Joshe

That’s not what it’s like. There’s a sense of responsibility to fully integrate and master this domain before escaping into spirituality. There’s an intuition that it is a mistake to leave this world prematurely. Yet there’s a desire to, which creates tension.

It's more attachment than love. I remember when I was maybe 23, my sister and her friends came to visit me for a week or two in the florida keys where I was living, and her friends were hot af and one of them liked me. When they left, I teared up, not because I was in love, but because of how attached I was to the experience. The whole ambience and enchantment of the experience was disappearing and it was like parting ways with a powerful drug, except I knew I couldn't procure this drug again.

😂You seem like you have my kind of intuition, which is why I ask.

Biggest thing is to truly recognize that other people are actually human as well. Recognizing this takes serious contemplative work for many people, as it doesn't come natural to introverts. If you could imagine a 10 minute life summary video of every single person you've ever known, seeing them in all their human moments, sitting at a desk struggling in grade school, sitting on the toilet, struggling with self-doubt and feeling like a faker, crying over breakups and life challenges, this in itself is sufficient to obliterate the majority of social anxiety for most. Do this practice daily and social anxiety will disappear. Do it just like you'd do a loving-kindness practice, where you actually connect with it.

lol. True story. Curious, are you an INTJ?

If you're on Windows, download shareX and set it up to connect to an imgur account, and then simply take a screenshot and paste in the url, and the forum will automatically replace your url with an image, like this: No need to worry about uploading files to Leo's server.

Do you think that if Obama was just now coming up, he'd have an easy time wiping the floor with Rs? I'm not so sure. Bernie Sanders is the closest I've seen to a character that could meet our current situation with the message and energy it requires, but he's too old and sufficiently smeared. You need fresh blood, hard to smear, spine, and purpose or entertainment without cringe. That's the current demand. Obama himself would have a hard time meeting these requirements. The right doesn't have to meet them because they pander to the lower nature. The onus is on the one's pushing for forward momentum. If you want people to move forward, they need ample reason.

What about them? I'm not big into politics but those guys seem to have charisma that the majority of dems don't. Charisma overrides and creates its own frame.

Fore the same reason a nice guy can't get away with acting like a Billy-badass. You actually have to be bad to pull it off.

Nice post Leo. It's going to be interesting how it plays out. I suspect one facet of this will be that centrists double down even further in their refusal to make a decision about which side to support because it will be harder for the average person to discern which side is less evil. Trust will degrade even further, which is a big reason we're in the situation we're in now. So it will come down to who can bullshit the best. And how do the centrists decide who is most likely correct? Whoever the majority sides with. And which side has the most money and is most gullible and corruptible? The right. So based on my spur of keystroke logic, it looks as though we're fucked.

Look, there's an argument that full-grown, experienced adults should be berated and/or humiliated for such behavior, but don't knock a goddamn youngster who's doing his best and means no harm. At least soften the criticism to something like @theleelajoker did. Don't call youngsters cringe or make fun of them. It's not good for them or anyone. This sort of behavior should only be used as a last resort. If you wanted to critique, I'm sure OP would have accepted it if it were respectful. So is your aim to correct or belittle? If it's to correct, you fucked up. If it's to belittle, you succeeded.

It depends on the task and what you need it for. If you want to do academic or STEM type research, apparently Grok is the leader. But if you need creativity, Grok ain't got shit on Claude or ChatGPT. If you wanted to research market opportunities or something like that, Gemini or ChatGPT would perform much better than Grok. Same applies if you wanted to research the best tech stack to use for your app idea. Also, when it comes to getting accurate up-to-date answers on something, Perplexity AI's search engine is often best. If you go to each AI and ask it "what is the best AI out right now", Perplexity outperforms all the top AIs. Also, cost comes into play, especially if you want to use the AIs programmatically via their APIs. Gemini is cheap as hell and Grok is insanely expensive. I just asked perplexity what is the API token cost of the top AIs and I'd trust this data more than I would the others: There's not a single AI that is best all around. I often combine them. One really cool thing is you can install Claude Code, Gemini CLI, or ChatGPT's "Codex" on your operating system, which gives the AI access to your file system. This is insane because you can have it analyze or edit your files, create new ones, run custom commands, fix computer problems, build custom apps, etc. My fav is currently Claude Code. I pay $200/mo to have maximum usage. Well worth it. Although I fear they're giving away more than they're generating, so the costs of these badass tools is probably going to skyrocket at some point. Best to max out what you can now. I'm currently using Claude Code to do about 75% of the work on a website project I'm working on. You just tell it to do shit and it does it:

Mirror effect. Lol. Some people just like projecting their own humiliation onto others.

If so, that very well could be the part I missed.

Lol, damn bro, this is some funny shit.

That's nothing. I'm surrounded by more than one neighbor that burns misc shit in barrels a few times a week. "Fuck these hillbilly retards" The stoners probably have their own forum where they're saying "fuck squares who get all in a tizzy about some weed smell". lol

I concur. It's funny you thought of the meditating tech CEO. So did I. I thought of those high-functioning guys from that show "Billions".

Maybe I half-assed it, lol. Didn't go far enough. Nah, I had to stop because I wasn't ready to surrender it all. I knew that I was about to take it too far. I saw the path and what I would would become if I didn't stop. Now, I'm having suppress spiritual development. Everyone around here is trying their best to attain it, and I'm fighting to keep it at bay. lol. It used to be all I wanted, now it's a hinderance. Really cool that it worked out for you like that though.

Yes

There's a good lesson to learn from your experience. Notice how attached you became and how much it hurt you to detach. Experiences like this can facilitate you becoming mentally stronger, or they can just as easily facilitate the opposite. It's nothing to shrug off. Contemplating what was going on with you internally is a great growth opportunity.

Not if you see the futility or absurdity of your goals. You sort of lose a lot of drive once that is seen, and it can't really be unseen once it's seen. Ever hear "ignorance is bliss"? In a way, it is, because it allows you to run on specific programs that can be very beneficial for worldly attainment. But once you see those programs for what they are, you can't as easily run on them, and eventually, awareness of them makes it very difficult for them to run at all. This is the main reason why I think spirituality should not be pursued until near the end of life - when one is actually ready to surrender everything. I'm convinced meditation and spiritual practices will only fuck you up in terms of wordly productivity. At least, this has been the case for me. Can't speak to others, but I'd bet it largely applies to most.

Those practices will show you how silly the pursuit of things you want are, thus decreasing effectiveness to attain them. So, if you can't unsee, you have to create something new.

The degree of monkey-see monkey-do seems to correlate with the degree of consciousness or metacognition.

Alter ego construction. The idea is that you intentionally construct an ego with a full-fledged identity, worldview, values, etc, and learn to fully embody it on command.

A few years back, a company called Kitu or something like that made these caffeine + L-Theanine drinks. I would mix one of those with some modafinil and consciousness opened up like crazy. I wouldn't consider this a productivity boost though. Just a boost in consciousness. Aside from that, I haven't noticed any benefit of just L-Theanine and coffee.