True happiness, research shows, isn’t found in leisure alone—but in the flow of tackling demanding tasks where challenge and skill align.
Again and again, he found that people reported some of their most positive experiences not during passive rest, but when they were absorbed in something demanding enough to stretch them and structured enough to let them respond. Challenge sitting a hair above skill. Goals clear. Feedback immediate. The self, for the duration, mostly out of the way.
In his own words: “The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” (Flow, 1990, p. 3)
https://spacedaily.com/m-we-tend-to-imagine-the-good-life-as-one-of-rest-and-leisure-but-after-years-of-study-one-psychologist-found-that-our-deepest-satisfaction-arrives-somewhere-else-entirely-in-the-middle-of-a/Open linkView original on europe.pubMayDay26 gif's artidote
my message to myself on MayDay26 😆
this is the best magnet i gifted myself in years, to remind myself i need to be kind to my self & learn to 🖤 every part. to be grateful for all the horrors i've been through as they taught me to rely on my self.
GifsArtidote press MentalHealth Emotional Health SelfCare
Change The World Start With Your Self
alt text:
magnet with the text: floggings will continue until morale improves.
it hangs on metal racking in which my book collection is proudly displayed. among others there's:
☆george orwell- 1984
☆king cole- terry hall
☆ geert mak - the angel of amsterdam
☆ diana ozon - squatter jack
☆ the tattooist of auschwitz - heather morris
☆ state of robbers - ewald van vrugt
☆ the life & rhymes of benjamin zephanaia - b. zephanaia
all i can highly recommend 🖤
No real place to post about cognition, hope this fits in here
RWG interface, mispoke; I interact with my random word generator and because of Pegasus II, it tells me to do things, to include breaking the law. If that or this first sounds crazy, watch to the end.
gif's artidote | episode 6 | the alcoholic roundabout
in this week's podcast i read the article ´the alcoholic roundabout' and discuss the toxic relationship dynamic i have been in since birth, how that came about & why i keep attracting alcoholics & narcissists in my life.
https://gifsartidote.life/2026/04/09/gifs-artidote-episode-6-the-alcoholic-roundabout/Open linkView original on lemmy.blahaj.zoneA look at how some teens use popular role-playing chatbots and, for parents, the high stakes task of understanding the impact of the possibly addictive products
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/04/technology/ai-chatbots-teen-roleplay.html?unlocked_article_code=1.YVA.MA5h.oLquJDA4G9DEOpen linkView original on lemmy.worldResearch across 1,372 participants and 9K+ trials details “cognitive surrender”, where most subjects had minimal AI skepticism and accepted faulty AI reasoning
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/research-finds-ai-users-scarily-willing-to-surrender-their-cognition-to-llms/Open linkView original on lemmy.worldAutism and psychopathy are both sides of the same coin
I don't intend to offend anyone with this post, it's purely based on my own theorising and observations, having interacted with people who have autistic traits, and people with psychopathic traits. I've also studied a lot of history, and specifically looked into the people behind certain events, not just the events themselves. I also detest the idea that people with psychopathic traits are "monsters", as this is a harmful way of looking at people, who at the end of the day are just as human as anyone else.
When you look at each of these traits, you can see that they are the opposite of each other. An autistic person is limited in their ability to engage in many activities, due to sensory issues, overwhelming feelings etc. A psychopathic person has none of these issues, they are completely "free" to do as they please, no remorse, no emotions or conscience to stop them from doing as they wish.
Both conditions are characterised by antisocial behavior, impulsiveness, inability to control their behavior in a social setting(not always the case).
The concept of "masking" is the same in both cases. Some psychopaths don't mask at all, these are typically repeat violent offenders, who function completely at the whim of their impulses and have no regard for any consequences of their actions. Some autistic people also don't mask, they seem to be completely unaware of their own condition, and don't seem to notice that other people may find their manners uncomfortable.
And some people mask very well, to the point where it's impossible for someone to tell who the real person is behind the mask. Sometimes the mask slips, for a psychopath this might mean showing an emotion that is not commonly associated with the situation unfolding, or an autistic person might go into too much detail about their Warhammer collection.
Autistic people are at risk of being the victims of different types of crimes, for example sexual assaults, due to their inability of reading social cues. Whereas psychopaths are often perpetrators of these crimes, as they often are extremely skilled at detecting vulnerability in a person, and exploiting those weaknessess.
I also believe that psychopathy is a spectrum, similar to autism. You could categorise it on a scale of 0-100%, 100% being a completely emotionless, remorseless and predatory psychopath, and in the case of autism being a nonverbal, socially regressed person who needs constant care.
When you look at a lot of serial killers for example, their "empathy" is very selective. They can brutally murder a specific group of people, without seeing them as human beings, but somehow draw the line at killing elderly women for example. My theory is that these people don't actually feel empathy, they project their own feelings onto the world. In this case, a person like this might have lost their grandmother at a young age, and remembers how bad they felt about it. Hence, they see killing a grandmother as something that is bad. Whereas most people can feel empathy towards someone who for example lost their dog, even if they personally didn't have any pets themselves.
I think autistic people feel somewhat similarly, they often struggle expressing empathy towards something they don't personally understand.








