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public/blog/articles/19-12-2025.html

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+<title>Poof, and it's gone</title>
+
+<article>
+    <p>
+        Since reading Ray Peat's work and drastically improving my wellbeing, something that had been declining for years, I've
+        been thinking more and more often about the phenomenon of learned helpless and its relevance to my life. Sometimes,
+        looking back to past times is useful to help reorient yourself in the present and aim towards a more desirable future.
+        Sometimes, a new perspective or experience might instantly obliterate previous behaviour without any sort of concerted
+        mental or physical grunt to eradicate it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+        On the flipside, I have sometimes hopelessly tried to forcefully change my behaviour, employing all the en vogue self-help tricks
+        to form long-term habits, only to practically immediately lose them not long afterwards. These kinds of experiences remind me of those
+        hypnosis advertisements that claim to have you give up smoking after just a few sessions; sometimes it's even after just one visit. There's no short
+        supply of stories of miracle cures or sudden, permanent breaks of addiction. Cold-turkey clean cuts that seem to arise with no obvious
+        effort on the part of the addict, no signs of worn willpower.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+        When I was sixteen I spent six weeks abroad in a small town called Marburg in Hesse, Germany. Those six weeks were spent
+        living with a new family along with my exchange student, who had lived six weeks with me and my family just prior to my
+        arrival in Germany. Six weeks of school, new acquaintances, a new language (albeit one I had been "studying" in the
+        Australian school system) and unfamiliar cultural quirks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+        It was a barrage of stimulation, I came home every day from school and would collapse, totally exhausted, onto my
+        exchange student's bed, which was mine for the duration of the stay. It's not like I was actually expected to
+        <i>learn</i> anything or do any homework whilst I was at school here&mdash;I was basically on holidays and could really
+        have just treated it as such. Plenty of my own friends who had taken a similar trip certainly did. I'm not manyt of them
+        learnt or used much German beyond <i>Wo ist McDonalds?</i>. But I had been gradually becoming more fascinated with the
+        structure of German before arriving. Once there, especially at that age I presume, the Deutsch on the blackboard in
+        biology class looked more like a sophisticated puzzle game than a complete drag of a memorisation task. Each day was a
+        new game of deductive guesswork, and better still, I got to play with new ideas about how the language works every day
+        in the schoolyard with new friends I was making. New ways to describe how things are situated and move in relation to
+        one another, mysterious new prefixes and other linguistic building blocks, and the insane backwards word order of German
+        provided unlimited entertainment to see if I was up to the challenge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+        On top of this, I was in the grade just above mine back home in Australia. Whilst that really shouldn't have made much
+        difference, the amount of responsibility and independece these kids were allowed to exercise at sixteen or seventeen was
+        nothing short of amazing to my adolescent self. I had never seen anything like it. Some of my classmates would stand out
+        the front of school during lunchtime and smoke a couple of cigarettes with their own teachers, something that still to
+        this day I find kind of insane. It certainly would never have been acceptable back at home. Starting in the senior
+        school, you were allowed to just leave and go home if you didn't have class on, as long as you were back in time. And we
+        did. School uniforms simply weren't part of the culture either. For everyone else perhaps stressful and another target
+        of the cruel status games of teenagerhood, but for me it was like every day was casual dress day back home. To top it
+        all off, the legal drinking age in Germany is sixteen, at least for wine, beer, and other weaker drinks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+        These classmates of mine were running their own meetings headed by the <i>Klassensprecher</i>, the class representatives, and they actually seemed cool, like people I would like to hang out and befriend. They were 
+
+</article>

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