LastThursday

For a different view, a good habit to have is to finish what you start. Other than the satisfaction of achieving a goal and being able to to brag, there's the psychological effect of finishing something. Firstly it provides a type of closure and allows you to detach and move on to the next thing cleanly. Secondly it teaches your psyche that finishing (achieving) is important and is something that is possible. In the long run it gives you a confidence in yourself and your abilities. Chess mastery is a long road however, so you'll need a lot of time, patience and focus to get a title.

Philosophy and art are about telling good engaging stories. As a side effect both can be about getting at some sort of truth about the world. There's an aesthetic and emotional dimension to both disciplines, which is ok for its own sakes - it doesn't all have to be about truth. Perhaps both are ultimately about transformation?

Life is matter with a name. Are you alive? Sure. The difference between you and the wind is that the wind doesn't care about death and stillness. Every mote of your being wants to live; on every level and dimension. To live you must know yourself intimately. For if you didn't entropy would soon scatter you to the four corners and you would forget who you were. This knowing of yourself is deep, it's the miracle of your form and your function and your most intimate thoughts. Look around you at the cactus you nurture, the cat you stroke, the mosquito that bites you. All that aliveness is of the same kind. A cactus yearns for heat and light and water so that it can keep knowing it's a cactus. You are connected directly to that first notion of self knowing that sparked all those billions of years ago. That first knowing has never stopped knowing itself, it became a cactus here, a cat there, you right now. Everything that lives is only one thing: the tendrils of some great unfathomable creature enveloping our home planet. It splits itself off, eats itself and argues with itself. For matter to know itself it's not enough to be around a long time. A rock formation may have survived the excesses of entropy for a billion years, but that's blind luck. Life knows its extents and constituents and actively maintains them. It must seek matter and energy to constantly replenish its identity, and eschew the parts that are no longer "me". In this way a constant flow and pressure is maintained between itself and everything else both alive and dead. Life is a mirage because it is never static, it is in a constant struggle to keep remembering itself. A creature is not the matter it is made of, but an idea that dynamically sculpts matter and energy to its own ends. Is that idea of self knowing separate from the dead matter it animates? That billion year old rock formation never got to know itself: it eventually weathered and crumbled to dust and stopped being rock. It didn't care or remember, it constantly forgot who it was moment to moment. Self knowing requires self correction. When communications are sent they need error correction, or else the static of reality erases the message over time and distance. Our bodies must constantly self repair and flush out broken bits of itself or the toxins that damage the identity of its cells and DNA. It's clear that matter and energy has the ability to correct itself and maintain an identity: it's just a mathematical trick. But the first life had to bootstrap this ability, proto-life was self correcting. To self correct, there must be a self to correct: as soon as matter erased its own errors it acquired a knowing of itself. Proto-life had to be more than self correcting to become life itself however. Remembering is never perfect. An identity that perfectly maintains itself is not resilient. Entropy is infinitely creative and can't be easily escaped. Proto-life had to adapt to different regimes or risk death by entropy. Once it had an identity and a self, it had to allow itself to change its identity over time. It had to evolve. The result is a cat and a cactus. Change is death, to change from a proto-cell to the spiritual primate you are, life had to die a billion times. The first life had an imperfect sense of self and it still does. That is why you will die. Your body's self correction is imperfect and accumulates errors over a lifetime, until finally entropy has its way. Reproduction is imperfect and is what drives the process of evolution itself. Imperfect though it is, the act of knowing in itself is perfect. That is why the giant multi-faceted organism that is life persists. Being alive is perfection.

@Thought Art that's a decent high level list. I would add emotions and mind to the list. A lot of immaturity comes from impulsive emotions not being kept in check (chimpery!) and a lack of self awareness and consequences of your actions. I'd say the most important ones in the list are relationships and health/fitness as well as mind and emotions. Those together are like the operating system of humans. Master those and everything else becomes a lot easier.

@Holykael start a gratitude journal (on here maybe). Find one thing every day that you're genuinely grateful for, big or small.

There's internal confidence and external confidence. There's also confidence in different things, say public speaking or playing an instrument. Internal confidence just means you feel comfortable and in control, you have mastery or experience in the thing you're doing. For example I would have confidence in talking about computer science subjects. I wouldn't have confidence in singing in public (or at all). I also have a certain level of social confidence etc. External confidence is how you appear to other people. The only way for people know you are confident is to watch you act. Nobody can get inside your head, so they judge you based on your actions. The "fake it till you make it" mantra is based on this. You may not feel or be confident internally, but you can appear confident externally: how you stand, how you speak, how you carry yourself etc. To a certain degree external confidence is just social confidence, you are manipulating people into thinking you're confident, which itself needs a level of mastery. Confidence is a mixture of these two things. But people are easily confused about confidence. They can think someone who's confident in one thing is obviously confident in other things, which is not necessarily true. For example someone who plays chess confidently is not necessarily intelligent. They can also think someone who's externally confident must be internally confident.

How does one flow through life and not get snagged up with suffering? How is the art of living learnt? Art is both creative and meaningful. Art is also a continuous process of mastery. Meaning, creativity and mastery are the three interlocking pieces of living the good life. Each piece complements and reinforces the other. Broadly speaking meaning, creativity and mastery can be applied to both the mental space and the material space. Perhaps above all what makes a human human, is the ability to think; together we can outsmart any animal with this ability. But this ability can run away with itself and cause us great pains. We are also animals however, and our physicality and material space is very important to how we live our lives. We have physical needs such as food, water and a decent place to live and other people - indeed those things can't be neglected or we die. The fear of death is a constant in our lives and is a core part of the art of living. The closer we see ourselves to death, the more suffering we have to endure. Suffering is not there to torment us, but to motivate us to act to remove the cause of the suffering. But it's not a fool proof system. We can be in seeming double binds, unable to act, or we can be immature, not knowing that we can act. Mastery is closely linked to maturation. By rehearsing, gathering knowledge and experience, refining, we learn how to act in our lives. This gives us freedom to escape many types of suffering, and a confidence that allows us to flow and get what we want. This can happen passively as we get older, by sheer weight of having tried many things over and over again. Mastery can be more active however. We can choose to concentrate our efforts into activities we value. Also, mastery is reflexive: one can master mastery itself. The greatest amount of leverage happens when we master our own minds and when we master our own biology and environment. What about creativity? You might not think of yourself as creative, but we are all very capable of it. We can constantly generate new ideas and solutions to our suffering. We can also be creative for its own sake and use it as an antidote to mundanity. Life is long and very repetitive, and can be very mundane and uninspiring; there is this inbuilt drive for novelty which is part of the human make up and being blind to it can cause suffering. The process of creativity can also be mastered through practice, and creativity is often need to master something new. Kids creatively play constantly just for the purposes of mastering being adults. Mastery can also take the brakes off creativity, by allowing us to flow and not get stuck in minutiae. Together creativity and mastery can lead to a meaningful life. By flowing constantly around suffering and avoiding death, that is valuable to us. The things we value in our lives are the things we find meaningful. The art of living is to constantly work on all fronts: physical, mental, creative, mastering, finding meaning - and to never let up.

I'm a very open and liberal person, and yet I'm a pretty private person too. How do I square this circle? I've always felt some amount of cringe talking about and being asked about myself. There are parts of me I don't wish to expose or I feel would mark me out as different somehow, or that don't paint me in a good light. There's a public persona and my private persona. That's not to say I'm an axe murderer, just that I feel uncomfortable (publicly) with some truths about myself. To that extent my public persona has always been somewhat curated. I also don't naturally rehearse my thought processes, so having to "explain myself" to others has never felt natural. A lot of it is just plain emotions anyway, which are always hard to put into words. That process of curation definitely goes against my innate openness. I want people to know I exist and that I have something to say. That openness also pushes me to be somewhat of an exhibitionist in all the myriad ways that manifests itself - including on here. Sometimes I feel as though I push too far and then I have to withdraw back into my privacy and re-assess myself, berate myself, curate further. If anything the wisdom of age has taught me, it is to take the middle path in most instances. Be open, but not too open, public but not too public. It's a learned way of being rather than an authentic one. I recently got invited for an interview of sorts for a dating show here for national TV. My friends are super excited, I was/am definitely very apprehensive about it. I spent several hours being quizzed in front of a camera and bright lights, about my history, love life and desires. Again, I had to carefully curate what I thought would be good to say and of course, the interviewer (producer) wanted an emotional angle and soundbites. The entire process was surreal and somewhat out of my comfort zone. Naturally, when my friend had originally pushed me forward for the application a year ago, I said "yes" in my open way, not really thinking too much about the consequences. I learned a long time ago to say "yes" to most things and then to back out afterwards if it was too much or things changed - it can be disappointing for others, but it has also opened me up to many new experiences. I've yet to film or be invited for the main part of the show. But if it goes ahead (it may not), then one of the potential consequences is that I will get recognised in the street. I'm ambivalent about that or even wanting that - anonymity is a pleasure I wish to maintain - but the exhibitionist part of me wants it. Another, is that people who do know me, will probably want to contact me and talk about my experiences, which given the above I also feel ambivalent about. The elephant in the room, is that it's a dating show and my lengthy singledom could potentially come to an end - that's actually the least of my concerns, ha! But I'm ambivalent even about that. There's no pleasing some. I imagine on my gravestone: "RIP Here's lies the body of LastThursday He was AMBIVALENT." But I console myself in having been part of the 0.1% chosen to participate in the show, maybe I am special you know? lol.

I had a dream where you shone transparently, just as an animated avatar. I wasn't sure it was you, I could make nothing out, you were silent. How I wanted it to be true. The light was grey, your clothing fluttering in the breath of my dream imagination. I reached out and tried to encompass you. You turned to a silvery liquid and enveloped me in your very being. I awoke, gasping, blinking, disbelieving.

Nature is naturally cluttered and maximalist and we are a part of nature. The difference is that nature's clutter works in harmony with itself. It can also be a distraction to constantly be afraid of having "too much". My preference would be to keep things that work in harmony or synergise together well.

Are you extraordinary? No? Yes? Or are you just ordinary, run-of-the-mill, nothing special? Are you broken and beyond repair? Maybe you're all of those things. I sometimes think about how beautiful people must view themselves. The only conclusion I can draw is that they experience perpetual cognitive dissonance: they belong, but they're different. There must be long stretches of normality interspersed with moments where they're fed specialness, which they may or may not learn to integrate within themselves. It's not just beautiful people though. If you have/had decent parents they'd've shown you how special you are, but those moments would have just been highlights in a long history of everyday ordinariness. If you had indecent parents then you well know what being broken is and existing in a state of "less than". Sometimes you yearn to break free into the burning light of specialness. I would even argue that that is our natural state - we are godly beings masquerading as mortals. But like a moth to a flame there is always an inherent danger of gripping tightly to that specialness - we become addicts, always in fear of losing it. No. How much better it is to realise that we are neither gods nor lowly mortals. We are like a river meandering from place to place, exploring the landscape, the highs and the lows. The joy is in the exploration and constantly rushing forward, gathering momentum, never lingering too long in one place or another. It's ok to be broken, ok to be ordinary, ok to be special. You're ok.

To improve on my previous effort: a good man reduces the suffering of those around him.

Isn't good just a value judgement? When you call someone a "good man" it's being said relative to your definition of good; the man is good for you (or the collective in general). The man is good by how his actions and, or, words benefit you or others you care about. This in turns indicates he shares your values and ideals: he's one of you. You could also call yourself "good" as a man without external validation, because you have a strong sense of what good means to you, and you can see that you stick to your own ideals. There might be universally agreed "good" traits, such as compassion, helping others, putting yourself out for others, leading in times of strife, handing down knowledge, defending your group, and so on. In all cases "good" is relative. But there is a general sense of good as being the reduction of suffering.

This is just your moral side piping up, and it's probably worth listening to for your own peace of mind, if not anything else. Like I said, porn is staged and you know this, you know it isn't real life. You're escalating because it's easy to do so, and you've become bored of the vanilla stuff. The reason you've become bored of the vanilla stuff, is well, because it is actually boring. It's the same reason some people prefer horror films to romcoms.

@Something Funny definitely masturbation has to be separated from watching porn. I would say the need to masturbate in males reaches a peak in the late teens or early twenties, then tapers off after that. It's completely natural and normal to want to masturbate and enjoy the pleasure of it. In that sense it may be psychologically detrimental to not masturbate for some young males. I would completely disagree that retaining semen improves energy levels. There may be a temporary effect straight after ejaculation, but it's not long lasting. There are no long term biological effects whether you masturbate or not, whether you ejaculate or not. The two potential problems with porn are: moral and psychological. The moral aspect, includes that the act of sex and naked bodies are somewhat taboo (and partly driven by religious dogma) and so watching it, is somehow "wrong" or "sinful" or "naughty" and basically bad for you. There is also the potential for the people appearing in porn, being under age or exploited in some way, depending on what material you're watching (and not being able to know what the situation is before clicking on a video). If there was a solid reason for not watching porn, it would be this. But I would say that sites like PornHub are regulated around exploitation. The psychological aspect can be overblown in my opinion. We're all used to watching films in which people are routinely shot and murdered, even in very mainstream stuff. But most of us can discern that a film is not real life, and we can put it in a box and not let it affect our everyday actions or thoughts. It's no different from porn: we know it's fake and staged, and that the bodies are enhanced, and it's just there to create maximum pleasure in us. Can it warp our view of reality? I'd say yes, but only as much as advertising and social media does, and only if we allow it to. Some people will be more affected than others. So the only part left is addiction. Addiction is only detrimental if it disrupts normal everyday functioning. Watching porn takes time, and the more addicted you are the more time it takes up. If this gets in the way of other more beneficial activities then it's bad. Watching porn is empty calories, other than short-lived pleasure, there is no benefit from it. You can masturbate without it.

A short story: Presenter: How do you feel about winning the gold medal for your 400 metre sprint? @StarStruck: I don't deserve it at all, the race is out of my league really. Presenter: You did great out there, you were way ahead of the field. You must have trained hard. @StarStruck: Actually it was all my coach's work. She activated within me the force my body needed to run the race. All I had to do is let go and run the race. I did nothing really. Presenter: I respect that you acknowledge your coach in that way - she must be special, but it was you that ran the race. You're the one with the gold medal. You deserve to celebrate your achievement. @StarStruck: nah man I'm good.

An experiment in sharing my love of music.

@StarStruck there's a direct link between this story you're telling yourself: and the way you feel:

These tests are like crack. A female friend of mine told me I'd make a great woman, which I took as a compliment. I don't know who this woman is, but I'm rolling with it:

That's good. Whatever story you need to tell yourself. Just own it, be proud of it, you did it, that's you she finds attractive.

Yeah I noticed that. I'm forming the Sigma Bruhs Club, it's official.

Of course these ideas are BS, but a Sigma would say that.

She's attracted to you, so you must be 10/10 as well right? Give yourself some credit here, you are clearly worthy already. Just enjoy being together.