I posted earier today in another subreddit sharing my story about having a recent miscarriage and then having my sister-in-law announce her pregnancy a few days later.
Original post: https://www.reddit.com/TryingForABaby/comments/1cuy68t/just_need_to_vent_about_this_impossible/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
She did not know about my miscarriage and I let her give her announcement and share any/all details and excitement for a few hours, including watching a video of my MIL finding out she’s going to be a grandma before leaving for the night with a smile and congratulations. At no point did I give any indication that anything was wrong and I was engaged in the conversation. I then cried the whole way home.
After making my post on Reddit and getting so many kind words and support, I decided to reach out to her via text this morning with a very carefully worded message explaining I am so immensely happy for her, but I just had a miscarriage a few days ago and we coincidentally had the same due date. I asked for a bit of space and for her to not share too many details with me during this time while I process everything, and reiterated that I am NOT asking her to not talk about her pregnancy. Just to try to keep “the baby is as small as an orange seed” and conversations like that to a minimum if possible.
I said again how excited I am for them and how sorry I am to ask this - I repeated that I would not be telling them any of this unless I felt it absolutely necessary to protect my heart.
She did not take it well at all. She replied that it is “completely unacceptable for them to share the biggest news of their lives and not even 24 hours later I tell her that she can’t share the details of her pregnancy.” And that it made her “so so so sick to her stomach” that I would text that to her.
I’m at a loss. I feel horrible for ever telling her, but at the same time, I told her because I imagined she would have even a shred of empathy and understanding. I apologized for telling her and offered to call her so we can make sure we get any weird feelings squashed. She said “a phone call is not necessary. Everything has been said. Have a good weekend!” And ended the conversation.
I’m just…baffled? Did I do something wrong by sharing this with her? I have told no one else aside from my best friend, so it’s not like I’m stealing her spotlight. I’m just so disheartened and grossed out by the response.

I'm actively trying to date for a year now. I'm 21(F) and I honestly thing dating is not for me. Like men just answer my questions instead of actively engaging in a convo. What am I doing wrong?I ask them what they do I ask them what they're looking for how was their day what do they play to do in life what's their fav restaurant but all men do is just answer back like they aren't interested Why did u swipe right then

I'm a 42 year old male, I met my wife when I was 18, she was 23 and we began 'dating' when I was 21, working a job I hated in the same place she worked (casino workers, if you know, you know). We hooked up at a Xmas party and started a very awkward relationship. I say awkward because we had some weird trouble having sex for the first like 6 months... it's odd when I think back on it, should have been a huge red flag but she was draped in reg flags the entire time and it didn't seem matter to me. Aside from that, when we finally did have sex she got pregnant... she was not at all ready, neither was I really, but are you ever? At any rate, I didn't have too much of say in it, she decided on an abortion and I supported her. We stayed together after that horribly shitty experience, our relationship was never really all that good, lots of petty fighting/arguing and really the only reason it continued was because we worked opposite shifts and barely saw each other which made it easier to sorta get along.
Fast forward a couple years, we decide to buy a house because financially it made sense (this is almost 20 years ago so it was still affordable at that time), she made quite a bit of money, mostly in tips (so not on paper), but she probably made 2-3 times as much as I did so she never really struggled financially (in her life I don't think) while I came out of poverty and lived paycheck to paycheck up until a few years ago (the pandemic was surprisingly good for my career). This was never really an issue for me, I've lived in debt my whole life and I've always had the optimism that I would eventually work my way out of it, it's really the only bit of confidence I have in myself, my ability to learn and become relatively good at almost anything. This was always a point of contention, my wife hated that I had debt so when we bought the house together we were asked if we wanted a joint bank account as most couples combine their finances with cohabitation, my wife scoffed and adamantly told the banker there was no way she's mixing her finances with mine, it was relatively embarrassing at the time but I was also just 25 (she was 30) so I went along with whatever, it was going to be slightly cheaper for me to pay a mortgage than rent at the time so I was in and she'd cover bills. Things were never that great when living together, things must have been good enough for me to stay but I only look back with anger now so it's hard to see anything good but I'm sure there must have been some.
Fast forward another couple years and I feel extremely pressured (by her and her family mostly, they're old fashioned country type folks) to ask her to marry me... so I do. We stay engaged for another few years, I have no desire to waste a bunch on money on a wedding but she's the one with money so we have the big wedding she wanted. I'll admit it was a pretty great party, I don't remember anything good involving her on our wedding day but I have lots of good memories with family and friends. Afterwards we went on a 'romantic' honeymoon at an all-inclusive tropical resort and this is where I'll get into a bit of what I've dealt with for years... our resort was gorgeous, room was nice, just a room but nice... first thing my wife did was complain, about everything, the bed, the fridge, the lights, the balcony... nothing was good enough for her, this would become a common theme for the next decade plus. We also did not have sex on our honeymoon, she was far too busy complaining and being angry for us to ever get in the 'mood', this would be more foreshadowing of what's to come.
Now, this might seem like I'm building up to her becoming really bad after getting married but that's not really the case... she was just as bad before, it didn't really get worse, it just became more noticeable... or maybe I just tolerated things more in the beginning. The truth is when I look back, there were so many signs, she casually put me down and basically treated me like a child from day one, something I just accepted because looking back, I was a fucking child when we got together... she was not really, five years my senior, and she very much took advantage of that dynamic. Over the years she slowly went about convincing me that the things I wanted were silly/ridiculous and that I should want what she wanted (the nice lawn, the house, kids, etc., etc.) because everyone should. I never wanted these things.
I won't get into details here because I could write a novel on the insane shit I've dealt with over the last 20 years that could prove this, but I did do a lot of research in the last few years and have come to the conclusion that she could have BPD with narcissistic traits... I'm obviously not a doctor so it's definitely not a diagnosis or anything but she ticks almost every box from the many many things I've read on the subject, so if you have a moment and you don't know what BPD is I suggest googling it. It's pretty terrible but it might give you a better idea of my life.
At any rate, I dug myself deeper and deeper, thinking that every next move would finally make her happy and bring me some kind of peace, so we had a child about a year after we were married. This is where it gets really tricky... I sincerely regret having a child with this woman, especially because she is not at all "cut out to be a mother" (her words, not mine) but her mother had been sick on and off with cancer for a few years and her older sister couldn't have children so she felt obligated to give her mom a grandchild, bad reasons all around to have a child. That being said, I love my son more than anything in the world. As much as I wish we did not bring him into this horrible world, he's still the very best thing to happen to me and I will take care of him and love him for the rest of my life no matter what.
I should mention, since I've eluded to it, I've always had self-esteem issues, goes all the way back to having acne problems in high school but my wife has methodically picked away at my confidence and self-esteem over the years, cutting me down to this very day... to the point that I feel very much worthless. I know that I'm not, I know I deserve better but another fun thing about my wife is her desperate need for sympathy... So, not only does she make me feel horrible about myself, she also manages to make me feel horrible FOR her... she's overweight, and I'm sure has low self-esteem herself but she has decided to take it out on others rather than internalize and try to make things better for herself. She would rather blame others for any of her short comings, I guess it's easier to convince yourself you can't do anything about it when it's someone else fault.
I apologize, because I feel like I'm a bit all over the place but I guess I'm just trying to set the scene for where I'm at now and give just a small glimpse of the hell I've been living in and how I got here...
The first few years of my sons life were pretty great (comparatively at least), honestly it was probably the best we've ever gotten along, probably because most of my focus (and hers) was on our son. Unfortunately, her mother passed away just after my son's first birthday, this was obviously devastating for her, not unexpected but still devastating. We're lucky in Canada because she had a full year maternity leave and was able to spend time with her mom. She took it very hard, and decided to stay off work for an additional 4-6 months (can't remember exactly). This was all fine and understandable, I supported her through all of it, financially and emotionally. Once she went back to work, this is when things took a real nose dive... she has always been a very entitled person but upon going back to work (part time I should mention) she decided everything was horrible for her so she was going to make it horrible for everyone around her. This went on for around 4-5 years (again, the time frames get fuzzy because it's been so long), it was hell. I really just plowed through for our son, I made him my main focus and I took care of everything. Without going into it too much, I sort of shifted gears with my job and focused on finding something that worked better for raising a kid, I got onto a full time day shift (unheard in the casino world) and we worked opposite shifts. It was pretty good for child care (that we couldn't afford) as one of us was always home. This made her more contentious... again, going back to the entitled thing, she felt it wasn't 'fair' for me to work a good shift, she should be the one doing that. I eventually worked my way out of casinos and into a work from home job (before COVID) and it was great, she could work whatever shift she had to and I would always be around for our son.
Fast forward again, my son's in school, she's still super angry at life and making things hellish but I do my best to make it good for our son. It's difficult to keep a smile on with him while putting up with temper tantrums and fits from my wife... yes, we had a toddler and she was the one who threw fits. For an example, I can recall one specific Xmas where my son and I were playing video games which is his biggest interest, something she absolutely hates, and she made a few comments about how we should be doing family things together for Xmas (it was Xmas eve), so my son and I got off the computer and played a board game in the living room... nice and wholesome fun I thought. My wife throws a fit, full on screaming and slamming things around, I don't even remember what for exactly, it happens so often I can't keep track anymore. Her temper tantrum ends with her storming off and slamming the door to her room. I'll never forget looking at my son right after, him tearing up a bit and asking me "what is wrong mom?" and I just said "I'm really sorry buddy, I don't know" and we hugged... I cried a lot about that that night, one of many times I would have to apologize for her and the way she acts around him. This is just one small example and a terrible Xmas memory that I'll always have, hopefully my son won't. I think the worst part of these 'tantrums' is that she can almost always justify them, only to herself really but usually by blaming me or my son for "making her so upset" or worse, blaming some inanimate object for "not working how it should".
Fast forward to now(ish)... I've basically lived in my basement for the last 5 years, my office and bedroom are there, I stay down there to avoid my wife as much as possible but it feels like a prison cell now. I've retreated from life in general over the years too, I've always been a pretty anti-social introvert, I prefer quiet one on one conversations rather than group settings. Most of my 'friends' over the last 10-15 years revolved around my job (casinos take over your life people, for real) and my wife, I slowly lost any friends that had no connection to her. This was partially due to me retreating and the fact that my wife would insert herself into any friendship that was just mine to the point that I sort shut those people out to avoid them having to deal with her. Sadly, I don't have friends anymore (didn't have many to begin with but still), my son is essentially my only friend and because I work from home by myself I rarely talk to any other adults. My wife and I talk only when necessary... I cannot make eye contact with her anymore. This is probably needless to say but we haven't had sex in over 6 and a half years and I don't cheat, I don't have the confidence, so I've just accepted that I'm celibate now.
One other area of contention that I feel I should explain since I've mentioned it already, through the pandemic there was a serious power shift, financially speaking. She essentially lost her job and is now in a lower paying part time job (more realistic pay compared to her previous job), whereas I made a couple job changes that bumped me up well ahead of her. For comparison, the salaries essentially flipped, almost exactly... to where I make 2-3 times what she makes. This has become an area of contention because this was something she was able to lord over me for the majority of our relationship, she spent money freely while I paid the mortgage and barely ate for the first 5 years we lived in the house but now, for the first time in her life she has to pay attention to her finances and watch her spending... she does not like this so it's just another thing to constantly complain about and make passive aggressive comments about the things that 'dad' can afford to do/buy but doesn't (mainly because I'm paying the mortgage and all the bills now while finally paying down some debt).
Oh, I should probably also mention that it's a regular thing for her to insult me and put me down in front of our son and on flip side of that she also uses him to garner sympathy from me ("shouldn't daddy feel bad mommy has to go to work?") it's very frustrating because I just want to protect my kid but I guess she knows that.
Again, I'll apologize for how disjointed this all is... the more I type, the more I think about shit to type... like I mentioned, I could write a novel on this, mostly because I have no real outlet, just sit in my basement talking to myself about it all... or I guess stewing in it.
So, I guess I should try to finish off with what exactly the advice is that I'm seeking... I essentially hate my wife, the word I use often is 'despise' and over the years we've had brief conversations where I've told her that "I'm done and I'm just here for the kid" and unfortunately she took this as push to work on our marriage harder and 'fix' things, far too little, too late. She makes me feel like the worse person in the world and yet I just can't bring myself to say to her face that I want a divorce... I feel sorry for her, fuck so much so that I bought a house with her, married her, and had a fucking kid with her... I'm sure that's not the case, I must have loved her at one point but I just can't see it anymore. I don't know why I can't say it to her, why I can't just end this... I'm so worried about how she'll react, what she'll do to me, to my kid... how she'll try and turn him against me. I'm just paralyzed with the fear of what could/will happen if I tell her we're getting a divorce.
I've made plans over the last few years to move out, rent an apartment for me and my kid and just continue to pay her bills until we can sell the house and split the profit. I can't afford to do this, it would cause me to go back into debt but I do not care, it would be worth it to get away from her. I have set deadline after deadline... "I'll do it after Xmas" or "after her birthday" or "before my birthday" and these days come and go and I just can't do it... I don't know what the hell is wrong with me, it's like I just don't want to hurt her, even though I'm hurting her by not ending things and she definitely doesn't give a shit about hurting me... I just don't want to face her and deal with it and how she will make the aftermath hell.. and I worry so much about my son, it would have been so much better for him if I would have divorced her years ago, he's fucking 10 now... another fear is having to explain it to him but we're setting a horrible example. One of my wife's favourite ways to use our son against me, is planting it in his head that "family is all that matters", focusing specifically on our little family, and how we have to "stick together no matter what, that's what family does". It's such an underhanded way to prep him for hating me because I'm "breaking up our family".
I would appreciate any advice on how the hell I can get over my paralyzing fear and just end this marriage or maybe you wanna come over and end it for me? I'm at a point where I'd take that... as I mentioned I've not shared most of this with anyone... so feedback would be a really new thing for me.
Oh, and please feel free to call me chicken shit, and tell me I just need to grow a pair and get this done... it's the same thing I've been saying to myself for years, not helpful but I understand the sentiment.
Shit... I'm sorry, this turned into a novel. Thank you.

I (23F) am really struggling to find ways to impress my boyfriend’s (20M) parents. All of us are Christians but they’ve had more time and dedication to God than I had growing up. My family and I went to church and even volunteered but besides that, we never went home to pray, study the bible, have conversations, etc. Now everytime I go over, they are asking me all these questions about my walk and I get very confused and flustered. I’ve been honest with them and they even have helped me throughout it all so thankfully, I don’t feel completely left out. When you think of Christian parents, they are exactly what you would expect: no living together until married, mom only works part-time job to help with kids, son has a curfew, purity until marriage, etc. As frustrating as it can be, I’ve learned to be okay with their rules, even as both their son and I are adults. Here’s where I’m struggling, when I first met them, I told them I was in college (which was true). I have recently dropped out due to the career path not being something I was interested in anymore and already working a full-time job along with other responsibilities. I’ve had a detailed conversation with my boyfriend saying things like, “If you want to be the main provider for our future family, why would I spend $10,000+ just for a degree I may not even use?” He was fully supportive and loved that conversation between us but how do I express that to his family the next time they ask without it making it seem like I just want to use him for his money? Considering we are only dating, and not engaged or even married, you never know what could happen between us, I’m aware of that. I want to come off as very “traditional” but I also grew up in a single-mother home where my mom was the only one providing for me and my siblings. Also, any pointers to help impress them entirely would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

Sometimes I feel like life isn’t fair. One of the most hurtful things for me to face is that I am single while almost everyone around me is getting engaged and married. My ex broke up with me for someone else 2 years ago after we were together for almost 5 years. I finally feel healed and ready to date And i keep hoping I’ll meet someone but I just don’t think that it’s going to happen for me. Any advice or experiences are appreciated.

I should preface this by saying I live with my boyfriend who I love dearly and just recently accepted a great job offer but am just just feeling super lost in life. We’ve been dating for 2 years, living together for one, and he barely brings up engagement or wanting to marry me even though he says he does when I ask him. I also don’t love the city I live in and recently accepted a job in the Chicago area to be closer to family. However, I’ve moved around a lot in my 20s for my former career and never built up a strong friend base moving from city to city. All my friends back home are living in the suburbs, getting married and having kids. So moving back home doesn’t sound as exciting. My boyfriend is also hesitant on moving an hour and 20 minutes South for this job, making me feel not super excited about it anymore, worried it’s going to ruin our relationship. It’s a really big career move for me that I couldn’t say no to. I just feel so so lost and feel sad all the time and lonely not having a big group of friends behind me. Any advice or words of encouragement went be great.

AI has long been discussed in rationalist circles. There’s been a lot of focus on risks from artificial intelligence (particularly the idea that it might cause human extinction), but also the idea that artificial general intelligence might happen quite soon and subsequently transform society (e.g. supercharging economic growth in a technological singularity).
I’ve long found these arguments intriguing, and probably underrated by the public as a whole. I definitely don’t align myself with people like Steven Pinker who dismiss AI concerns entirely.
Nonetheless, I’ve noticed increasingly high confidence in beliefs of near-term transformative AI among rationalists. To be fair, it’s reasonable to update somewhat given recent advances like GPT-4. But among many, there is a belief that AI advances are the single most important thing happening right now. And among a minority, there are people with very extreme beliefs - such as quite high confidence that transformative AI is just a few years away, and/or that AI is very likely to kill us all.
My core arguments in this post are that firstly, from an “epistemic humility” or “outside view” perspective, we should be suspicious of confident views that the world is soon going to end (or change radically).
Secondly, the implications of the most radical views could cause people who hold them to inflict significant harm on themselves or others.

Who Believes In “AI imminence”?

The single person I am most specifically critiquing is Eliezer Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky appears unwilling to give specific probabilities but writings like “Death With Dignity” has caused many including Scott Alexander to characterise him as believing that AI has a >90% chance of causing human extinction)
As a very prominent and very “doomy” rationalist, I worry that he may have convinced a fair number of people to share similar views, views which if taken seriously could hold its holders to feel depressed and/or make costly irrevocable decisions.
But though I think Yudkowsky deserves the most scrutiny, I don’t want to focus entirely on him.
Take Scott Alexander - he frames himself in the aforementioned link as “not as much of a doomer as some people”, yet gave a 33% probability (later adjusted downwards as a result of outside view considerations like those I raise in here) to “only” ~20%. While this leaves enough room for hope that it’s not as potentially dangerous a view as Yudkowsky’s, I agree with how the top Reddit comment in the original post said:

Is AI risk the only field where someone can write an article about how they’re not (much) of a doomer when they think that the risk of catastrophe/disasteextinction is 33%?

Beyond merely AI risk, claims about “transformative AI” date back to ideas about the “intelligent explosion” or “singularity” that are most popularly associated with Ray Kurzweil. A modern representation of this is Tom Davidson of Open Philanthropy, who wrote a report on takeoff speeds.
Other examples can be seen in (pseudo-)prediction markets popular with rationalists, such as Metaculus putting the median date of AGI at 2032, and Manifold Markets having a 17% chance of AI doom by 2100 (down from its peak of around 50% (!) in mid-2023).

Why Am I Sceptical?

My primary case for (moderate) scepticism is not about the object-level arguments around AI, but appealing to the “outside view”. My main arguments are:

• Superforecasters and financial markets are not giving high credence to transformative AI. Both groups have good track records, so we should strongly consider deferring to their views.
  
• The transformative AI argument is "fishy" (to borrow Will MacAskill’s argument against “The Most Important Century”). It implies that not only we are at an unusually pivotal time in history (perhaps the most important decade, let alone century), but that consequently, rationalists are perhaps the most important prophets in history. When your claims are that extraordinary, it seems much more likely that they're mistaken.
  
• The “inside view” arguments do not seem very robust to me. That is, they are highly speculative arguments that are primarily discussed among an insular group of people in usually relatively informal settings. I think you should be wary of any argument that emerges via this process, even if you can’t point to any specific way in which they are wrong.
  

Why I’m Against Highly Immodest Epistemology

However, maybe appealing to the “outside view” is incorrect? Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote a book, Inadequate Equiibria, which in large part argued against what he saw as excessive use of the “outside view”. He advises:

Try to spend most of your time thinking about the object level. If you’re spending more of your time thinking about your own reasoning ability and competence than you spend thinking about Japan’s interest rates and NGDP, or competing omega-6 vs. omega-3 metabolic pathways, you’re taking your eye off the ball.

I think Yudkowsky makes a fair point about being excessively modest. If you are forever doubting your own reasoning to the extent that you think you should defer to the majority of Americans who are creationists, you’ve gone too far.
But I think his case is increasingly weak the more radically immodest your views here. I’ll explain with the following analogy:
Suppose you were talking to someone who was highly confident in their new business idea. What is an appropriate use of a “modesty” argument cautioning against overconfidence?
A strong-form modesty argument would go something like “No new business idea could work, because if it could, someone would already have done it”. This is refuted by countless real-world examples, and I don’t think anyone actually believes in strong-form modesty.
A moderate-form modesty argument would go something like “Some new business ideas work, but most fail, even when their founders were quite confident in them. As an aspiring entrepreneur, you should think your chances of success in your new venture are similar to those of the reference class of aspiring entrepreneurs”.
The arguments against epistemic modesty in Inadequate Equilibria are mainly targeted against reasoning like this. And I think here there’s a case where we can have reasonable disagreement about the appropriate level of modesty. You may have some good reasons to believe that your idea is unusually good or that you are unusually likely to succeed as an entrepreneur. (Though a caveat: with too many degrees of freedom, I think you run the risk of leading yourself to whatever conclusion you like).
For the weak-form modesty argument, let’s further specify that your aspiring entrepreneur’s claim was “I’m over 90% confident that my business will make me the richest person in the world”.
To such a person, I would say: “Your claim is so incredibly unlikely a priori and so self-aggrandising that I feel comfortable in saying you’re overconfident without even needing to consider your arguments”.
That is basically what I feel about Eliezer Yudwosky and AI.
Let’s take a minute to consider what the implications are if Yudkowsky is correctly calibrated about his beliefs in AI. For a long time, he was one of the few people in the world to be seriously concerned about it, and even now, with many more people concerned about AI risk, he stands out as having some of the highest confidence in doom.
If he’s right, then he’s arguably the most important prophet in history. Countless people throughout history have tried forecasting boon or bust (and almost always been wrong). But on arguably the most important question in human history - when we will go extinct and why - Yudkowsky was among the very few people to see it and easily the most forceful.
Indeed, I’d say this is a much more immodest claim than claiming your business idea will make you the richest person in the world. The title of the richest person in the world has been shared by numerous people throughout history, but “the most accurate prophet of human extinction” is a title that can only ever be held by one person.
I think Scott Alexander’s essay Epistemic Learned Helplessness teaches a good lesson here. Argument convincingness isn’t necessarily strongly correlated with the truth of a claim. If someone gives you what appears to be a strong argument for something that appears crazy, you should nonetheless remain highly sceptical.
Yet I feel like Yudkowsky wants to appeal to “argument convincingness” because that’s what he’s good at. He has spent decades honing his skills arguing on the internet, and much less at acquiring traditional credentials and prestige. “Thinking on the object level” sounds like it’s about being serious and truth-seeking, but I think in practice it’s about privileging convincing-sounding arguments and being a good internet debater above all other evidence.
A further concern I have about “argument convincingness” for AI is that there’s almost certainly a large “motivation gap” in favour of the production of pro-AI-risk arguments compared to anti-AI-risk arguments, with the worriers spending considerably more time and effort than the detractors. As Philip Trammel points out in his post “But Have They Engaged with The Arguments?, this is true of almost any relatively fringe position. This can make the apparent balance of “argumentative evidence” misleading in those cases, with AI no exception.
Finally, Yudkowsky’s case for immodesty depends partly on alleging he has a good track record of applying immodesty to “beat the experts”. But his main examples (a lightbox experiment and the monetary policy of the Bank of Japan) I don’t find that impressive given he could cherry-pick. Here’s an article alleging that Yudkowsky’s predictions have frequently between egregiously wrong and here’s another arguing that his Bank of Japan position in particular didn’t ultimately pan out.

Why I’m Also Sceptical of Moderately Immodest Epistemology

I think high-confidence predictions of doom (or utopia) are much more problematic than relatively moderate views - they are more likely to be wrong, and if taken seriously, more strongly imply that the believer should consider making radical, probably harmful life changes.
But I do still worry that the ability to contrast with super confident people like Yudkowsky lets the “not a total doomer” people off the hook a little too easily. I think it’s admirable that Scott Alexander seriously grappled with the fact that superforecasters disagreed with him and updated downwards based on that observation.
Still, let’s revisit the “aspiring entrepreneur” analogy - imagine they had instead said: “You know what, I’ve listened to your claims about modesty and agree that I’ve been overconfident. I now think there’s only a 20% chance that my business idea will make me the richest person in the world”.
Sure - they’ve moved in the right direction, but it’s easy to see that they’re still not doing modesty very well.
An anti-anti-AI risk argument Scott made (in MR Tries the Safe Uncertainly Fallacy) is that appealing to base rates leaves you vulnerable to “reference class tennis” where both sides can appeal to different reference classes, and the “only winning move is not to play”.
Yet in the case of our aspiring entrepreneur, I think the base rate argument of “extremely few people can become the richest person in the world” is very robust. If the entrepreneur tried to counter with “But I can come up with all sorts of other reference classes in which I come out more favourably! Reference class tennis! Engage with my object-level arguments!”, it would not be reasonable to throw up your hands and say “Well, I can’t come up with good counterarguments, so I guess you probably do have a 20% chance of becoming the richest person in the world then”.
I contend that “many people have predicted the end of the world and they’ve all been wrong” is another highly robust reference class. Yes, you can protest about “anthropic effects” or reasons why “this time is different”. And maybe the reasons why “this time is different” are indeed a lot better than usual. Still, I contend that you should start from a prior of overwhelming skepticism and only make small updates based on arguments you read. You should not go “I read these essays with convincing arguments about how we’re all going to die, I guess I just believe that now”.

What Should We Make Of Surveys Of AI Experts?

Surveys done of AI experts, as well as opinions of well-regarded experts like Geoffrey Hinton and Stewart Russell, have shown significant concerns about AI risk (example).
I think this is good evidence for taking AI risk seriously. One important thing it does is raise AI risk out of the reference class of garden-variety doomsday predictions/crazy-sounding theories that have no expert backing.
However, I think it’s still only moderately good evidence.
Firstly, I think we should not consider it as an “expert consensus” nearly as strong as say, the expert consensus on climate change. There is nothing like an IPCC for AI, for example. This is not a mature, academically rigorous field. I don’t think we should update too strongly from AI experts spending a few minutes filling in a survey. (See for instance this comment about the survey, showing how non-robust the answers given are, indicating the responders aren’t thinking super hard about the questions).
Secondly, I believe forecasting AI risk is a multi-disciplinary skill. Consider for instance asking physicists to predict the chances of human extinction due to nuclear war in the 1930s. They would have an advantage in predicting nuclear capabilities, but after nuclear weapons were developed, the reasons we haven’t had a nuclear war yet have much more to do with international relations than nuclear physics.
And maybe AGI is so radically different from the AI that exists today that perhaps asking AI researchers now about AI risk might have been like asking 19th-century musket manufacturers about the risk from a hypothetical future “super weapon”.
I think an instructive analogy were the failed neo-Malthusian predictions of the 1960s and 1970s, such as The Population Bomb or The Limits to Growth. Although I’m unable to find clear evidence of this, my impression is that these beliefs were quite mainstream among the most “obvious” expert class of biologists (The Population Bomb author Paul Ehlrich had a PhD in biology), and the primary critics tended to be in other fields like economics (most notably Julian Simon). Biologists had insights, but they also had blind spots. Any “expert survey” that only interviewed biologists would have missed crucial insights from other disciplines.

What Are The Potential Consequences Of Overconfidence?

People have overconfident beliefs all the time. Some people erroneously thought Hillary Clinton was ~99% likely to win the 2016 Presidential election. Does it matter that much if they’re overconfident about AI?
Well, suppose you were overconfident about Clinton. You probably didn’t do anything differently in your life, and the only real cost of your overconfidence was being unusually surprised on election day 2016. Even one of the people who was that confident in Clinton didn’t suffer any worse consequences than eating a bug on national television.
But take someone who is ~90% confident that AI will radically transform or destroy society (“singularity or extinction by 2040") and seriously acts like it.
Given that, it seems apparently reasonable to be much more short-term focused. You might choose to stop saving for retirement. You might forgo education on the basis that it will be obsolete soon. These are actions that some people have previously taken, are considering taking or are actually taking because of expectations of AI progress.
At a societal level, high confidence in short-term transformative AI implies that almost all non-AI related long-term planning that humanity does is probably a waste. The most notable example would be climate change. If AI either kills us or radically speeds up scientific and economic growth by the middle of the century, then it seems pretty stupid to be worrying about climate change. Indeed, we’re probably underconsuming fossil fuels that could be used to improve the lives of people right now.
At its worst, there is the possibility of AI-risk-motivated terrorism. Here’s a twitter thread from Emil Torres talking about this, noticeably this tweet in particular about minutes from an AI safety workshop “sending bombs” to OpenAI and DeepMind.
To be fair, I think it’s highly likely the people writing that were trolling. Still - if you’re a cold-blooded utilitarian bullet-biter with short timelines and high p(doom), I could easily see you rationalising such actions.
I want to be super careful about this - I don’t want to come across as claiming that terrorism is a particularly likely consequence of “AI dooming”, nor do I want to risk raising the probability of it by discussing it too much and planting the seed of it in someone’s head. But a community that takes small risks seriously should be cognizant of the possibility. This is a concern that I think anyone with a large audience and relatively extreme views (about AI or anything) should take into account.

Conclusion

This post has been kicking around in draft form since around the release of GPT-4 a year ago. At that time, there were a lot of breathless takes on Twitter about how AGI was just around the corner, Yudkowsy was appearing on a lot of podcasts saying we were all going to die, and I started to feel like lots of people had gone a bit far off on the deep end.
Since then I feel there’s a little bit of a vibe shift away from the most extreme scenarios (as exhibited in the Manifold extinction markets), as well as me personally probably overestimating how many people ever believed in them. I’ve found it hard to try to properly articulate the message: “You’re probably directionally correct relative to society as a whole, but some unspecified number of you have probably gone too far”.
Nonetheless, my main takeaways are:

• Eliezer Yudkowsky (these days) is probably causing harm, and people with moderate concerns about AI should distance themselves from him. Espousing views that we are all likely to die from AI should not be tolerated as a merely strong opinion, but as something that can cause meaningful harm to people who believe it. I feel this might actually be happening to some degree (I think it’s notable that e.g. the 80,000 Hours podcast has never interviewed him, despite interviewing plenty of other AI-risk-concerned people). But I would like to see more of a “Sister Souljah moment” where e.g. a prominent EA thought leader explicitly disavows him.
  
• Yudkowsky being the worst offender doesn't let everyone else off the hook. For instance, I think Scott Alexander is much better at taking modesty seriously, yet I don't think he takes it seriously enough.
  
• We should be generally suspicious of arguments for crazy-sounding things. I have not only become more suspicious of arguments about AI, but also other arguments relatively popular in rationalist or EA circles, but not so much outside it (think certain types of utilitarian arguments that imply that e.g. maybe insect welfare or the long-term future outweighs everything else). I appreciate that they might say something worth considering, and perhaps weak-form versions of them could be reasonable. But the heuristic of “You probably haven’t found the single most important thing ever” is something I think should be given more weight.
  

Today is my due date with first pregnancy! I’m 41 years old and have a loving boyfriend who is several years older than me with two teenage boys so he’s been through this before. Everything has been going fine in my pregnancy - essentially no morning sickness, normal genetic screenings, normal ultrasounds, normal glucose tolerance testing, normal blood pressures. I’ve been followed by MFM clinic given my age and doing weekly antenatal testing since 36 weeks with everything being normal so far, including amniotic fluid levels and fetal heart monitoring. I’ve had some anxiety just with this being my first pregnancy and having been previously married in a marriage that was not good. I essentially came to the understanding that I would never have children. The marriage ended have been divorced since fall 2022. I met my boyfriend last spring and we just clicked and things felt perfect - like a whole new outlook on life full of opportunities. It was amazing and incredible news to learn we were pregnant last fall. During my pregnancy we have been primarily seeing one midwife who we love and trust. At around 36 weeks she mentioned possibility of cervical ripening and induction but didn’t dwell on it and said if things were going well with no concerning findings on monitoring or concerning symptoms, she’d be ok with letting me progress without planned induction during the 39th week. I’ve subsequently seen other midwives just due to scheduling availability, and to meet other midwives in case our primary one isn’t at the delivery. Upon meeting new midwives, the recommendation for planned induction was pushed heavily on me, including possibility of use of the balloon to help with cervical ripening. A date was scheduled this past week to start an outpatient cervical ripening protocol but on the day we were to start that, I was seen in L&D and had fetal heart monitoring which was normal. By sheer luck we saw our usual midwife and spoke with her about giving the baby more time as long as everything was still going well and all monitoring was normal. She supported that and arranged for another antenatal monitoring appointment with MFM on Monday (2 days from now) and a follow up with her. Now that today is the baby’s due date and no signs of early labor, although I am feeling more pressure in my pelvis that may be engagement of the baby, my boyfriend is pushing to go in to L&D triage today just to be seen and monitored despite having an appointment in 2 days. I feel like I’m at a loss of what to do and second guessing myself because of him being impatient. I’ve been walking, doing some yoga, using yoga ball, stretching, drinking raspberry leaf tea, eating dates, having sex, etc. All the things that could potentially help induce labor (I know some have no real science behind it but why not?) but no true contractions yet and I still feel overall really good and can feel the baby moving normally. Anyone else in my age range with no comorbidities and normal fetal monitoring who declined elective induction? I don’t want unnecessary stress or anxiety to overwhelm me at this point but also want to be sensitive to my boyfriend’s concerns since today is the due date. He scared me this morning saying I may end up with a c-section but I feel like that’s a strong assumption to make. I’m thinking maybe I should just do an elective induction to get things going even though it wasn’t what I imagined or hoped for at this point.

Long story short my old boss (who became a friend) was/is highly unstable. Im fairly certain she has undiagnosed BPD and had mentioned it to her in the past. She had no boundaries for work or personal. It was only her and I who worked together each day so I have no one to really speak for the experience I went thru (anyone who did work there quit by week 6 because she was bad. They don't want to write testimony letters in my appeal case due to fear of her retaliating). My boss ensured I quit via email and not fired so i could not get unemployment. I did get approved for unemployment due to a toxic work environment. She claims she did not receive the documents in time to dispute the claim.
Here's a quick overview of why I quit below: We where on a "worktrip" (I was not paid) at a medspa conference. I am not a injector but she is and I was her model. She got mad at me during lunch for inviting one of the girls to go out with us later that night because she was alone. My boss decided to be rude and say ACTUALLY NO THIS IS MY ASSISTANT AND WE ARE NOT GOING OUT TONIGHT (we where and had already had plans on the night for weeks) and then she said COME ON LETS GO and I said no Im going to finish lunch and the conversation and she rolled her eyes and walked away. After that she ignored me for the rest of the day and would pretty much walk away from me if I tried to engage her. She started to be rude to the people running this thing and throwing a fit because she was one of the last injectors. She threw such a fit that they ended up giving her thousands of dollars in free product to get back into her good graces. I was around for this and it was super akward. There was no reason for her to be so rude and disrespectful and she knows I dont play that game and dont want to be associated with people that do cause its not a good look (I had almost quit a few months back due to her being so rude to a sales person that she almost cried and told her then I would not be apart of that ever again and she said she would fix it). After the conference there was a reception for drinks and snacks. She went straight to bar and I sat where she could see me and she just walked away so I went downstairs to the lobby to call and check on my kids. When I went to go back up to the room she had a call on speaker and she was saying terrible things about me and lies. After 15 mins of this she realized I was outside the door and could hear her and asked me to come in and talk. I was pissed at the time so I said no not right now and she slammed the door. I went downstairs to call my husband and calm down and about 20 mins later she comes down with glass of wine in hand telling me we had to speak now. I said no I'm speaking to my husband right now and I'll speak with her later. She said OH YEA REALLY THATS HOW ITS GNA BE THEN I GOT YOU and went back upstairs. A few minutes later a text comes thru from the girl I met at lunch asking about plans for the night. I go to respond and my boss had locked me out of the work account so I go and check my other work accounts and I was locked out of those as well. Then I see her go into the lobby bar and I was not wanting to play her mind games and her "forcing" me to talk to her so I went up to the hotel room to pack my stuff and go to another hotel. I get to the door and try my key and it won't work so go down to the lobby asking for assistance. They called her 3x on speaker with no answer and then go to the back office and 5 mins later come out saying security would be escorting me to get my things. After getting my stuff with security I'm in the lobby and she's like where are you going and I said I'm leaving I'm not doing this with you and she freaks out so I said I was serious to leave me alone and we would discuss it once we got into the office on Monday. She went on to text me at least 70 text messages during the night saying how I wasn't suppose to hear her saying those things (backstory: she has been caught doing this multiple times to me either clients, coworkers, friends, and even directly in front of me. I had spoken to her about it previously saying to stop and she said would and was always just teasing). The next morning (aprx 8 hours later) we fly home. I changed my seat so I wasn't next to her and she kept walking the aisles trying to get my attention and after the 4th time dropped a note on my lap apologizing again). I didn't speak with her and had my husband pick me up from the airport. A few hours later she ends up sending a text that says HEY DID YOU QUIT? I said no I assumed I was fired since I was locked out of all accounts and I'm fine with that. She said no your not fired but if you want to quit please send a resignation letter so I did and it said I QUIT DUE TO A TOXIC WORK ENVIRONMENT. As the days and weeks passed she continued to message me apologizing and asking me to come back to work and each time I refused telling her until she is under the care of a mental health professional for at least 6 months I would not consider it. Once she realized I filed for unemployment and got approved she lost her shit and started to report me saying that I am working and frauding the system (I'm not) and that I quit because I was mad that she told me I was not hitting work standards. Eventually she filed the appeal and it's filled with lies and aprx 40 fake document "writeups" and where the employee should sign it says EMPLOYEE REFUSED TO SIGN on every single one (this is not true as I never received any write up in my 1 year). The appeal hearing case was the other day and she brought her brother inlaw/part owner of company/lawyer with her. I know this guy and have watched his child for him and we have always been on great terms. He came at me hard. So hard to the point that when I was answering the officers questions I had to ask that he be muted due to him laughing or repeatedly yelling at me saying REALLY or ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THAT?! They denied ever receiving my documents concerning the case (they did I sent them to her email where she sent her documents to me from) and insisted they not be used. This went on for over a hour leaving the officer to say we need to continue this at another date and the packet will be in the mail with the new date and time. He went on to argue about why it should be settled now and she had to keep repeating herself that it would be continued as she has other appointments. I expect this next hearing will be just as crazy and if I am still approved for unemployment that they will appeal it again and again until they win or are out of appeals. I'm not sure if I should continue to fight it or just say screw it because I have really bad anxiety over it all (even typing this my heart is racing and hands are sweating) and she is pretty crazy so I'm kind of worried how she will retaliate if I do win. I also know if I lose that I have to repay all money received plus interest and I can't afford that at the moment..obviously. Really the only reason I am at this point is due to principal and wanting to let's her know what she doesn't isn't acceptable. If I give up I feel like she will win and continue on her merry path of destruction and hate. Should I get my own lawyer for this? I'm sure it will cost me more that I will even get from unemployment in total (I have a max benefit amount of 2k) but I have never done this before and feel like I might need someone with experience.

Over the course of my 4 year marriage to my partner, I have arrived at the position that I was abused, manipulated, and functionally enslaved to a mentally ill partner.
In simplest form, the progression is apparently observable. She was diagnosed with cancer in October of 2019 while we were engaged. Due to the diagnosis, we moved up our actual marriage date (our wedding was still set for mid-April) to December 1, 2019. Her surgery was December 13, 2019. In my compassion for her, I agreed to move our wedding date up to offset her anxiety around who would be responsible for her if things went south with her surgical treatment.
Our first month of marriage was straightforward; she was on pain meds recovering from surgery, so the main engagement that occurred was me walking her up and down the hospital hallway as she recovered and trying to meet her base physical needs of hygiene, food, and presence. We stayed in the hospital for 2-3 weeks (with recurring hospital visits for complications).
Quickly after we figured out our marital living situation in her small 3-bed apartment with 2 roommates, our relationship devolved. Specifically, she was irritable because of the pain she was in, causing her to lash out at me with regular frequency for small things. If I didn’t put clothes away in the right place, didn’t anticipate her needs (without her communicating them), or ate the wrong food in front of her she would shout at me and decry me for my thoughtlessness.
These small, critical engagements were wounding and created a distance between us – and there was no upside. She was never kind, never paid mind to needs I might have, and started down a path of cultivating a root of bitterness in her soul. She quickly revealed herself to be venomous, hateful, and vindictive when she felt like she was wronged — and any observation of concern about our marriage resulted me in being accused of being mean or insensitive, even if I spent hours or days calculating the best way to share my concern (and I have a master’s degree in communication where I focused in studying disagreement — I know how to carefully package concerns).
During this time, I worked hard to provide for us, foreseeing a significant time period where I would have to be primary financial provider and caregiver. I increased my income each year we were married by around 25%, finishing our marriage at >$80,000 in yearly income, compared to starting our marriage at a modest $42,000 salary (including dramatically improving our healthcare). Frankly, I increased my income to provide for us in spite of the lack of support at home.
But to be clear: I don’t think it would have been particularly difficult to provide financially if I had an ounce of support at home.
However, the relentless criticism and expectation of mind-reading continued through the years. I rationalized this abuse for the first year of our marriage because of all the excuses to be cruel, she had a good one – she had cancer. I hung onto a hope that it would stop. Contrary to my hope, as the years went on – and our expenses climbed – and I continued to work myself to the bone – she continued to relentlessly critique and even started being more emotionally demanding, expecting me to take responsibility for her inability to cope with her emotions – I was drowning. She was asking too much of me. There was no deliverance from her abuse.
I was exhausted. In the peak of the abuse I endured at her hand, I was working multiple jobs, sleeping 10+ hours a night and napping frequently during the day around meetings and work, then coping with alcohol to numb myself to the abusive dynamic and fall asleep with no support from her. The only time I could approach her sexually was when I was intoxicated, with inhibitions lowered. The only time I could have a conversation with her was with a counselor in the room. Without something to mitigate opportunity for her to be cruel to me, either a mediator or self-medication, I was scared.
I lived at home in a constant state of alert and cognitive fatigue. No matter how I tried to make sense of my home life, I couldn’t. When she looked at or touched me, I would recoil in fear, anticipating some sort of incisive critique or demand expressed. Then she would criticize me for not responding warmly to her, exacerbating the cycle.
I couldn’t meet her needs – I was utterly exhausted. When I would tell her of the exhaustion I experienced in marital counseling, her responses were typically something along the lines of not believing me, denying what I was saying was true, or calling my exhaustion an ‘excuse’. I could interact happily with my friends… why not her?
I did not deny her demands were legitimate; rather, I expressed my inability to meet them because of how fatigued I was. I said ‘I can’t’ so many times. I realize her demands were small; affection, saying ‘i love you’, complimenting her. But it’s disorienting to be consistently berated and belittled by a person and then asked to compliment them and tell them you love them.
The push and pull of abuse is exhausting to a person who is not mentally because it does not make sense.
Further, in counseling I realized that I have forgotten that I have needs. I have lost the tools to even evaluate what my needs might be because, implicitly and explicitly in my marriage, I was told my needs don’t matter.
My marriage made no sense; I was obviously drowning, exhausted with the demands our life imposed on me. I was doing everything I could to get straight. I was in individual therapy, marital counseling, pastoral counseling, trying different antidepressants (4 in total – all with no effect), changing eating habits, trying to reduce my drinking, getting medical tests to see if I had health issues causing my fatigue, and being vulnerable in my friendships in an attempt to invite others in to process and move forward and figure out my marriage. I desperately shared everything I could about my marriage, hoping someone else would crack the code where I couldn’t.
None of my efforts worked. I could not get out of the exhausted state I was in. It’s worth noting here that within weeks of separating I almost completely cut out alcohol, got into a regular sleep schedule, was waking up at 6-7am every day and reading multiple hours (which I couldn’t do in marriage due to cognitive fatigue/distraction), and experienced a resurgence of energy. I have felt the duress I was under lift and lift and lift and the weeks and months have went on.
In retrospect, I was experiencing cognitive fatigue because I was taking the demands my wife was placing on me seriously, but no matter what I did I could not make sense of them. How could she not see that I was doing everything I could to make ends meet – the ends which she was imposing on me? I did not have additional energy left. She would ask me ‘Do you love me?’ and I didn’t know how to respond. How is my work not at least some symbol of love? My dream was to be a poor professor, which she knew – instead I was grinding myself to the bone, working in digital marketing with multiple freelance projects, picking up a bartending gig and a teaching gig on top of full-time employment.
The last straw was when she accused me of abuse. I took that accusation seriously, and weighed it against my experience. ‘Am I an abuser?’ I asked myself. I sorted through my behavior and how I treated her. I came to the conclusion that I may be a poor husband in serious ways; but I am not an abuser. And the abuse question opened the door to the question… ‘I may not be an abuser… but is there abuse in our marriage?’ And the answer quickly became ‘Yes.’
When we were married, I understood that she wasn’t going to work much for a while. However, she worked the bare minimum she could for 4 years, earning at most in a single year $18,000. As the years went on and my income climbed, our debt continued to climb as well. She was still contributing the same, yet spending frivolously on useless knick knacks for our home and a cat. As I packed up our home to sell, the majority of items were dozens of boxes of useless junk she’d accumulated.
She lived a life of mania around finances. We would go to marital counseling and she would regularly express, ‘I would rather be poor and happy than rich and sad’. We were poor and sad. Sure, my income was the highest it’d ever been – but we were still drowning, with debts climbing. At the end of our marriage, we’d accumulated about $20,000 in consumer debt between credit cards and personal loans.
It was traumatizing (and abusive) to go to counseling and be told by my partner she would ‘rather be poor and happy and than rich and sad’ when the factual scenario we were living was neither. She actively denied reality – both my lived experience and the reality of our finances – at my expense. It was killing me, trying to make sense of what we were going through but being unable to make sense of what I was being told and what I was experiencing.
Throughout this time, it is worth adding that she also leveraged my spiritual leadership to ‘set me straight’. I was in a conservative Evangelical space, believing that men are the ultimate provider in a family unit and primarily responsible for the status of the marriage. Because I was not doing what she wanted me to (lavishing her with affection), I was muscled into multiple groups and meetings where pastoral care intervened to restore our marriage. In the moment, I submitted to my pastoral care because of my trust for them and my faith in God. Now, I believe this dynamic was abusive; my pastoral care did not care in any sense for my soul; they only cared about fixing my marriage. No questions around ‘why’ my marriage was so bad were asked; only what was going on and how it could be fixed. I relish the thought of my pastoral care being held accountable for the abuse they exercised upon me during this time on judgment day, albeit through a shaken faith in a God that would enable this dynamic.
With my spiritual community, I shared that I felt like she was my tormentor; that she it felt as if I were on the ground due to exhaustion, and she was standing on my throat, telling me to ‘get up’ and ‘tell me you love me’; that our metaphorical life was a boat, sinking, and I was desperately bailing out water. All the while, she stood at the other end of the boat, desperately bailing water in and looking at me like I was a maniac.
And yet, because there was no adultery, there was no category for divorce. We had sworn an oath before God and were required to fix this.
As I reflect upon my marriage (and the ongoing divorce proceedings), a few things are clear.
She is an abuser. I don’t think she intends to be, but impact matters. She is mentally ill and unable to reckon with basic reality.
She is a manipulator. She manipulated my spiritual community against me. I was viewed as someone to be corrected while begging for help from my trusted friends and pastoral care, whom I now regret being vulnerable with due to their abuse and denial of my reality because I didn’t fit neatly into their thin theological categories.
She is an enslaver. In divorce proceedings, she is doing everything she can to get every dollar from me, leveraging student loans I did not co-sign, my continually increasing income due to my hard work, and denying every claim of dissipated assets she can.
It is truly a mind-breaking experience to see your compassion leveraged against you for money. I had to sit under an attorney proclaiming to a judge that, since I consented to move up our marriage date before her cancer surgery, ‘I knew what I was getting into’. That she is entitled to large sums of money (that do not exist; we never had more than $3000 in our bank account during marriage) due to that decision.
Even apart from the abuse, I did not know what I was getting into. Including the abuse, I am full of remorse for having invited such an evil, hateful person into my life.
This experience has been the most challenging to my faith. As I endured abuse from her, I trusted God in a few ways. That the compassion I showed would maybe be rewarded – or, at least not punished. That my spiritual community wanted what was best for me. That God was not a punitive, hateful God (like my partner). I do not believe this trust was well placed, but am open to shortcomings in my views here.
I struggle to consent to a God that allowed my experience to occur. I’m open and processing in some kind of faith, but I really don’t know what it looks like to find a place to put this pain and betrayal that I’m experiencing.
I am a survivor of abuse, and the abuse I endured was mind-shattering. I sacrificed everything to support a partner diagnosed with serious bodily illness, which drove her to hate me and deny my lived experience because she could not reconcile it with the hatefulness she cultivated over our marriage, choosing bitterness over any positivity for four years, poisoning my well-being in the process.
What I envisioned to be the most compassionate moment of my life — marrying a person with cancer and promising to support and love them — has become nothing but a symbol of pain and remorse. I envisioned a life where my partner and I would fight against the terror of cancer; instead she hopped to the other side, choosing her ongoing health issues as the ally and myself as the enemy.
It took me 4 years to realize it. And as she drags me through court to leverage every dollar out of me I can, my only regret is that I didn’t leave my abuser to her own devices sooner; self-pity, hatefulness, and a sheer disregard toward taking responsibility for anything.
I am grateful but drowning. As we are negotiating settlement, the end is near, and my abuser will soon be unable to execute any influence in my life.

For context, this story happened nearly 3 years ago, however a recent late-night conversation with a friend made it clear to me that the repercussions of this incident are still being felt to this day.
I (25M) met my now-ex girlfriend (25F), whom I will be assigning the fake name "Anne," when we were both 17 at our small town high school in semi-rural Georgia. Our romantic relationship began following our senior prom which we attended together. Despite our approaching high school graduations, the two of us decided that we could make our relationship work beyond high school and into college since we would both be attending different universities in the same city. We each grew up in typical southern protestant traditions and casually held onto some sort of religious beliefs. I, myself, have always identified religiously as something of a deist, meaning I believed (and still do to this day) that some sort of higher entity, force, or meaning was responsible for existence. Anne, at that time, would have self-identified as a Christian and attended church semi-regularly, however it was never a significant part of her life or attitude toward the world.
Shortly after we both began our new lives as college students in an unfamiliar city, Anne expressed that she would like to search for a new church to attend regularly as it helped create a sense of community and belonging for her which she had been missing since moving away from home. I strongly encouraged this, since I wanted her to be able to make friends and discover herself philosophically. The church that caught her attention was a non-denominational "modern" church that seemed to emphasize community at least on a surface level basis. However, out of curiosity, I took a look at the church's website and did notice a few mentions of "Pentecostal experience", which worried me since my only knowledge of Pentecostals was rumors of snake handling, especially in the more rural areas of the South. However, I chose to not be too judgmental upfront and continued to encourage her to find herself and meet new people.
Over the next few months, Anne started to spend more and more time devoted to bible studies and attending gatherings for women at the church. She specifically asked me not to accompany her on Sunday services since, as she put it, the elder members of the church would not act too kindly about unmarried woman "dragging around" some unfamiliar man who was not her husband. It became clear pretty quickly that she was becoming more than just a casual Christian and I supported this, however we did not talk much about the specifics of what she was being taught at this church.
This all came to a head when one night, Anne asked me if she could pray over me in something she called a "spiritual language." Having only ever heard vaguely of speaking in tongues, I obliged. I sat next to her on my couch and watched as she raised one hand and began quietly chanting in complete gibberish. My heart immediately sank in discomfort and fear but I was too stunned to do anything. so I just sat and watched for several minutes until she finally went quiet. All I could do or say was tell her that I appreciated her thoughtfulness and went about my day.
Pretty soon, the behaviors and acts became more and more extreme. Her "tongues" became louder and more intense and began to include violent shakes and lots (and I mean LOTS) of crying. She spoke of seeing "signs" and hearing "the voice of God" in a very literal sense. Her grades in college even began to suffer as more and more of her time was devoted to these newfound beliefs. Naturally, I became extremely worried that she was slowly slipping into some sort of paranoid delusional psychosis. At the very least, these teachings made her into a much angrier and more paranoid person. It was clear that her new beliefs were more than just a spiritual awakening but also a nose-dive into a mental health crisis.
Our relationship, at this point, was very clearly waning but my feelings toward the woman I once knew were still strong. I decided that it was time for an intervention of sorts. This resulted in me spending a whole weekend studying Pentecostal beliefs and reading Reddit stories from ex-Pentecostals about what it took to break them out of their conditioning. It was on a Monday night when I invited her over to my apartment to confront her about how the things her church were teaching her were actively harming her and even presented her with evidence of how these churches prey on mentally unwell people and how "speaking in tongues" was nothing more than an experience in her own brain chemicals. While I had hoped that hearing her new beliefs be directly confronted would help break the spell they had on her, it seemed to have no effect. Surprisingly, she did not fight back or show much anger toward my confrontation, instead resorting to the "please respect my beliefs" argument that made it so hard to push back against, since, at this time, I was still concerned about preserving our relationship.
Unfortunately, things only got worse from here. I spent some time trying to ignore the issue for the sake of the relationship, especially because I did not sense that I had many other romantic options given my shy nature and struggles to make new friends at college. However, my new "ignorance is bliss" approach to our relationship did not last long. At this point, we had been together for about 3 years and the conversation of marriage and kids started to become serious. I have always wanted kids since I come from a large family with many siblings, which Anne seemingly was excited about as well. However, after a pleasant conversation in which we fantasized about what we would name our children, she said something that sparked an anger in me that I did not often feel. She told me that if any of our future children came out to us as gay, lesbian, bi, transgender, or anything like that, that we would have to disown that child at all costs and that she could not love her child knowing that they were a "sodomite" (her words). I have always considered myself an ally of LGBTQ+ folks and wouldn't think twice about loving my children any less if they came out to me and have always felt this way. I did not say much in the moment out of pure shock and instead steered the conversation elsewhere while I quietly boiled over in anger over this comment.
Here is where the title of this post comes into play and where my role in this interaction enters a grey area. I spent several days unable to let this anger subside while imagining my own perspective children being thrown to the streets for bravely coming out to their own parents. I decided that another intervention was necessary, except this time I didn't want to be ignored. I came up with a plan that I referred to as a "scorched earth" intervention. Over the course of an evening, I began texting, calling, or messaging almost every person that Anne was close to. This included family, friends, past friends, classmates, and even some plain old acquaintances. I needed her paranoid and hateful beliefs to be confronted by more than just myself and hoped that if everyone important to her also expressed concern; that she would separate herself from this church and seek proper mental health counseling.
The responses I received from Anne's friends and family ranged significantly. Some people, including her mother whom I was close with, asked that I not try to "insert myself between Anne and God". Some friends agreed with me wholeheartedly and would reach out to Anne over text or in person to try and offer help. Some people met me with total apathy. Unsurprisingly, once Anne found out what I did, she broke things off over a brief but highly emotional phone call. She told me that I had embarrassed her and that supposedly God was telling her I wasn't the man she was supposed to marry. It did not hurt too bad since I was anticipating the end of this relationship for a while. The effects of my approach seemingly had lasting impacts on many of her relationships, however. At least one longtime friendship had ended because the friend was appalled by Anne's new paranoid beliefs. It was also unsuccessful, as Anne would never seek mental health counseling. In fact, it probably pushed her further into her church crowd - only further bolstering her new delusions.
Since much time has passed, I have started to feel uncertain whether or not I did the right thing in trying to have all of Anne's friends and family confront her about her extreme beliefs. At the time, I felt that I was justified and doing the right thing by trying to encourage a clearly delusion person to seek mental health counseling by any means necessary. Now, I am able to realize that I acted out of anger and permanently damaged how some of her oldest friends view her. I also realize that I acted immaturely and probably should not have tried to bring in every person close to Anne to fight a battle on my behalf.
Nowadays, Anne is still with that church and regularly posts on Facebook all sorts of whacky spiritual conspiracies. She is still very clearly paranoid and delusional all while putting on a facade of normalcy. I just pity her for living in a constant state of paranoia at this point. She even works full time with the church as a "worship leader," although I am not sure what exactly that means. She actually got married about a year after the relationship ended to a man she met at her church. They met, got engaged, and married all within 12 months. Thankfully, no children have been brought into this world yet from their relationship, which is surprising to me considering how urgent it seemed to her during our relationship. I do not hear much from any friends or family of hers anymore, other than one mutual friend who told me that Anne frequently refers to me as "that demon." As for myself, I finished school and have not married but was able to finally make friends and go on dates and my future is looking bright.
So, Reddit, am I the asshole for my "scorched earth" methods towards my fanatical ex-girlfriend?

I have a question on Dalton capstone for the griffin case. I've completely presentation and the audio recording over it. This may be a dumb question - the engagement letter, risk tolerance questionnaire and IPS - are we asked to use their template and only edit the red parts (name, date, family name, student name) and that's it? Or are they asking us to use their template, rewrite it in our own words and submit a separate document? I definitely don't want to submit their document and get a bad score but all of our firms should have this prepared for us so I don't see why we would be asked to prepare our own. Any and all help is appreciated, thank you!

An attractive alternative to traditional rewards for outstanding performance

Synthetic equity refers to a collection of strategies and instruments frequently used to provide employees with financial advantages of share ownership without actual shares changing hands. It is a potent instrument that practically all advanced investment organizations may utilize to attract, retain, and reward competent employees.
The favorable economic qualities of equity are embedded into synthetic equity plans, also known as equity alternatives, without the financial obligations coming from purchasing shares from the initial owner. Instead, synthetic equity programs often develop into cash payments to the employee and a corresponding deduction for the employer. Since it represents compensation, synthetic equity may be easily adjusted to handle almost any scenario.
The following scenarios exemplify the situations in which synthetic equity is an optimal solution:

• An employee desires ownership-like benefits but is unable or unwilling to assume the financial risk of purchasing and paying for company equity.
• An employee aspires to ownership but lacks the credentials or licenses required for a role of a full equity partner in the company.
• Employees feel uncomfortable providing personal guarantees or accepting responsibility for credit lines, office leases, payroll-related expenditures, or the commitments made under buy-sell or continuity agreements.
• A company owner wants to share the economic worth of equity rather than the actual equity. This includes owners not interested in supporting this transaction with seller financing.
• A company owner wishes to motivate an employee to work on increasing the company’s value but also wants to discourage them from leaving and creating competition for the business, engaging in client solicitation, or performing other actions that might harm the company.
• An owner planning to leave the company in the following 5-year period wishes to reward one or more critical workers at the time of the sale without requiring them to purchase and pay for equity.

Tokenization of business and individual performance

The above method has been known for decades. The critical challenge in the modern business world is ensuring that innovation and productivity are rewarded equitably across an organization. At the same time, executives must be compensated for creating these conditions.
However, rewarding innovation and equitably delivering executive-level incentives and rewards across the organization from the top to the shop floor is the alternative made possible only by deploying smart contracts and blockchain technology — tokenizing business and individual performance.
The tokenization of business elements such as performance and innovation is one of the newest ways to drive planned outcomes. The process is about moving your business to blockchain. Although it may seem complicated and challenging to implement, almost any entrepreneur can tokenize the building blocks of their business. Tokenization is simply transforming a company’s value into a digitized resource in the form of tokens.
Tokens represent a value within the organization in a transparent and auditable way. They can be cashed in upon completion of the vesting period if both company and individual targets have been met. What makes Synthetic Equity on the chain unique is its transparency, auditability of incentives, and most notably, equitable distribution of tokens corresponding to each employee’s job size.

The Mechanism Behind Synthetic Equity

For synthetic equity to produce favorable results, a profitable, successful firm with a proper entity structure is necessary. Corporations and LLCs can use the tools relating to synthetic equity. In some situations, they may also be used by sole proprietorships, albeit in a slightly different form.
To fully grasp the idea of synthetic equity, it might be helpful to understand the mechanism behind equity in general. Understanding how equity functions allows those interested in synthetic equity to utilize some of the tools used in working with actual equity.
For example, investing in an independent advisory company generally offers the following considerable advantages:

• The right to vote
• Participation in the corporate governance system
• Access to the company’s financial documents
• Limited liability
• A proportionate cut of the revenue
• Sale-related long-term capital gains tax rates
• Capital growth potential

SyntheticEquity.io app is changing how we think about incentives and rewards.
These advantages have a monetary value. Therefore, purchasing equity carries a price, and awarding employee equity has tax repercussions. A tiny ownership share in a fee-based firm might cost several hundred thousand dollars. In these types of businesses, the stock is often acquired and paid for after tax, and the equity partner or shareholder usually expects to obtain the entire set of rights in return for taking on the investment risk.
The rights can be unbundled, meaning that the current owner does not have to sell or provide the full bundle of rights to an employee or investment advisor. To fulfill specific goals, each of the rights mentioned above can also be further divided or redefined in as much detail as necessary. For example, one or two rights from the total package might be provided, such as the opportunity to grow the company’s worth or a percentage of the profits.
By allowing someone to own a portion of the rights in the bundle rather than all of them, synthetic equity generates an advantage. These unique rights or benefits are often described in a plan document and frequently provided via individual award agreements between the employer and employee. A wide range of flexible options for creating a solid and profitable company are produced when equity-like benefits and a long-term remuneration strategy are combined.
Synthetic equity plans often come in one of the following three forms:

• Full-value plans can result in a substantially big payment to an employee since they pay both the value of the underlying stock and any appreciation that is gained over a certain period.
• Performance unit plans swap out equity as the value metric for another metric like sales growth or profitability.
• The value of any growth in the underlying stock value over a specific period following the date of the award is typically paid out under appreciation-only plans.

These kinds of plans are like conventional non-qualified plans insofar as they offer a possibility of discrimination and a significant risk of forfeiture that often lasts until shortly before the benefit is awarded to the employee.
Essentially, synthetic equity is a type of delayed compensation that links a worker’s financial incentive to the company’s performance. By striking the correct balance between the danger of losing a valuable employee and the potential future cost to the employer, each plan is specifically created to meet the advisor’s needs. The plans are intended to reward employees for contributing to the company’s success, but they also ensure that no payment is due if either the company doesn’t develop as expected or the employee doesn’t uphold their end of the deal by quitting their job to work for a rival company or starting their own.

Synthetic Equity Benefits

Synthetic equity is meant to be an equity-related instrument that helps a company find, reward, and keep hold of valuable people.
Synthetic equity benefits are:

• Synthetic equity inspires employees to adopt an owner’s perspective and put development and shareholder value first.
• There is no debt since important participants do not buy phantom shares like full equity stockholders do.
• If a participant’s job terminates before the designated vesting date, they typically forfeit any benefits under the plan.
• Participants normally do not have voting rights or a vote in corporate governance and may or may not be entitled to collect profits from the company.
• Synthetic equity programs provide flexible vesting timelines; vesting can take place over time, depending on the accomplishment of certain quantifiable company or individual goals.
• If the company’s growth is slower than expected and the stock price does not rise, nothing is exchanged.
• When a synthetic equity grant is issued, owners of genuine equity are not adversely affected by a dilution of their ownership percentages.
• Compared to S-Corporations, which are often more restricted, more freedom is provided in terms of stock class and shareholder count.
• The advising business’s shareholders’ or members’ agreement and associated buy-sell provisions do not immediately apply to synthetic equity.

Synthetic equity options’ versatility comes with many benefits but may also have many drawbacks. The companies need to make decisions regarding what valuation technique will be utilized, what vesting rules will be implemented, how liquidity problems will be addressed, what eligibility conditions will be imposed, and what rights to participate in corporate governance will be granted due to the wide range of possible directions for designing synthetic equity plans.

Conclusion

In the hands of a forward-thinking business leader, synthetic equity is a potent instrument. It may be utilized to solve the difficulty of attracting, rewarding, and maintaining top talent to create a great practice or viable business without the challenges of selling and paying for an actual ownership stake.
Like full stock, synthetic equity may refocus the employee’s attention and motivate them to contribute to a flourishing and profitable company.
Authors

Paul Lalovich

Organizational Effectiveness and Strategy Execution Practice

I (31F) was with my ex-boyfriend for a little over a year. I thought things were good. About two months ago he told me that he had an opportunity for his job to spend a month in a different city - I told him that sounded like a great opportunity and he should take it. Fast forward to now and apparently he loves living in that city and isn't going to come back any time soon. This decision was made without consulting or discussing with me, so I ended things.
I'm really struggling with this. I'm really struggling with feeling abandoned and with low self worth. I feel shame in having picked the wrong partner and not having been able to see that he might do something like this. I feel fear as I think about trying to reenter the dating pool as it seems unlikely there are may good prospects left at this point. I feel envy as my friends advance in their relationships - moving in, getting engaged, weddings, etc. I feel sad because I want kids and know I might run out of time. Mostly I feel confused because even though I feel so hurt by him, I still have feelings for him.

So, I went to school with this girl, Onion...Well after covid I moved away, but on her Whatsapp profile and status last year I saw that she is now in a relationship with...a guy who used to work as a substitute teacher type of role at our elementary school in grade 6. Earlier this month I saw they got engaged. Am I wrong to think it's weird to be engaged to a guy who was your teacher in grade 6? She is 18, turning 19 and he is 8 years older at 26, turning 27. Is this weird? Or is it just weird to me? They started what I know of openly dating in the beginning of her last year of school(grade 12).

My former girlfriend Dakota and I started out as childhood best friends in kindergarten. I did move a few states over for a couple years before moving back, but we religiously mailed each other and called as much as we could. Our parents each joked that we were like sisters, so jokes on them when we got together as girlfriends in 10th grade.
Dakota and I had our ups and downs and we both did a lot of growing as people over the years, but in my humble opinion, we were solid even ten years later, engaged and saving up for marriage, when the car accident happened. Dakota died from sepsis from her injuries, so it was a rollercoaster to deal with the crash, to have her stabilized in hospital and visit her while being told prognosis of PT, and then for her to nose dive again, and finally to lose her. I struggled with grief but my family and friends were huge aspects of my support network. Even Dakota’s parents were a huge help, which I’ll forever be grateful for. After three years of abstaining, I dipped my toes into dating again, with a few dud relationships that eventually fell apart for various reasons, ranging from not meshing to differing points in our lives, before I met my current boyfriend Michael. We have since been together for almost a year and a half at this point.
The ring in question is a simple silver crown shaped band I wear on my right ring finger. When I was in the depth of my grief, it helped a great deal to fidget with it as it helped remind myself to treat myself as a queen, to be gentle and patient with myself, to remember I was loved and love will come again and life will improve, “there is a light at the end of the tunnel”, that sort of thing. I’ve explained to Michael that while Dakota gave it to me, it has also taken on a meaning of self love and self care. He insists that I can at least just wear it on a necklace so that it’s not on my hand where everyone can see constantly, and I’d still be able to fidget with it in a way similar to my normal method and still have it on my person. I’m not a necklace person though, and it felt awkward and uncomfortable around my neck despite giving it two months to adjust. I stopped wearing it as a necklace, going without for a few weeks before I told him I’d like to return to wearing it on my hand, which started a huge fight about how I am prioritizing Dakota over Michael. But other than the ring, he hasn’t been able to tell me any other times that I made him feel second rate, despite me asking genuinely many times during our talks, not even about the ring, before this fight. As in I’ve been checking in about my grief concerning Dakota and how it impacts him, and he doesn’t care about the grave visitations, or when I talk about her or my history with her, but it’s the ring that seems to be the issue. I won’t lie: I feel guilty because he “puts up with” me visiting Dakota’s grave each month or how she features in childhood memories that get brought up, not even by me but by my family.
I need to know if I’m blinded here and missing a reasonable upset to the point I’m being cruel, or if I can talk with him about getting a mediator like a couples therapist to help us both talk our sides better without getting lost in emotional translation. I’ve found having a third party helps when words get mired, either in speaking or hearing, in emotional background noise. I would love us to go to therapy together as it is, but if he’s 110% reasonable and my attachment to the ring is not, then I don’t want to pressure anything.

Hello Reddit users and friends, I am a 42-year-old male currently navigating a complex separation from my 36-year-old wife. We've been married for 14 years and together for 16. We have only one child, and I manage a business that I originally started over a decade ago and she joined as a helper 2 years ago.
Despite our plans to support each other as friends post-separation, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to cope with the situation, especially the idea of dating again.
Context for our situation:

• Relationship Foundation: We both had minimal dating experience prior to our marriage, which might have affected our relationship dynamics. We never cheated on each other.
• Career and Financial Support: I have financially supported her through three different career paths, including her current roles as an engineer and a teacher, without expecting financial contribution to our household. Contrary to her feelings and dis-approval of any of my support, I've always encouraged her career development and she saved every Penney she made into her own personal savings by working in both careers.
• Legal and Financial Arrangements: Our marriage included a pre-nup, which we later revised into a post-nup due to ongoing relationship issues, detailing the separation of our property and a 2-year promise to assist her with a lump-sum after divorce when / if it happens.
• Family Dynamics: There have been ongoing challenges with family acceptance on both sides. She has repeatedly criticized my racial and religious-sect and all of my roots and background, even my fatherhood (i am a good father as i get compliments from strangers and i feel content about my fatherhood abilities, often shown in my kid's sports, school, and character) and she pretty much criticizes everything about me which has caused further isolation.
• Mental Health: I suffered a serious depression about five years ago, which led me to seek therapy. Although the therapy was beneficial, she was dismissive and even ridiculed the process, which strained our relationship further.
• Social Isolation: My social life has been significantly isolated to a few friends, which includes a few straight friends and two gay friends. Total isolation from women friends (she is very jealous) This isolation was exacerbated by her jealousy and reluctance to engage socially with my acquaintances or partake in my planned activities.
• Exploration of Sexuality: In an attempt to cope with our marital issues, I explored my sexuality with a friend, with her initial and complete consent (started about 16 months ago and went on for a few weeks and had stopped since 14 months ago due to the added criticism and drama, i tested him for STDs before, and tested after-wards, and she saw all the tests before and after). This later became a point of contention and she punished me by isolating me from any intimacy with her or any other human being for 5 months which i agreed to in-order to avoid divorce. Again, i never cheated on her, she approved every thing and she had met my friend as well ! I did not mind having sex with him, was socially very rewarding and approving of my character as opposed to my distant wife's dis-approval, but i missed having sex with her, as we had a successful sex life (which she also criticizes the next day but feels satisfied in the moment with a positive feedback of "amazing" and the like) however, i am not socially happy with her ! She also met a guy back then, over a year ago, but she never became intimate with him, and i had approved.
• Physical Abuse: She had punched me very strongly once on the chest, which was very painful for 2 weeks and hindered my ability to exercise well, and had hit me another time before-hand but was not as painful, i never hit back, i am a muscular guy so i wouldn't dare out of fear of causing a serious harm.

Specific Challenges:

• Despite our separation, we are still living and working together but are physically and emotionally distant.
• I am grappling with feelings of loneliness and isolation, compounded by the emotional toll of our strained relationship. I am seeking therapy just so you know, i am fine.
• There is a lingering feeling of being misunderstood and unfairly judged, not just by her but also by her family, and i tend to be a sensitive person, had my own childhood trauma as well.
• The situation has left me questioning my readiness to date again, as my feelings for her wane daily, and i feel, well, just over-whelmed sometimes, i still do my fitness routine and i work hard.

Questions for the Community:

1. For those who have navigated a long-term relationship breakup, especially under complex circumstances, how did you manage the emotional fallout ?
2. When and how did you decide you were ready to start dating again? Were there specific signs or milestones that helped you realize it was time?

I’m looking for guidance, personal stories, or any advice that could help me understand how to move forward emotionally and socially. Thank you in advance for your support and insights.
I am usually social, have a good sense of humor, and respectful, and i love people. She tends to be reserved and she is also likeable by people. She does NOT take pride in being next to me out in public, but all my friends enjoy my company and i am known to be a respectful and fun to be around. Enough said about our characters, we are both average and never had any troubles with the law.

Hi. My bf and I are high school sweethearts. We’re 24 and have been together since we were 18. Always been extremely close. He joined the Army and got stationed in Korea. He’s been there for a year. Around the same time he left for basic training i moved states for a job. That job didn’t last for me and it was not an easy move for me at all and i dealt with a lot of loneliness, pain, missing him, and financial issues. I got to see him at graduation and it was amazing, we both missed each other so much. Since he’s been in Korea we have obviously been in contact frequently but he seemed to prioritize his friends and new connections and going out and partying until 8am or later. I would rarely go out ever and was honestly just by myself majority of the time. But still we were making it work, distance puts stress on a relationship regardless. I shared my location with him, gave him my instagram password without having either one of his. I did it to make him feel better about my situation as he expressed that he didn’t like i was living in a new state out of my moms house. I understood even though it wasn’t necessarily fair, but i love him to death and just wanted to make him feel better about it. It hasn’t been easy being away from him but i knew he would be coming back to the states and we could be together. I unfortunately wasn’t in the financial place to be able to go over there as i was looking for a new job. (i regret that move with all of me). We talked about marriage lots but he sometimes seemed unsure about it. Fast forward to about a week or so ago. He messaged this guy on my instagram that randomly shared a reel with me of a funny video. Unfortunately, i shared some dirty messages with this person (the lives across the country in another state). Not nudes or anything but that doesn’t make it any better and i will fully 100% admit that (cringe, i know). I never had any intentions of going to visit the guy or do anything with him physically. but i technically still cheated by engaging in something like that. I didn’t message the guy back again after that conversation whenever he would text me, i wouldn’t answer. But the damage has still been done. I don’t know, i feel like a fucking idiot. I know i fucked up and i genuinely feel horrible for what I did. So my bf pretended to be me, responded to the guy and somehow got him to send screenshots of the messages. I don’t know what all was said between them because he deleted the instagram dm thread. I wake up in the morning to my bf sending me a screenshot of one portion of the dms where the other guy sent the screenshot of the messages. He said nothing else just that alone. I obviously explained to him that i have never done anything with the guy and never would, that i was genuinely sorry and understood that i hurt him by doing that. We argued and argued and he told me that we should just probably not be together. Then he proceeded to tell me that he’s been talking to someone that he likes but kept it very vague and didn’t give me much more information than that when i asked. He said that i’m worried about the wrong thing. So i’m not exactly sure what their relationship consists of.. if they’re sleeping together, dating, etc i don’t know but i was the one in the wrong because he saw proof and i didn’t and had no idea he was involved with someone else. Anyways we ended up getting back to a decent place, not great he was still understandably angry. This was all happening as i was in the middle of packing up my apartment and driving my cat and i halfway across the country to move back home. I was super stressed and got sick in the middle of the move so our communication wasn’t great but i have always been the one to make more of an effort communicating and be patient as i know he’s busy. But he always has time to go out and get shit faced with his friends. This is long as fuck i’m sorry but basically moral of the story, now he blocked me on imessage, unfollowed me on snap and instagram, and won’t answer any of my messages on whatsapp. he answered like twice in the last week or so -ish and told me to shut the fuck up. I’m just so sad and don’t know how to go about handling this. He was basically my only and best friend so now i’m just grieving that loss but i know im at major fault. I’ve always been pretty codependent on him and now i just don’t know what to do. i don’t really need advice because i know i was wrong i just feel like i lost a major part of myself and i can’t stop thinking about what he’s doing, who this other girl is, if he’s going to just go be in a relationship with her and forget about me, and if he will ever talk to me again. It’s also just confusing because i messed up but he’s not exactly right either for hiding this new girl he’s been involved with from me. I don’t want the relationship to be over. Oh and also he’s still been logging into my instagram so it’s just all really confusing. Just sucks because i’m sure he’s having a wonderful time over there while i’m alone and depressed. Send help :(

I feel like I screwed up and let my crazy show. I was in a situationship with this guy for about 1.5 yrs and we had great chemistry, really clicked, spent Valentine’s together, weekly sleepovers, all the cliche things that I know don’t necessarily mean a guy still really likes you. So he’s super, super active on Instagram stories and there was a 2 month period where he was completely inactive. I went to his profile, noticed all his highlights were gone, and he has dozens of highlights. FYI, I used to work in marketing so know all of the social media inside and outs. I said nothing, then finally said, "Hey I know I may have overstepped and been anxious, but did you hide your Instagram stories from me? and he was like “Uh, well I’m trying a social media detox. I’ll change it back". And sure enough, highlights are back. And this is where I think I screwed up, like a crazy stalker. The only reason I keep Hinge is to keep tabs on him, and his location changed on a business trip. Again, I owned up and said "I know this isn’t my best behavior, I have baggage I’m working on in therapy but I saw your location change, I felt a need to check bc of what happened on Insta. And he goes “oh yeah it’s just when I’m bored”. Now he wants to take a break which I means is just an easy way into passive aggressively working into a breakup. The reason I got stalkerish bc there were lots of red flags (which I won’t get into) that caused me to act this way and all along I knew he wanted something casual and clearly I’m not in the headspace to date seriously. So I apologized and he’s like “yeah, your texts about what you noticed caused me anxiety and was bad for my mental health. Because you’re absolutely correct about women’s intuition”. He then said he felt like he wasn't in the headspace to commit to anyone and was like, let me know if your'e catching feelings or want something I can't give you. And then went into how we could maybe hangout soon but not hook up after a break. Anyway, I realized that I would rather him in my life as a casual situationship than not at all and I regret confronting him. The logical part of me realizes that if I have to engage in the insecure behavior I was engaging in, then the situation isn't healthy, I'm not healthy, or both. But I'm struggling and realizing that it probably wouldn't have come to this if I had not used social media/Hinge as of a way of confronting him. And realized that I could have kept them out of the equation all together, and used the "real life" red flags as examples and maybe it could have led to a more mature discussion.

This is a pretty long read but idk how else to explain it..
For context I’m a Male 23 and my gf Female 24 almost 25 and she just broke up with me out of nowhere after dating for almost 3 years.
Everything was perfect, we planned our life out with goals and aspirations, adopted a cat and a dog together and life was great. I was living in my college apartment finishing up school and she was living at home finishing up law school. We supported each other and both couldn’t wait to graduate and move out. We had the typical minor couple arguments but no major fights and no arguments for many many months leading up to it. I graduated a semester early and had a job lined up where I moved back home to Florida to work for 5 months to save up some money to start off on the right foot. She was set to graduate in May take the bar then go on for one more year the University of Florida. During the coming time at UF we discussed that we would look for rings and I would propose that fall (we both agreed and were super excited so we’re both of our parents) but… 2 days ago she calls me after work crying saying she having doubts about a wedding and getting engaged and that she cant be with me because of that and she dosnt want to but we need to be done. Apparently she’s been having these thought for almost 2 months prior but never mentioned it once while we were long distance. As you can imagine I was and still am devastated, this came out of absolutely nowhere and I can’t imagine what caused it.
The following day we both agreed to talk again that night because I was so confused and just wanted some answers and to really know if we were done of if it was some form of panic attack or something. That conversation went amazing she was open to listening about how we can work through this she thought we were going to be able to slowly work through whatever is causing this feeling and so did I. She said that conversation made her feel safe, relaxed, and confident again. Then ended with an I love you from both of us.
Well… this morning I get the “can we talk” text and I already know it’s bad. She says she thought about it and it just wasn’t going to work and it’s just prolonging the inevitable. She said that deep down she knew during yesterday’s conversation that she was just doing this to appease me. We both said our goodbye, wished each other the best, and talked about when we would take down social posts. We decided that we’ll do it the same time but as of now it’s just all too soon and neither of us want to “look single”. We both said I love you and hung up.
Important facts/info:

• she had a bf in hs for a short time and broke up with him before graduation.
• she had a bf in college for 3 years and broke up with him right after graduation.
• she broke up with me a few days after law school graduation
  
• their is definitely not some other guy out there, ik her and the guilt would be just too much and she would tell me.
  
• she mentioned that she dosnt know why and wish’s she could just be like it’s this or that but she honestly said she don’t know
  
• she wants to “be their for each other” if anything happens.(if that even means anything)
  

This is just so hard and painful right now because there were no signs leading up to this and we both were so excited about the future.
In my personal opinion I think she has a deeper physiological issue where her brain has convinced her that before a big change she needs to push people away and even if her heart dosnt want too she convinces herself anyway. Idk what that means for me or our future at all but I’m extremely heartbroken about everything and still so confused…

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