[looking at people younger than me] you have your whole life ahead of you, [looking at people older than me] you have your whole life ahead of you, [looking at myself] it's over.
@tasx_04 the punishment for this should be that old medieval device they'd insert in someone's butt and widen it, tearing the anus to the point of death! just saying
Λεφτά δεν έχουμε, έρωτες δεν ζούμε,
η υγεία διαλυμένη, φίλοι αληθινοί δεν μας έχουν απομείνει, όνειρα ούτε στα όνειρα μας, χαρά νιώθουμε μια φορά τον χρονο, τι σκατα κάνουμε σε αυτή τη ζωή απορώ ειλικρινα
This has a clinical name. Revenge bedtime procrastination. And the ADHD version runs on a completely different mechanism than the neurotypical one.
A neurotypical person stays up late because they want more leisure time. The ADHD brain stays up because it spent every drop of dopamine it had on executive function during the day. Sitting in meetings, managing transitions, filtering impulses, remembering the thing you were supposed to remember. That burns through dopamine the way sprinting burns through glycogen. By 10pm the tank is empty.
But here's where it gets counterintuitive. The exhaustion is physical. The dopamine deficit is neurological. Those are two separate systems. Your muscles want sleep. Your prefrontal cortex is starving for the stimulation it was denied all day because it spent 14 hours on task-switching and impulse control instead of anything that actually felt rewarding.
The phone at midnight is the brain trying to collect what it's owed. Low-effort, high-stimulation content. Scrolling, short videos, rabbit holes. The exact profile of activity that delivers dopamine without requiring the executive function you already depleted.
The sleep researchers call this a "self-regulation failure." It's closer to a debt collection. You borrowed against your own reward system to function all day. The bill comes due at midnight. And the brain will not let you sleep until it gets paid.
Pixar hired a chef with three Michelin stars to design the dish in Ratatouille. Then they built the scene around the neuroscience of how taste triggers memory, and got Peter O’Toole to deliver one of the great monologues in animation history.
What you call “taste” is mostly smell. When you eat, molecules rise up the back of your throat into your nose. From there, smell takes a unique route. Every other sense (sight, sound, touch, even the actual taste your tongue picks up) gets filtered through a kind of switchboard in your brain first. Smell skips it. The smell heads straight to the parts of your brain that handle memory and emotion. Which is why one bite of food can drop you back into a moment from 30 years ago.
Ratatouille’s director, Brad Bird, built the entire flashback around this. Anton Ego takes one bite, and Pixar zooms the camera through his pupil into a childhood kitchen. The dish itself was Thomas Keller’s. His restaurant The French Laundry in California has three Michelin stars. He took a 1976 recipe by French chef Michel Guérard called confit byaldi (paper-thin vegetables spiraled over a tomato-pepper sauce) and adapted it for the film. Keller even had Pixar’s producer intern in his kitchen for months to get the look right.
Anton Ego is voiced by Peter O’Toole, the lead in Lawrence of Arabia. He was nominated for Best Actor eight times. Never won. He holds the record (tied with Glenn Close) for most nominations without a win, and once called himself the Academy’s “Biggest Loser.” He was 75 when he recorded the Anton Ego monologue. He died six years later, and it became one of his signature performances.
The speech was Brad Bird’s. In the review he writes the next morning, Anton Ego turns on his own profession. Critics risk almost nothing, he writes. They thrive on tearing strangers apart. The only risk that matters, he writes, is defending new talent when no one else will. He ends with the line everyone still quotes: “a great artist can come from anywhere.”
Ratatouille won Best Animated Feature at the 2008 Oscars, plus a Best Original Screenplay nomination on the strength of Bird’s speech. The film grossed $624 million on a $150 million budget.
In 90 seconds, a cartoon rat and a fictional food critic turn that science into something you can feel. Your best memories live in your stomach.
ppl don't realize how isolating it is to grow up thinking and knowing that nobody around you likes or had a crush on u. I genuinely think that it’s not possible to find me pretty in that way and that I will never find someone. when someone gives me a compliment my first thought is that they are either making fun of me or lying.
i’m going to delete linkedin and focus on what really matters this year. learning how to crochet. memorizing poems. attempting to befriend a crow. writing a kids story. going on walks. and doing yoga