Basman

Birds are dinosaurs.

@Elliott I've made a substantive point of how technology expands the capacity for morality, but I'm yet to receive a serious respond. Your only responding with these empty platitudes and moving the goal post. You are not arguing in good faith. I'm not going to waste any more of my time on your nonsense.

Technology doesn't automatically make you live more morally but it does increase your freedom to do so. It's not trivial to have the agency to alleviate survival challenges. Child mortality, murder, rape, etc. aren't moral issues in a tribal society because they don't have the capacity to avoid them. Most hunter-gatherer tribes are restrained by base survival and group conformity. In that sense they have less capacity for moral development. It's really fucking hard to be a hunter-gatherer comparatively. You could become one today if you really wanted to, but you would have to be crazy to do that. And even then, you'd be hard pressed to not rely on modern tools like guns and clothing, which proves why technology is so significant. Even the humble spear was a revolutionary technology at the time that changed which reshaped ecological systems. The spear has been instrumental to the extinction of hundreds of species, millions of deaths and the proliferation of humans across the globe at large. That is what one invention did for humanity. But when modern humans invent technology it doesn't count?

The question is, why do you need to be spoon fed meaning by your externals? I understand the fascination with tribal life. I too think being part of tribe would naturally lead to a lot of happiness because it is the environment humans are adapted for. But it isn't utopic, your are ruled by your environment to a much greater degree and therefor you have much less capacity to live virtuously. You can do all of this things that you listed today. What is stopping you? Tribal people are using technology and have been from the very start. This is ridiculous.

Rumination and an unquiet mind seem to be characteristic of bipolar disorder and your distress in a broad sense. I would assume professional help would be the most constructive approach but there might be techniques you can find online that could help you find more inner peace. Self-help doesn't rely on other people's opinions. It's not required. If something doesn't work for you then just discard it. The point of positive thinking is that it is more solution-oriented and takes you out of a victim mentality. It is not meant to gaslight you, but the truth is that you have a lot of room for how you interpret any situation. It is often no more true to see something in a positive light as it is seeing it in a negative light. But you gain more from being positive, so you might as well. That is my thinking at least. Negative thinking in its extreme is creating one's own hell distinct from actual reality. There's a huge difference for instance between thinking that the world is conspiring for you as opposed to thinking that the world is against you, not only in how it makes you feel but also what actions you end up taking down the line. Though how it makes you feel is probably the most significant part.

I was talking about hunter-gatherer tribes. Not ancient civilizations. Ancient world art are products of technology.

Keep in mind that I'm no psychologist. My knowledge doesn't extend further than a general interest in psychology, philosophy and self-help, so take what I say with a grain of salt. First of all, it seems like your mind is juts very cluttered, with overlaying stressors and internalized feelings of believing you are unworthy of love. Feeling like your inherently unlovable seems to be a recurring theme, between fatherly abandonment, feeling like nobody supports you and generally being lonely. This could explain why you are hung up on your mother scolding you for molesting your younger sibling, even though it would be normal to freak out over that kind of sibling abuse, objectively speaking. It's an old wound. It might be worth going through and explicating what is objectively your fault VS what is theirs for each issue you've had for every major relationship you've had in a kind of list style. A = incident B = what your responsible for in this incident C = what they are responsible for in this incident This way you can make it clear in your mind what is theirs and what is yours in a more objective manner. The truth is that a lot of abuse is not about you anymore than the fact that you where vulnerable at that moment and the abusers very own psychology. You also seem to tend to interpret things in a very negative way. Like with the example of your mom scolding you earlier. It is a fact that she freaked out. It is a subjective interpretation that that means your inherently unworthy of love. I believe it is a symptom of BPD to ruminate and catastrophize. This tendency towards a negative and implicitly self-defeating thinking could be contributing to your feelings of suicidality, which is in my understanding the consequence of prolonged distress and not being able to see a way out. Suicide is a symptom of not being able to imagine a way out of distress. One technique you could try, if you feel so inclined, is softening your language. Softening one's language lets you negotiate with negative thinking. For example, you recently experienced a bunch of set-backs, like losing your job, losing money, drugs not working, etc. The first obvious example is to think of these as set-backs as opposed to failures. Or another example, "the medical system exploited me" to "they don't know what they are doing". Or "life is really hard" to "life is challenging". However you choose to interpret a situation, you'll be right. It's not about gas lighting yourself but dialing how you interpret events. In reality, this events don't actually mean anything. Your mind creates meaning in order to deal with this situations in order to survive, but one's interpretations aren't always constructive and solution-oriented.

Meaning is a projection of the mind. As a tribesman, you have very little individuality and the tribe equips you with all meaning. This is also fundamentally true of modern societies, but you have way more wiggle room as an individual as the scale of society expanded. But there is something to be said about the meaninglessness of modern society. We live in a highly material society which has rejected the religious spirituality of the past, but didn't replace that with anything beyond a vague pursuit of happiness. It is one of the downsides of stage orange and likely an aspect which will exhaust the population of it. People are missing meaning in their life. The other day, I learn of a violent prank called the "Blue Whale" which are a series of challenges which illicit young people to partake in a series of increasingly violent forms of self-harm, culminating in suicide. I can easily imagine young and very lost people being drawn to something like that just because it gives them a purpose. But it is not the case that modernity is exclusively meaningless, you just have too be more proactive about it. There are plenty of examples of people who live meaningful lives today. Arguably humans are adapted for tribal life. So we would naturally "slot in" to that kind of lifestyle and easily find meaning in our lives. But you can't compare modernity to tribal life without acknowledging that being a hunter-gatherer was an extremely hard life with very little room for self-dignity. Modern life is the current peak of humanism in comparison. There is no denying it. It is not possible to find a better time alive to be "useless" and have self-dignity, or the best you can get at least, be it as gay, elderly, sick or as a child. In a tribe, the elderly and children are particularly vulnerable. Child mortality is high and the elderly are often killed or left for dead if they can't up. There's an account of an Acho man who used to sneak up to older aunts and kill them with an axe. And he was proud of it too. Greenland, whose culture is closely rooted to a stone-age culture due to being a nomadic hunter-gatherer society up until colonization only a few hundred years, tend to see children as somewhat disposable, with sexual abuse of children being rampant (about every third child). In part due to the liberal tradition being less rooted in their culture as well as other factors like rampant alcoholism. That is not to say that modern society doesn't have any evils of its own, like pollution (I would be tempted to say war too, but that would actually not be accurate. Relatively, we live in the most peaceful era of human history). There also the factor of depth. The meaning you would find being a tribesman is obvious and immediately enrapturing, but it is also limited by how harsh life is. Most of your thoughts go to "food" and "danger". Compared to modernity, you can create and discover incredible purpose and meaning that can change other people's lives. Just look at any great musician or philosopher. It's like, would you rather have the tastes and hobbies of a dog or a wine connoisseur? The latter is easily pleased, but doesn't enjoy nearly the same depth. Technology is just an extension of natural means through ingenuity and generational knowledge. Humans have always used technology to survive better and to better themselves. Because it improves our survival it contributes significantly to the development of our consciousness overall.

In western societies, we tend to put happiness on a pedestal. We treat happiness as the end goal of life, more or less. So, are you ashamed of being unhappy/stressed? Because if you are, then that would be just added stress.

How much would this cost to attend you think?

I wanted to do this for a while, compile videos of strange and weird games that are dreamlike, trippy, ethereal, etc. The weirder and more obscure the better. Feel free to add your own contributions. --- LSD: Dream Emulator

I thought you where against this kind of stuff.

Technology use is part of what defines us as a species, which goes all the way back. You have to be extremely cynical to even consider technological advancement as a net-zero for humanity. There are downsides, but there are way more upsides. The standard of living is so high right now.

Your writing is very peculiar, but I'm sure your posts will be well met if they are substantive and empirically grounded.

It sounds like you have something like performance anxiety relative to this girl. If I was in your position, I would try the logotherapeutical technique of paradoxical intention, which is to intend that which you are trying to avoid, which I'm guessing is failing at having good sex with this girl. IE. deliberately intending to not have good sex to haywire your anxiety.

Only if you spell their name right.

Arab societies seemed to be much more advanced in the past in terms of influence, art and learning. They invented math and letters bro. Then they got fucked by Mongols, become religious nut bags, stopped learning and eventually got outpaced.

What topics are you exactly interested in discussing, and from what angle?

I have no knowledge of the topic, But I know that Arab and Europeans clashed during the medieval ages. I know that Muslims used to control Spain at a point in time. There was also the whole Jerusalem thing with the Templars and shit. Fascinating stuff.

I've recently started reading for 5 minutes a day then adding 5 minutes each week till I reach an hour. My goal is to read an hour everyday and this method has been really effective. I'm actually looking forward to reading everyday because it is something that feels both easy to do and productive. I'm gradually getting myself used to it without overwhelm. You don't appreciate how interesting your stack of books actually are because your mind isn't used to reading probably and isn't associating enough good feelings to the activity yet. It takes time to get used to it since it is a focused and a low-dopaminergic activity. I started this about 2.5 months ago and I've already finished two books and I'm well into the next one. It feels good to be finally digging into my back log and exploring all of this topics that I'm not only interested in but know are going to feed into my life. It has made me wordier, at least (or unfortunately, depending on who you ask).

Great read. Lots of good points. I have some thoughts on my own based of what you wrote. My understanding of the main message of academia, which I've learned both from Leo and elsewhere, is that you need to assess whether or not university is relevant to your goals. You ideally want to be making deliberate choices with some kind of plan instead of just following the group think. I understand "college is for idiots" as meaning that you inherently don't need college to learn anything, especially in the age of the internet. It's for "idiots" in the sense that an institution is responsible for your education. That is not to say that college is necesarilly insufficient (depending on your standard of how educational it should be), any education is more education than no education, but there are certain cons that come with a formalized 4-5 year tenure which you avoid through self-education. With that mindset, higher education becomes more about the credentials than anything else. Higher education has become a conveyor belt style ritual for the lowest common denominator. The point about taking survival for granted is very vindicating. I often get the impression that a lot of users on this forum still have a lot of the "basics" to work on, but their head is full solipsism and whatnot while generally having a stand-offish attitude. They'll snobbishly dismiss Tony Robbins as basic while being broke and homeless in India (literally). It is basic, but are you doing it? You wouldn't want to go amiss of air, would you? Just the principle that you can direct your mind can fundamentally change your life and directly feeds into one's spirituality long-term.

Legalization tends to increase demand. Prostitution is a clear example of this, where legalizing the trade increases the flow of human trafficking victims due to the increase of scale. It's quiet the problem in Germany, who legalized the trade. The main concern with incest is the potential for abuse, especially of minors, and inbreeding. I'm not sure what would be the correct approach. If otherwise legally consenting people are blood related and as long as they don't reproduce, then I don't really see what the issue is inherently. It would be quiet arbitrary to penalize such couples legally if they are not hurting anyone.

It's obviously technological limitation, but they are way too big. This concept benefits from being as imperceptible as possible from the outside. Less of an issue if they are googles though. I wonder if this technology has military application, like those visor from the first Halo game. Nice job team.

In my opinion, right-wing politics is largely a front for corruption and self-dealing. Because conservatives tend to be less conscious than progressives, they are somewhat less capable of separating their internal reality from the external world, which is terrifying when you consider that most politicians are elites. They tend to believe what is good for them personally is also what is good for society, hence you get budget cuts to public goods like road work and schools, which a healthy society depend on, but which hurt the pockets of tax payers. Many of the decisions that have a clear demographic that are negatively affected by a certain policy conveniently don't touch the politicians enacting said policy.