It's purely a function of skill and ability.
Elites have skills, abilities, and intelligence which plebs do not have.
You must shatter this liberal myth that humans are equal. Humans are totally unequal in their abilities and intelligence.
The average human is simply incapable of buidling anything of significance. This isn't personal or moral, it's a question of how useful you are, how well you can build.
How much survival value are you able to generate for others? If you cannot generate survival value you are basically worthless and nobody cares what your excuses are. That's how society works.
This is what lefties refuse to understand because they are too busy moralizing about equality.

I know it's hard, but keep in mind that I had to appraoch 450 girls to get my first one. The learning curve is steep in the beginning. You should also try other locations than college. Locations where girls are more receptive to sleep around, where sex is more socially acceptable.
Just because 100 approaches don't end in sex doesn't say anything about your worth.
I did 450 approaches to get a girl. Does this mean I am worthless? How absurd.
Both categories are just silly human fictions.
You are God.

1) You can feel it in your body just from the hangover effects. Psychedelics tax the body and you can feel it.
2) If you do a lot of psychedelics frequently, you will feel the toll and also the psychological addiction.
3) Even if there were zero negative physiological effects, you are still getting addicted to them psychologically, which in itself is bad. Sober life is the ideal. The further you stray from sober life the more problems you will have.
4) There are studies which show that chronic weed use leads to physiological damage like reduced memory, etc. So even mild psychedelics are harmful long-term.
5) Weed is certainly addictive. Millions of people are addicted to it. This is obvious since they struggle to quit.
6) If you use psychedelics a lot you will feel yourself losing joy during your sober life. You will only have joy while you are high. Which is a bad habit to develop and it the classic problem of heroin or meth addiction. You shouldn't need a chemical to make you happy with your day. If you do, that's obviously wrong.

Robbins is not a scam, self-help is not a scam, the problem is the corrupt way in which it is marketed and sold. And also the shallow materialistic versions of it. There is a grifty quality to Tony Robbins and his ilk. There is a fakeness to it, as you saw in that video.
It's similiar to religion. Religion is not a scam but it is so corrupt.
If McConaughey wanted to do a legit self-help course he could, but instead he got seduced by the Tony Robbins crew into this fake cringe grift. And the problem is that Tony Robbins' crew have deluded themselves into thinking this is an acceptable way to teach personal development. This is like preachers who tell you that God will give you a place in heaven if you just send a check for $100 dollars.

The reality is that government has little impact on your individual life unless something very specific happens like a draft for WW3, or you get unlucky enough to get in some terrorist cross-fire.
If you don't got to protests and you don't work in government, virtually nothing will happen to you.
You can live in Putin's Russia or Saudi Arabia, and unless you are actively challenging political power or your country is at war, nothing bad will happen to you. How do you think most of the world lives? Most people live in peace even in a warzone. Even in Ukraine people mostly live in peace and go about business as usual.
When bad stuff happens, it falls on a very small percentage of the population. Only those who are unlucky get hit.
Realistically we are talking about a market crash and some bad inflation. That's mostly what I expect. Plus a bunch of media noise, chaos, and corruption. And of course the death of democracy. Death of democracy does not mean that you personally get a gun to your head.

I don't want to tell you how to invest your money, so you do what you think is best.
But as far as my thinking goes, when the market is down 40%+ for a period of a 3-12 months, that's when it's time to reinvest. The lower it goes the righter it is to reinvest. So if goes down 60%, you can reinvest without worry.
Like I said, you have to consider upside vs downside ratio. Your upside right now is 10-20% max. Your downside is 50-70%. That's a bad bet.

This was the first time I had a direct experience of something - or rather, nothing - as a result of one of Leo's videos (in this case it was 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' if anyone is interested). At least one as potent and instantaneously eye-opening as this one. As I contemplated the concept of 'nothing' and the concept of everything being nothing, something suddenly clicked in my brain and I could see it. It is tricky to explain how it appeared to me but I will make an attempt so that someone else may share my experience, too. Instead of seeing 'nothing' as some separate realm, something completely oppositional and removed from what we are experiencing right now, instead consider it as an element of it. Since nothing is comprised of literally nothing, and since non-existence does not exist, one can see that this nothingness, this non existence, is boundless and is everywhere. Since it doesn't exist, it doesn't have a form or a destination or anything to it whatsoever. It is silky dark matter without a jar to contain it, it is ever-permeating and flows like a snap of the fingers, like water, like a black hole, like none of these things but these are the mental images that the feeling of it conjures up in me so follow this feeling with me if you tend to understand things more intuitively. It is everywhere because it is a complete and total opposite, untouchable and unmovable because to touch or to move it is to change it into a component of something. I hope this has made sense! I do not know if it did, as it is something that makes a lot more sense once you 'see' it for yourself. I am also sharing this because this realization has brought me a lot of peace. Directly before this happened, I was going through what could be referred to as an existential crisis of sorts, a sudden and extreme fear of death that I had not felt since childhood. However, after this realization struck me, although I did not immediately understand why, I immediately knew that my problem had been solved and that there was nothing to worry about. Nothing cannot touch you, it has already touched you, it is already encapsulating you and because of this you will always be safe from it. It isn't scary because I know now what it is. It has been here the whole time. 

No matter how serious things are you still need time for rest and entertainment and socializing.
Do not guilt trip yourself over such things. It's only a problem when it is used excessively as an escape, addiction, or distraction.
There is no problem going to a concert a few times a year. That is fully compatible with work and life purpose.
If you work hard for 8 hrs on your LP, that is enough. Then you take the rest of the day off. And you can not work on weekends. This is important for long-term sustainability.
Your life should not be only about work. So there's no contradiction here. Going all-in on an LP does not mean you have no social life. Find a way to build a social life that aligns with your LP and perhaps even leverage your LP to socialize and have fun if such a synergy is available.

I know. And I told you that's a mistake.
You have invented a self-reinforcing delusional tautology. Like: The Bible must be true because by my definition it was written by God and God cannot lie.
Or like: science must be true, because if something isn't true then it cannot be real science.
You can craft all sorts of definitions like this, but you will get reality wrong by using them.
The critical point in all this is to realize that you cannot trust your own mind. You're trying to skirt this point with clever mind games but that will fail because your mind will deceive you. That's not a maybe, that's guaranteed. You are already in a state of self-deception, you just don't realize it.
The point is that there is no way to trivialize the distinguishing of truth from falsehood. This is like a law of the universe which you are trying to short-circuit. You're trying to do the psychological equivalent of traveling faster than the speed of light or building a perpetual motion machine.

It's not about money. It's about the ego feeling important and significant. Because these people are spiritually bankrupt all they have to live for is the feeling of self-importance they get from achieving ever more. If they stopped they would feel empty and miserable. They would have to do spiritual work from scratch and feel ordinary and lost.

Of course.
But notice further than even once those people get money and sex, they still don't care about truth, they continue endlessly chasing more money and sex.
Do any of the richest and most powerful people lack access to basic needs? No. Yet they are still lost in chasing success and survival.
And I cared about truth before I had money or sex.
Caring about truth transcends your material situation. Which is why getting a billion dollars will not suddenly make you care about truth.
And also notice, if you really cared about truth you would work really hard to handle your base material needs so that you can focus on truth without being distracted by survival.

It is important not to create a shadow out of selfishness.
Selfishness absolutely needs to exist, which is why it exists. Without selfishness you could not be alive.
Yes, turning selfishness into a "bad" is a trap.
Again, the point of awakening is to realize that nothing bad has ever existed, including of course selfishness, which is just what is meant by evil.
If you think selfishness is bad then that's equlivalent to saying that evil exists. Which of course is wrong.
But also notice the trick here: when someone behaves very selfishly towards you, you will not be able to stop yourself from calling it bad. So not demonizing selfishness is very, very advanced stuff. Most humans are nowhere close to that. Even spiritual humans will fail at it.
A better way to put it is that excessive selfishness is problematic and self-defeating while a healthy level of selfishness is appropriate and even necessary.

Don't guess.
Sit down and observe what meaning is, how it is created.
This work is not about guessing about how things are, it is about sitting down and looking at what is actually going on. It's like science. Do the science of meaning.
Go outside, pick up a rock, and ask yourself, What does this rock mean? And look at it. There is your answer.

It's like I need to write a quote, and then write an explanation of it. Like some kind of BIble/Shakespeare commentary. But this feels over-the-top. Sometimes I don't feel like over-explaining it. But it's also important that it not be misunderstood.
There is a trade-off between pithiness and clarity. Quotes sacrifice clarity for pithiness.

More like: less dense ego equates to those things.
Less ego, less gooding and badding.
Observe what role gooding and badding play in upholding the ego.
The ego is like a bird that flys on two wings: good and bad.

Feelings are more primitive. Emotions are feelings + conceptual content like thoughts and images.
If I stab you in the foot with a fork, that's a feeling. If you hate me for it, that's an emotion.

Note that in the evolution of living things, feeling was the first sense to evolve. Feeling is more primordial than vision, smell, hearing, taste. Cellular organisms can feel before than can see. In fact, all the other sense organs evolved out of feeling receptors. Your eyes literally "feel" photons. Your tongue "feels" food molecules.
That shows you how fundamental feeling is to survival. And why emotions override rationality and logic.
If you felt bad enough you would not be able to do anything: walk, talk, smile, eat, make money, socialize, and even think.
At some point you will feel so bad that your only option will be death.

You're asking why religion is popular.
Because it takes the highest truth and perverts it into a cartoon fantasy for ignorant people to follow without actually doing the work.
Every ego wants to think that whatever fantasy it believes and follows is absolute truth.
It's like asking why is pizza and porn popular? Because it feeds the ego's deepest cravings.
In the case of religion, it feeds the ego's need to know and to be certain of itself.
Ego loves to worship God, but only on its own terms. Rats want to worship rat-God. Rabbits want to worship rabbit-God. Humans want to worship human-God.
Also, who do end up realizing God tend to be pretty exceptional people with what seem like magic powers. So it's like watching Tiger Woods play golf. It can look like magic which you cannot do yourself.

Because in the end God is the highest pursuit and purpose. Nothing else really matters. You can't compare God with shooting golf balls or making money. The promise of God is very enticing beyond material rewards.
When all these religions were founded humans were much less materialistic, capitalistic, pop-cultural. There was little to do other than God, family, and farming.

You ask some good questions.
This depends on how you do it, of course.
You can get lost in fantasies, speculation, and mental masturbation.
However, proper contemplation and study can produce serious and valuable insight and understanding into the nature of reality and any systems within it. Do not discount the importance of high quality sensemaking and serious understanding that's grounded in direct experience and genuine insight rather than speculation, belief, and fantasy. The real work is in seeing past the fantasies to see how nature really works.
My solution is to do both. In fact, you need something tangible like artistic work or business to keep you from getting lost in pure theory.
If all you do is philophy you will get too stuck in your mind and it won't feel good. It could even turn into mental illness.
Life is long enough for you to pursue art, business, and philosophy. And they all balance out the excesses and limitions of each by themselves.
Only doing philosophy and nothing else is NOT healthy. You also need pursuits to ground you in the realities of life. This can be business, art, sport, family, pickup, running a community, etc.
For a healthy, happy life you must engage not just pure mind, but also your body and you heart. And you must not only master the theory but also engage in practice. Do practical stuff like art, craft, business, or raising a family.
A healthy life is something like 80% action and practical affairs and only 20% pure philosophy. If you get this ratio backwards you will run into problems.

Learning how to think deeply and well, is crucial.
This strand of Neo-Advaita which marginalizes thinking is a trap. The world is way too complex to get by without deep, serious thinking. Yeah, if all you do in life is just teach others about Neo-Advaita them maybe you don't need to think much. But if you are seriously engaged in human affairs like business or politics or art or science, you better learn to think well.
The reason some guru can get away with this no-mind stuff is because he isn't doing any serious work. It's a very self-absorbed sort of approach, ironically, because that kind of life cannot sustain the civilization which your life depends on.

I don't deny or neglect the emotional aspect at all. Emotions are all about survival. The ego's survival. Of course bias is grounded in emotions. Emotions corrupt the mind almost entirely.
It's not about cerebral, it's about consciousness. You're not going to become deeply conscious when lost in emotions.
Pretty much all human morality is nonsense. It's an unconscious emotional game that the ego-mind plays. It is pure survival. And it must be transcended to reach true morality. The typical human has no idea what morality is or how to achieve it.
Your moral/emotional approach will fail. Because it will turn into corruption/survival/self-deception/bias.
Yes, empathy is hugely important, but not the naive, biased empathy of common people. Something much deeper and more serious is needed because ego will co-opt empathy towards your own tribe. Your morality, your empathy, your love -- all of it will be used against you to deepen your self-deception.
I didn't focus on emotions or morality in this series because it's about post-modern philosophy. I focused on what is needed to make sense of post-modernism. I will have separate videos on morality and empathy.
Of course there is deep emotion behind all of human survival, which is why any time I say something radical or brutal people get pissed off me and come here to criticize.

You are allowed to feel whatever.
The point is just to be conscious of what your feelings are really doing to you and why they are happening, and to not let them distort your understanding.
Humiliation is a pretty rare emotion, so it's not going to have much impact on your sense-making. You should be more worried about other emotions, such as your sense of moral outrage -- that's gonna badly screw up your sense-making.
Anger, fear, hatred, love, lust, excitement, hurt, envy -- all these will trick you badly.

Are you saying you're blackpilled due to Trump?
Certainly it is a disgusting turn of events, but the world must go on.
You don't need any spiritual positivity. What you need is to appreciate how real life is. Life is real in that politics is brutal and serious, not merely a spiritual New Age "the world is on the brink of awakening" fantasy.
The bitterness of society and politics is what makes life serious and worth living.
I do not want to live in a New Age positive fantasy, and neither should you.
It is good to be bummed out by Trump's victory for a few months. But then you use that grow yourself even higher!

@Dazgwny It's trickier still, because if you stop making the distinction between nothing and something then you get thrown back out right where you started -- which is with something. But now that something is identical to nothing, where previously it wasn't.
See, ordinary humans think something isn't nothing. But the Awakened see something and nothing as identical.
In this way you can hold a table fork in your hand and realize it is nothing, as you hold it.