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@Preety_India Wow, I really relate to most of what you're saying, except for the fact that I'm not female I see presenting a different opinion/point of view, especially in a work context, as a positive thing. I see it as a way to consider alternate options and try to figure out the best course of action. But people are very hostile to me when I do this. They don't want to be open-minded at all about my suggestions and dismiss them as if they're stupid. People also don't take well to me trying to be open and authentic with them. They tend to reject most attempts I make at creating rapport. And I can even relate to what you said about being Indian. I'm not Indian myself and I don't live in the USA. But I'm an immigrant in the country that I live in and despite my best attempts to adapt and fit in, I still have different mannerisms and ways of speaking than the people who are native to that country. While being an immigrant is definitely not the only reason people treat me different, I feel that it does play a part.

I wanted to go on a psychedelic retreat next weekend. I live with my family and I obviously knew it would be a bad idea to tell them. However I had to tell them that I would be going somewhere. They managed to get a few vague snippets of information from me, and then from googling the events that were going to be happening in the area, they were able to deduce that I was going on a psychedelic retreat. My parents are very religious and so they took this badly. At first they told me how by going on this retreat I'd be inviting demons into myself, and this would completely mess up my life, and it would be dangerous to my family if I were to keep living with them after having brought these demons onto myself. Later, they started making fun of psychedelics, saying that the insights you have on a psychedelics seem like complete bullshit once the trip is over. And they made fun of the kinds of things psychedelic users say: "we are all one", "the universe is love", etc. But the conclusion of the entire conversation was that if I went they would never let me back in the house again. Now, I'm not some teenager going through a rebellious phase. I'm 24 and I'm both embarrassed and depressed to be still living with my parents, so I thought this might just be the catalyst I need to move out. I was religious when I was younger and I understand exactly why me going on a psychedelic retreat bothers my parents so much. Our worldviews are incompatible, there can't really be a compromise, and it would be best if we just lived separately. I had a job last summer and I hardly spent any of the money. I have enough money to cover the cost of the retreat plus modest living expenses for at least 2 months, possible even 3. My current living location isn't great for finding a job, especially with the Covid-19 lockdown, but by renting a room in the city I would have a better chance of finding one. If I managed to find a job within those 2 months, things would be fine. In theory it doesn't seem like an unrealistic plan. In practice, I've been heavily depressed over the past year and a half, and it's only getting worse. I'm now getting doubts about whether going to a psychedelic retreat is the right thing to do, regardless of my family's attitude. While the combination of therapy, psychedelics and relaxation you get on such a retreat is probably quite good for mental health, I feel my problems may be too severe to be taking them to such an event. I feel it may be silly to expect the retreat to be a magic cure and that it may make things worse in fact. There are several reasons why I'm depressed but chief among them is definitely my inability for dealing with people. I have an extremely hard time communicating with people and people tend to dislike me more often than not. My social skills have been improving over time, especially over the past few months. But no matter what I always feel I massively lag behind other people my age in this regard. People would expect a 24 year old to have better social skills and this will make it difficult to find and keep a job. I have had a few jobs before but I never lasted long in them (all of them were less than 2 months). On top of that being depressed, I know there will be days when I have absolutely no motivation and this will further make it harder to find a job. The problem is that if I do nothing, then what? At my age, living with my parents and sitting in my room all day (as I said it's very hard to find a job in my current location, and the lockdown limits how far I could commute) is both bad for my mental state and it's bad for other people's opinion of me. Thus, it only magnifies my problems. I'm not expecting people on an internet forum to have the perfect answer of course, but please try to advise me: 1) Should I go on the psychedelic retreat? 2) Regardless of whether I go on the retreat or not, should I move out? (not going on the retreat would save a fair amount of money, giving me a few more weeks of breathing room)

I don't get this article 13 stuff. They've been scaring us with it since last summer and yet it keeps getting delayed. Tbh I cannot see a situation where we aren't able to use Youtube at all. Would lead to too much backlash. Youtube isn't just an information and news source, it's a large source of entertainment i.e. a sedative for the masses. Politicians like those.

Why do American progressives think UBI is a good idea? There have been experimental studies done with it and they've shown it doesn't work, most recently in Finland. I brought this topic up to a hardcore socialist acquaintance of mine (we both live in Europe) expecting an argument but he actually said that he's spoken with various economists and knows from them that it's a bad idea. Imo if the USA somehow manages to make UBI work it'll only be thanks to imperialism or some other kind of exploitation. It's not that I think people will be "lazy" if there's UBI. People will probably do things they genuinely value, but with no incentive to cater to wider society many people will end up doing things that don't bring enough benefit to anyone else. How many people on this forum would just sit at home meditating and contemplating if they had their basic needs taken care of? And yeah, that's great, but it's kind of exploitative of the people who will work to provide those needs. If the majority of manual jobs get automatized, then we can bring in UBI and have this utopia but at the moment this is nowhere near being the case (also having thousands of robots doing everything would be very energy expensive, we'd need to solve the clean energy problem first).

I know what you mean but it doesn't work in practice.

I get the sense that the current Leo would never encourage something like that, lol.

Please watch the full video. I would like to hear what the women on this forum think of ARC's teachings.

Women have a poor understanding of why male attraction manifests the way it does.

You don't get what I said. There isn't just one type of attraction.

@Emerald You're talking about 2 different things though. "Guys are only attracted based on looks" applies for sex only. For a guy to want to be in a long-term relationship with a woman the attraction will need to be on a deeper level. So you're comparing male sexual attraction with female romantic attraction, which is apples and oranges.

Lol which is it, more men or more women? Countries like China and India definitely have more men due to selective birth control. The west has more women but I've heard many guys try to use that to imply that men have more value on the dating market and that women should be the ones doing the approaching. But the excess of women comes from their higher life expectancy - there's more elderly women than elderly men. So this stat has no bearing on the dating market. For people of reproductive age, the amount of men and women is for all intents and purposes equal.

If you were in orange or blue, Leo would be strongly encouraging you to empathize with other sentient beings and to get involved in this sort of activism.

There's quite a few examples here already that are below yellow.

@Emerald I know I'm not really a part of this conversation, but to be fair what you're doing does feel an awful lot like a high-pressure sales tactic. There are groups on both the right and the left who tout being uncompromising. Every political group with a strong opinion sees itself as the minority, as the victim. Unless you've got some statistics to back up your claims, I don't think it's fair to assume that centrists are any more susceptible to converting to the right than to the left. EDIT: For clarification, by minority here I mean minority in terms of political thought.