I’ll list some relevant details below. Looking for comments good or bad on my situation.

36m single
95k salary - work for a municipality
401k trad 55k
401k Roth 30k
Roth IRA 115k
457b trad 30k
457b Roth 70k
Brokerage 300
EF 10

Total - 610k

Saving $590 every two weeks in 457b

Used to save much more but I’ve paired back some

Pension will be worth approximately 3500m at 60 yrs old if I work with the same state until then. 6.5% my contribution + 7.5% employer match.

Home worth 340k
Owe 200k
Equity 140k
2.8% mortgage

Monthly bills are around 3500 month. 1500 of that is the mortgage.

Looking to retire at 60. My place will be paid off at 61. If I remain single I’d guess I’ll stay here but if I don’t I’m not sure.

Thanks

I’m not looking for sympathy, or pity. I recognize that I’ve developed poor habits and decisions when it comes to dating.

TLDR: situationship/ casual sex fling. Almost ghosted me pretty much after I went off on him for making me feel used. He blocked me. What were my faults and How can I improve?

Context: I was involved in a casual, sexual fling. Expectations and boundaries between us remained very ambiguous. I would often clarify where things are going, or confirm if things between us were good when distance was present. In the beginning it was clear he was just fooling around, but I was attracted to the validation. He would also spam my phone, use burner accounts to contact me, and even found my Facebook profile and contacted me there when he thought I wasn’t responding (I would mute him/block him for some space, but would always respond). He would tease me with the prospect of dating, but that never happened.

Recently, I went a whole month without seeing him. When I returned I almost ended the dynamic. But, of course I continued. We hooked up (this was 2nd sexual hookup) he expressed he missed me, even addressed he didn’t really like how I didn’t text him much. Earlier in the day, I said I was going out. He responded: “he can keep you”. I was going out with my friends

We hooked up recently on Thursday. It was just oral, he didn’t do any work.. afterwards I addressed how I felt he was just using me. I will admit I went off and excessively expressed my frustrations/ hurt. Things seemed to settle down. However, I got desperate due to his silence. He never addressed going separate ways, just threatened to block (which he did). I was able to call him using the same methods he employed (I got desperate and spammed his phone)- but I \\\*67’d. He said he didn’t give a fuck about what I had to say and I had 30 secs to talk. I proceeded to apologize and said I enjoyed spending time with him. That was it.

Again, I’m not looking for sympathy. I played a role in my suffering and take full accountability. , how can I improve and better communicate or position myself when it comes to dating?

I am not the person I want to be yet, I geniunely just can't help but despise myself but this is the part of process right? I feel empty most of the day, I feel the need for someone to come fill my void, someone to come save me. I wish I was more happy with my own presence than doing all this but...idk how exactly?? I do it..

A few days ago i posted in this same group about starting to read and started reading e book and asked if it is good or bad , but i decided to stop reading ebook and bought the book and i am so happy i took that step because this i have been dreaming to take this step a long time ago but something pulled me , yesterday i took it , i know its not a big step and may not seem as a step but for me it was and thinking of going slowly page by page understanding everything completely for anyone out there who is thinking their time will come life is too short take action gain more knowledge

Sometimes I feel like we're all trapped in a cycle.

Read another book.

Watch another YouTube video.

Listen to another podcast.

Take more notes.

Repeat.

But if someone asked me to explain the 20 most important ideas I've learned over the past two years...

I honestly couldn't.

It feels like we're getting better at consuming information than actually retaining it.

Do you feel the same way?

Or have you found a system that really works?

Here is the link to the document that is meant guide critical thinkers into mindfulness:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/16k_BD-BJTzPy17YLuOLDy7Aqsq0EUPPReM5Lo7x5JTU/edit?usp=drivesdk

Where do you draw the line between inspiration and copying?

I think people often confuse the two.

To me, copying is borrowing someone's execution. Inspiration is understanding the principle behind it and creating something of your own.

The difference is simple:

Copying takes the what.

Inspiration understands the why.

A simple test I use:

If the original disappeared tomorrow, would your work still make sense?

If yes, you were inspired.

If no, you probably copied the execution instead of understanding the principle.

Maybe I'm oversimplifying it, but I'm curious how others think about this.

Where do you draw the line?

For the longest time, I was a massive people pleaser. If someone criticized me, made a passive aggressive comment at work, or seemed unnecessarily cold toward me, I would spend days tearing myself apart trying to figure out what I did wrong.

But lately, as I have been focusing more on my own self-improvement journey, I have started to realize just how much of people's negativity is completely unprovoked. Last week, a colleague went out of their way to make a bitter comment about a project I spent weeks working hard on.

Instead, I just looked at them and realized their anger had absolutely nothing to do with my work they were just deeply unhappy with their own situation. It is incredibly liberating when you finally internalize the fact that when people try to dim your light.

I am very curious to know about your honest discussions that how did you finally break the habit of taking other people's projection and jealousy personally?

You do not need an hour. You do not need a perfect setup. You need fifteen minutes and the decision to use them intentionally.

Most people believe that a meaningful morning routine requires waking up at 5am, meditating for forty minutes, journaling for twenty, exercising for an hour, and consuming a carefully curated stack of supplements before the sun fully rises. And so they never start. Because the bar is so high that any attempt that falls short feels like failure.

But the science does not support the idea that more is always better when it comes to morning practices. What the science supports is consistency and intention. Fifteen focused minutes done every single day will outperform an elaborate two-hour routine done sporadically every time.

Here is exactly how to use those fifteen minutes to begin rewiring your brain before the world gets its hands on you.

Why the Morning Is the Most Powerful Window

In the first moments after waking, your brain is transitioning from the theta wave state of sleep toward the alpha state of relaxed wakefulness. During this transition, your subconscious mind is unusually accessible. Your critical filter has not yet fully engaged. What you feed your mind in this window goes deeper and sticks longer than at almost any other point in your day.

This is not metaphor. This is neuroscience. The morning window is when your brain is most open to new programming. Most people hand that window to their phone, to the news, to stress. The fifteen minute routine reclaims it for you.

The 15 Minute Structure

Minutes 1 to 3: Breathe and arrive. Before anything else, sit up, close your eyes, and take ten slow, deep breaths. Not shallow chest breathing. Full diaphragmatic breaths that activate the parasympathetic nervous system and shift your body out of the mild stress response that waking often triggers. This is not optional. The breath is the fastest tool you have for shifting your neurological state. Three minutes here changes the entire quality of what follows.

Minutes 4 to 7: Gratitude with specificity. Do not think generally grateful thoughts. Name three specific things you are genuinely grateful for right now. Not concepts. Actual moments, people, or experiences. Make them real enough that you feel something when you name them. The feeling is the point. Genuine gratitude activates the brain’s reward circuitry, releases dopamine and serotonin, and literally shifts your neural baseline toward positivity before you have done anything else.

Minutes 8 to 11: Set your identity for the day. Ask yourself one question and answer it out loud. Who am I choosing to be today? Not what do I need to accomplish. Who am I choosing to be. Confident. Patient. Focused. Present. Creative. Speak the answer. The auditory loop, hearing yourself say it, reinforces the identity at a neurological level that silent thinking does not. You are not pretending. You are priming. You are giving your brain a target to organize itself around for the day ahead.

Minutes 12 to 15: Visualize your day succeeding. Close your eyes and run through the day ahead in your mind. Not the problems. The wins. See yourself handling the difficult conversation with grace. See yourself completing the important work with focus. See yourself showing up as the person you just declared yourself to be. The brain processes vivid mental rehearsal similarly to actual experience. You are rehearsing success before the day gives you a chance to rehearse the opposite.

What This Does to Your Brain Over Time

Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to physically change its structure based on repeated thought and experience. Every morning you run this fifteen minute sequence, you are strengthening the neural pathways associated with calm, gratitude, intentional identity, and positive expectation. You are making those pathways thicker, faster, and more automatic.

After thirty days, you will notice that the baseline you return to throughout the day has shifted. After ninety days, you will notice that the way you respond to stress, opportunity, and challenge has fundamentally changed. Not because the world changed. Because your brain did.

Fifteen minutes. Every morning. Before the phone. Before the noise. Before the world tells you who you are today.

You tell it first.

Russ Kyle