I’m mot sure I understand what kind of answer you are looking for. What did the Whig historiography achieve? Or the Great Man theory? Isn’t Critical Theory an academic approach that allows people in the humanities a different theoretical framework to approach the problems of culture, history, literature, etc? It’s been pretty successful in that, and while I believe that academic scholarship has some influence on world affairs, it’s generally the political zetgeist exerts more pressure on academic thinking than the other way around…

I get the sense from your wording that you might be in the younger end of the spectrum. Although the world can feel pretty shitty and messed up, it’s often worth remembering “this too shall pass”. Obviously no one wants the world to be awful, and living through hard times isn’t desirable, but just like the good stuff never lasts, the bad stuff changes too. The Great Depression lasted a decade, the Nazis ran Germany for just a bit longer.

Those were presumably fucking dreadful times to live through. But the decades that followed were comparatively prosperous for the countries. What’s happening in the US is depressing as all hell, but it’ll change, and all you can do is the best you can to make it less dreadful, for yourself and the people around you.

My take is that written communication is hard, unless a) you know each other really well, e.g. messaging friends, or b) you write carefully and with enough detail to help the other person understand fully your position, and they bother reading with the same care.

When you read an essay or article it of often begins by setting out the problem, giving some context and even defining their priorities and approach, before they make a claim or argument. They spend time addressing the obvious criticisms of their argument, and ideally admiting weak spots, and maybe even empathising with why someone might reject their position. This means that when you read an article like that, even if argues against something important to you, you don’t feel attacked. It’s calm, general reasoning, and obviously not a personal a attack on you as an individual.

But if you post an picture of the secondhand car you’ve saved for two years to afford, and the first comment is “fuck cars, they’re killing the planet” it’s easy to feel like it’s a personal and it’s aggressive. Or if you write a pretty reasonable but contraversial opinion, people might not have the time or will to break it down and explain why it’s wrong, but they don’t want other people to read it and think it’s okay, so they down vote and comment a quick “what is this shit ?”

Mostly just water, but defintely happy to have multiple drinks at the same time. Particularly breakfast, I can have coffee, juice, water and a Bloody Mary. But in general I want hot drinks hot, and fizzy drinks fizzy. So if I have a lot of drinks on the go I’ll have to drink them quickly.

Inductive reasoning. I don’t have any non-circular reason to believe that previous experience should predict future events. But I’m gonna believe it anyway.

Spot on with “lieing about having your shit together”, I’m in my 40s and in academia and almost everyone is “just pretending” to be a high functioning adult.

But you don’t need to spend your life in front of a computer. You can do all sorts of shit. But people like economic security and that makes “college > soul destroying job” seem appealing. But life can be all sorts of things, as long as you realise you’re in control of the choices not the results.

There’s a well established trope that at every age, people think there life is about to settle down and stop being as open and free. I was defintely the kind of person who felt that turning 21 was becoming ancient and tbat life was basically over. But each decade has been completely different and often wild, I’ve done lots of different things, lived in different places and even now I’m married and have a house and all the more “settled” things, I’m confident the last few decades will also be varied and interesting.

I’d agree with that. If you use you’re vast wealth to do awful things then you’re an awful person. But I’ve defintely had moments when a moment of rage or lust or other bad intention has bubbled up inside, and I’ve wanted to buy a business just to fire the rude person I’ve argued with, or hire a team of sex workers just to fulfill some weird fantasy. But as a poor normal person those thoughts appear and pass because i can’t do anything about them. I’d hope that if I was a billionaire, I’d still take a moment and realise the gap between id urge and superego approved action, but who knows?

Almost every part of this is wrong. But I suspect op’s parents do have better music taste than them.

The things that we call accents are just collections and patterns of speech variation, usually regional or class-based. Each individual has their own minor variations, depending on their speech communities and life experience. So, you’re kinda right to hear them as a bunch of individual voices.

But if you’re interested in tuning back into accents, you can start learning / spotting the features that mark the difference. Do they pronounce an ‘R’ at the end of a word? Or just use a long vowel? Would they pronounce cot and caught the same?

Once you start noticing, its less about matching an accent to a stereotype, and more about understanding all the interesting ways that speech variation occurs.

An increase in supply would reduce wages, unless it also increases demand. If you think about wages in cities vs rural areas, you’ll see that most of the time more people = more economic activity = higher wages.

Where this breaks down, is if there’s barriers of entry that prevent immigrants from participating in the economy fully. If immigrants aren’t allowed to legally work or start business (as happens with some asylum seekers or ‘illegal’ immigrants) then they are forced to compete over a small pool of off-book / cash-in-hand jobs, which could see a reduction in wages without a significant increase in overall economic activity.

I’d happily watch some clips of all of your suggestions. But I don’t think it’s a great idea in reality. There’s a lot more to acting that just having a specific appearance. Watching Humphery Bogart’s take on the character of Indiana Jones would be awesome, but watching his face deepfaked over Harrison Ford would be meh, and watching a team of graphic artists attempt to recreate what they think would be an interesting Bogart performance might work, but also might be dull, or unimaginative.

What they’d probably need to do, is hire an actor to create the performance then cover his face up with cgi. In which case, I’d rather just watch the actual actor.

But a future where it’s easy for fans to create mash ups and fan fiction episodes sounds fun. And I’d happily watch those for fun.

Defintely, it’s a waste of an opportunity. But as someone also living in non-English speaking country, it’s surprisingly a lot of effort to make sure I actually expose my self to the language. If you’re work and social circles are all predominately English speaking, you need to take active steps to have meaningful exposure (and you most certainly should!)

I think it’s different now that in the past, because it’s so easy to live in a bubble and spend a lot of time communicating online. Even back in the ‘old country’ I barely spoke with strangers, beside shop interactions. I have my headphones on, listening to music, watching streaming services, and interacting with my friends and family. Now that I’m abroad, I can do pretty much the same thing, I don’t need to watch the local TV channels I can just watch YouTube, I don’t desperately need to make local friends, because I videochat and game with my buddies back home very easily.

It’s taken a couple of years here to realise that without actively pushing myself, I’m not really picking up much of the language. Now I make myself listen to talk radio in the car, and try to overhear conversations on the train, rather than existing in my normal bubble. It’s absolutely worth it, but if I’d been motivated I could have made myself consume shows, radios, etc in the target language back I the ‘old country’. And while there’s certainly more possible language partners to practice with, if they don’t emerge naturally in your social circle, then it’s not all that much easier than finding someone back home who wanted to improve their English to be my language buddy.

Tldr it’s a waste to not learn the local language, but failing to do so isn’t so much “doing something wrong” as “not actively pursuing a challenging but reward interest”.

Two years certainly could be enough, but it really depends what the environment. If OP, like many English speakers who live in France for a couple of years, was teaching English, or studying in an English speaking postgraduate course, and then socialising with a mix of people from different places, who all use English as their shared language… It can be pretty easy to miss out on a lot of immersion.

And the level of language to comfortably phone up a hospital, explain a slightly odd request and be bounced around different departments with the administration… I know plenty of native French speakers who would avoid doing that.

I’m actually surprised it’s as high as that!

I sympathise! Meal planning, buying ingredients, realising you messed up and now half your vegetables have rotten, etc is a nightmare. I do envy people who can just get into a routine and eat the same stuff. But I defintely crave variety, and I feel like what I eat each day is probably two thirds of the joy I experience. I’d defintely go without hobbies, activities or possessions to eat slightly nicer food. Eating a nice meal with people you love feels like the pinacle of life experiences for me, and luckily it’s one you can do multiple times a day!