Every time there is a longer period of cold weather in the warm season I see populists on social media ironically asking where is this climate change supposed to be. People have a short context window. It doesn't help that our efforts to combat climate change consist in large part of petty consumer regulations that are annoying to individuals while not achieving much.
Social media is so easy to fill with unaccountable non-genuine activity (bots, shills, trolls, influencers, guerilla marketers, reputation managers, bored attention seekers) that I no longer consider most social media a valid heuristic for what "everyone thinks." I made this decision after looking at the profiles of those who tended to post like that, most of the time they seem fake.
What is the valid heuristic is that what you see on it all the time is clearly what someone wants you think.
Someone in real life that cites rando social media too much is probably on their phone too much or themselves in a non-genuine activity group.
First of all, listen to your body and calm down. I've been to an otolaryngologist recently because of recurrent dizzy spells. The test results were all good, and the diagnosis was simple: I've been unconsciously flexing my muscles and clenching my teeth. The advice was to build consciousness to this and actively relax.
I've then realized that with that flexed state a kind of mental flex follows. I got used to this kind of stressed-out context switching that put my brain in a racing thought state. Noticing when this happens and consciously stopping and then actively releasing the bodily pressure has been an important step in regaining control of my brain.
I've realized that I kind of conditioned myself to this kind of dopamine seeking that persisted regardless of the medium I'd consume. I'm >30 and therefore skipped the TikTok phase, but even as I got rid of the Instagram habit (it helps that the algorithm is really poor at predicting content I'd want to watch) I would find myself doing the same kind of short bursts of short-term attention and immediate switch even with text-based media such as Reddit or Wikipedia.
Try to capture your mental state when you are in this "mindless consumption" mode and learn to identify it. Develop a habit to notice when this happens and then stop and ask yourself what are you chasing, after all. Try to pause at the content you're currently reading and read it till the end once you calm down.
It also helps to find books that keep your brain active while being engaging to you. I've had a lifelong passion for linguistics and I found myself digging into language philosophy, for example. This is the kind of literature that keeps me engaged, but forces me to slow down as well to think and properly process what I've read. Your mileage may vary; we are different people and definitely you have different interests than me.
While I'm not a fantasy fan, I'd be a little wary of picking up fantasy books. My observations tell that the most successful ones read like action movies or first-person video games, and fast-paced action is something you want to steer away from for the purpose of this exercise. Pick up something that challenges you a bit, but is still comprehensible with the context you have right now.
Twain is of course being satirical here, but I can tell that many people have an overly strict approach towards language learning. They expect rigid rules and get annoyed when the language does not adhere to them, yet they do not realize that these rules came after the language and they are most often a tool to teach and analyze it. What language instruction is supposed to achieve is providing one with a foundational understanding of language, just enough that immersion learning becomes possible. Since human language is a mix of logical thinking and fuzzy pattern matching, there is no other way to learn it completely than by pattern matching itself.
I'm a Polish speaker and have met some Polish learners in my life. Often I have no better advice than "you choose the conjugation patern based on how does the word feel to you".
Having lived here for a bit over 5 years, I can say that Germans too often like to speak from the moral high ground. There are things that are sacred and indisputable, like opposition to nuclear energy. Try to complain about a strike in public services causing you inconvenience, and you will invariably get lectured on solidarity. I've seen people interrupting speakers at public events to "provide important context" that was nothing more than self-flattery from the interrupting person. I do believe in this country and think that it has way more upsides than downsides, but the people here could sure use a bit of humility.
I used to be VERY into police procedurals: John Sanford, Lee Child, and William Kent Krueger. I still read them, but during lockdown I made a conscious decision to widen my horizons.
Some of my favorites over the last year:
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Most of Joe Abercrombie; particularly the First Law series.
Reading lists really give people the idea that reading is some mechanical task that has to be done in fixed time and has a potential to be optimized. This is how speed reading classes were invented.
The ability to read fast is not a bad thing. The compulsion to is harmful. Ideally you read at the pace you enjoy or at which you best absorb what you need. Being able to read fast and slow down for the important or relevant (to you) bits can be very useful for learning.
Moving to a Western country and having a Polish name with a fixed diminutive effectively means having two different names, each one used with different crowds. Work colleagues know me by my full name, everyone else by the diminutive. A friend of mine who is seeking naturalization pondered simply assuming the diminutive as her official name for simplicity, because it's how she introduces herself to everyone.
In my home country people have the diminutives encoded and they know to switch when we are in an informal context. Full names are rarely used in speech if one's name has a diminutive - if you don't know someone it's more likely that you will only use Mr/Mrs + their last name, otherwise you address them with a diminutive. A curious intermediate form of address is found in superiors at work and people who met as older adults - Mr/Mrs + first name, which then can be a diminutive or not depending on personal preference.
I've been working on a project for the former Polish state telco and the codebase was mostly Java EE as written in the mid-00's. Since you cannot really be productive in Java without an IDE, standard English conventions for naming have been pushed onto the devs from early on - a getter must start with `get` or `is` if the return type is boolean, class names have to contain standardized postfixes corresponding to the design pattern used, such as `AbstractFactoryBean` etc. But since few people spoke English back then, they ended up with awful hybrid names such as `getCennikSluchawkiKeySet` or `OfertaManagerPrzylaczeProxy`.
100+ years is still pretty recent. The immediate predecessor to English as a world language was French. Matter of fact, my country has only dropped French translations from its passport with the most recent design update a decade ago or so.
Latin would have been used pre-Renaissance. Our grandparents might have still had to learn it as a part of an educated person's toolkit, but it was long not intended for communication anymore back then.
> The immediate predecessor to English as a world language was French
From what I remember, there was a divide between Catholicism and Protestantism, where some of the smaller countries that followed Protestantism used German as a common language due to its origins. I think knowledge of German in Norway was something that was expected of students attending the universities until the mid 1900s (due to geopolitical changes)
