Not necessarily. I definitely go through waves like this, and it doesn’t feel like depression to me.

I’ll have a couple of days (or weeks) where I want to do things, but not enough to actually motivate myself to start any of it. Then I’ll bounce back for a while and be so focused on something that I’ll forget about taking care of basic needs like eating and sleeping.

I’ve kinda learned to embrace those extremes. What I hate is the middle ground where I want to focus and get something done, but I realize about every 5 minutes that my brain is off topic again.

previous theories that equine brains respond only to immediate stimuli and are not complex enough to strategise

Who held those theories? And have they ever been around horses?

Just this weekend my spouse and I had to move our mare and almost 4 month old colt. She’s quite used to riding in a small horse trailer, but the little guy was terrified of getting into it. When his mom realized it, she started getting on and off the trailer several times to show him it was fine. Then she went behind him and kept nudging him towards the trailer. Seemed pretty obvious to me that she knew what was going on and was trying her best to help the little guy understand it was all ok.

I’ve certainly met some horses that could have made me question the species’ intelligence if they were the only ones I knew. But there are plenty of intelligent horses out there. I’m really surprised that the prevailing theory was that they only respond to immediate stimuli.

I think the hard part is, almost no one realizes that they felt that way until they are finally on the outside.

I remember a really interesting article I read a few years ago that indicated the best way to change someone’s viewpoint was to welcome them into your community or group without requiring a change of mind first.

Turns out our social and emotional needs will trump our rational or logical side almost every time.

So you’re 100% right. What people need is a caring group of family and friends who encourage each other to question themselves in an effort to learn and grow.

I did bad.

But I expected to do bad. AI generation has become too good.

You tell yourself you can identify them, because sometimes you notice weird artifacts and spot the AI quickly. But we’re really only noticing the bad ones. We’ll never even know the good ones were AI most of the time, so we can’t balance how good we think we are at spotting them against how often we were actually wrong.