@Thought Art That's why we gotta keep things funny.
Existential humor is key to all this.

Story of my life. I wish someone would have warned me properly about how much suffering real spiritual work causes before I started the journey. The opposite was sold actually.
Either ways I would have probably done this work anyways but just having proper expectations would have made this journey much more smoother.

Aversion to death
"Thoughts"
Identity, period, not specific identities, just identity
Mowed lawns
Brushing your teeth and showering in a room with a toilet
Preparing food in a room with a trash can
Sleeping on a pillow
Different clothes every day
Deodorant
Sleeping at night and eight straight hours
Refrigerators
Air conditioning
Travel
Holding in farts
Toilet paper vs bidet
Plastic grocery bags
Wearing shoes, and clothes.... 
Jogging
Not just gym bro culture, but going to the gym

I took guitar lessons for about about a year or so and then I spent the next 15 years just improvising every time I play. If you ask me to play a song, I will actually struggle to find one I can remember in its entirety (although I learned essentially Metallica's whole discography the first year or so, then some Opeth, Tool and Death songs, but really, so few songs).
I remember one of my cousins (he is much older) came to visit at my dad's place back when I had been playing for like two years or so. I showed a song that I had made as an assignment in music class, and it was some kind of metalcore-inspired song where I took elements from a blues progression I had learned from my guitar teacher and integrated it with something that sounded like a rip-off from some Bullet For My Valentine song.
But in the middle of the main riff, I went from an E-scale to an A-scale, and my cousin who is a math nerd and classically trained musician (and on the spectrum), told me "yeah that was very wrong, but it sounds cool 😅". And my dad was like "hey ". And internally I was like "but teach me then". After that, I developed a severe complex around whether or not I was playing music "properly" (in terms of Western music theory), and it took like seriously 10 years before I realized that all my musical idols essentially didn't give a shit about that and just played whatever they thought sounded cool.

Roller Coaster Conformity Study
(shoutout to my ketamine/5-MeO therapist for this example)

A study with 12 participants examined how social framing influences subjective experience.

Method:

Participants were randomly divided into two groups before riding a roller coaster:
    •    Group A (n=6): Told beforehand the ride was “scary”
    •    Group B (n=6): Told beforehand the ride was “fun”

Results:

Post-ride surveys revealed participants’ reported experiences aligned with their priming:
    •    Group A reported negative experiences
    •    Group B reported positive experiences

Conclusion:

This demonstrates how external framing and social suggestion can shape our interpretation of identical physical experiences—a clear example of conformity influencing perception. Same ride, different experience.

Forums are actually under-utilized these days.
People who don't use forums are more conformist.
A good forum is a powerful tool that most people have no clue exists.

University system with credit points  biggest conformity I have fallen into. I have two complete degrees, a master in economics and diploma in computer science.
I can just laught at me how serious I took these systems for granted. Only at the end I realized more and more what's going on. What a waste of life but I would just play computer games instead. The second biggest conformity I have fallen into.
You need to be a conformist to do them. Especially video games.

Yes you can, I do that.
In my work breaks, I watch through the window and contemplate the imaginary nature of Reality and its raw beauty. I love watching the leaves moving and the trees breathing.
If anything I've learnt in life is that human development and Awakening are the best combo. If you put all your points there, it gives the greatest returns and synergies. 

@Husseinisdoingfine You are taking university way too seriously. It's really not important as you tell yourself it is.
All this situation means is that you are not cut out for that kind of high academic work. That's okay. The problem here is that you keep trying to succeed in a field that you are not naturally well-suited for. You need to sit down, accept that, and find a new field that isn't heavy on math and hard science. That's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. You will be much happier once you switch careers. You are too attached to that one career field.
Do not kill yourself over this issue.
I switched my major from out of enginnering after years of study because I realized engineering was a bad fit for my personality. Imagine if I killed myself instead. That would be silly.
Throw away your rope right now.
You will never need it. Just sit down and accept the pain that engineering is now right for you. There's no shame in that. There are much better fields than engineering.
Throw away your rope.
Switching to a career that suits you better does not make you a loser, it makes you wise.
Happiness awaits you once you just accept that you don't need any of this engineering stuff or academics to be happy and successful. Academia is an illusion. Certainly not worth killing yourself over.

There is nothing wrong with working a simple job. Billions of people do it and find happiness.
Many successful people started out with very basic jobs. Or even homeless.

If you want to be a bum there is no normative argument against it.
However, survival requires work no matter what. By choosing to be a bum you will suffer the consequences of that and so will society at large.
Being creative and hard working is necessary to live in a beautiful world. Otherwise you live like a bum in a shithole. If you want to live in a shithole house, city, society -- okay, go ahead. But I will not be joining you.
Having wealth means you are not a burden on others and you have the means to help others better their situations.
A bum inevitably becomes a leech on others around him, leeching off their labor. So it is not an integrous way to live.
I had a choice. I could have been a bum, or I could be creative and hard working and create Actualized.org. If I chose to be a bum then none of this would exist. Instead of helping people self-actualize I would have been a leech on others.
It all comes down to the question of: How do you want to live?
There are no objectively right or wrong answers to that question. But however you chose to live, there will be serious consequences.

This is a bad scarcity mindset.
Wealth isn't bad, it's good. Just earn it through legitimate creative work rather than scams.
You should have way more wealth than to pay your expenses. You should be so productive and creative that you earn millions. This means you've made yourself useful to the world.

Yeah, kindness isn't real because you're looking for it from people, instead ,realize what's better than kindness, Inside of you, the source that loves you more than your mother just seek it and it will come to you.
 

This suffering is from valuing materialism. You probably value the sky and smells in nature, sunrises, sunsets, stars, nice glass of water, a nap in the sun. If you focus more on what you like that you do have, instead of what other people tell you you should like, you'll end your suffering. There's nothing wrong with working a low pay dead end job "just to live", the park is free, sunsets are free,... Get 'ahead' when/if you can, but in the mean time, soak up what you have.

@Aciddhartha
I get what you’re saying because I’m in that same headspace. I also yearn for death sometimes, but what stops me is exactly what you’re describing — not knowing what’s on the other side. People talk about suicide like it’s a clean ‘escape,’ but when you’re honest about it, you realise it might be horrendous, messy, humiliating, even panic‑filled at the moment of dying. And then, if there is something after death, it could be infinite madness with no take‑backs.
So you end up in this bind: told to ‘appreciate the now’ while sitting in a mouldy bedroom, broke no matter how much you budget, watching the world burn in a trash bucket. You can’t wish your life away, but you can’t really live it either. It’s like being held between two walls — you see everything clearly, but there’s nowhere to move. Some days I feel like I’d need a lobotomy just to make the bind stop. I’m saying this not to be dramatic but because I think it’s the honest reality for people like us.

How old are you? Do you have close family members? 
From my understanding when people cross over to the other side because of suicide they experience their life review and if that person commits suicide , they will experience the pain of that decision from every person who knew them because you are always connected to all that it is and connected to other people even if it doesn’t feel like it. 
In your natural state which is pure spirit , suicide is always the wrong choice because you came to this life to learn lessons so that you can grow as spirit. 
you are more powerful than you think as a spirit, as pure concsousiness.
you might not resonate with that I said but I just wanted to say it. 

No, it doesn't mean that.
Pedophiles are attracted to much younger girls and they tend to be exclusively attracted to them, and the key difference is that they act on it.
Being attracted to a 16 year old's body is one thing, that is natural, but acting on it is different.
I would be attracted to an 18 year old but I'm not going to date one even if it's legal because it's inappropriate.

This is one of the hardest questions. I think it's possible, but not in the way people usually think. I just contemplated this a few days ago, as a what-if, if I would start earning money, what would I do.
A trap might be believing our own willpower is enough. Money can change your nervous system, it can make you risk-averse and starts bending your decisions toward protecting wealth instead of purpose. 
A way I developed that could work is to build external structures before you have the wealth:
Automate giving (do 40% off the top of any big inflow)
Create a 'pod' of people who can veto your financial decisions
Legally pre-commit that 90%+ goes back to commons when you die
It's not about being a 'good person' with money. It's about building the plumbing so the money can flow through you instead of pooling and poisoning you. The goal shifts from 'being wealthy' to 'being a useful conduit.' Otherwise, you end up contributing to the very inequality you probably wanted to solve, just by following the default logic of the system.
The might be other ways but, yeah... it's unusually hard. The system is designed to capture you.

@ZeldaStar There is much additional depth and insight, but if you're just casual about it then it can all seem the same.
It is hard to communicate the depth to you guys without it sounding repetitive. Depth is not about more new ideas, it is about deepening existing ideas.
To appreciate the depth of this issue you have to read all of MetaRationality.com

It much depends on your personality and level of ambition. Most people are not very ambitious nor creative so for them working a simple steady job is fine.
But for someone like me it is torture.
I cannot do it because I demand way more from my life than obeying a boss to do medicore work to make him rich while the world gets dumber and dumber.
It all depends on your values. Creative people require lots of autonomy and freedom to do their work. For non-creative people this is a non-issue. Some personality types can be happy working at the post office licking stamps. If I had to do that I would kill myself.

There's nothing wrong with working a job, however if you think you have the opportunity to make a lot of money in a short period of time, even tho the method of making that money is kinda BS (but not necessarilly unethical), then you should take it imo. With the advent of social media and our collective transition to post modernism, the whole sense of "realness" of ones work had basically dissipated. It's all clownery nowadays. This is the position I'm holding now, if I'm gonna see an easy opportunity I'm going to take it, and I think there are some out there. Just have to move fast to capitalize. I think people on this forum definitely deserve to get money ngl

youtube and social media is now where people spend time, but if. your blog is top tier people are going to read it anyways.
You need high level SEO and social media promotion.
Also, if you want to make money build a email list and nurture it.

For making money it is a bad way to go. It's worth it if you enjoy it or you have an existing audience.
You need a better way to build your audience, especially with AI search now. AI search has killed 50% of organic web traffic.

@LordFall Promote snippets from your blog on X, Threads, BlueSky, etc.
Create a funnel, with shallow content up front and deep content further in.
Try to offer people value. What is useful to them? What are their needs?

Because they have no actual understanding of intelligence. All they are doing is feeding it data, but they have run out of data already. There just is not enough data on Earth to make AI more intelligent than it currently is. And data is not real intelligence because is leeches off human intelligence.
To make AGI they would need to actually crack the issue of intelligence, which they are not even working on.
They are deluded by their own hype, greed, and lust for power. The whole thing is a gross juvenile rationalist farce.