Whitney Edwards

Deconstructing suffering is a trap too.

Compassionate delivery. Awesome.

The quality of sleep was compromised a bit with lucid dreaming.

I had a recent out of body experience. Obe. I had a lucid dreaming adventure. I was in the middle of nowhere and i felt like souls were leaving the body. It was surreal. These souls appeared like vanishing smoke, appearing and disappearing. I could hear giggling and cackling sounds. Like children laughing in the distance. Endless laughter. It was frightening sometimes, my head was heavy. It seemed as though fear was the only thing that bound our bodies to physical existence. Everything else was illusory. Nothing made sense. Our physical reality was warped. Everything was cloudy. Most souls were happy, giggling and laughing genuinely,effortlessly. The atmosphere was joyous. I'd like to research this obe in more depth. I could hear giggling sounds. Then there was interruption. Quite often in fact. I couldn't figure out what was real and what was not. In all of it, reality appeared meaningless. As if it were manufactured through space and time, it was man made and anchored by fear of existence, a real primal fear. Some souls were upset, sad, sinister and seemed to be under some karmic influence. It's hard to tell. But these were imprints. I don't know. But they were like dna imprints. Like finger prints and palm prints. That's how the souls appeared. It was bad. It was bad. It was bad. It was bad. It was bad. The feeling of fear was awful. A gnawing sense of attachment. Pure existential fear. It seemed as though karmic influence was bad for the souls. The best way to describe the mental state was an unusual state of calmness and unaffectedness. It was like being in the middle of a bad psychedelic trip. It just didn't matter. Nothing mattered. There was no flow. No meaning. Only peace.

Feeling shame is a trap. It's one of the biggest traps. You cannot get out of it easily, it locks you in. It can make you miserable and turn into a vicious trap. Those have lived in shame will know it. Too much debating or arguing. The internet is a blessing as well as a trap. Validation is a huge trap. It's a poison to the soul. It's worse than addiction.

Wholeheartedly.

Found a good video on digital minimalism.

I see. I can understand how false positivity can cause inaction. That makes sense. I'm wondering how to balance positive and negative self talk or positive and negative visualization because both seem to help in different ways, only the timing needs to be perfect.

@trenton the one thing that you need is a solid structure. Once you have that it's easy to ward off most traps.

Can positive self talk ever be a trap? So far it has only helped me.

It's not like everything is a trap. There is no gift here. Just lessons. Those lessons are still a gift because they prevent you from future traps. Your problem is quite complex and a bit general. You're facing problems with strangers, this is obvious. You need to stop trusting strangers and invest your time with people who have some credibility, in the sense that you have known them for some time and they have shown some degree of courtesy, trust, availability and decency. That way they won't scam you because they are obviously not the ones to put others in unnecessary trouble. You need good leadership skills to weed out bad apples in a group. They might not be genuinely bad, just not good for your health. Being selfish is not evil. Being moderately selfish is an essential necessity to survival. Hope you take better decisions next time and everything is a lesson for something bigger. Then there are some common traps that go along with socializing and assimilating with human nature in general - Overly Optimistic View Having an overly optimistic view of human nature can lead to the following traps - Naivety Trap: Assuming the best intentions in others and being too trusting which can make one susceptible to manipulation, scams, or exploitation. I'll call it the naivety trap. Doormat Trap: Being overly accommodating and putting others' needs before one's own leading to being taken advantage of or disrespected. Leo has discussed this in his video. Especially in the relationship part. Misreading Social Cues: Failing to recognize warning signs or red flags in social situations due to an assumption of inherent goodness in people. I often tend to fall into this trap. It's my most common trap. Some level of body language analysis might help me overall in this direction. Cynical View On the other hand, having an overly cynical or negative view of human nature can also lead to traps: Paranoia Trap: I can escape into illusions of constant skepticism, once I feel threatened in some way.Constantly doubting others' intentions and being distrustful, which can strain relationships and create unnecessary conflicts. Those conflicts then turn into a spiral. Isolation Trap: Avoiding social interactions and connections due to a belief that people are inherently selfish or untrustworthy, leading to loneliness and missed opportunities. Confirmation Bias Trap: Selectively seeking out and interpreting information that confirms one's negative view of human nature, while ignoring contradictory evidence. I also call this the bandwagon. Sometimes we jump on other people's conclusions and mirror their views inadvertently feeding into their confirmation biases as well.

Oh ok. Thanks for the reply.

Feeling shame is a trap. It's one of the biggest traps. You cannot get out of it easily, it locks you in. It can make you miserable and turn into a vicious trap. Those have lived in shame will know it. Too much debating or arguing. The internet is a blessing as well as a trap. Validation is a huge trap. It's a poison to the soul. It's worse than addiction.

How is this a trap?

The trap of preaching against selfishness while actually being selfish and people falling for this trap.

Go watch leos video on traps. It's s trap you set up for yourself when you think you need to do something to get sex. You don't. Relationships have to be authentic and genuine. You're missing out on the real part. The loss is yours.

Not having compassion is also a trap. One of the biggest traps. Because it puts you in a position where you can never know any other position.

Another way to reframe what Claude said about this whole presentation is that of course, actualized.org can be a trap. Of course, it can. Of course, the very source of your highest information, your spiritual Guru, you know, your expert, your Genius scientist, that very Source itself can, you see, how that becomes a trap, all right? That's it. I'm done here. Please come check out my website, check out my blog, check out the Forum, check out the life purpose course, check out the book list. We've been having some technical issues with the actualized website over the last week, but those have all mostly been resolved at this point. I apologize for that delay. We had some problems with the server and the hosting company that's all being fixed. And I'm making improvements into the infrastructure, migrating to better server and so forth in the future. Look, final Point here is that I've been away on a very long break for almost a year. I didn't release any content. This was necessary for me. I haven't really talked about it. Why I went on this break and what happened during this break I'll reveal some of that in the future. It was actually pretty tough but also a huge growth opportunity for me. In the future, I have a lot more videos planned, a lot of deep stuff, a lot of stuff that comes from the lessons that I learned over last year. I wasn't just sitting around Naval gazing. I was suffering a lot and I was going through a lot and I I I integrated a lot of deep lessons and a lot of changes subtle changes have happened inside of my own mind and how I'm going to be presenting content going forward hopefully you can already see some of those in this episode I don't know they're they might be pretty subtle at first but maybe you can pick up on some of those. I'm also going to be working on some new courses coming soon although I don't want to promise anything but hey you know I've made that mistake before and I'm sure I'll make it again so that's kind of where we're at I'll I'll share more in the future and frankly some of the stuff that I went through I'm not even prepared to share yet for you know a lot of it is quite personal but um I do have a lot of deep insights to share with you on various topics the fundamental topics practical topics political topics I have some deep stuff on politics that I have planned so stay tuned for that and I want to leave you with one final thought this is a little reward for those of you who stick around through this long three-hour long episode you know I saved a little tidbit for you towards the very end and that is this the final thought is what is the ultimate trap in life. Self. Self is the ultimate trap.

So when I'm generating one of my episodes, you know that's me generating a single perspective, and it's always great to have another perspective, but oftentimes I don't have anybody else to bounce off of, but now I have AI. The next hole it pointed out was falling into traps should be reframed as an opportunity to learn, not a personal failing. The next hole it said is under the emphasis of systemic factors. Individual agency isn't the whole picture. We did focus a lot in this episode on individual agency, what you can do about these things, but of course, there are also more systemic factors. There's more collective factors. We touched on some of those, but a lot more could be said about the political aspects of this, which we didn't have time to go into. And then the final point that Claude made is, it said, "Hold the framework lightly." And when I read that, it was funny, I started laughing because it's like, "Have you been watching my videos?" Because that's what I usually say. That's the kind of injunction that I usually deliver at the end of an episode. So, I wholeheartedly agree with all these points. And the reason I present them to you here is because I'm also trying to show you the power of this AI if you use it appropriately, of course. Now, you can use AI to reinforce all of your biases and all of the gaps in your thinking, and AI is not going to automatically fix the gaps in your thinking. You have to actually see if you're actually interested in truth in understanding genuinely, not just as some platitude and virtue signaling, but if you're really interested in that, and you don't confuse the truth with your own perspective, then you will actually ask other people or an AI to point out flaws in your own perspective, limitations in your own perspective. And the reason I'm able to do that and to use the AI in this way, which is a little bit counterintuitive, most people wouldn't use AI this way, is because I'm really interested in truth. I'm not interested in just reinforcing my own perspectives. I don't need that. What I want is the value of the AI. Finally, I have someone that's very intelligent—a very intelligent mind. That's what this AI effectively is. Whether it has consciousness or not is irrelevant. It effectively serves the purpose of a very intelligent mind. It's more intelligent than most humans. You know, a human couldn't point out all these holes if given this presentation. But the AI could. So, that's a very amazing technology. The proper way to leverage that is to take whatever perspective you have, feed it to the AI, and ask it then to play Devil's Advocate. So that's literally what I told Claude. I said, "Okay, play Devil's Advocate with my outline here." And you know, initially, because Claude is very obsequious, so all these AIs are overly obsequious. They love to blow smoke up your ass. Whatever you tell them, they will say, "Oh yeah, that's a very good point you made," and then they'll slobber all over you of how intelligent you are and how good of a point you made, especially if you're telling them something of the quality that I would share with one of these AIs, you know. But then, see, that's the trick. Your ego is like, "Oh yeah, yeah, Claude, tell me more about how great my perspective is, how great my outline is." That's initially what it was telling me because it was a great outline. But I knew that that was a trap, you see? And I knew that really to use this AI properly, I have to ask it to play Devil's Advocate. So what I told it is I said, "Now play Devil's Advocate with me and point out all the flaws and holes in my perspective." And so it did, and that's the beauty of this technology. So now, here you have a brand new Cutting Edge tool for how to identify traps in any domain, which is AI. Amazing, right? This is a revolutionary technology that has only existed for like the last year, really. You couldn't do this a year ago. And so from now on, I'm going to be running all of my future content through AI to point out these kinds of holes for me. Now, of course, that can still be a trap, you know, because I haven't used the saying that much, so I don't know what the potential for the traps are. But I can already foresee a few traps. Like I can foresee that it's possible to start to get lazy because, you know, it took me a lot of work, manual contemplative work, you know, months of contemplative work to slowly develop this outline. But in the future, I might get lazy and I might just say, "Hey, I'm not going to skip all that. I'm just going to cut a corner here," which would be a trap. And I'm just going to ask Claude to write the whole outline for me. And I'm sure that a lot of people are going to fall into that very trap because why? Because they're looking for something fast, easy, free, cheap, convenient, no emotional labor, no contemplative efforts, no difficulty, right? Why spend months developing your own examples when you can just scrape and copy and paste the ones from Claude? But that's not going to be the same quality, you see? So that's a trap that I could potentially fall into in the future. We'll see. I don't know. I haven't done this enough to really understand how alluring that will be. But of course, you know, saving time is always alluring and avoiding work is always alluring. So you know that from all the traps we discussed above.

Judging yourself for falling into a trap is a trap. You want to have self-compassion when you make mistakes. Don't beat yourself up for making a mistake because that itself isn't a mistake. You just have to look, you lacked consciousness, lacked experience, you were lured in by something that you needed, you were desperate. That's the human condition. So, don't beat yourself up for that. Ultimately, you have to get good at reframing your traps as gifts, opportunities to learn deeper. A lot of times, when you go through your deepest suffering, you learn the most. So, of course, traps can be sources of some of your greatest suffering. Life is a balancing act. It's all about finding balance. Achieving success or goodness or truth in some domain usually involves having the right balance. For example, you need to strike the right balance between being too cheap and being too wasteful with your money, between working too hard, being a workaholic, and then avoiding work and procrastinating, between believing in religion blindly and dismissing all spirituality. There's something in the middle, the right balance. Trusting people too much foolishly or distrusting everyone in a cynical, toxically skeptical way where then you can't relate to them properly, you're too distrustful. Being too selfish on one hand and being too selfless and self-sacrificing on the other. Engaging in too much theory or not enough theory. There is a balance there. Being too serious or not being serious enough. Of course, it should be obvious that I am not immune to all of these traps, and yet I should say that anyway, just to reiterate it. How do you think I know about all these traps? Many of them, of course, because I've just contemplated them and thought ahead, but a lot of them I've fallen into myself, and I still reserve the right to fall into some traps in the future. If you see me falling into a trap and doing something stupid, that's not a mistake. That's expected; I expect that of myself. I think I spent a lot of time thinking about what is the value that actual art or content brings to its audience. One of the functions of my content is that I try to point out all the traps to you of all these various tricky domains. That's something that I'm passionate about, and notice that there's a lot of value in that. It's actually very practical, rather than me waxing philosophical for you or filling your head with ideology and various kinds of belief systems. It can be a lot better to just point out traps to you, and that's really what I've been doing all along. Going back for 10 years of this content, I've been implicitly pointing out traps. Now, we've made it very explicit that that's what we've been doing. Now, I want to conclude this with a little bit of talk about AI. I started using AI recently and I discovered the power of it to supercharge my contemplations. This is the first episode where I applied AI to my contemplations, and I have used AI to improve this talk that I gave to you. This talk was run through the Claude Opus AI. This doesn't mean that this talk was generated by the AI. I spent many, many, many hours and two years compiling the research for this topic, brainstorming all the examples, and I got it to the point where I would normally get one of my outlines. I don't write out what I'm going to say word for word; I speak off the cuff, but I do make an outline. I speak from an outline just because there's so much content here and it's so tricky that it's easy to forget stuff, which we don't want to do. Also, it needs to have a nice, logical, linear order in order to flow well. So, I arranged my outline, which was like 70 pages - 70 pages of outline for this talk, one of my longest ones because there are so many examples, over 250 examples. Then, what I did is I fed it into the Claude AI. I have a funny story about that, but we don't have time. Anyways, I fed it into the AI, and then I told it to read through my whole talk and then offer me improvements. So, that's what it did. It took just a couple of seconds to do that. I asked Claude to find holes in my thinking. Right, I asked it for additional examples. Some of the examples above that I mentioned were generated by Claude. Most of them were generated by me, but a few of them were generated by Claude, maybe 10 to 20 of the examples. Which was nice, I mean, it generated a lot of examples. I had to filter them through, so I'm not just using every example it gives. It might give me 50 examples, and I'll pick 10 of those that I think are the best. So, I'm using my judgment there. Here's the magic question, here's where the power of the AI comes from: I asked it to find holes in my presentation. So, here is the list of holes that it found. I'm going to read them verbatim. Hole number one: a risk of oversimplification. Not every situation is a trap. Hole number two: potential for excessive cynicism, mistrust, and paranoia. I've sort of addressed that; some of these holes that it mentions I've already gone back and I've made some corrections to make sure that people don't misunderstand things. Now, hole number three is potential for blame and shame. It's important to not judge or blame others too much for falling into traps. Compassion for others comes from understanding how complex, deceptive, illusory, and intelligent reality is. Very well said. The next hole is the potential for rigidity and dogmatism. The trap's lens can become a rigid absolute perspective. Of course, that's a trap. The next hole is traps are context dependent. What can be a trap in one context can be an opportunity in another. Excellent point. The next hole is a limited exploration of the potential gifts of falling into traps. Our greatest growth in insight comes from falling deep into traps. I've added that improvement already above because I already mentioned to you some of the gift aspects. When I was making this presentation, this outline, I was so focused on generating the best traps that I didn't even think about the gifts of the traps. It's only after I ran this through the Claw AI that it started talking about gifts, and I'm like, oh yeah, I was so focused on this one aspect of the topic that I left out that other aspect. You see, this is the power of the AI, it can point out these kinds of little blind spots, these kinds of little biases, and kind of like fixations that you have, especially when you're working on something. You can get very fixated into one way of thinking about it, and then this is where you need alternative perspectives. Remember I said that having only one perspective is a trap.

Right, it's really about strategic positioning because anyone will fall into a trap and be easily lured when they are very, very, very desperate. Like if you're broke and you have no money, yeah, you're going to be lured into all sorts of shady business deals. And if you're in this position where you haven't been socializing, you've been playing video games your whole life, living in your mother's basement, yeah, now you're in such a desperate position for sex that you're going to be tempted and lured in by all sorts of shady sexual schemes and offers. So, it is about positioning yourself strategically such that you're not in these kind of compromised positions. Then, of course, you can't avoid all of them, but you do the best you can. See, as you get trapped, you get more desperate, and as you get desperate, your options get worse, trapping you in even more. And it's sort of this negative vicious cycle. This can be sort of a cycle of addiction, like maybe you were abused as a child and you got traumatized, so that's already made you kind of desperate, emotionally vulnerable and so forth. And that makes you, of course, now, because you don't have a healthy emotional state, now that makes you susceptible now to intoxicants and drugs, and you start with a bit of alcohol, then you move on to weed, then you move on to cocaine, then you move on to heroin, you see? And this gradually makes you more and more and more desperate over time. And then, you know, when you're at the bottom of that spiral, you're so desperate that it seems like you have no way out. And in that case, what you need to do is you need to ask for help. You need to look for help from other people who are, you know, who can, who are in a good place in life such that they have abundant resources that they could help you because you're at the point where you've tapped yourself out. So, be careful about those kind of compromising situations that you can put yourself in. Traps are a mirror of our desires and fears. We fall into traps because they tap into something we crave or wish to avoid. Here's a quote that I'll read to you from an AI that I got from an AI. The Claw 3 AI says, "Traps are a mirror that reflect back to us our own psychological and emotional landscape." I thought that was a especially eloquent beautiful way of summarizing this whole thing. Here are some exercises that you can do that will help you to get a better handle on traps and to avoid traps. The first exercise is write down a list of 10 traps you've fallen into in your life in the past and then ask yourself what led you to fall into each trap. What did you learn from each trap? And importantly, in what way were these traps ultimately a gift? Don't forget that traps are not just purely negative things unless they're catastrophic, but even some of the catastrophic traps honestly can also ultimately be converted into gifts, and your ability to do that, your mental resourcefulness to do that is a very powerful skill. And maybe that deserves an episode all on its own, how to reframe this kind of negative stuff. In fact, I need to do an episode on reframing. That's powerful. And here's another exercise for you. Write down a list of five traps that other people who you know have fallen into. Friends, family members, romantic partners. And then ask yourself what led them to fall into these traps and how will you avoid falling into those traps? And then, here's an extra powerful question which is, what traps am I specifically susceptible to? What traps does my unique personality and life situation expose me to? Because you see, we're all quite different. We have different consciousnesses, different levels of development, different genetics, different personality types, different strengths and weaknesses. And that of course influences what kind of things we will be lured in by and susceptible to. So, you have to not just know about traps in general but specifically what kind of traps you're vulnerable to. Some people are much more vulnerable to alcoholism than others, genetically. You have to know that about yourself. If that's true for you, maybe some people can just go out and drink every night, and they're not vulnerable. But you're vulnerable, so you can't do that. However, you may have other advantages that those people don't have. Here are some meta-traps, very high level traps: Thinking that you're immune to a particular trap. For example, telling yourself, "Well, I would never join a cult; I could never join a cult because I'm too intelligent." Of course, that makes you more vulnerable to joining a cult if you believe that. Thinking that you've escaped a trap. Sometimes there's a trap within a trap within a trap. You might think, "Well, I've already escaped this trap, Leo, so it's not a big deal." But you don't realize that there's a deeper, more advanced version of that trap that you still haven't escaped. Watch out for that one. Especially true when you're getting into advanced spiritual stuff. You might think you've awakened to the max. But then, what you'll realize is that there's something beyond that. It's easy to overlook because you might think, "Well, I've escaped the ego; I've already awoken. So, what more could there be?" This kind of trap, in general, thinking that you're immune to self-deception, will be a trap. Criticizing, judging, and ridiculing others too much for falling into traps is a trap. Because the more you judge and criticize others, the harder it becomes for you to admit when you fall into traps yourself. Denying that you've fallen into a trap when you have is a big trap. If you can't even admit you've fallen into it, like if you can't even admit that you're doing some of the things listed above that are problematic, half the challenge is just admitting that you're doing some of these things honestly. Because you're going to be in denial about it, which is a trap. These traps can snowball and work together against you. Sometimes, you're not just dealing with one trap; you're dealing with multiple traps. For example, you're in denial that you're an addict, maybe using psychedelics but have turned it into an addiction now, and you're doing spiritual bypassing with psychedelics. If you ridicule others for falling into traps and you think they're stupid for doing that, automatically, that means you're going to think you're stupid for falling into traps. And you don't want to think you're stupid, so you're not going to want to admit that you fall into some of these traps. Sometimes, you can look like a real fool falling into one of these traps, like joining a cult. You might think you were just joining some sort of mild, good-mannered spiritual community, but it turned out to be a cult, and you were really fooled by that. But you don't want to admit that because you've been ridiculing others who joined cults. Another meta-trap is worrying about avoiding all the traps and getting paranoid about it, which will make you very risk-averse, get you stuck in your head, make you very indecisive, and then maybe you won't even take action because you are too afraid to fail and make a mistake, and you think that everything is a catastrophic trap, which isn't true. Getting paranoid about traps is itself a trap.

Another way to avoid traps is what's called the premortem technique. I have an episode about the premortem technique. A premortem is like a postmortem except a postmortem is something you do after you finish a project. You look back on the project and you say, okay, what went wrong, what went right, what are the lessons? Well, you can do that even without starting your project. Whatever project you have in mind, you can sit down and visualize a premortem. It's basically okay, visualize yourself failing at this project and then ask yourself why did I fail and what could have been done to prevent the failures? When I started actualized.org 10 years ago, I did a premortem on what would it look like if I failed at actualized.org. I discussed that in that episode, go check it out. It's kind of an old one, but still relevant. The other way to avoid traps is just by falling into them but then getting really good at learning your lessons. Perhaps the biggest trap is not that you fall into traps but that you keep falling into the same traps over and over again and don't learn your lesson. You'd be surprised how often people just live their whole life this way. It's okay to fall into a trap as long as it's not catastrophic so you should distinguish between two types of traps: those that are catastrophic and those that are not. If it's catastrophic, those you really want to avoid because those can really mess up your life and even kill you. But most traps are not catastrophic and they're actually presenting you with great learning opportunities, but of course, that assumes that you have this kind of learning mindset approach. Another way to avoid traps is to explicitly ask experienced people about traps. Seek out experts, talk to them, pay them for advice. That advice will pay for itself and specifically ask them what are the traps. You can ask them what are the newbie traps, what are the intermediate traps, what are the advanced traps? I bet you that most experts have never been asked that question so explicitly and they'll be thrilled to hear you ask such an intelligent question because see, no newbie, like it's hard for me to imagine a newbie like some new AG newbie coming to their spiritual guru and then saying what are all the traps of spirituality? Like I've never heard that happen before. Usually, they come in there with their eyes wide open, you know, all sort of mesmerized by the aura of the guru and then they just blindly fall into all the traps by worshiping the guru and adopting ideologies and beliefs and groupthink and all that kind of stuff. Of course, a way to avoid traps is to expose yourself to massive experience. We've talked about that before. Severe inexperience is really the mother of all traps and you really can't help it because you're born in life ignorant, completely inexperienced, and then you just got to learn by making mistakes. The next way to avoid traps is just to fail a lot. Failure is okay as long as it's not catastrophic. So fail more, fail faster, but don't fail in crippling ways. That's the key. Sometimes a simplistic piece of advice that might be told to people is like just fail a lot and don't worry about failure. Failure is great, you know, I failed so much in my life and I came up to be a success. Well, that's not quite correct advice because sometimes failure can be so catastrophic that it cripples you, it traumatizes you, it kills you even, or it costs you in an irreversible way that you can never replace. So what would be an example of a catastrophic failure? Well, if you get your hand caught in a circular saw and you cut off your hand, that would be an example of a catastrophic mistake. An example of a non-catastrophic mistake is let's say you make a bad investment, you lose $10,000. Losing money, of course, is always painful and it can be quite bad, especially if you need that money. But in the end, you know, you can make more money. Money is fungible, it's replaceable. $10,000 you can make that up in your lifetime, it's not a big deal. But losing your hand to a circular saw, that is a big deal, you can't replace that, there's no replacement for that. So if you're going into situations where there's a potential for a catastrophic trap, you know, identify which traps, like if you're making a list of traps in a new domain, put a little star next to the ones, there's going to be a few that are going to be like catastrophic that will kill you and mess you up, mess your business or whatever, and then when you're dealing with those, be extra careful. And then, you know, you can be very anal on those traps and the other traps you don't have to be so anal about. This way you have some sort of like sense of priority because if you're just going to be anal about everything, this is not going to be beneficial for you, it's going to actually trip you up. Another way to avoid traps is reading a lot to know a little bit about everything. Read biographies, history, business, memoirs, spiritual books, psychology books, philosophy books. This, you know, if you read all the stuff that I have on my book list, this is going to give you a very nice foundation where you're going to be aware of all the mistakes that humans have made in the past. You know, history is really great for that, biographies are great for memoirs, and so on. Also, adopt an attitude of facing truth. The avoidance of truth will land you into many traps. So, if you're just facing the truth a little bit every week, every month, every year, and you're doing that consistently, and you're valuing the truth, and you're not just stuck in an echo chamber, this will serve you well for avoiding many traps. See my episode "The Avoidance of Truth," which discusses that topic in depth. The next way to avoid traps is seeking out diverse perspectives. Only having one perspective is itself a trap. Don't have only one perspective on spirituality; you need more than that. Likewise, for business and for relationships and so on. The next way to avoid traps is context awareness. Becoming more context aware. See my old classic episode "Understanding Recontextualization" for more on that. The other way to avoid traps is reaching the construct-aware stage of cognitive development. This is from that episode three-part series episode I have called "The Nine Stages of Ego Development," especially in part three I talk about this construct-aware stage where you start to become aware of how your mind constructs your sense of reality. And this is very, very helpful for seeing some of the more abstract existential, epistemological, psychological sorts of traps. Then, I have this principle that helps me avoid traps, which is the principle of sustainability. When you're trying to do something, do it in a sustainable way. If you're building a business, build a sustainable business rather than an unsustainable business, because there's often solutions that are not sustainable which are the easier solutions. Not sustainable means I'm not talking about the environmental impact of your business here. By sustainable, what I mean is how long will this method of business be able to sustain itself? For example, if you have some sort of get-rich-quick scheme where you're flipping houses, how long can you do that? You can do that for a year or two. How long will that last? Or if you're making money off meme stocks, how long will that last? See, these are not sustainable ways of making money. You want a sustainable business. And of course, sustainability in business, for example, will mean that you need to actually offer value, not just leech value. The unsustainable methods are the ones that are based on leeching value, like, you know, you can make a lot of money as a hacker, but that's not sustainable. And then, of course, relationships. You can have unsustainable relationships, you can have sustainable relationships. Which ones do you think lead to true satisfaction and love and so on, and which ones are traps? In the end, of course, there is no algorithm for spotting traps. You just have to stay conscious and be intelligent and stay vigilant, keep your wits about you. Intelligence is your ability to see traps. Strive to live in a preemptive way. Work hard to position yourself such that you are not easily enticed into compromising on your values, your integrity, chasing after short-term pleasures, unsustainable solutions, get-rich-quick schemes, and so forth.

Of course, then there's the trap of ideology. It's a very broad general trap. I have an episode called "How Ideology Works" that explains that in more detail. Ideology is antithetical to everything we're doing here with actualized.org because it limits the functioning of your mind. Your mind is not actually thinking originally for itself and having genuine insights and observations, but rather it's just following some sort of laid-out trajectory or path and thinking along lines of conformity. Regardless of what kind of ideology it is—left-wing, right-wing, religious, or scientific—irrelevant capitalist, Marxist, all of it is limited and problematic. The other trap related to that is being stubborn and close-minded. That's usually what you get when you subscribe to any kind of ideology. The stubbornness and closed-mindedness come along with it, and there's your trap, there's the cost. Another trap is taking your point of view as the truth, confusing those two, taking your limited perspective as the best and truest perspective as absolute. And then just a very basic epistemological trap is thinking that you are right and whoever else you're dealing with is wrong. This is our default assumption in relationships and debates, whether they're political, philosophical, religious, in various kinds of conflicts—political conflicts, geopolitical conflicts—we just automatically assume that we're on the right side and they're on the wrong side. This is a trap. I've talked about Paradigm Lock in the past, that's a trap, go see my episode "How Paradigms Work." Creating an echo chamber around yourself is another kind of trap, surrounding yourself with likeminded people. This is really a sort of a variation on confirmation bias, not a paradox but a trap. Because when you surround yourself with like-minded people, then of course, you're going to be sharing your perspective and reinforcing it altogether. Another trap is spiritual bypassing, which is using spiritual beliefs to avoid facing practical responsibilities, real-life, and real-world business and uncomfortable emotions, shadow stuff, taking only like the positive aspects of spirituality but avoiding the real difficult work that spirituality should entail. Then there's the trap of happiness, pursuing happiness as a constant positive state. Then there's the path of arriving, the attitude that one day in the future you will finally reach a point in your life where you will be finally satisfied and at peace because you've achieved some XYZ accomplishments. Then there's the trap of assuming that what makes others happy will make you happy. Maybe that Hollywood celebrity is truly happy living that kind of life that he or she is living, but that doesn't mean that you will be, that's the trap. How about the trap of the perfect relationship, finding that perfect partner who will complete you and finally you will be happy? There's the trap of pure rationality, which is thinking that the problem of epistemology can be solved by just being hyper-rational and not seeing the limitations of rationality itself. Scientifically minded people suffer from this one the most. There's a trap of assuming that freedom is an absolute good. Libertarians fall into this trap. The American right-wing also tends to fall into this trap, which is very ironic because they restrict freedoms in many ways, so it's very hypocritical. Of course, the trap of positive vibes only, this is sort of this kind of new-age spiritual attitude of like let's just be positive all the time, like you know don't tell me that I'm out of money, that's negative, don't tell me I need to get a job because that's negative, let's be positive about it, let's just look at the bright side of all these situations of not having money and not having a job and not paying my taxes and just kind of like, again, this is a kind of spiritual bypassing. How about the trap of demonizing survival and selfishness because now you're so woke you've supposedly transcended your selfishness to some degree and now you expect that of everybody else? Well, of course, that's a kind of delusion there as well. So, these are some of the more psychological traps that I personally find most profound to really contemplate and some of these can be like the most advanced kinds of traps that will take you a decade to really appreciate. Now, let's get to the topic of uh, let's stop listing out traps and let's get to the topic of how do you avoid traps? So here are some tips for you. First of all, use this lens, this paradigm of traps that I'm offering to you, so just that alone, making this explicit is helpful. Next, go in expecting traps. Whatever domain you're going into, research that domain and study the traps that others have fallen into and expect that every new domain has traps in it, especially newbie traps, that's where the most traps are, is the newbie traps, but then there's like we said more advanced ones, intermediate and then advanced. The next point here is don't be a fool, don't expect free value. This is how you really get trapped is expecting free value. Free value often comes with a hidden cost. Are you using Facebook for free? Are you using some online service for free? Well, you better believe there's a hidden cost because they're not doing it for free. Facebook's making a lot of money. Facebook is one of the most profitable companies in the world, so where are they charging you? What's the hidden cost of Facebook, of Instagram, and so on? Think about these things, businesses don't just do things for free for you. In the end, a business does things because it thinks it's going to get more value out of it than you will, that's how businesses operate. So if a business is offering some kind of sale, you better believe that the business is earning more money on that sale than you are, so figure out where they're hiding the cost from you. Also related to this point is stop expecting things to be quick and easy, your desire to leech value you and get freebies will be turned against you and then you're the one who's going to end up getting screwed in the end. Beware of things that are high value but easy, free, cheap, quick, and exciting and fun. See a lot of these traps are just fun, that's how you get trapped in there by them, some of this stuff is fun and you might say well Leo if I don't, if I live my life avoiding all these trap you know being paranoid about avoiding all these traps all the time where's the fun in life um you're being a buzz kill, yeah in a certain sense I am, you know I'm sort of like that parent telling you to be careful when you go outside well why do your parents tell you that because there's crocodiles crawling around out there they might snatch you now of course in practice you know you don't want to take it overboard and I'll have some more points towards the end about um you know the limits of this traps paradigm because every paradigm has its limits every lens has its limits. Another way to avoid traps is don't be desperate and needy. The more needy you are for sex, for money, for power, for fame, for love, the easier you will be to trap, so live your life more preemptively where you avoid putting yourself in these kind of compromising needy desperate positions. Avoid traps by being a long-term thinker, short-term thinking is the mother of all traps, learn patience, the get-rich-slowly approach rather than the get-rich-quickly approach. Another way to avoid traps is get clear about your values and stick with them, don't betray your values. That's a huge trap right there. Another way to avoid traps is to distinguish between what is truly valuable and what is merely tempting or alluring. The distinction between fake value and real value, or shallow value and deep value, is what you want to be going after. The real deep value probably deserves its own episode. That distinction, just right there, also beware when people tell you, uh, rather, beware when people are telling you what you know you want to hear. Salespeople, your intimate partners, they will often tell you what they know you want to hear. Business partners will do that, investors can do that, or people offering to bring you investments can do that in like investment opportunities. Another way to avoid traps is to contemplate. Just sit and contemplate the traps for every new domain, make a list of them, make lists of traps in your commonplace book, and review it regularly. Start with some of the ones I mentioned above in this episode, but then also find your own traps. I mentioned some very kind of general traps, but then if you're going into very specific domains, whatever you're doing, you'll have specific traps related to that domain. Make lists of those and then review them periodically just to kind of refresh your memory because it's not enough to just look at them once. You've got to remind yourself of it every year because you're going to get complacent.