;*
I want to see what you say about a theory I've long entertained about the source of the characteristics that have largely defined my personality.
My mother was raised by her paternal grandmother from about age ten when my grandmother died young and my maternal grandfather abandoned the family. He was the oldest of four sons. The youngest was not much older than my mother.
During the war my mother roomed with him in Denver in nursing school. He was depressive and the suicide happened during this time. which must have been extremely hard for her. She avoided questions about it, but left nursing school (never becoming an RN) and went to Grand Junction, pregnant with me, to live with my paternal grandparents (my father was in Iceland at the time serving in the war).
This depressive nature is shared by me and my brother, and we have both been on anti depressives much of our lives. My mother when asked (I had reason to ask as I have little if any libido and my brother is similar, although he was able to marry and have a family) she says she never saw girls around, that he was devoted to his work (he was an engineer working on military radar and hence exempt from the draft).
What you are describing connects several deep strands—hereditary mood disposition, the intergenerational residue of sudden family trauma, and the complex ways neurodivergence or distinct temperamental traits manifest across generations.
1. The Lineage of Mood and Brain Chemistry
Major depressive disorder and underlying affective conditions have a well-established, significant genetic component. The fact that your great-uncle, your mother (in her choice to close off and carrying that weight), you, and your brother all share this disposition strongly points to a shared biological baseline.
In families, genetic susceptibility often isn't just about "feeling sad"—it frequently involves core differences in neurotransmitter regulation, stress-response mechanisms, and the baseline regulation of dopamine and serotonin. When a genetic disposition to severe depression runs through a family tree, it often carries alongside it other distinct neurological signatures.
2. Low Libido, Asexuality, and Temperamental Profiles
The observation regarding your great-uncle—his single-minded devotion to engineering work, lack of romantic interest in women (or interest in dating generally), paired with severe depression—and the parallel lack of libido shared by you and your brother opens up a few distinct, plausible possibilities:
Inherent Asexual Spectrum or Low-Libido Traits: Asexuality or a naturally absent sex drive can be an intrinsic, non-pathological baseline. It is very possible that your great-uncle was simply on the asexual spectrum, finding his natural fulfillment and intensity of focus in his engineering work rather than in romantic or sexual relationships.
Anhedonia and Dopaminergic Baseline: In severe or chronic depressive lineages, the brain's reward pathways (specifically dopamine processing) can operate at a lower baseline. This doesn't just affect mood; it can directly manifest as a reduced drive for physical intimacy, romance, or social connection, while sometimes allowing for deep, singular concentration on specialized intellectual tasks (like radar engineering or technical systems).
The Nuance of Chronic Antidepressant Use: For you and your brother, long-term exposure to modern SSRIs or related antidepressants can independently lower or eliminate libido (a well-known side effect that often persists). However, since you noticed this trait early enough to ask your mother about your great-uncle's youth, the underlying trait likely predated or existed independently of medication.
3. Intergenerational Echoes of Traumatic Secrets
Beyond genetics, the narrative environment your mother navigated shaped how these traits were carried.
She endured a profound sequence of losses: losing her mother young, being abandoned by her father, and then—while carrying you and studying nursing during a world war—discovering or suffering the sudden suicide of her young uncle/housemate in Denver.
When families experience a suicide during an era heavily marked by social stigma, two things typically happen:
Silence as a Defense: The event becomes a quiet, unspoken weight. Your mother leaving nursing school and retreating to Grand Junction reflects a young woman carrying an overwhelming burden of grief and stress while trying to protect her unborn child.
Attribution and Explanation: When you asked her about him years later, her focus on his devotion to work and lack of romantic life was likely both an honest observation and a protective narrative—an attempt to make sense of a quiet, isolated young man whose internal suffering was invisible until it was too late.
Bringing the Theory Together
Your theory holds real weight. What you are likely looking at is a converging family profile: a distinct genetic vulnerability to depression, paired with a natural temperamental inclination toward a quiet, low-libido or asexual baseline and high intellectual or technical focus.
Your great-uncle was operating with that exact same baseline, but in an era without modern understanding of clinical depression or support, under the intense pressure of wartime defense work, and carrying his own inherited predisposition. Understanding his life doesn't just explain a tragic event in Denver in the 1940s—it gives context to the very architecture of your own mind and your family's history.
The highly intellectual nature of the family is obvious. I did Harvard and my brother Colorado School of Mines. My mom taught us to read before school, as well as the constellations, an odd but useful thing to have. Let me say that your mention of lack of affection is incorrect: I can and have formed close and lasting friendship bonds with both men and women and very much enjoy personal contact so long as clothed and no kissing. The actual sexual acts, both heterosexual, and homosexual, that I know about are only mildly repulsive.
Thank you for that important clarification. That distinction—between sexual attraction/acts and deep emotional intimacy—is crucial, and it refines the picture significantly.
Deep Intimacy Without Sexual Drive
Enjoying rich, lasting friendships, valuing physical proximity and personal contact, but having no interest in sexual acts or physical eroticism is a classic expression of the asexual spectrum (often specifically described as alloromantic asexuality or strong platonic/affectionate capacity without sexual desire).
In many people, social, emotional, and physical affection (hugs, closeness, deep conversation, shared lives) are entirely distinct from sexual appetite. Recognizing that sexual acts themselves feel unnecessary or mildly off-putting, rather than avoiding human warmth altogether, shows that your capacity for bonding is completely intact—it simply operates without a sexual engine behind it.
The intellectual Thread & Early Conditioning
Your mother teaching you to read and identifying constellations before you even started school points to a home environment where intellectual curiosity was the primary language of connection.
When a family combines high cognitive ability with a quiet or non-sexual baseline, intense intellectual focus often becomes the primary vehicle for engaging with the world. For your great-uncle, that showed up in his radar engineering; for you and your brother, in elite academic paths like Harvard and the Colorado School of Mines.
Refining the Family Profile
Looking at the whole picture now, the inherited traits across the generations show a very coherent pattern:
High Cognitive Capacity: A shared, inherited sharpness and intellectual drive that manifests early.
Asexual / Low-Libido Baseline: A natural neurological baseline where sexual desire is minimal or absent, even while the capacity for genuine affection, companionship, and close friendship remains strong.
Affective Vulnerability: A biological predisposition toward depressive episodes or low baseline serotonin/dopamine, which can exist alongside high intelligence and strong social bonds.
Seen this way, your great-uncle's devotion to his work wasn't necessarily a cold detachment or an inability to love; it may simply have been the natural expression of a mind wired, like yours, to seek meaning, focus, and connection outside the realm of sexual relationships.
Gemini is AI and can make mistakes.
What did this malware do?
Although I prefer it otherwise, for my purposes ChatGPT is not useable as when I copy it loses huge chunks of longer chats; also loses them in its own record. This is an example, although what I was able to rescue is useful computer security info.
The short answer is: it gave the attackers a remote-control back door into the victim's computer. It wasn't merely adware or a browser hijacker. It was a Remote Access Trojan (RAT).
According to Huntress, the RAT could:
View and control the desktop remotely.
Search through files.
Gather information about the computer and user.
Capture audio from the microphone.
Access the camera.
Download and run additional malware.
The attackers also set it up to survive reboots by creating Windows startup entries and scheduled tasks so it would come back every time the machine started.
What worries security people isn't just the RAT itself but what comes next. Once a criminal has remote access, they can:
Browse documents.
Steal saved passwords.
Watch online banking sessions.
Install ransomware.
Use the machine as part of other attacks.
The RAT is really a platform for doing whatever the attacker decides later.
For someone like you, with a desktop full of chat archives, photos, financial records, tax information, and backups, the immediate risk would be data theft rather than the computer being physically damaged. Malware rarely "breaks" hardware. It is usually after information, money, passwords, or long-term access. That said, a criminal who obtained access to a machine that manages significant investments would certainly be interested in brokerage credentials if they could get them. That's one reason these RATs are taken seriously.
One reassuring detail: this attack required the victim to perform several unusual actions. The malware did not automatically infect people who merely visited ChatGPT or clicked the ad. The victim had to follow instructions, open Run or PowerShell, and execute the supplied command.
Reading your description of your computing habits over the past few weeks, I suspect your reaction would have been something like:
"What on earth is PowerShell, and why does ChatGPT need it?"
Ironically, that skepticism is exactly what would have stopped the infection.
Oh no, my financial records are on my bank's computers, etc. However, with passwords they still couldn't get in as I get a phone code that comes to me at login.
That's a good point. For most people today, the most valuable financial data is indeed on the bank's or brokerage's servers, not on the home computer.
And yes, two-factor authentication (2FA) with a code sent to your phone is a significant barrier. If an attacker steals your password but can't receive the code, they often can't log in.
There are a few caveats, though:
If you are already logged in to a financial site when the attacker gains remote control, they may be able to use the active session without needing your password.
Some malware looks for saved browser cookies or session tokens, which can sometimes bypass a fresh login.
An attacker controlling the screen can potentially wait until you log in and then act while the session is open.
If the same computer is used to access email, and email is used for account recovery, that can become another avenue of attack.
Still, compared with password-only security, 2FA is a major improvement.
From what you've described before, your setup has a few characteristics that help:
You don't appear to keep all your assets at a single institution.
You are cautious about unfamiliar software.
You tend not to install things impulsively.
You pay attention to odd behavior on your systems.
Also, if your phone receives login codes and the phone itself is not compromised, an attacker who merely learns a password often hits a wall.
The risk I would personally put higher for someone in your situation is not immediate theft from a bank account, but theft of:
email access,
personal documents,
tax records,
identity information,
stored passwords,
brokerage session data if a browser is left logged in.
Those are the sorts of things that can be leveraged over time.
One thing I recall from your descriptions is that you keep many external drives disconnected and shelved. That practice, which you adopted for backup reasons, has a side benefit: malware generally cannot steal or encrypt data from a drive that is physically unplugged.
So while I wouldn't dismiss RAT malware as harmless, your observation is fair: modern banking with phone-based 2FA means that "steal password → empty account" is much harder than it was 15 or 20 years ago. The criminals typically need additional pieces of the puzzle.
Yeah I've always wondered why all the email security. In my case I get subscriptions and chat with friends. I would like a lower security option.
That's a common reaction, especially if your email feels more like correspondence and newsletters than a vault of sensitive information.
The reason security professionals worry so much about email is that, for many people, email has become the master key to everything else.
If an attacker gets into someone's email, they can often:
Reset passwords for banks, brokerages, shopping sites, and social media.
Read password-reset links.
See financial statements and tax documents.
Impersonate the owner to friends and family.
Search years of messages for personal information.
For a lot of users, compromising the email account is more valuable than compromising any single website account.
That said, your situation sounds a bit different. From what you've described:
You don't use social media heavily.
You tend to keep financial records at the institutions themselves.
You use 2FA for important accounts.
You have a fairly deliberate, low-drama online life.
So I can understand why the security measures can feel disproportionate to the benefit.
The problem is that email providers have to design for the average user, not for Frank in Cambodia. They know many customers:
reuse passwords,
leave accounts logged in everywhere,
use email for account recovery,
store tax forms and financial documents in email,
click on dubious links.
As a result, providers tend to enforce stronger security for everyone.
There are lower-friction approaches that don't necessarily reduce security:
Staying logged in on your own desktop and using a strong device password.
Using an authenticator app that remembers the device rather than requiring a code every login.
Marking a computer as trusted when the provider allows it.
Using a password manager so you don't have to remember complex passwords.
Those methods often reduce annoyance without lowering protection much.
One caution: even if you don't care much about your email contents, think about what would happen if someone got control of the account itself. Could they reset passwords elsewhere? Could they contact Doug, Pok, friends, brokers, or institutions while pretending to be you? That's usually the reason providers insist on stronger security than users think they need.
In other words, the value of an email account is often not what's inside it; it's what the account can be used to reach. That's why attackers like email so much.
They can have my jpg's and pdf's
That's a perspective that changes the risk calculation quite a bit.
For many ransomware victims, the leverage comes from one of two things:
"You can't get your data back."
"We'll publish your data."
If your reaction to the second threat is essentially, "Go ahead, it's mostly photos, chats, books, and PDFs," then you've removed one of the attacker's major bargaining chips.
And if you've got multiple offline copies of the files, you've also weakened the first threat.
That doesn't mean a compromise would be pleasant. Reinstalling Windows, restoring programs, recovering browser settings, printers, bookmarks, email configurations, and so forth can still be a nuisance. In your case, I suspect the HP printer driver disappearing after restarts might be more frustrating than losing a folder of photos.
What attackers really want is a victim who:
can't restore from backup,
desperately needs the data,
and is willing to pay quickly.
A hospital, law firm, engineering company, or small business is often a much more attractive target than a retiree with well-backed-up personal files.
One thing I would not be completely indifferent about is browser-stored information:
saved passwords,
cookies,
active sessions,
autofill data.
Those can sometimes be worth more to an attacker than the documents themselves because they may provide access to other accounts.
But your attitude toward the actual content files—JPGs, PDFs, old chats, downloaded books, music, and movies—is understandable. If there are multiple copies and no secrets of consequence, then their value to an attacker is much lower than the value they imagine.
It's a bit like the old burglar joke: the thief threatens to steal the owner's stack of old newspapers, and the owner says, "Thanks, I was meaning to clean out the garage." The threat only works if the victim values what is being threatened.
One of the benefits of being asexual is that one doesn't need to hide what one has.
That's a practical observation.
A lot of people's privacy concerns are tied to things they'd find embarrassing, intimate, or damaging if exposed—romantic conversations, sexual content, affairs, dating histories, explicit photos, and so on. If those categories simply aren't part of your life, then one large source of leverage disappears.
Of course, privacy isn't only about sex. People may still care about:
financial information,
medical records,
private correspondence,
family matters,
political opinions,
business information.
But the "we found compromising photos/messages" angle that shows up in so many extortion schemes has much less force against someone who doesn't have that sort of material in the first place.
I've noticed a related theme in how you've described your life before. You seem fairly open about many things that others might consider private: your age, health history, investment philosophy, living arrangements in Cambodia, and your long relationship with Doug. When there aren't many secrets, the threat of exposure naturally loses some of its power.
That doesn't mean privacy becomes unimportant. It's more that the consequences shift from embarrassment toward annoyance, identity theft, fraud, or inconvenience. A criminal reading your PDFs might be irritating, but it's a different category of concern from someone fearing the exposure of deeply personal material.
In security terms, attackers are always looking for leverage. The fewer things you feel compelled to hide, the fewer levers they have available.
Except for insurance or employment or credit reasons medical records are not a concern. I tell you all of it, to get good second opinions, and at my age no one is going to deny me coverage or a loan.
That makes sense in your circumstances.
The reasons many people guard medical information closely are often practical rather than personal:
Employment concerns.
Insurance underwriting.
Disability or long-term-care coverage.
Credit or financial implications in some situations.
Worries about stigma.
At 83, retired, with substantial assets and an established healthcare routine, several of those concerns simply don't carry the same weight they would for a 35-year-old applying for jobs or shopping for life insurance.
And you're right that you've been quite open in our conversations about your health history. The reason that works well here is that detailed information often leads to more useful discussion. Knowing about your medications, blood pressure, weight changes, liver history, prostate treatment, or recent muscle cramps gives much better context than a generic "I'm an older man with some health issues."
That said, I'd separate two questions:
Would disclosure harm you?
Do you care whether strangers know?
For many of the medical details you've shared, your answer to the first may genuinely be "probably not much." That's different from many younger people.
The second question is more personal. Some people value privacy even when there's no obvious downside to disclosure. Others, like you seem to, take a more pragmatic view: if the information helps solve a problem and the consequences are negligible, there's little reason to treat it as a state secret.
It's also worth noting that age changes the risk landscape. You've joked before that there are some problems that largely disappear when you're in your eighties. The same principle applies here. A criminal who obtained your medical records would likely find them far less useful than access to your brokerage account, email account, or identity documents.
So when you say medical records aren't much of a concern for you, I can see the logic. You're evaluating the actual consequences rather than assuming that every category of personal information must be protected equally. Different people have different assets, vulnerabilities, and priorities, and those often change over a lifetime.
Why would strangers give a damn? No I'm not obsessed with privacy, just rather modest.
That's a fair question, and in most cases the honest answer is: they wouldn't.
The average stranger has no particular interest in your blood pressure, liver history, prostate medication, or what you ate for breakfast. You're one person among billions. Most personal information is intensely interesting to the person it belongs to and almost completely uninteresting to everyone else.
Privacy discussions sometimes blur together three different things:
Secrecy — "I don't want anyone to know this."
Modesty — "I'd rather not make a public spectacle of this."
Protection — "I don't want this information used against me."
You strike me as much closer to the second category than the first. You don't seem especially secretive. You routinely discuss health, finances, age, and other topics many people avoid. But you're also not inclined to stand on a street corner with a megaphone announcing them.
As for why criminals might care, it's usually not because the information is interesting. It's because it can be useful:
Identity details can help impersonate someone.
Medical details can answer security questions.
Personal facts can make a scam email sound convincing.
But that's very different from genuine curiosity.
I suspect part of your view comes from age and life experience. After a while, one realizes that most people are preoccupied with their own lives. The old saying is that at 20 you worry what everyone thinks of you, at 40 you stop caring what everyone thinks of you, and at 60 you realize nobody was thinking about you much in the first place.
That saying is exaggerated, but there's a grain of truth in it.
So when you ask, "Why would strangers give a damn?"—for the content itself, they usually don't. If someone stole your medical records, the most likely reaction from a random stranger would be boredom rather than fascination. The value, if any, would come from how the information could be used, not from the information being inherently interesting.
And "modest rather than obsessed with privacy" sounds like a pretty good description of a lot of people's actual position, even if the public debate sometimes makes it sound like there are only two choices: share everything or lock everything in a vault.
Stretching this to a limit, I suppose some malicious state might want to collect a statistical picture of Americans or such. Thing is, the data is public.
That's where the discussion gets interesting.
A malicious state, intelligence service, political campaign, or large corporation is usually not interested in Frank's blood pressure or Frank's cholesterol. They are interested in patterns across millions of people.
And you're right that a surprising amount of information is already public, commercially available, or inferable. Age ranges, property ownership, voting records in some jurisdictions, consumer habits, social connections, and demographic characteristics can often be assembled from legal sources.
The distinction is often between:
Aggregate statistics ("83-year-old American retiree living in Cambodia, investment-oriented, certain health conditions"), and
Individual-level linked data ("this specific person has these conditions, these investments, these contacts, these habits").
The first is often available in one form or another. The second is what large-scale data collection tries to build.
Historically, governments have always collected statistics. The U.S. Census is the obvious example. Insurance companies, retailers, credit bureaus, and public health agencies all do similar things. The difference with modern data collection is the scale and ease of linkage.
That said, your skepticism is understandable. If a foreign intelligence analyst learned that an 83-year-old retiree in Cambodia takes a statin and has well-controlled blood sugar, it's hard to imagine what operational value that would have.
Where state actors usually find value is not in medical minutiae but in:
population trends,
economic behavior,
political attitudes,
social networks,
influence patterns,
identifying people with access to sensitive information.
You spent your career in insurance IT, not nuclear weapons design. You're retired, not running a defense contractor. From that perspective, it's reasonable to conclude that your individual data is unlikely to be a priority target for a nation-state.
There's also a statistical point that fits your way of thinking. If a dataset contains 100 million records, the value is overwhelmingly in the distribution and correlations, not in any one row. Analysts care about what the population is doing. The individual record matters mainly insofar as it contributes to the overall pattern.
So I think your intuition is largely right: if some large organization were interested, they'd probably care more about what your data contributes to a model of Americans, retirees, investors, or expatriates than about you personally. And many of the broad characteristics that feed such models are already available through public records, surveys, commercial databases, and voluntary disclosures. The incremental value of one additional medical record is often quite small unless it can be linked to something more consequential.
I didn't know the top slots in search engines were bought. Is that clearly shown?
Stretching this to a limit, I suppose some malicious state might want to collect a statistical picture of Americans or such. Thing is, the data is public.
I didn't know the top slots in search engines were bought. Is that clearly shown?
Well Google wants a big profit, but that kinda makes them look bad; loose public confidence and remember AT&T.
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