I’m curious how old you were when Covid hit? I noticed a similar change somewhere in my early to mid 20s.

Seconding both of those - getting older and having kids both have independently made me more responsive to emotional scenes.

And Bluey and all the Pixar films are good!

Probably due to how I grew up, I don’t often feel like it’s… right? Reasonable? for me to cry for personal things. But I can cry for others, for whatever reason. Showed my kids Pixar’s Up for the first time the other day, and we got to the scene near the end where Carl finds some of the messages his wife left him. My kids are still fairly young, and were trying to figure out what was going on in that scene. They also didn’t understand at first why my voice sounded so weird…

I feel like there’s a term for it, but I can’t recall it now - it seems like after you have kids, emotional impacts in media can also start to hit a lot harder. I’m not sure if there’s some empathetic response that tends to get strengthened or what, but my wife and I both have things we either can’t watch anymore or don’t process the same way. Like, I decided to start rewatching Star Trek: DS9 a few years ago (a year or two into fatherhood) and got wrecked by the scenes in the first episode where the captain relives losing his wife.

I think it was mostly the fact that if he did go at that point, the other warehouse guys would decide he had indeed sat down to pee, regardless of what actually happened.

Used to do IT for a small meat packing plant; would shoot the shit with the warehouse guys whenever they came in for a break. Bunch of 20-something guys slinging 20-60 pound boxes of meat all day.

Power went out one time, and we’re all sitting around waiting to see if the power is going to come back quickly enough that we don’t need to start unloading all the inventory; and one of them expressed a need to use the facilities. I told him the bathroom was right there; it didn’t need power to flush.

There were no windows, and he didn’t want to end up peeing all over the floor.

I pointed out that if he sat down, he wouldn’t need to aim.

“I’m not gonna sit to pee!”

“Dude, it’s not like it’s gonna fall off.”

“It might!”