• federalreverse-old@feddit.de
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      6 months ago

      Trees and grass and other green things around you in the garden have a positive psychological effect. The feeling of having done something visible has a positive psychological effect. Getting a physical workout has a positive psychological effect.

      I know yours is a humorous comment, but a child digging in a garden has nothing to do with them yearning to be an early-capitalism style child laborer.

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    I mean, yeah…

    I grew up on a farm, if kids got too hype, they got chores.

    If you keep a husky puppy locked up in an apartment all day, it’s gonna act out and destroy shit and be difficult.

    Same thing with a human kid.

    You gotta let them burn that energy kut, giving them an iPad isn’t going to make them tired.

      • Որբունի@jlai.lu
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        6 months ago

        Crazy thing is, walking 20 miles a day isn’t burning that many calories. By the end of the day, if it is flat ground and you’re used to it, 20 miles isn’t even enough to be sore or tired…

          • JDubbleu@programming.dev
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            6 months ago

            Similar to ours just not crammed into shoes with tiny toe boxes. If you look at a baby’s foot their toes are spread super wide which is how human feet naturally are, but most shoes cream your toes causing you to develop narrowed feet over time.

            I started wearing barefoot shoes two years ago and my back no longer hurts when I walk, and I can walk 10+ miles now without my feet killing me. It took a few months to get used to but once my feet adjusted they got much stronger. Now normal shoes are painful to wear and difficult to balance in because I’ve gotten used to being planted firmly to the ground.

  • Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works
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    6 months ago

    A 6’x3’ hole?

    Little dude is chill now because he’s dug your fucking grave, man!

    Talk about cathartic. Everytime he feels like you’re a dick to him, all he’s gotta do is think of that hole waiting to swallow your body.

    And he’s got a blunt instrument with a handle to fix the size difference, that he’s getting real good at wielding.

    Hand him the shovel if you want, but don’t turn your back.

        • Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works
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          6 months ago

          It’s only 2 measurements of a 3D hole, I assumed depth wasn’t specified and it was 6 feet long and a yard wide. Traditionally graves are also 6 feet deep but that’s not always practical, so if it’s less you should put rocks on top to keep animals from digging it up. Since I’m pretty sure the kid isn’t going to bother with a coffin, even if OP is taller than 6 feet, their knees and spine are bendable.

          • Ech@lemm.ee
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            6 months ago

            That’s fair. I hadn’t thought about the missing third measurement.

            • Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works
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              6 months ago

              I could of course be wrong and it’s six feet deep x 3x3. Not sure how a kid is throwing the dirt up and out, but possible. And easy to dump in a body, it’d just crumple down in there. Less suspicious in appearance too. Stick a little tree on top, water it in.

              • mlegstrong@sh.itjust.works
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                6 months ago

                Or it could be measurements for a circle that is 6ft wide and 3ft deep. We don’t really have enough detail cuz they don’t say the shape but it doesn’t have to be square.

                • Ech@lemm.ee
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                  6 months ago

                  *Instance federation issues. Response reposted on alt account.

                • Ech@lemmy.world
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                  6 months ago

                  Well he’s gonna have to dig down 2 more feet if he doesn’t wanna be left out with the yellow-spotted lizards.

      • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        I knew a kid who loved bass fishing, but there were carp in the creek near where he lived. So he would go out at night and bowhunt the carp. In a couple years he’d cleared miles of river of the nasty things, and he had the best bass fishing in the area.

        Later on he went to college and got a degree in fisheries.

      • Technus@lemmy.zip
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        6 months ago

        I’m surprised no one’s said archeologist.

        I guess it’s unrealistic even as a dream job these days.

        • weariedfae@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          I’ve worked with two archaeologists. They’re more employable than you think. Both of them were at drilling sites I was working. Not that kind of drilling, we often dig small (< 6 inches in diameter) holes in the ground to see what’s going on in the subsurface for a variety of reasons. In this case both were there for planned underground utilities (water and sewer).

          Anyway we were legally required to have an archaeologist at these two sites just in case we encountered artefactsand they sifted through the top 10 feet of our hole. It’s fairly common in some areas and the archaeologists worked for private consulting firms.

    • Syn_Attck@lemmy.today
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      6 months ago

      Who was that guy that discovered something very important in physics, and he said the elves told him about it? The elves that were in the massive holes/caves he would dig in his back property, as his outlet. I forget how large his friends said the tunnels were, but he clearly spent a lot of time digging tunnels.

      Edit: Seymour Cray, of the Cray supercomputer. AKA The Father of Supercomputing.

      John Rollwagen, a colleague for many years, tells the story of a French scientist who visited Cray’s home in Chippewa Falls. Asked what were the secrets of his success, Cray said “Well, we have elves here, and they help me”. Cray subsequently showed his visitor a tunnel he had built under his house, explaining that when he reached an impasse in his computer design, he would retire to the tunnel to dig. “While I’m digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem”, he said.

      Cray has been called solitary, uncommunicative, secretive, and difficult to get on with. Frank Sumner, Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Manchester, met Cray on several occasions and refutes suggestions that he was a prickly character: “He was a very friendly man, and perhaps the greatest all-round computer scientist ever”, says Sumner.

          • Technus@lemmy.zip
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            6 months ago

            This passage from Wikipedia is infinitely funny to me:

            DMT has a rapid onset, intense effects, and a relatively short duration of action. For those reasons, DMT was known as the “businessman’s trip” during the 1960s in the United States, as a user could access the full depth of a psychedelic experience in considerably less time than with other substances such as LSD or psilocybin mushrooms.

            “Have you always wanted to have a transcendent psychedelic experience but just could never fit it in to your busy schedule? Now you can, with DMT™! Ask your dealer about it today!”

    • Starb3an@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      I live in Houston. Everything is clay. That shit gets stuck to your shovel and does not come off.

      That being said, we had some woods behind our house and we would play out there all the time. Digging, pellet guns, machetes to chop down trees and make forts.

      • shneancy@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        for a week or two yes, but once the novelty of just chilling runs out you start feeling like shit

        • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          People who need work always assume everyone else is like them, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar or defective person. Like morning people, or sports people.

          I would happily spend the rest of my life not working.

          • ikka@lemmy.sdf.org
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            6 months ago

            I’m pretty sure he’s talking about doing literally nothing, as opposed to not working.

          • Mmagnusson@programming.dev
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            6 months ago

            But presumably you don’t just stare at the wall. “Humans need something to do” is mainly bound to not just sitting around twiddling your thumbs. It’s the reason we get bored, the brain is annoyed at not having anything to focus on.

            It doesn’t have to be literal work, just something you find engaging, be it going for a run, tending to houseplants, or completing your entire video game backlog.

            And of course there is variation between humans. Some people cope well with having little to do, others always need to do something they find productive.

            • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              I’m pretty sure no one at all was talking about literally doing nothing, because what a stupid scenario to even consider

          • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            6 months ago

            but if you literally had nothing to do in your life, you would grow bored, and start doing something the human condition is to create things.

            Why do you think we industrialized?

            • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              I’m pretty sure no one at all was talking about literally doing nothing, because what a stupid scenario to even consider

              • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                6 months ago

                yeah see im confused because i thought that’s what we were already talking about, but then people started talking about it again like it wasn’t already understood.

                I did not pick up on it.

                • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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                  6 months ago

                  No, you guys were right. I overestimated OP, couldn’t imagine him possibly making such an inane statement. But yeah, he was literally saying that people don’t like sitting and doing absolutely nothing.

          • squidspinachfootball@lemm.ee
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            6 months ago

            I think they’re talking moreso about having anything to do at all, not just work. I think we all agree that work can be a drag. But if I didn’t need to work to make a living, I’d still be doing things - hobbies, learning new things, whatever. I’d rot away if I just sat on the couch watching tv all day everyday, for example.

            • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              Watching TV is not doing nothing, and lots of retired people love sitting and watching TV all day.

  • PrettyFlyForAFatGuy@feddit.uk
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    6 months ago

    I had a great time with my brother in law a couple years ago shoveling snow off my parents drive…

    So much so we continued into the road and did a houses length in each direction.

    was fun (when we were done) watching cars struggle almost all the way up the road until they got to our bit, have a couple seconds of perfect driving experience, before re entering the icy hellscape.

    I was sore the next day tho

  • Ultragigagigantic@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Holes, a wildly popular movie about the very real problem of exploitative kids camps. And yet they persist…

  • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    Turns out exercise and purpose is good for kids. Breathing through disappointment is a buddhist technique, a letting go technique. But letting go is only half of mental health. The other half is going after things.

    • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Humans are not evolved to be sedentary. We need to be going out and about to be stimulated, not just physically but also mentally.

  • Crackhappy@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Hell yeah! I did this kind of thing a lot with my kids. Give them a backpack, a flip phone, lunch and drinks and tell them to go explore a hill visible from the house.

  • Turious@leaf.dance
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    6 months ago

    I unwittingly terraformed a huge swath of land that started flooding when they flattened out the gravel road to our house over the course of a month or so with a spade when I was 10. This post is weirdly accurate.

    I sometimes think of going back there to see what happened since but I’m not sure if someone lives there these days.

  • Juice@midwest.social
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    6 months ago

    I love to dig. My dad used to get mad at me for failing classes in school, which happened often. He’d say, “Do you wanna go dig ditches for a living?!”

    Now I’m a software developer and yeah I like it. It shuts my brain off. I wish I could do it part time or even just as an exercise but I live in a suburb and any time you want to dig you have to make a phone call and wait for someone to come out

    • DesertCreosote@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      Have you considered calling the locating service, get them to mark the entire yard, and then taking pictures so you know areas are okay to dig in going forward? I’ve been considering doing that for my yard just so I know where I can safely landscape.

      • Juice@midwest.social
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        6 months ago

        I’ve done it before! I think its illegal to dig before calling. A friend of mine was digging in his yard and found an underground cable of some kind, almost took it out with a spade. Probably would have cost a pretty penny, with court fees to boot! Maybe I should take an ad out and offer to help dig for people. Maybe i could get a couple jobs a week, and I would do it for free or travel money and pizza at least