Cireeric

Mysterious swelling lol. Sounds intense, you are the true hedonist!

https://bigthink.com/videos/the-hedonist-ideal/

I really like the radical experimental approach of his whole project. He is really pushing into new uncharted territory in many ways.

Recently ChatGPT started to feel more and more manipulative to me. It can give nuanced and complex answers, but always in a way that tries to flatter me or positively affirms my thinking. It feels superficial to me in a way it hasnt before. Claude feels a bit more authentic and grounded. I think all of these LLMS have the danger that they can create a positive feedback-loop on your existing bias.

Im not denying that there is valuable stuff in there and I would recommand to read all the ones you mentioned, but at some point you wont gain much more value by reading hundreds of personal-development books. After reading 10-25 of the best you will get the gist of it and it becomes pretty repetitive. Nowadays Im bored to death if I read a classical self-development book. Implementation of the few ideas that will really make a difference in your life is much more important.

Reading tons of mostly stage-orange self-improvement books still isnt a good indicator for some more ambitious and holistic definition of personal-development. His center of gravity still seems to be orange after all these years of reading and studying.

Epic

Sounds pretty intense. I never heard of this technique of taking it before sleeping. But I probably wouldnt want to have such an reality-shattering experience and I imagine it can be very hard to integrate such an experience afterwards. Thanks for sharing!

Have you shared a more detailed trip-report of this experience anywhere here on the forum? Did you do this method once or multiple times? And how did you integrate this experience afterwards?

Then go for this one: There are still some amazing highly creative genius regisseurs out there like Paul Thomas Anderson or Giorgos Lanthimos.

Daniel Pinchbeck has been following and reporting on all of this very thoroughly over the last months. I have been binging his substack way too much in the last weeks, this is a good and insightful overview.