I do practice lucid dreaming but haven’t really done so lately.
I figured out how to easily induce lucid dreaming for myself basically by letting myself become sleep deprived and then drinking copious amounts of caffeine before letting myself nap. Somehow, that almost always results in a lucid dream state.
Then in my lucid dreams, I often choose to dream about things that I wish were a reality in my real life, but that are not. Often relating to desired connections and relationships with people i’d like to have relationships with in real life, but can’t for whatever reason. Maybe it’s partly due to my anxious-avoidant attachment style, but I struggle to have healthy romantic relationships or even to maintain friendships for very long.
The other reason I use lucid dreams (less often) is for exam preparation. I lucid dream that I am studying my course material etc usually the night before. Somehow it helps with recalling facts etc during exams the next day.
I tip wine down the sink regularly. Usually because it’s been gifted to me, and I don’t really like to drink alcohol. So… I might have a glass of wine in the presence of the gifter and then when they’re gone, tip the rest down the sink.
I’m currently in the midst of a career change. I currently work as an anaesthetic assistant. But in 2022 after doing an MBA out of sheer boredom, I decided I was more interested in humans, and what drives their behaviour/choices etc at a fundamental level. I was also interested in how human behaviour and choices can be manipulated by external influences.
I decided I wanted to become a psychologist, and now more recently, I’ve refined that further and decided I’d like to become an organisational psychologist/behaviour analyst, though I’ve kept my options open, and dabbled in clinical psych as well. However, my goal is to be able to influence human behaviour en masse (in pro-social ways).
How the path to change has looked for me:
I already had a health science degree from before I did my anaesthetic assisting training. In my health science degree, I had done all the 100-level and some of the 200-level psych courses so I chose to go back to the university for ease of transferring, and getting some prior recognition. This saved me 2 years of study.
I then completed a graduate diploma in psych, and I’m now in the midst of a 2 part masters which is made up of 8 post-graduate courses and one 12-18 month research project/thesis.
Where I live, that’s not enough to be a psychologist. After the masters, you have to then do further study, since I’ve decided I don’t want to be a clinical psychologist, I’ve decided to do a Master of Organisational psychology after my general psychology masters. Then, in addition to that, I’ve also found a Master of behaviour analysis that I’m looking in to doing if I think it will actually add value. Part of me suspects not, I think if you already hold two Masters degree’s in psychology, then at a certain point extra formal study becomes a waste of both time and money - but I keep an open mind, as I’ve seen a really interesting job once advertised by my countries tax department, they were looking for a behaviour analyst to work on a project that was aimed to encourage business people to be more honest and reliable in paying their taxes.
Changing career is tedious. The number of years of dedication and consistency it requires is definitely off putting. If I did not love my chosen subject and chosen career change I’d not do it. As I already have a career where I earn 6 figures and have a fair amount of job certainty. I’d even go as far as to say for the most part, I actually like my current career, it’s just boring and under stimulating on a day to day basis. Sometimes I wish my anaesthetic assisting could extend to other animals. I’d love to help anaesthetise a bird or a lizard. Something that isn’t a mammal.
Yes. I also wrote that technically you can be a doctor with starting in your late 40s.
But personally I would hardly call it a career though, starting as a complete junior at the age of 60-62. Rather a "hobby", if one at least enjoys doing it. Otherwise just a waste of time, money and med-school place...
I felt I was failed by education/parents with regard to financial literacy, because the first time I ever had real money in my life was when I went to university the first time and I had no idea how to manage it, and I ended up homeless for some time.
Now I’m a parent myself, I decided I’d teach my kids about money by actually giving them money. $100 each per fortnight. I made both kids set up savings accounts that earned interest, and they had to save $50 a fortnight. The other $50 I said they could spend on whatever they liked, but that I would no longer pay for anything related to their gaming (ie, Xbox subscriptions etc), I don’t buy them toys, or nice snacks, or fancy branded clothes - that’s all stuff they now need to save for and buy themselves with the money they are given.
One kid has ADHD and the other kid is close to neurotypical. The neurotypical kid certainly learned how to manage money quicker. His savings account remained perfect, he accumulated interest as well, and can always afford his subscriptions etc. he barely ever even spends the $50 that he’s allowed to do anything with, but when he wants to use money when going out with friends etc, he just always has money, and he even keeps some cash on hand as well.
The other kid on the other hand has taken a longer time to understand but, there’s absolutely no way an ADHD kid would learn without real money to manage in my opinion and I think they benefit from having the freedom to make mistakes with money. He would spent his $50 within about 10seconds of receiving it, generally on stupid shit from Amazon. Then he never had money for his gaming subscriptions which would result in massive meltdowns when he couldn’t play his games, and then he never had money to do stuff with friends when he wanted to. He was always the “poor kid”. Then, even though he wasn’t supposed to, he withdrew cash from his savings to pay for subscriptions, losing interest etc, and then also having no savings. It took about a year, but he’s finally learned to stop buying stupid shit on Amazon. He still can’t seem to save the way his brother can, but he saves for a couple of months at a time, and then buys the next computer part he wants, and he always sets aside the money for his game subscriptions now as well. He also does sometimes put extra little bits of money in his savings when he’s particularly motivated for a more expensive piece of computer, but he still often withdraws for stupid small shit. He also compares his spending behaviour to his brothers and he realises that his brother is “rich” because he doesn’t spend money.
It’s an expensive lesson for me to teach them, but, I genuinely think that it has helped them both learn real life lessons with regard to money. I think the unfortunate thing is that the people who really need to learn money, are the ones that don’t have it. I’m very lucky that I’m in a position to be able to afford to let me kids experiment with $100 each a fortnight. There’s people out there who could probably afford more than that, but I think that in the real world, a large majority of people cannot afford to give their kids that learning opportunity. However, for me, having once been homeless, and then many years later having done an MBA which included finance, I realised the best way to help my own kids learn to manage money was to give them some money to manage.
Sure. When we started, the younger son was 8 years old and the older son was 10 years old.
At first I did it with cash and they didn’t have bank accounts, but I found the problem was the younger one would “misplace” his savings money all the time. And I also found that the ADHD was sly and would “find” the younger brothers misplaced money and spend it, but in such a way that I couldn’t prove it. So I just went and opened bank accounts for them. Who has cash these days anyway! It’s been much better since.
I do much the same: slightly less but with no rule about saving. Both have learned to handle money reasonably well.
Its fits in with my general approach to parenting and education too - generally encouraging autonomy and making their own choices, "home educated" up to 16 (GCSEs - UK high school exams), managing their time (just as valuable as money).
"I think the unfortunate thing is that the people who really need to learn money, are the ones that don’t have it"
and their parents have the same problem so cannot teach it either.
That said being rich can make you stupid about money too, as it can lead people to think they have an endless flow, especially if they have indulgent parents.
> That said being rich can make you stupid about money too, as it can lead people to think they have an endless flow, especially if they have indulgent parents.
I agree. It’s difficult to strike the balance right. I definitely don’t think there is a need for me to give my kids more money than they already get. Particularly because they’re sort of lazy when it comes to household chores, especially the neurotypical kid - he’s diabolically lazy. The money I give is independent of “chores”. It’s literally a lesson in an of itself. If I want them to do a job for me, ie, gardening etc, I’ll offer them a similar amount of money to what I’d pay someone else to do it.
The $100 a fortnight is basically like my own version of a universal basic income for kids. It hasn’t destroyed their motivation to earn money in other ways, in fact, I think it’s motivated them to want to get good paying jobs etc, so they can have more money.
They’re still relatively young though, so I will be interesting to see how they do once they reach adulthood and have real adult responsibilities and bills to pay etc.
It is beneficial for your kids to have the opportunity to make mistakes with the small amount of money they receive. These lessons learned will save them from future troubles. 50 bucks may not be much, but it’s enough to keep it real.
~$5000 per year, which you would have likely spent anyway just giving them things, in order to hammer in solid financial literacy skills seems like a really good return on investment. Especially for the ADHD one - even if he can't or won't save like his brother I think you are immunizing him against the worst kind of financial ruin in the future.
Yes - I don’t buy them extra things through out the year.
I also only top up their bus cards for public transport once every 3 or 4 months (sometimes they use their bus cards to pay for their friends) and if they run out of bus money, then they have to either walk, or top it up with their own money.
This is a sobering account. Thank you for sharing.
I’m curious, is the ADHD child receiving treatment? On medication?
I wish more people understood how this goes, when their answer to every social ill is “people need to do better” and there’s no allowance for those who don’t possess the same capacity.
Unfortunately he does not receive the typical ADHD treatment. As he also has a tic disorder (Tourette’s). Standard ADHD medications are contraindicated in people with tic disorders because they exacerbate tics.
This is why some people who have ADHD actually get worse on medication, as they may also have mild cases of Tourette’s that haven’t been identified. Tourette’s and ADHD commonly occur together along with OCD. I call it the ADHD trifecta. My son has behaviours consistent with all three (the most overlapping symptom being impulse control (or also known as compulsive behaviours). It’s a difficult combination of behaviours to manage, and with Tourette’s in particular, it’s not just verbal tics or motor tics, it’s also severe disinhibition (think having no filter), and uncontrollable rage (also because of the lack of filter). So the ADHD medication makes all those behaviours worse.
He instead has off label medications. Clonidine, and a SNRI (I hate that he is on an SNRI, but he’s been on it for 4 years and before he was on it, life was really extremely distressing and hard most of the time so I often remind myself of those times when I feel guilty that he’s been on an SNRI for as long as he has).
So a lot of the management of his ADHD has to be through behavioural approaches since we can’t use medication to help.
Hence doing things like this money thing, and him suffering the consequences of his poor money choices.
This is fantastic and inspiring, thanks for sharing it! I'll definitely share this with my parent friends. There's no better way to learn some stuff aside from it happening to you, all driven by incentives.
When my parents got me a bank account as a kid, the banker explained to me how great compound interest is. Then I asked what my APR is, and she said 0.01% but I still make some money off my $500, then I asked if it's rounded up or down... A few months later, I took out all the money and invested it in my favorite company Apple, though my dad talked me into diversifying it.
I learned as a kid that savings accounts are a scam, and that's still what I think. Even if it's 4% today, that's basically losing wealth each month, and I'm not putting anything more than emergency money in there.
No, because their savings accounts actually have fairly decent interest rates for kids accounts.
However, I do give them extra money on birthdays and Christmas. Also, when they do really good things, (ie, achieve something good at school) they always get a cash bonus.
Interestingly, even though the the non-ADHD one does better at saving, he doesn’t understand the concept of interest yet. However, the ADHD one clicked on very quickly to how interest works, and his bank has a policy that if you withdraw from your savings more than once in a month, you lose the interest for that month. So now the older one has started to plan withdrawals around that idea. It’s not the exact lesson I would like him to learn, I’d prefer that he just didn’t withdraw. But I like that he’s coming up with his own strategy to manage his money (and impulse control issues).
I think some entrepreneurs actually have kind of obsessive traits. They seem to get obsessed with an idea and see it through major hurdles that most other people would give up on. It’s like a combination of obsession and aggressively putting forward their ideas with confidence, whereas people who are “intelligent” - like have a lot of education, a lot of experience might actually sometimes see the bigger picture in a way that’s detrimental to the success of the overall idea.
I actually had an idea the other day that I thought, fuck that would be a great idea - one that could really be something… will I see it through to fruition as an actual sustainable business? Most likely no, because I lose my passion for things quicker than entrepreneurs. That’s ok, not everyone is supposed to be an entrepreneur. I’m looking for other ways to find my success, and basically build a life that is full of joyful experiences and a happy retirement. I don’t need or want a billion dollar idea or company
I figured out how to easily induce lucid dreaming for myself basically by letting myself become sleep deprived and then drinking copious amounts of caffeine before letting myself nap. Somehow, that almost always results in a lucid dream state.
Then in my lucid dreams, I often choose to dream about things that I wish were a reality in my real life, but that are not. Often relating to desired connections and relationships with people i’d like to have relationships with in real life, but can’t for whatever reason. Maybe it’s partly due to my anxious-avoidant attachment style, but I struggle to have healthy romantic relationships or even to maintain friendships for very long. The other reason I use lucid dreams (less often) is for exam preparation. I lucid dream that I am studying my course material etc usually the night before. Somehow it helps with recalling facts etc during exams the next day.