Joefroobs 🦧

Got my results: Classic Hodgkins Lymphoma Likely won't post much about this primarily because cancer posts are always a downer and I want to focus on the positive. Feels too significant for me not to share though. Kinda wild as you never expect it'll happen to you. 🤷‍♂️

Gary doesn't even understand the basics of taxation, like income tax vs inheritance tax or corporate tax vs consumption tax.

At 24 hours of fasting, autophagy begins. At 36 hours, it triples. At 72 hours, it maxes out. If you have never fasted past a single meal skip, your body has never run its own cleanup cycle. Not once. Not in years. The heart fat, the visceral fat, the dead tissue — it is all still there because you never gave your body permission to burn it. You need to fast, and you need to make it a habit.

A depressed brain will spend 4 hours in a corner rather than 10 minutes in a shower. Every piece of why that happens has been measured in a lab or seen on a brain scan. The lab task works like this. You get a choice: an easy button-press task for a small reward, or a harder one for a bigger reward. The healthy brain picks the bigger reward most of the time, especially when the payout is nearly guaranteed. In depression, the pattern flips. The smaller reward wins, again and again, even when the bigger one is almost a sure thing. The original study came out of Vanderbilt in 2009, with a follow-up in 2012 showing that the longer the depressive episode, the worse the effect. If you've been through this, you probably called yourself lazy. The research points somewhere else entirely. Dopamine, the chemical your brain uses to say "this is worth the energy," runs low in a reward center called the nucleus accumbens. The brain does bad math. It underprices the reward. It overprices the effort. A 10-minute shower feels, inside the brain, like climbing a mountain for a penny. The other half is called rumination. When your brain has nothing urgent to do, a network of regions in the middle of your head starts chatting with itself. That's your "thinking about yourself" circuit. In a healthy brain, it quiets down when you get busy. In a depressed brain, it runs on overdrive. Four hours of "why didn't I just take the shower" on a continuous reel. A 2015 paper from Stanford's Gotlib lab nicknamed this network the dark matter of clinical neuroscience, because its role in depression is huge but almost invisible on any single scan. So the 4 hours in the corner have a signature. One network stuck on max volume. The circuit that would have started the shower, dead silent. Both states are measurable. Neither is a choice. The therapy with the best evidence for this has a boring name: behavioral activation. In plain English, doing the small thing even when you can't find a reason to. Especially then. A 2014 review of 26 studies found it works about as well as antidepressants and about as well as talk therapy. Action restarts the reward circuit. Thinking about action keeps the rumination stuck. Over a billion people worldwide have a mental health condition, per a WHO report from September 2025. Depression affects 5.7% of adults right now. Mental health gets two cents out of every health dollar governments spend. What Lola posted is one of the most common experiences on the planet. It just doesn't leave a visible mark.