmy.world if you still want to get in early on that. It’s our annual bracket tournament to determine the community mascots for the next year.

Otherwise you can learn about the near 250 species of owls through my research and personal experience.

Summit is peak!

I’m going to assume a few things, given the small amount of details provided, and see if I can be helpful, as I just got married this month myself, so I’ve spent much time reflecting on it.

You call yourself Indian, and not Indian-(insert other country) and are in an arranged marriage, so I will assume you both currently live in India and are at least traditional leaning in faith/culture if you’re both willingly in this marriage. The other replies seem pretty good for a Western marriage, but I wasn’t sure what exactly was considered appropriate for Indian marriage.

My only reference for anything close so far was reading a comic series about arranged marriages in nomadic groups around the Caspian, so I checked out the wiki for Marriage in Hinduism and Grihastha. The traditions and motivations sound fairly different between India and here in North America, but the goals sound very similar. I’m going to try to avoid touching on too much religious/cultural stuff, because I am 100% ignorant on that besides this reading, but I will give my basic takes on it.

Under the first article, we have:

In Hinduism, the four goals of life (Purusarthas) are regarded to be righteousness (dharma), wealth (artha), pleasure (kama), and liberation (moksha). Marriage is generally not considered necessary to fulfil these goals because following righteousness (dharma) applies to a person since birth and wealth (artha) and liberation (moksha) are again one’s personal goal as dharma and need not to be aligned with marriage as they can be practiced with or without it. The three goals of marriage include allowing a husband and a wife to fulfil their dharma, bearing progeny (praja), and experiencing pleasure (rati). Sexual intercourse between a husband and wife is regarded to be important in order to produce children, but is the least desirable purpose of marriage in traditional Hindu schools of thought.

Dharma sounds like being a righteous person. Do what it takes to lead an upstanding life and be someone worthy of respect. We tend to call that The Golden Rule, which usually boils down to “don’t be a jerk and treat people how you would like to be treated.” Treat your wife and her family how you would treat your own, and always be working to improve that. We all make mistakes or don’t live up to our potential, but we can always keep working at it.

Artha seems to be finding purpose for your life by learning an occupation that can provide a proper life for you, your wife, and any children. Worldly success while not doing something to violate dharma. It seems to be making the best of yourself at work so you don’t have to struggle to be and feel successful as a person and as a provider.

Kama looks to imply more than just sexual excitement, but the excitement of all senses. Work on becoming a good lover, which requires a lot of intimate communication. It is awkward to discuss these things, but every body works differently. You say you have had some prior experience, so I am sure you have seen some of your moves work differently on different people. Don’t focus on what you know how to do only. If she can’t communicate comfortably right away, try different things to see how she responds. Even small movements of where you are touching can make a huge difference, as you may understand from yourself. Eventually she may be more open about her desires and what she enjoys most. Some people are givers, some receivers, and some both. If she doesn’t like doing what you are into, give her time, or come to understand some things just dont give her pleasure or put her in a place where she is not having a good time. When you both come to the same enjoyment during activities, it will maximize both of your enjoyments.

In non-sexual things though, kama also looks to include enjoying arts, music, dance, etc. Learn what types of entertainment you both enjoy and find common ground to enjoy things together, and find ways to still appreciate things you don’t both enjoy. If you like concerts and she prefers gardening, find times where you can each pursue those things without frustration or jealousy. Don’t stifle each others’ individualities. You are united together and should learn to love each other for your unique qualities as well as those you share. In my example, if you did not like gardening but she does, enjoy how her work enhances the beauty and feelings of life it brings to your home even if you hate to do yard work.

Moksha sounds like a very interesting concept to me in a culture that doesn’t seem to have an equivalent. The second linked article sounds like this is more along the line of what those who don’t pursue marriage should start pursuing when they realize that. It seems like moksha is something you approach by practicing good dharma, artha, and kama, so as a married couple, it seems like something you should work on together. In the most general sense, it sounds like finding your rhythm in life, where you are able to let go of struggles as you become more proper beings. You better understand yourselves, each other, and your place in this world, and that can only be accomplished as you improve your lives together and explore inside yourselves and your relationship.

All-in-all, it sounds like being Indian doesn’t make marriage all as different as it can seem outwardly. We all strive to become better people, better spouses, and to live to the best of our abilities. The most important part now it to realize you are more than yourself. Where before, you were on your own or had your family, you are now in a union with this woman, who should be your equal partner in all things. You will experience both joy and sorrow together, and to function well and grow, you need to share all those experiences as one.

It sounds hard to do as two people who are, in a way, still just getting to know each other. You may end up being a perfect match, or you may find troubles, but that is much the same as any relationship really. I was married once before, and after my first wife’s father passed away, she decided she wanted a different type of life than the one we had been living, and she no longer wanted to be with me. People change, and what can start good can end up poorly, or what starts hard may wind up being the best thing ever. No one can predict how it will go for you (or any other couple) long term, but if you both are open, honest, and do your best to love each other as you would want to be loved, you will stand the best chance of happiness possible in an imperfect and trying world.

I changed myself a lot before meeting my new wife. I tried to fix a lot of the areas I was lacking, and that helped me to support her as she was my girlfriend, who then had a long period of health problems, and my ongoing love and support has probably kept her from ending up in a very bad place. It was a lot of learning and patience I had to develop on my part, but I am committed to her and her happiness and our happiness together. Life will continue to throw things at us, but now I have her when I feel weak, and she has me, and when we have happiness, I get to experience my own joy along with hers, making it feel twice as great.

Keep working to make yourself proud, grow the kind of household and family that you picture when you imagine a beautiful home and a happy family, and expand your world while also bring the two of you closer to being one mind and body. Every day will present you with something new, but always remember you are now in it together.

Best of luck to the two of you, and I hope I spoke of relevant things to you with the care and respect intended from an outsider to what your life may or may not be like.

I spend a lot more time watching Forgotten Weapons and C&Rsenal than I do shooting these days. Still get the mechanical bits and history stuff and they don’t typically talk political stuff, which is probably good.

Karl of InRange does get political when I am in the mood for that, and he’s a good guest occasionally on Behind the Bastards as well.

It would be nice if local clubs could be more like that, but at least there are a few avenues left.

My parents and grandparents were into hunting and shooting sports, so I have always been around them and learned how to use them responsibly from an early age, so I used to think it was something everyone did.

I used to shoot 5-7 days a week. Ammo was dirt cheap so I have some guns that used to be really fun, but are now too expensive to use all that much, so I hunt one week a year and go skeet shooting a few times, and occasionally plink at targets with one of the 22s or 38 Specials that I have a pile of reloading stuff for.

It doesn’t excite me as much as it used to either, as gun ownership has become more politicized for everyone, so it’s also hard to find anyone I want to shoot with other than my brother. It used to be a fun hobby where people would just shoot the breeze more than the guns, but now clubs here are filled with MAGAs and plastered with Republican propaganda so I don’t feel as welcome as I used to.

Yup, you’re going to want at least a tiny keyboard at some point soon.

If too many controls is intimidating in your plugins, either try one but into the DAW like ReaSynth in Reaper which will be basic but still fairly powerful, or something like Decent Sampler which has knobs that do a bit of tweaking but are still most just preset sounds. Many will have ADSR and some basic effects and that’s it.

I started One Piece about 3 years ago and have read all the manga and just recently caught up on the anime.

Some of the things I really enjoy about it:

The story progression ramps up nicely. Nobody is that OP from the get-go, and the stakes and power levels have increased steadily as the story goes on. There is definitely plot armor, but it’s not like every bad guy is on the same level as the previous one.

There is great representation. There are people of different races. There are gay-coded, trans, and gender fluid characters, there are young and old people. And none of them are really played for laughs for those traits. All character types have heros, villians, comic relief, and serious characters. And none of the characters with real screen/page time are flat and one dimensional. This along with the power scaling, really makes the adventure feel important and like a fleshed out and lived in world that you are part of. I can only imagine this is even moreso true for people that have been fans since the late 90s.

At almost 1200 chapters, I feel like I understand this fictional world and how it works. There are macguffins and such, but nothing that feels out of place. Characters still behave how you would expect them to behave and the creator doesn’t just pull stuff out of nowhere. There is still great continuity with the earliest things that happened in the story. There are many familiar characters, but more still come and go, but not before becoming necessary parts of the full tale. It’s not like Star Wars where it feels there’s about 2 dozen characters with names in the whole universe.

And the last thing I’ll say is in spite of all this, it still does stuff just for laughs regularly. It knows it’s a story primarily for young boys, and despite being one of the best loved anime/manga ever, it doesn’t take itself all that seriously. It’s a damn fun time to read and watch almost every bit of it with few exceptions. The stuff coming out now is as good or better as it’s ever been.

Like anything else, it won’t be for ever single person out there, so if you don’t like it, you don’t like it. I saw a few random episodes on Toonami in the 90s and was WTF is this random stuff then. It is a weird thing to dive into the middle of, and a lot of it is outright silly. But I had people at work keep telling me I’d like it, I finally gave in, and I was hooked from the first chapter.

Taking away that spiraling feeling is the best thing they do for me.

I always tell people something along the lines of, they do nothing to make me happy, they just give me a chance to make myself happy.

I still get sad, angry, depressed, etc, but it’s manageable now and doesn’t have every inconvenience drag me down to my deepest depths and feeling like I’m stuck there.

Young me: triceratops all the way. A bulldozer with horns, plus it wouldn’t eat me. Not as over the top with horns as styracosaurus.

Current me: ankylosaurs. Always thought they were unique, but young me also found them weird looking. Now I see it as a giant armadillo with a massive club.

Shout out to ichthyosaurs and pterosaurs. Not dinos but very awesome and terrifying creatures. I feel much safer knowing neither is around anymore though. gh.

Very awesome animals, but I don’t think these are technically dinos.

Those limited Cokes keep breaking my heart. So many of them have been good. The Spice and the Rosalia have been my favs, but the space flavored one and the League of Legends ones were good too.

I also like the Pepsi and Mt Dew with real sugar when I can find them, and Cheerwine also needs wider distribution.

Despite what it sounds like, I don’t drink massive amounts of soda, I just like trying the new flavors and regional stuff as I find it.

Poop in a group is good 😄

Yes, I lost some really great people along the way. But I understand it perfectly now why they felt they had to move on from me.

I’m glad we can have conversations like this here. It feels really important to discuss this, and I hope the person I think that inspired you to make this post reads this and can turn his life around.

It isn’t always easy to publicly admit we used to be this way, but I feel it benefits the community as a whole.

Your first line of how it all seems stupidly obvious now is so true. But that’s the thing about being self-centered, that you can’t get any other perspective on it.

I’m glad you were able to get out of that cycle!

I always knew he was a bad example, but having to grow up in that environment gave me a crappy set of social skills for when I was in the outside world from my family. I had to play the transactional game to stay out of trouble, and worry about my own well-being for most things. From spending my whole development years that way, I knew his behaviors were bad, but without any other context, I couldn’t grasp that I was doing much the same things. I was just being me and what I felt I had to do.

There’s obviously a lot left out of the story, it’s 40+ years of life. I started making progress acting like a decent human in my later 20s / early 30s as I moved out and started meeting better people and being able to spend more time around them. After my wife divorced me, I spent a lot of time by myself reflecting and that was when I went to the doctor about depression as I was completely humbled and ready to face up to having problems I couldn’t fix on my own.

After getting medicine, it was the last boost I needed, as I was able to let go of a lot of things holding me back. Whenever something would go bad, it would feel like it would drag every memory of me screwing up or people “screwing me over” back up to the surface and it would just swallow me whole. I couldn’t get anywhere because I’d just go into survival mode and shut down. Medicated me can tell those memories to shut up because I need to tend to the current thing that needs my attention. Which at that time was for me to stop being a jerk.

I still get mad at myself for all the bad things I did to people and to myself, but now they moreso serve as a reminder to stay being my best than something that really haunts me. Everything is just more manageable is about all I can say. It’s hard for me to really accurately verbalize my feelings through all these time periods without really taking a ton of time. I just think a lot of people, especially men these days, suffer with a lot of this stuff, and I’d rather rehash my worst times than see people get sucked down deeper into manosphere and incel crap. I haven’t forgotten for a second how bad and lonely those feelings are, and I don’t want to see other people go through it feeling alone.

After getting my depression treated, I was able to really work on myself better and have lasting results. With the untreated depression, it was like trying to rebuild a house while it was still on fire. I’d try to fix one part of my while the other stuff was still actively messing me up. Getting treated let me let go of a lot of things that were just a byproduct of my own mind and focus on what the root causes of things were. I wasn’t reliving slices of all my previous bad days every day. I could come to terms with things in my past, see what I did that was cringe/jerky/etc and understand it and see better ways to go through life.

It was far from a quick fix, and I still have to live with that part of me, ala The Babbadook. This year in particular has been very hard on me. Medication just lets me manage it, it does nothing to fix core problems. That’s why many people go to therapy in addition to medication. Meds do just enough so I can sweep away the bad crap my mind tries to trick me with before it causes trouble.

What it feels like and how people react to it is different for everyone because we all have different brain chemisty and different underlying and associated issues. For me, a quick visit to my GP and a cheap Rx for Lexapro gave me what I needed. My partner had a much harder time and it took a few years to get sorted out. She also talks to the therapist and has done DBT programs and group therapy to get where she is, while I usually do ok on my own or just talking things out to her or friends.

It can be a real struggle, but it really sucks being your own worst enemy and is far, far worth it to talk to a medical professional if you think you are having problems. No matter where you try to hide from things, you can’t escape your own mind, and it knows every way to really mess you up if it wants to. It isn’t being weak and it doesn’t mean you are a bad person, it’s taking personal responsibility for yourself. You wouldn’t try to heal a broken leg yourself, and a mind is no different. Some things are best left to the pros.

Research something non-work related (usually owls)

Plan a vacation or home project

Study music/theory/plugins/production or play on my mini keyboard

Make friends with other contractors outside of my company

Go out and enjoy the fall weather

Read an ebook or enjoy an audiobook. I started Discworld. I’m down 4 so far out of 41 I think it is.

Basically stuff I’d want to do anyway that requires little or no equipment. Down time is my time. The only thing that stinks is an open office with no real privacy. People don’t seem to care, but it makes it less enjoyable for me. I’ve been here 2 years now and no one has ever said anything.

Bad examples of manliness, seeing things as transactional, and being so focused only on myself.

My dad has a narcissistic type of personality. I’m going to just insert this bit from Mayo Clinic to save me a ton of time.

Symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder and how severe they are can vary. People with the disorder can:

• Have an unreasonably high sense of self-importance and require constant, excessive admiration.
• Feel that they deserve privileges and special treatment.
• Expect to be recognized as superior even without achievements.
• Make achievements and talents seem bigger than they are.
• Be preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate.
• Believe they are superior to others and can only spend time with or be understood by equally special people.
• Be critical of and look down on people they feel are not important.
• Expect special favors and expect other people to do what they want without questioning them.
• Take advantage of others to get what they want.
• Have an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others.
• Be envious of others and believe others envy them.
• Behave in an arrogant way, brag a lot and come across as conceited.
• Insist on having the best of everything — for instance, the best car or office.

At the same time, people with narcissistic personality disorder have trouble handling anything they view as criticism. They can:

• Become impatient or angry when they don’t receive special recognition or treatment.
• Have major problems interacting with others and easily feel slighted.
• React with rage or contempt and try to belittle other people to make themselves appear superior.
• Have difficulty managing their emotions and behavior.
• Experience major problems dealing with stress and adapting to change.
• Withdraw from or avoid situations in which they might fail.
• Feel depressed and moody because they fall short of perfection.
• Have secret feelings of insecurity, shame, humiliation and fear of being exposed as a failure.

When to see a doctor

People with narcissistic personality disorder may not want to think that anything could be wrong, so they usually don’t seek treatment. If they do seek treatment, it’s more likely to be for symptoms of depression, drug or alcohol misuse, or another mental health problem. What they view as insults to self-esteem may make it difficult to accept and follow through with treatment.

So long story short, a lot of treating the world like it owes you something and being an asshole to people when they don’t live up to your unreasonable expectations. Everything had to revolve around him, and that is the example I got, as I wasn’t around many other adults.

Relationships were transactional. I did this, this, and this, so now you owe me this, no excuse. It’s like grinding in a game. Complete these objectives, earn this reward. But that isn’t how life is. You can do as you please, as nice or rude as you want, but so can everyone else. If I did something nice for someone, that should be out of wanting to be nice to them, not to make them owe me something and being rude if they don’t see it that way.

In the OP’s nice guy scenario, guys will compliment someone, do them a favor, listen to them when they need someone to talk to, and not see that as being a friend or supportive person, but basically as points. I helped you, so now you should owe me a date, for instance. You see the boyfriend thing not as a partner, but a business relationship. I did this, so why aren’t you doing that? You aren’t thinking of building an equal partnership with someone, you are being selfish and inconsiderate of them as their own person. It’s totally hollow, because even though another person is there, they’re not really actively involved in the relationship, they are basically a game piece in your eyes when you think that way. You don’t care what they want or feel, you see it as they owe you something. And who would want to be with someone like that? But a person with that mindset can’t place themselves in the other person’s shoes and they lash out of anger instead. The other person will usually just WTF on out of there, and I don’t blame them.

So much of my life has been me losing friendships for having an egocentric view like this. Everyone tires of it eventually. Some last longer, others see how you are right away. I am constantly reminded of such cringe stuff I’ve done, and now that I understand it after getting medicine for my depression, I was able to see what I was doing and fix it. I found better examples of how to be a respectable person, and made friends with women instead of trying to “win” them. Now I’m able to be an interesting and well rounded person that people will naturally like…usually. Some people will still dislike you, not want to date you, or be rude to you for no apparent reason, but that’s just how it goes, and I can handle that now.

I’ll shut up now, since that’s a lot, but if you want to hear more about anything else, or if I’ve missed the mark on what you’re looking for, I can talk more.

My experience echos yours. Bad examples of manliness, seeing things as transactional, and being so focused only on myself.

Making friends with some really great people and getting treated for depression helped me break free from the cycle and start putting others first and understanding myself more had really helped me be a person that other people can enjoy being around.

Birds of a feather! 🦉🦉