kylan11

It's like asking why can't every programmer be like Linus Torvalds. Bruh, Dr. K is the final boss of his field. The dude is half indian monk and half Harvard psychiatrist, VERY smart, god-tier communication skills, developed insane third eye chakra to understand people (he said so himself), can defeat all kinds of psychological defenses & establish deep levels of rapport in the span of like 10 minutes with anyone from Pokimane to fucking Adin Ross/Sneako. Also a meditation teacher. Indeed when I pursued therapy because of him, some years back, I thought all therapists would be something like him. I can't overstate how disappointed I was. It's almost criminal how much he raises expectations.

No offense but this sounds like the shittiest piece of advice I've ever heard dude lmao

What you're describing sounds like it could be something deeper than a mindset problem. Sometimes our brain chemistry gets stuck in a dark place, and no amount of willpower or philosophy can unstick it alone. You've been fighting this for three years. You deserve real, professional support. A good therapist, maybe even exploring whether there's a physiological piece to address. And alongside that, I do think your intuition touched something very real. You mentioned feeling directionless, not knowing what you want. Every human being needs a sense of meaning to feel alive, your own dharma. But here's the thing: you don't need to figure out your dharma right now, while you're this exhausted. First, get help. And as the fog lifts (and it will) you will start noticing what pulls you in. What absorbs you. What makes time disappear. Happiness is a bird that lands on your shoulder when you're fully present and immersed in meaning... much like enlightenment : )

Donald Hoffman has been saying it for years & proved it scientifically. Spacetime is doomed.

Shinzen Young talks of this. "There are, however, two possible exceptions to the general rule "observe any and all thought regardless of its content." The first exception involves deep insights, which may occasionally arise during the observing process. You may find it useful to intentionally leave the "just observing mode" for a while to intentionally consider and clarify such insight." I highly recommend reading his full reflections, they've helped me immensely on various thought loops ("thinking about thinking about thinking") and such traps. https://www.shinzen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/art_thought-process.pdf

By default, just out of pride for the "homeland", no matter what side of history it's on? Fuck no. Countries are made up. What I would die for is the values that, flaws and all, have shaped the free society I enjoy in my home country of Italy, Europe as a whole, the US (though increasingly less so) and the global West. If they came under attack, I WOULD be willing to defend pluralism, democracy, liberalism, individualism, free speech and human rights, because I'm not some deluded, ungratefully privileged dumbfuck who thinks all cultures are equal and there's moral equivalence between us and the maniacs who routinely stone women to death for not wearing a burqa - or totalitarian hellholes such as NK. Defend them with my life if I must, as my ancestors have, not even that long ago. Anything less of that is cowardice, I'm sorry. As it turns out, those freedoms don't defend themselves, and while we may not fully know what lies ahead in the quest for the ultimate flourishing of every conscious being, what we CAN say is that Putin is on the wrong track. We chose a better path foward, so fuck him and everyone who would drag us on the same corrupt road to destruction

More often than not, the simplest answer is the correct one, no matter how stupid it seems. And with Trump it's pretty much a guarantee. Tulsi Gabbard all but confirmed Iran was not posing an imminent threat to the US and it was the president's direct decision. So my money is on this: Trump wants to look good. He smelled Iran's weakness (and to be fair the regime is on life support and has been for a few years now) and thought that by solving that problem,which has plagued the US for 50 years, he'd be hailed as a resolute, pragmatic strategic genius. He loves to be seen as the dude who inherited a mess and solved the issues Obama and Biden couldn't. Except he and his cronies are so incompetent he could not verbalize a clear military goal or purpose to the war, contradicted himself a thousand times as usual, completely overlooked the Strait of Hormuz card and now he seems so desperate to make a deal it's actually Iran who holds the winning hand and just needs to wait for the world to feel the pain of stagflation and TACO the fuck out of their land. I still root for the US to overthrow those religious psychopaths but it's hard to be optimistic

Among others, a fundamental moral proposition of post-Enlightenment democracy is that we can negotiate conflict with words, dialogue, debate, human conversation. The celebration I see online, and even here of all places, convinced me this is no longer as widely shared as I thought. One side is literally out there celebrating a bullet to the neck to a guy who made mouth noises you didn't like in front of his wife and orphaned children who won't even remember his voice. The other side is, as expected, engaging in the same incendiary rhetoric that has led to this hellish environment, now with a thrist for revenge. What could possibly go wrong. If we don't agree that violence outside of self-defense is a red line, ask yourself what is stopping that guy that sits on the other side of the political spectrum from shooting you in the face. He loathes you as much as you loathe Charlie Kirk. The very scaffolding of civil society is being stress tested to a degree I haven't seen since Jan 6. The least you can say about Charlie is that he believed in and partook in this recursive peaceful process of democratic debate. We can argue whether he operated in bad faith sometimes, we all fucking do. We try and preserve our destructive biases. He may have lacked empathy. If that's your excuse to see this and feel nothing, your 'spirituality' is nothing but egotistical self-serving delusion.

Evolution selects for survivability. Thus perpetuating the root cause.

Leo's recent blog post about America's decline into oligarchy & the critique of libertarianism (though it read more like a critique of Hoppe) has inspired this reflection. Years of research and inquiry into history, political science, and ethics have led me to this conclusion, which I'll be sharing in hopes of receiving meaningful pushback and maybe sparking some interesting discussion. There is simply no solution. Any utopian society your mind can imagine is fatally flawed, and there is no escaping this. If it touches reality, it will either detonate on impact or devour itself. We thought we had it with pluralistic, classical liberal post-enlightenment democracy. And, to be sure, it is the least shitty implementation so far, but I'm done pretending democracy is anything other than a temporary elaborate illusion that buys a few generations of comfort before collapsing back into oligarchy, tyranny, or chaos. Let's take liberty as our highest value. Surely that must be it, right? Except that when you're born with nothing and nobody is compelled to lend you a helping hand, your only actual freedom is to starve to death. What looks like freedom from the penthouse is just moral bankrupcy in the gutter. And NAP is not gravity. It is a suggestion (ironically enough I'm paraphrasing Elon Musk here) with no recourse. So... maybe equality? Sounds pretty reasonable. Everyone ought to have a fair shot. But equality is as far away from ground reality as it gets, meaning it requires careful engineering and enforcement. Which means massive coercion. Which means centralization. So congratz, we've built the world's biggest monopoly and gave it nukes. What could go wrong? So let's do decentralization then. Add attrition (this is democracy's shtick, in a nutshell)! Spread the power around! Cool, so we're back to gradual self-destruction by polarization, feudal warlording, and round we go. Power tends to concentrate. And the only leviathan is an even bigger power to break it up. And the latter can be corrupted, and is, just as easily. Not because it wants to do evil, it just wants to survive. Like us. Survival IS corruption. Self-preservation at all costs and to hell with everyone else if my life is on the line. This is the engine of history. Centralization -> stagnation -> collapse -> decentralization -> chaos -> re-centralization. We all ride this cycle, and no constitution or dynasty or empire or ideology has ever broken it. So if you think we're marching towards a stable equilibrium, we are: DEATH. Silence. Utopia requires permanence... in a world which runs on the illusion of duality, which runs on constant flux, definitionally, before devouring itself. It's a contradiction. That was my 2 cents. If you can go deeper, do it. I'd like to hear it.

This is meant to be a reflection about a recent experience I had on low-dose MDMA and its potential use for treatment of social anxiety, which is a problem I've personally struggled with since high school due to constant bullying. It's not supposed to be a linear trip report. See, I thought MDMA was gonna be a weird weed + alcohol-like feeling. When you drink, it's like a whole part of your brain shuts down and you become an extroverted, unencumbered version of yourself. And you know it. It feels free, fun, energizing. On MDMA? The usual thoughts are there. You retain a total lucidity that I did NOT expect, at all. Your brain keeps throwing you the usual ego-fueled, self-referential, miserable shit like "I'm being awkward", "These people think I'm weird", "What should I do now?" and a thousand catastrophic scenarios of how you're gonna ruin the whole social gathering and how everyone is looking at you etc. and how ugly and cringe you are. But here's the twist, all these usual thought patterns are entirely robbed of their emotional content. You are so hopelessly used to them immediately eliciting an emotional reaction that, when it doesn't come, you are immediately stunned. You are still at peace. That feels so distinct and baffling that it opens up the possibility of reflection: Holy shit, guess what? Whatever happens now, whatever the fuck I say or do in this social situation... the Earth will keep spinning, the Sun will rise in the morning, and nobody fucking cares. This is a thousand times more helpful than just shutting down your nervous system with alcohol. The latter will leave you with the feeling of "how nice it would be if I wasn't such an awkward piece of shit when sober". MDMA, on the other hand, teaches you that that black void of fear and anxiety can only grip you if you let yourself be captured by such useless mind-chatter, that will vaporize at first glance if you simply observe. I knew that already, conceptually, but experiencing it as a real possibility for YOU is something else. As I'm sure you know very well if you've dabbled in any kind of spiritual work. Mind you, this was a low dose experience. I don't know exactly how much I took. No boundless feeling of love or anything metaphysically significant. But it does have its place in snapping you out of things you thought were an indivisible part of you. Have you guys had any similar experience? Did the insight stick or fade away in time? I'd like to eventually try a bigger dose.

And who decides when a country has reached a certain level of consciousness? If all it takes is one psychopath for you to stumble into an Orwellian dystopia, perhaps you should think twice about the system you're trying to build.

Sure, the SEC should (again, SHOULD) investigate blatant insider trading and similar fraud... except that the whole system is rigged, there are no adults in the room. They've been kicked out one by one (you could argue there never were any, see the 2008 financial crisis or senators turbo selling stocks prior to COVID). So don't hold your breath.

Ben Shapiro (who's actually pretty pissed off about the tariffs) optimistically argues that Trump is responsive to bad press - and while that's true, he doesn't seem to realize (or refuses to say publicly) that his response has always been spinning, lying, distortion and scapegoating. Hardly helpful when you operate on the economy that tracks reality much more closely than theatrical politics. He may dig himself into a deeper hole by doubling down, or back off by getting some largely symbolic concessions in negotiations and spinning those into a huge win "for the american worker" (= best case scenario). It's a 50/50 the way I see it. EDIT: Actually, the absolute best case scenario would be an actual win: the EU getting their shit together and tearing down the innovation-crushing bureaucratic labyrinth that it is + Musk convincing Trump that an EU-US trade agreement is in the best interest of both. Now that would be one way to seriously fuck with China. Pure fantasy for sure, but you never know. Trump has been failing upwards his whole life after all.

The prophet had warned us.