1. LOOK AT THAT FAMILY RESEMBLANCE, NO ONE SPEAK TO ME OR MY HANDSOME BIRD SON EVER AGAIN
2. Re: Bucky. I’m honestly not sure when Buck would’ve actually killed more people, tbh. Most soldiers in WWII would have been individually responsible for a fairly low number of deaths, if any, but I think that Cap 1 implies that Bucky’s numbers would’ve been much higher that the norm. While he was the Winter Soldier iirc canon says he was used for something like a few dozen assassinations, but idk whether that would include any collateral damage (if he shot THROUGH Natasha to get to a target then surely he took out plenty of other innocent bystanders as well).
I have to say that I think he was really, really messed up by the war and his time as a POW/torture victim long before he fell off the train, and his time as the Soldier probably just made a deeply fucked-up mental health situation much worse. HOWEVER, I don’t necessarily think that he has a worse shot at a happy ending as a post-Winter-Soldier Bucky than he would have if he had made it home after the war. Men of that generation didn’t talk about or seek treatment for mental health issues, and even in the extremely unlikely event that he did try to get help for his PTSD the available resources would have been … not great. Like, Freudian analysis or electroshock, maybe? All of my headcanons for a survives-the-war Bucky are pretty grim, tbh. But post WS Bucky in 2018 is going to A. have his trauma and guilt taken fairly seriously and not be expected to pick up exactly where he left off in 1939 as carefree charming Bucky Barnes, and B. realistically be expected to seek some kind of therapy or counselling or SOMETHING before he attempts to return to any kind of active duty (Not that Marvel would ever actually show one of their characters seeking therapy, God forbid, WOULDN’T WANT TO SET SOME KIND OF WUSSY CRYBABY GIRLY-MAN EXAMPLE FOR THE 13 YEAR OLD BOYS WHO ARE OUR TARGET DEMOGRAPHIC). So like, best case scenario 2018 Bucko has enough trauma to float a barge, a Steve Rogers with some VA meetings under his belt and access to Google, a therapist, a support group and maybe a giant floofy service dog named FUBAR (@yawpkatsi), while best case scenario 1947 Bucko has enough trauma to float a slightly smaller barge, a totally at-sea Steve Rogers, a parish priest, and a bottle of whiskey.
… that was a pretty long and overly elaborate answer to your straightforward question, whoops
Is Decisive a book? Is it a book I need? It sounds like a book I need.
Decisive is a book, and I firmly believe that everyone of our generation should at least try reading it.
Chip and Dan Heath are two terrifyingly intelligent brothers who have written a series of books that are, really, at base, how to hack the brain of yourself and everyone else around you in healthy, positive ways – they’re not quite self-help books, more like…guidebooks to adulting. Two of their books, Made to Stick and Switch, are primarily about business, but have personal applications also – they’re both about effecting permanent change, or knowing when to make a change.
Decisive is about techniques for making better decisions and how to give yourself more options when faced with a choice. For example, they briefly talk about making a pro/con list (and the history of it – apparently Ben Franklin really loved them) but then they talk about moving beyond the pro/con list to more sophisticated techniques that help to exclude emotional bias.
Like, they talk about “hedging”, where you give yourself a taste of each option or you hedge your investment in a choice. If my main concern was whether I’d be happy in Boston or whether I’d want to move back to Chicago, I might “hedge” by putting most of my stuff in cheap pod storage, going to Boston with just the basics, and sending for my stuff in six months if I was still happy there, or moving back if I found I wasn’t. If I wanted to make the move permanent, I wouldn’t pay significantly more than if I’d moved six months earlier, and if I didn’t, I wouldn’t pay to move at all, just a sort of convenience fee for storage.
And just thinking about hedging helped me say “No, I don’t need to do that. I know I’ll like the city, I just don’t know about the job” which helped me focus on the real concerns I have as opposed to the extraneous stuff.
Last time I used the book’s techniques, I was trying to decide whether to leave my job (because it was moving south and would make my commute hard) or move south to be closer to it, and I used their “set a deadline” advice. Rather than immediately choosing one or the other, I decided to jobsearch for six months, and if I hadn’t found anything, I’d stop jobsearching and start looking for apartments. It worked really well, and that’s how I ended up in this sweet condo I’ve got now. 😀
Anyway, I strongly recommend all three books; I think they are exceptional for helping people cope with a very uncertain world. But Decisive has been the most directly useful to me in my personal life. Every time I’m faced with a decision of this agonizing, terrifying size, I re-read the book to try and find the best way to move forward. It always has something to offer that I’d forgotten about. 🙂
Bless me Tumblr for I have Sinned: I just finished editing almost 3,000 words of entirely gratuitous and emotionally manipulative 1930s Sweetpea/Honey smut
Anyway here it is because if I’m going to hell I’m dragging all of you down with me
Tumblr Exodus 