Have all the opinions you want just fucking voice them and don’t downvote shit just because it’s not your preference. Or do I’m not your mum.

No i used disposable cards. Like the ones you can top up.

This is why I used to use a fake name at gyms. When I quit you can chase that ghost.

My climbing gym lets me pause membership for free. Done it’s few times when I’ve had pulley injuries.

Love how you get downvoted for your own personal preference. This place is wild.

I understand the surplus value argument and I’m not dismissing it, within that framework you’re technically correct. But reducing all employment to exploitation by definition flattens a meaningful distinction between a worker being genuinely mistreated and one who isn’t.

My point wasn’t that capitalism is perfect or that my experience is universal. It was that employment isn’t inherently exploitative in the lived sense, conditions, power dynamics, and how surplus is distributed all matter. A framework that calls everything exploitation equally makes it harder to identify and fight actual exploitation where it’s causing real harm.

Working isn’t necessarily being exploited though.

I have a great boss for a small company. Last year we got pay rises and a reduction in hours at the same time. Don’t feel I’m being exploited, it’s quite the opposite as works comes second to our health.

I’ve lost track of how much sick time I’ve had due to mental health etc. we are not giving targets or micromanaged or anything like that.

Guess I don’t know much about 4chan other than seeing green texts and thinking it’s a bunch of oddballs trying to solve the odd murder.

Didn’t know it was manosphere and don’t know it’s political leaning.

I had no idea that nofap was what you just described. I saw the green text as the person taking all those positives steps to get back to living life and not some Andrew Tate thing.

I apologise for my misunderstanding and wading into this discussion, as my concern is for the people who are doing things compulsively not manosphere stuff.

I do understand that, perhaps more acutely than most as I’ve had countless destructive “hobbies” (my god hobby is the softest word I could find here) that I used to mask the underlying issue. Heck I’m still not sure I know the underlying cause but I have translated those destructive things with positive ones but the goal is the same. This is all to say I’m well versed in addiction, compulsions, and poor mental health.

With that in mind I would say that sometimes you have to stop the thing you’re doing, let’s say masturbating here, so you can get your body back to baseline before you can even begin to work with a therapist or do some introspection.

I’m not saying we should demonise masturbation, just accept that for some people they may need to stop doing that for a period whilst they then fix the other shit they got going on.

I’m in my forties and really never been happy and had a shit childhood that is still the cause of the way my mind bullies me to this very day. I’ve tried therapy before but when you’re in the midst of masking all your shit with other shit you really can’t make any progress in my experience. What I’ve done now is spend several years working on myself and replacing negative addictions with positive ones. That afforded me the will power to begin to remove the substances and other coping strategies. Now I actually feel I’m in a place where I might benefit from some EMDR or trauma therapy.

Everything is a problem if you’re doing it compulsively or mask something else.

Masturbating can surprisingly help with restless leg syndrome but doing it in work might be a problem.

below is a reply to a comment I made below, pasting here as I find it crazy how this went down and is allowed.

For those curious I did a little digging. I’m on mobile so won’t be going in and out to add company names etc.

Basically, the private equity firms got together and said let’s buy Toy R Us for $6.6B but we only want to use say 300M of our own money and get a loan for the rest.

Then they bought Toys R Us but made them sell all assets to equity firms which then leased them back to Toys R Us so they could pay back the loans. This means Toys R Us are paying hundreds of million a year to cover loans and can’t put that money into making a better business.

The private equity firms also made Toys R Us issue dividends in the hundreds of millions so private equity can make money.

In the end private equity walked away with over $1B in profit whilst Toys R Us declared bankruptcy with $5B still left to pay.

What a fucking insane system. Like how many people lost their jobs so these ghouls could make some extra cash off its downfall.

And people think I’m crazy for making my life harder by not shopping at places like Amazon or being a pirate and not giving money to Netflix etc.

I feel I am living in crazy land. Like the Uk has all our pensions and shit tied to the damn stock market, ensuring we can never really leave this system.

I used to work for Apple and before I joined the Genius Bar I was working the avenues (what they call the sides where they keep accessories) and because I’ve been known to pull a few scams myself (companies, never people) I have an eye for something out of the ordinary.

So I saw a lady bring in an iPhone and receipt to change it for the same phone in a different colour. Not that odd mind but I did notice it.

A few days later I see the same lady do this again with another employee and now I am thinking something is definitely off.

The next time she comes in I make sure I approach and ask them if they need help, again they ask to swap for a different colour.

I then say sure we can help with that and as is procedure we would confirm the Serial Number matches that on the receipt, we didn’t have access to the tools that read this from the hardware as we would on the GB, so we would power on the device and press the little “i” to view and compare. It’s a match, but still this isn’t legit obviously.

At this point, not that I’m protecting Apple here I wanted to work GB and this would get me on their radar, plus I was the shit at faking extroversion and giving outstanding service as I was depressed and I found being overly nice and energetic made me happier I would leave work on cloud 9 and then crash. I take the phone to the GB host (dude who checks people in) and say something is off here and explain all of the above. They send me to the repair room 🥰 never been in before and I was excited.

Once inside I explain to the tech guys that’s up and they’re like yeah that’s odd. They say to tell her that we need to do a few more checks and to come back in 30 minutes. Basically we were going by to open the phone and verify it’s innards. As well as using the serial number reader tool (forget the name now) to verify all is legit.

Go back to the lady and explain this, she’s flustered but agrees as she can’t not. Take the phone and box and drop it in the GB repair room. When I come back out I can see the lady is on the phone in an irate conversation with someone. A few minutes later she says she’s changed her mind and wants the phone back.

Go get her her phone and am instructed to write on the receipt to do a check before returning (again I forget the terminology) so that if she went to another store they’d now go open this phone up.

She’s pissed at this and leaves with her phone and receipt unhappy.

A while later I recall seeing a bust of a gang of folk from a certain country (the same this lady appeared to be from) for returning iPhones that either had fake innards or were not the phone in question.

As a scammer in the past it hurt to stop someone doing the same but this was my patch and I wanted to make a good impression. Which I did as I moved to the GB for 3 years which changed my life. They offered so much encouragement and you’re surrounded by talented people that I up-skilled and I’m now a software developer (not for Apple).

I don’t know what it’s like working there in the USA, but in England it was amazing. They paid more than any other retail store, stock was given every year, you could buy it too at a discount, you were trusted and not micromanaged, the benefits were outstanding and led me to my ADHD diagnosis with healthcare (as sadly mental health support on the NHS is underfunded).