Yarco

One example that comes to mind... I've seen several posts recently like "What is ________" that could've been a Google search. Generally if someone is asking for a definition or fact that you could look up on Wikipedia, I don't think that's a good use of anyone's time. I think posts should seek opinions/input or spark conversation at minimum.

I don't want to make this a full trip report and describe the entire thing. But basically, I took one puff of a disposable vape pen like this one: And depersonalized / derealized / dissociated (idk what the technical term would be) for like 3 hours. This was a grey market vape pen (weed is legal here, but only through government-run or approved dispensaries) so it's possible it contained synthetic cannabinoids like spice or something crazy. But I had a very similar experience with 100% for sure pure/authentic THC oil from the government before as well. The seller seemed reputable and had lots of positive reviews from this product that seemed like they were from real people. In a place where weed is legal, I don't think they can get away with cutting their product with fake stuff nowadays. So I'm pretty convinced it was pure THC and I guess weed is just not for me. The main thing that really freaked me out was... it was like I was following myself a split second after the fact. And I could jump between being slightly behind myself, in the present moment, or slightly in the future. I guess my main concern is... if I react this badly to cannabis, am I going to have a similar experience with mushrooms or DMT? I thought I was just going to relax a little bit as an introduction to mind-altering substances but I blasted all the way off the deep end into insanity. I haven't done mushrooms before, but this is literally what I would've expected a 3+ gram or more mushroom trip to feel like. I had to lay in bed in the dark listening to music to try and hold onto the present moment, and every 10 minutes at a time felt like an hour. I had maybe 20% positive and 80% negative from it. I think I felt what Nothingness is at one point, and absolute bliss at another point. But then waves of feeling terrible would always come back and took up a lot more of the time. This CAN'T be what taking 1 hit of weed feels like to normal people. There's no way Elon Musk could do a podcast in this state, there's no way Snoop Dogg could record music in this state. I couldn't do this and then play video games and just chill out. I'm wondering what it all means... Does cannabis just not agree with me? Is the plant trying to tell me I'm not ready? Is being this sensitive a sign of spiritual development, or a lack of spiritual development? Should I still try mushrooms or DMT to see if I react better to them? Or is this a sign my mind is too weak and if I try a more potent substance I may permanently go insane? After being in that state I definitely have a newfound appreciation for being sober and living in reality. I don't want to go back there any time soon.

It totally depends on the corporation. But generally the larger a company is, the less flexible it is, and the more stringent bureaucracy that's at work. When a company gets huge there's no time or place for playing favorites, everything just works like a machine. At medium sized companies (still hundreds of employees) it's all about who you know. If you're a good worker and your boss isnt a total jerk, they are the one who can most effectively move you up the ranks and get a new person to take the more basic position. Even having a manager in your corner isnt enough unless they wield sufficient clout/influence with their higher-ups though. When I was in college for accounting, I worked in a grocery store seafood department. My dept manager tried to put in a good word for me several times to switch to working in the back cash room where they counted all the money and prepared the tills for cashiers so I could get some financial experience, but nothing ever came of it. Sometimes you just don't have the network within the company to make it happen. I know in my wife's company, she's so valuable to them that they'd basically bend over backwards and offer her whatever to get her to stay. She has all the leverage. Talking to your manager and making some kind of development plan is the way to go though. Even if it's just doing 1 day per week in another area of the company to start. The biggest thing that will hold you back is selfish managers. If you're making life easy for them, they dont exactly have an incentive to give you away to another manager. It takes a special selfless kind of manager that actually wants to see what's best for you and help you flourish, even if it means they have to train a new person and their department suffers for a while. In my experience I've had about 1/4 of managers that were this "good type." If your own boss seems like an achiever who is moving up the company that's a good sign. Theyll bring you up with them. A manager who seems content to stay in their current position until retirement usually just wants to insulate their department and keep things static if they're working.

Admittedly I have fallen into this trap of low quality posting myself a lot as of late. I've gone from no warning points since 2016, to getting warned twice within the past couple of months. Part of it was that I expanded out from answering questions in the Life Purpose / Entrepreneurship section almost exclusively, to reading and replying to all areas of the forum. I've also been posting a lot more, I've made probably 30% to 40% of all my posts from the past 7 years in only the last couple of months. I also switched from lengthy, well thought-out answers that I spent 30+ minutes writing to short poignant/quippy answers, only a sentence or two long. If I'm honest, this was an attempt to emulate how I was seeing Leo post on the forum. People dont read giant walls of text even if they're helpful, so I tried breaking through to people with just a paragraph at most, Twitter-style, like he was. So I'm glad he's setting a higher standard for himself and will set an example as well. Posting in the Politics section especially seems to only get me into trouble and rile me up and create conflict. I'm gonna make a strong effort to hide my power level and just go back to offering people useful Life Purpose / business advice.

Everybody has good days and bad days at work. Very few people give their job 100%, especially not every day. If you could see how truly unproductive some of your fellow employees are, you might be shocked. It's good to hold yourself to a higher standard, but you might just be an overachiever being too hard on yourself. Think about how much you get paid, and realistically how much work your boss should expect to get done for that amount. If you think you've done a fair amount of work, then I wouldn't feel too bad about it. It sounds like you're giving it 100% even though you're sick. The problem is that 100% while feeling fatigued and lethargic can never amount to the same as 100% while at your peak. Have you talked to your boss/manager about how bad you're feeling and how it's impacting your performance? If you've been a solid worker for years, I'm sure they would understand and just tell you to take it easy for a bit. If not... maybe they aren't someone worth working yourself to exhaustion over.

Both. Why can't it be both? If the price of being alive is having to experience trauma and suffering, it'd take a lot of suffering before I'd wish that I had never been born. If you fail a class at school, the punishment is that you have to take it over. Only when you learn the lesson are you ready to move on If there is only one consciousness in the universe (non-dualism = not two, literally) then there is only you experiencing. You have to take the good with the bad. If you want to know what it's like to be a billionaire on a yacht surrounded by beautiful women, you have to live another life where you starve to death in a mud hut too. If God just wanted to make this a utopia for everyone, it could. But obviously there is some higher reasoning why things aren't that way. The way things are, is the only way they can be. This is the most perfect form of the universe possible. Although it's hard to see how all of the pain and violence could possibly be justified from a finite human perspective. If you think about the world for too long, it doesn't matter if you're coming at it from a Buddhist, Hindu, Actualized.org, or atheist perspective. It's still going to look crappy and depressing if you focus on the negative.

If she is still conscious and able to have a conversation (even if not) I'd think of all the things you'd want to tell her if you never got another chance. Or anything you want one last chance to ask her. Basically tie up any loose ends, try as much as possible to not have regrets about things left unsaid. Especially if it's apologizing for something. I would probably want to express gratitude, tell her that she was a great mother and that you appreciated all the sacrifices she made for you.

???

Can I get some clarification on this rule: With the threats of shutting down, there are at least a few people here I'd really like to find a way to stay in touch with if that happens, and currently have no other way of doing it. Are we allowed to share email addresses, Discord usernames, etc in PMs if it's just for 1-on-1 communication off-forum (not creating chat groups or servers), or is that also a bannable offense?

That big pinned post at the top of every forum page that says "Guidelines - Please read before posting". It's even underlined lol

Seems like a lot of work, having to use lube and then clean the thing out afterward. But now that I'm seeing these Tenga eggs that are only 5 bucks a pop, I might give one a shot...

The surest way to develop passive income is whatever you're most passionate about or can work at the longest without burning out or giving up. Most things aren't likely to fail if you're willing to try hard enough for long enough and learn along the way. If you want to write ebooks, you'd better be willing to pump out a 10,000-word ebook every week. In 5 years that's 250 ebooks. If you want to start a Youtube channel, you'd better be willing to pump out at least 3 videos a week. That's 750 videos in 5 years. If you want to sell stock photography, you'd better be willing to take 20 pictures a week. That's 5,000 pictures in 5 years. You can do all 3 of the above things in less than 8 hours a week once you've got a routine worked out. If you want to make an online course, you'd better make 20 of them in 5 years, not 1 or 2. If you want to set up vending machines in your city, you better buy as many as you can afford and then keep reinvesting 100% of the income for the first 5 years to keep buying more and more machines. The reason people fail is they'll write 2 or 3 books, or make a dozen or two Youtube videos, or put 50 stock photos up for sale, or buy 1 vending machine, and not see immediate results and get disheartened or second-guess themselves and quit. More or less likely to fail is just a matter of how much you're willing to put in. If you're producing anything at a large enough scale, it's very hard to fail. The key is to be prolific at whatever you decide to do. (Also invest the $6,000 @ 5% and that's already half a months worth of your income goal per year)

Whiny progressive Cenk Uygur whining about progressives whining. This must be one of those "strange loops" they speak of.

This basic idea can already be done without NFTs. It's how humblebundle.com got big. The problem is the "Pay What You Want" model requires consumers to be honest about how much they're willing to pay. Plus if it's truly "pay what you want", some people will opt to pay $0.01 (or your set minimum) for your product while others will overpay the retail value. You're basically hoping that people are overall good and you'll end up getting more instead of less. Normally you have to incorporate charity in some way to get people to buy into this model as well. You could also hold a "dutch auction" where you start with a high price and lower it until people start accepting. But as a consumer this would be annoying. I don't want an eBay auction every time I want a new phone or gaming console, I just want a Buy It Now button. Even with all the information that Google has collected on you, I don't think they have enough to guess your max price that you're willing to pay for a new product. I think the inefficiency would be so great for now that you'd lose more demand than you'd gain from increased prices. Even if they did it, I'd just make a new browser and do stuff to fill it with cookies that make me look like a poor person and use that dedicated browser for all my purchases. Also for luxury items like new iPhones it's one thing, but it'd be super unethical to start auctioning off basic necessities like food, especially during a time of scarcity. Plus 100M people aren't all willing to buy an iPhone on launch day. That's over several years of the product life. So sellers are already kind of doing this. The price of stuff already tends to drop a bit as it gets later in its life cycle.

"In both sexes, mortality was lowest at about 22·5–25 kg/m2. each 5 kg/m2 higher BMI was on average associated with about 30% higher overall mortality (hazard ratio per 5 kg/m2 40% for vascular mortality 60–120% for diabetic, renal, and hepatic mortality 10% for neoplastic mortality 20% for respiratory and for all other mortality Below the range 22·5–25 kg/m2, BMI was associated inversely with overall mortality, mainly because of strong inverse associations with respiratory disease and lung cancer." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2662372/ Sample size: 900,000 "All-cause mortality was minimal at 20·0–25·0 kg/m2 (HR 1·00, 95% CI 0·98–1·02 for BMI 20·0–<22·5 kg/m2; 1·00, 0·99–1·01 for BMI 22·5–<25·0 kg/m2), and increased significantly both just below this range (1·13, 1·09–1·17 for BMI 18·5–<20·0 kg/m2; 1·51, 1·43–1·59 for BMI 15·0–<18·5) and throughout the overweight range (1·07, 1·07–1·08 for BMI 25·0–<27·5 kg/m2; 1·20, 1·18–1·22 for BMI 27·5–<30·0 kg/m2)." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4995441/ Sample size: 10,625,411 https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k2575 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(18)30288-2/fulltext BMI is BMI. Fat is worse, but too much muscle is still bad as well.

If you want to live as long as possible and be as healthy as possible, I think the optimal body type is more of a runner or cyclist. Even if you do a completely clean bulk, eating grass-fed chicken breasts and organic broccoli, it's not just the eating that is a problem. Whether it's fat or muscle, carrying any significant amount of extra weight around is harder on your heart, your lungs, and your whole circulatory system. If you're eating tons of food it's going to be hard on your digestive system and wear out your kidney / liver and all other organs faster even if it's clean. Sure lots of bodybuilders are dying early from steroid use and other problems, but I have a feeling that they'd be statistically more at risk just based on the fact they're 250 lbs, even if they ate completely clean.

The only solution I can think of is basically taking anti-trust / anti-monopoly laws to the extreme. You could artificially limit someone like Elon Musk once he hits a certain size. But then you completely disincentive people to keep making progress past a certain point. You can make the tax bracket or whatever other controls high enough that it just becomes illogical to keep working. Basically you end up with 50 Elon Musks operating at a state/regional level instead of a national level, each earning 1/50th of the money. But then you lose a ton of efficiency. Also may create more jobs though. And you're assuming there are 50+ people with the work ethic and vision of Elon Musk out there to take his place.

If you're at Sadhguru's stage maybe this makes a difference. The average person won't notice the difference between wearing white or black. I've tried it for myself and I'm not spiritually advanced /attuned / sensitive / whatever enough to notice a difference. Even when I'm specifically looking for it. Kanye isn't having a hard time because he's wearing black. He's wearing black because he's having a hard time. Think of goth/emo kids. What comes first, the negative feelings or the clothing? The inward first, then the outward reflects it.

(Potentially dangerous advice follows - Don't try at home) The only way to make your skin thicker and tougher is to progressively injure it more and more on a regular basis. For your hands.... manual labor.... woodworking, hammering, playing guitar to develop blisters and calluses. In Chinese martial arts they do something called Iron Palm training. Conditioning techniques where you hit progressively harder and harder stuff. Start by punching and hitting a bag of flour or sand or a beanbag with your hands (front, back, edge, fingertips), forearms, shins, knees, etc. Then work up to filling the bags with harder and harder stuff.... rice, beans, gravel, steel pellets. Until in a couple years you can just straight-up punch bricks and not feel much. Just spend all day slapping and hitting your skin with stuff when you have nothing else to do. Whatever part of your body you want to toughen. Set your shower as hot as you can reasonably stand it. You want to mildly scald your skin, giving yourself minor burns. Toughening the skin, damaging and killing nerves and pain receptors. Don't do too much at once, if you give yourself 2nd degree burns it can cause scarring. For bonus points go back and forth between scalding and ice cold. Start walking barefoot everywhere, even outside on the street... in the hot summer, in the snow. This is a long and painful process, it's not going to be fun, and may have unintended side-effects and other health consequences. Personally I'd rather just have soft skin. Everybody who works in an office has soft skin and hands, it's not a big deal.

You can only accelerate it so fast. If you try to burn through it too quickly, it'll actually be counter-productive. Like when the US invades Iraq and tries to pull a whole society from blue to orange before it's ready, it actually sets progress back further and it'll take longer for them to go through the natural process. It just creates chaos. Even if you genuinely want to become an activist and you're a willing participant, you'll likely get in too deeply too fast and become disillusioned. Instead of slingshotting up past green, you're at risk of whiplashing back deep into orange, and developing a new hatred for green that you'll have to burn through to ascend again. I've tried what you're wanting to try several times, breaking out of capitalist mode into full hippy territory, and been set back several times. I'd probably be further along if I just chilled and did nothing and let things take their course. You definitely can't just go through the physical actions of doing activism. It has to be an inner transformation first.

Growing your own food, cooking and heating without electricity, communication skills to barter and form relationships. Access to, and knowledge about how to use, manual tools that don't require electricity... old-school plows, hand drills, etc. In an apocalypse situation.... meditation, psychedelics, etc will be the least of your concern. When you get knocked back down maslow's hierarchy you don't have time or energy for that stuff any more, it's a luxury. You're just focusing on survival. Nobody around you is going to be eager for a shaman or life coach for a while either.

So many good new TV shows and video games to come out that I can't even imagine right now. So many more times that I can eat my favorite foods before I die. So many mind-blowing new technologies in the next 30 years. I might find that porn video tomorrow that's my new all-time favorite. I have an infinite amount of time to not exist, and in all probability, only one lifetime to exist. Plus I'm a coward. It'd take crippling chronic pain (could be physical or mental) to push me to a point that I'd consider it a viable option. I'd rather just be alive. It's an innate survival mechanism. I'd rather be sitting alone in solitary confinement for the rest of my life than dead. As long as I'm not being tortured, pretty much anything is better than death. Because most people who attempt will regret it once they reach the point where it's too late to turn back.

I pity you. It sounds like you've been through a lot of traumatic stuff. I'm full of sorrow and compassion at the misfortune that you've suffered over the years I'm sorry you had to live with that constant tension, stress, and anxiety. I see you, I get you, I understand you. I love you unconditionally for exactly who you are. Not the fake front on the surface, the real you underneath. It doesn't matter if it's fucked up, it's authentic man. I appreciate you (as much as a stranger can). You deserve intimacy and you're worthy of it.

Yeah you did it right and passed the shit test. If it's indirect, just play stupid like it went totally over your head. If it's direct, treat it the same way as if a guy you had just met asked you.

I quit. Yes I had to rationalize it and do a risk assessment. Also for some people I think staying in a job is the better short-term solution as a means to an end. To invest their income into repositioning into something else at least. I don't think you can make the final decision to quit without getting over the cognitive dissonance. I'm not jobless and waiting to run out of money. I discovered the world is full of infinite abundance and tapped into it. People are emailing me begging to give me money and I've had to turn down at least 3 since the start of the year. Most younger coworkers are just as disillusioned as I was. Those that stay are just too afraid to take a risk (which I can totally understand, it's a big risk.) The older an employee is, the larger the cognitive dissonance is. They develop Stockholm syndrome and find more and more ways to justify their lifestyle and create more reasons to not leave. I do think that the pandemic has created a tidal wave that is just starting to unfold. We're just starting to see the start of things like the "anti-work" movement. People are realizing how little their employer really cares or looks out for their best interest. How having a job isn't really as stable as they thought, or any less risky than being self-employed. You might see the cognitive dissonance break in even the older generation and the whole system start to crumble over the next few years. Maybe. Combined with automation potentially rendering a lot of jobs useless in the next decade or two, it could get ugly.