LastThursday

More femina vibes

VPN only for video content on here I can't access from the UK. I wouldn't normally log out of the forum when switching to VPN and back.

I'll continue my current fetish for female singers

I held you in my hands, just for a moment and then had to let you go. I knew it in that moment that it would be forever and I would, forever, be looking back at you; back at us as we were. I was tense and angry at what happened with a certainty I haven't felt since. If only I were so certain now, but I am not, what I had is lost. Just like my old tattoo what we were has blurred and become indistinct, rubbed out by the motions of time. What's left is just a shadow of the despair I once felt, that wrench of separation now transformed into I don't know what. No matter what beautiful substitutes have taken your place - I loved them all equally - they were somehow incomparable, you would call me crazy I know. In every love I had I saw you, and yet not you; I wanted to continue loving just you and to hold you in my hands for just a moment again.

Are you a drama queen or king? I feel as though I've always had a strong distaste for drama, I prefer a calm and considered approach even if all hell is breaking loose. And yet, drama has followed me around like a bad smell, and I have to consider the fact that I might be at the centre of it at times. I suspect I'm a closet hypocrite. Definitions. What constitutes drama? Fundamentally it's a strong emotional reaction to circumstances, usually negative. But in itself that isn't enough, that emotion has to be expressed in an overt way. That expression can often be over the top and impulsive, and is designed to get the attention of as many people as possible. This is so that the needs of the drama queen/king are met. There is an element of insecurity with drama. I'm certainly guilty of having strong emotional reactions to circumstances. Usually, this comes about because of some perceived unfairness (towards me generally), or because of being overwhelmed, or more rarely the stupidity of people's actions. My default reactions are intransigence or sarcasm as a way to signal my emotions. They can be effective in getting my own way if done right. However - and I know this - they can induce strong emotions in other people and actually cause the drama I'm trying to avoid. My behaviour is to a degree selfish, but directly challenging a person can also induce drama, and I have done this plenty also. Mostly, I just keep my emotions to myself and let them dissipate, that is the sane option, but nearly always unsatisfactory. I think my behaviours have coalesced over time in response to being in positions of helplessness when I was younger. I was helpless against bullies at school, I was helpless at work when being asked to do things I was uncomfortable with (long hours, work weekends). In order to wrest back control you have to either make the antagonist feel uncomfortable every time they deal with you, or see that you're unwilling to yield to their demands. Sarcasm or humour can be very effective for making people feel uncomfortable, without them having anything to push back against - and therefore avoiding drama. Intransigence shows that you are unwilling to yield to demands, or if you do yield, you do a bad job of carrying out their demands. Again, it's hard to fight against someone who is carrying out your demands - it avoids drama. A lot of drama is caused by outrage. I guess outrage is just a strong emotional reaction to some perceived unfairness or rule breaking or entitlement. The entitlement one is interesting, as often people in positions of authority expect others to do as they say. Directly challenging people in authority often causes outrage which can create drama. Some people use drama as a modus operandi, either consciously or unconsciously. At some point in their lives they've realised the effectiveness of getting lots of attention to bolster and validate their emotions. Often elaboration happens around those emotions and a dramatic story is weaved with lots of reasons and justifications for those emotions. Usually, there is an outward projection for the causes of those emotions and a complete rejection of responsibility for owning those emotions: that guy made me unhappy and I'm outraged, everyone needs to know my story! And my distaste of drama comes from that need to make something bigger than it really is, the impulsiveness and irrationality of it, the need to involved people unnecessarily, and the unnecessary elaboration around simple emotions. It just makes me roll my eyes in despair. Stay calm, keep your emotions in check, and challenge the person who upset you directly.

The Mobius strip is a way to understand consciousness. The Mobius strip is self-referential, it's a loop. When you cut the strip it takes on a new form, but really it's still the original strip. In a way the cut (consciousness/awareness) is imaginary, the original strip (non-duality) always exists. Consciousness is just a constant process of cutting into non-duality. You can't capture this process with numbers.

Two throughts are whirling around each other, and I wanted to capture them before they disappear. A: the interchangeability of the sense of self; B: the absurd coincidence of reality. I don't think they're connected outwardly, but they probably are somehow. --- Imagine throwing a die over and over and getting the same repeating pattern 4 and 2. You would suspect something was up, and you might inspect the die for some form tampering. Probability itself says that any pattern or non-pattern is equally probable given enough throws. Now extend the notion out to infinity. The die will throw every conceivable pattern sometime in the infinite number of throws. In fact it will throw any finite sequence infinitely many times. Notice that even though we are interested in certain patterns, say 1,2,3, each throw is totally independent of the previous throw (given a completely fair die). So despite having patterns, each pattern in itself is not cohesive, the parts of a pattern are not dependent on each other. What if we extend the analogy of die throwing to reality? Reality appears to be "meaningful". Meaning in a stripped down sense is just patterns that we recognise. Reality is chock-full of patterns. Each object and emotion is a pattern, ideas of space and time are patterns, our sense of self is a juxtaposition of patterns. Patterns, patterns, patterns everywhere and at every level. Say there is an entity - for the sake of argument - which throws random assortments of qualia together infinitely many times. Somewhere along that sequence of infinity randomness dictates the qualia will come together to form meaningful patterns. We are living in one such assortment of randomness which is rich in coincidence because those patterns have occured together all at once. If you have enough monkeys mashing typewriter keys ad infinitum, they will eventually type the works of shakespeare: if God throws qualia around enough it will create your reality. See how in this model of reality, nothing is actually dependent on anything else, it's just one big coincidence. Cause and effect is just coincidence, the laws of nature coincidence and the same for the rest. What about all those realities God threw together that didn't quite work out? It doesn't matter. The process of "throwing" qualia sits outside of time and space, it's only the patterns that matter. There's circularity here: it's only the meaningful arrangements of qualia that get "selected" by consciousness to be "reality". So the base of reality is in fact not the arrangement of qualia themselves, but the process of "selection". What gets selected? It's simple, those patterns that repeat themselves. For example, gravity is a pattern that repeats itself throughout the cosmos. The patterns are self-selecting through their own repetition. Fundamentally any pattern is just difference. A repeating pattern is a repeating difference. --- We feel differently at different times. We can look back at our former selves and sense that we have become different people over time. Because we label that trajectory of our persona with the same label (e.g. Guillermo) we have an idea of continuity. But this is untrue, our sense of self can be untethered. In fact the dissolution of the self is a goal for spiritual practices. I can say killing a self (or ego), is hard to achieve and in some ways undesirable unless you go and live in a cave, or mix just in spiritual circles all the time. The next best thing is to take on different selves. The idea is that we're made up of a huge number of processes or entities or smaller selves. This is because as apes we like to mimic other apes and also other animals. We store away all that mimicry for later retrieval. Not only that, even though we may not outwardly express that mimicry, in order to understand anything at all we have to internally embody the mimicry. This is the source of empathy and altruism, we are constantly modelling (aka theory of mind) other beings albeit mostly unconsciously. We can leverage this internalised mimicry or theory of mind, to "inhabit" other selves. The goal of this is pretty much the same as killing the self: to be free and fluid and non-attached and flexible in our thinking and behaviour. To do this we turn up the volume on that mimicry. We are used to inhabiting our everyday selves, but with practice we can bring out all that learned mimicry to be someone else entirely, even if only for a limited time. The extreme example of this being multiple personality disorder, in which those other selves are amplified so much that they become mutually exclusive. We can do this at any time and for any aspect of ourselves. Some things to play around with are: voice - raising or lowering pitch and tempo, walk and gait - tempo, spacing, attitude, blink rate, facial expressiveness, hand gesturing, different clothing. What tends to happen is that whatever the body does, the mind follows. If you want to think and feel differently, then change the body first. Maybe if you want to express more masculine traits, squared off shoulders, feet apart, serious expression; you will find yourself thinking in a more masculine manner. With plenty of practice this becomes second nature, and you can put on the clothes of a different self to suit a situation and your mood. The main point is freedom of expression. Instead of being rigidly "you" you can accomodate yourself to an ever changing reality. Mimicry is the most powerful tool we posses.

I try and steer well away from gossiping. The biggest problem with gossiping is groupthink, which can lead to bullying behaviour against individuals. I would class gossiping as making negative judgements based on little information, or even worse actively putting someone in a bad light. My rule is to talk about what people have actually done and to keep down speculation, or try and keep my judgments down to a minimum. I outright don't gossip about people I don't know well. If intervention is necessary, then I talk to the person directly.

@Preety_India thank you for your insight, compassion and wisdom. Just keep on growing you're on the right path. And just ignore the idiots in life, unfortunately there are plenty of them.

And those parts are simpler than the whole, that's the reason for reductionism, to make things simpler to understand. Another way to understand a complex system is to interact with it, learn its behaviour. For example to understand @LastThursday, you don't take his limbs apart and reduce him, instead you talk to him and observe him. Or you might also go in the other direction and see how @LastThursday fits in within the larger system of the forum. Another way to see things, is to see how they are similar to other things. For example to understand person, you can make assumptions about what has been learned from studying other people: men will be men, @LastThursday is a man, for example.

Travelling back from Dublin yesterday I realised something. A lot of what makes travelling (or any such situation) uncomfortable for me is all to do with the body. For example train and aircraft seats really are uncomfortable for sitting in for any length of time. Shoulders and back begin to hurt and this makes you want to move around or get up. Fairly obvious. The body also complains when under some sort of stress. This can be caused by any number of things when travelling. No one enjoys queuing for example. What makes queuing unenjoyable is impatience, close proximity to people (I don't mind too much personally), and standing for long periods. For me it manifests as tension around my neck and shoulders and a tendency to hold my breath or breathe very shallowly. Mentally, it's a kind of "willing" the queue to move faster, which causes dissonance with reality. I have to actively work against these manifestations of stress: I look sideways away from the queue, relax my shoulders and try to breathe more deeply, find something else to fixate on, quieten my self-talk. Ideally I avoid queuing until the last minute. Whilst travelling there is a lot of waiting around too, when all you want to do is be making progress towards your destination. The obvious things like reading or listening to music help, but simply just meditating or people watching can be effective. I also don't wear a watch when travelling, because clock watching causes stress and boredom. Sleep can be effective for passing time, but it's nearly always difficult to sleep sitting up without head support. One thing I can't recommend enough is to get plenty of sleep before travelling. I tend to feel more stressed and unable to control it if I'm tired. Strangely there's also a tendency to want to eat when travelling. I don't know if this is just comfort and distraction from the stress of travelling, but I actively try and avoid eating unless I'm hungry and just drink liquid instead (I don't drink alcohol when flying to avoid dehydration and tiredness). Being in strange surroundings can also be off-putting, if you're abroad then odd customs, dress or having to deal with foreign languages can be difficult or even just trying to find your way round - the simplest things can become difficult. The best thing to combat this I find, is just to go with an open mind and not have too many expectations, enjoy being in a new situation, relax the body and the mind, let it wash over you. I'd say if you can be totally relaxed in the body and mind and be in the moment when travelling, then you can apply this to all areas of life.

I've offhandedly thought about giving up alcohol and being teetotal recently. It seems to be a recurring thought. I'm finding I'm paying attention to it and not just dismissing it like I have before. This has happened before. I was quite addicted to Facebook for a long while, it slowly sucked me towards its event horizon, but I was saved before I became whatever happens to existence inside a collapsed mega star. Sorry... I digress. In short, I gave Facebook up and never looked back. Mostly, I nip on there once in a blue moon, and instantly regret it, but that's enough of a reminder. I did the same with consuming the news. Every time I watched it or listened to it or read it, it made me angry, miserable, helpless or digusted. Eventually, I paid heed to all those that said: just stop it. Again, I've never looked back. It may still catch me unawares if I'm listening to the radio whilst cooking (wtf's a radio hmm??), but I let it wash over me and I switch it off soon after. Alcohol is different. It's part of the fabric of socialising in this country (The United Kingdom of...). Stopping drinking puts you into that category of people who are nice enough but completly vanilla. That thought really pokes at my ego - I should just let it burst that ego, but my ego is tough and rugged, with a square jaw. Several things have confluenced to make thoughts of not drinking ever again rise up to the surface. One was visting my dad. In a bid to try and save his health (he has heart disease and diabetes), he in hunkering down on diet and being strict. I know that having to do this hurts him, he loves his food. However, its extremely likely that that food has over his lifetime given him type two diabetes. There is also a strong correlation between diabetes and heart disease. Seeing all this, makes me not want to embody his health issues for my self later on - it's making me think about my own consumption and how I could clean things up: alcohol would be a relatively easy win. I don't drink particularly often, especially I haven't in the lockdown. I was bought a bottle of Armagnac back in May and I haven't touched it, I just so rarely drink alone (I love Argmagnac). It's the Facebook effect, every time I do have even a glass of alcohol, I feel like shit the day after. For some reason feeling like shit never bothered me that much before, I just waited a day and all was good. But nowadays it just really bothers me. I don't want to feel shit at all, especially not in a self-imposed way. Why do it? Now that the UK is opening up, I have been out socialing and drinking as a consequence. Other than the feeling a bit shit the day after, I also behave like an idiot if I drink a bit too much. I don't have a big build, so I don't have body mass to soak up a lot of alcohol - I get drunk quickly. I mean, I'm harmless I'm not an aggressive drunk, I just talk a whole bunch more than I normally would and I'm just even more uninhibited than normal. Mosttimes the lack of inhibition friends find entertaining, but occasionally it crosses the uncanny valley and it gets irritating. I won't go too much into drunken stories, but let's just say I should stay away from taxi drivers, and attractive women half my age with big burly boyfriends. Whilst really IDGAF about my drunken uninhibition, I do care about my friends. If my behaviour is not fun for them or annoying, and I only do it because I'm drunk with them, then really I ought to just stop it and grow up. Is it possible to go out out and have the same relationship with socialising with friends without drinking at all? That's a big nope. That is to nearly a degree where I may even think about not going out - I just can't bear to be that vanilla teetotaller, and watching others being drunk is no fun at all. Bah! I know I will become a teetotaller, it's just a matter of time, I can feel it coming. Ah well.

@Breakingthewall yes I know I'm not particularly old, but I am by some standards. Really my point is, is if you do the right things by your body, then you won't have to suffer decline or at least not so fast, either mental or physical. In fact things can improve. It's not going to be all roses and unicorns I admit, but you can do a lot to enjoy life in old age. And you never actually feel old and that is something that isn't understood by being young. Loss is something you gradually learn to accept, it's part of the process, it's not insurmountable. In some ways you stop being interested in a lot of things you did when you were younger, the focus shifts, so the loss in that respect isn't as great.

Excellent my advertising worked! That doesn't surprise me. I'm fairly together as well in that way, I certainly don't worry about travelling in waking life for example. I believe a lot of dreams are a kind of emotional role play - they give you resilience and let you deal with your emotions in real life, so when that accident at the airport (or wherever) does happen you don't get emotionally overwhelmed by it. But I would also say that you're right to listen to your intuition. Dreams are very metaphorical they fly under the radar of consciousness most of the time. The airport is a symbol that you intuit as something to do with being away from your family, the emotions you feel at the airport are to do with that symbol.

I can't believe I'm answering this question. Anyway. For all those worried about it, it's good to realise getting older is mostly a process or a matter of degree. You don't wake up one day and think "I'm offically old", and then start losing your faculties and health. Age is mostly relative, those in their seventies think everyone is young, those in their teens and twenties think everyone older than them is old. The aging process is a lot slower than you believe. For the upsides: I don't feel old. I pretty much feel like I'm the same I was when I was twenty, just calmer and mostly wiser. In terms of faculties and health, those have actually improved from my twenties: I drink far less, don't smoke any more, eat better, and exercise a lot more. My mind is much sharper than it was in my twenties. My social skills are immensely better, I'm a lot more relaxed and confident than when I was younger, I'm less impusive, and have no anxiety any more. I haven't been ill in years, I constantly got colds etc. when I was younger. In terms of memories, everything is still fresh and feels like it happened yesterday. You have more disposable income and steady life. Downsides: most people seem to think I'm old. I don't recover as quickly from lack of sleep etc. or when I go out partying, or when I do get ill - but those things happen rarely anyway. Concerns start to kick in about how you will support yourself in your old age, such as pension, property and so on. Time seems to shrink and there's never enough of it to do what you want to do. I don't have kids, but for most the responsibilities of family run your life, but it gets easier as your kids get older. You also do get increasingly prone to bodily injuries and ill health, but it's gradual. Diseases of old age kick in after 60 or so. Vision deteriorates like it or not after about 45 (mostly reading). Your good looks can diminish, but sometimes you actually look better older! You will start losing older relatives first and then friends after around age 60. I think as long as you maintain a certain level of fitness and eath healthily, have some sort of social life and something to keep your mind engaged, you don't need to worry about old age very much. In lots of ways it's far better than being young.

Hmm. Have you been reading my journal? TLDR I have the same thing about trains. My conclusion was that it's metaphorically related to my commuting regularly. Although, I sense that there's a fair amount of anxiety in your dreams around confusion, getting lost, accidents. I think travel in general can be anxiety inducing, it's a lot of our fears rolled into one activity. So... it could be just a general expression of a certain amount of anxiety you feel in waking life - that you somehow have to "keep things together".

Tell us your dream, let us interpret for you.

Free energy conspiracy quackery at its best. He has a David Icke aura in his delivery.

I'm slightly bothered by the formality of my writing in my journal. Somehow my unconscious tendency is to write like I read, I mean, using the same level of language that I'm used to reading. I don't know, I feel as though I want to be more informal in my writing but I also want to express myself concisely and using all the words at my disposal. I don't talk to my friends the same way I write! Then again I don't talk to my friends about the "weird shit" I talk about here. Maybe I just need to use a different level of language to get my musings over? I thought I'd go back to talking about dreaming. I just find the recurring themes in my dreams fascinating. I thought that maybe I would try my hand at dream interpretation for a laugh. Although, I think that on the whole trying to decipher dreams is pointless. If there is some sort of hidden message in dreams then it's only meaningful within that dream space. I suspect that given enough time though, the reason why certain themes repeat themselves becomes apparent. Here's a few of those themes and reasons why: Running I have a fair number of these. Normally I'm just running and feeling hot and sweaty. I do run in real life (or used to), so there's a connection there. My suspicion is that those times I'm just too hot in bed and I normally wake up sweating. Sometimes though, there's a kind of urgency in my running as if I need to make it to some appointment or other - maybe I just need to wake up and cool down. Swimming/toilets I have a fair few dreams where I'm either in a swimming pool or open water. I'm not a hugely great swimmer in waking life, but I do enjoy being in water. There's normally no particular reason for being in the water and no anxiety, it's a pleasant experience. The other side of the coin is trying to find somewhere to pee (in the dream of course). Usually, it's a failure. Mostly either it's too exposed, or the toilets are too disgusting to use, or the toilet floor is flooded, or I'm naked or partially undressed and I feel too uncomfortable to go, or I simply can't find somewhere to go. I suspect there is some form of anxiety around this that is a mirror of waking life. Although the level of disgust is unsettling, which I don't normally get in waking life. Occasionally I'm successful within the dream. Yay! Both of these I've worked out is because I actually need to pee, most times I wake up desperately needing to go. Good brain. Ex girlfriends This is a very frequent theme. This is despite having not been in a relationship a fair while. Normally it's just very run-of-the-mill, and the ex is just sort of in the background of my dream like an extra or there's minimal interaction. There's nothing sexual at all about these dreams. For many many years I dreamt about my first girlfriend (I was about 15/16 when I was with her!) and her family. This is strange because I haven't seen or had contact with her since I was about 19. Although I have met up with her brother in the last ten years (who I was also friends with), and her sister is on my Facebook (strangely). I won't use her name but these dreams were so frequent I actually used to call them E------- Dreams, to myself. The E' Dreams I think has something to do with an intense curiosity about what she's up to now. She was always the black sheep of the family, when I met her brother he could tell me nothing about her, he hadn't spoken to her in a very long time. I had no pictures of her either. She seems to have no internet presence at all. At the time, being a teenager my parents had already separated, and her family sort of adopted me, and they became my second family. I suspect this had a deep impact on my psyche. A lot of emotion and other things are bound up in that period of my life. However, I recently found a couple of photos of E in my mum's photo albums. My E' Dreams have now stopped - weird. Flying, levitating See my previous journal entry about this. In general I think its caused by being horizontal in bed, but upright in the dream, because IRL my feet are not touching anything, so this is interpreted as being off the ground in my dream. Exploration For many many years I used to explore buildings in my dreams. I would go room to room, and through corridors and up and down staircases. There would rarely be people around and normally it would be dimly lit. There would be a lot of attic spaces with weird assortment of stuff up there. Occasionally I would have to climb over balconies to get from one place to another. One particularly memorable dream I was on a balcony and realised I needed to hide from someone, I had nowhere to go, so I climbed over and hung from my fingers from the floor of the balcony, hoping my fingers wouldn't be seen - it would make a great movie sequence! I am an inquisitive type of person. I lot of the reason why I enjoy walking is to explore new places just to see how places fit together. I think my dreams are an extension of this curiosity. However, I have no explanation as to why there are always inside buildings. I'm not the sort of person to get lost normally, and I don't normally go wandering around abandoned buildings, who knows? Maybe there's a computer game element to this, I did used to enjoy games like Half-life and Counterstrike, which are kind of "room based" and exploratory. These types of dreams have largely stopped recently. But have switched mostly to staircases. They're bloody annoying in my dreams. It's like Hogwarts most of the time: staircases that lead into walls, staircases with scary large drops into other staircases. In last nights dream I had to slide down the shiny metal handrail to get from one staircase to the other. Why!? Don't know. Trains Again the frequency of these types of dreams has decreased. It's everything around trains, from waiting in stations, trying to find ways to get to my destination, walking on tracks, mainline trains, tube trains, walking through train tunnels from station to station, and on and on. I mean, most of these things I've never done in real life. I don't even travel on trains frequently any more (I drive). Saying that, I did used to travel on trains a lot in my teenage years and I was fascinated with trains from a young age. In a nerdy way I still am (see my post about subway maps!). I worked out in the end that the trains are just a metaphor for travel in general and especially commuting. They were more frequent when I had to drive into work longer distance. Aliens I don't have these types of dreams much any more. Normally there was a nightmarish or scary aspect to these dreams. A lot of times I would be staring into the sky, normally at night and weird stuff would happen, like stars would move about. Or, I would be in dimly lit or dark rooms and would feel a presence there. It's hard to describe the scariness of these dreams, I mean most of the time I wouldn't even see anything, very rarely I might actually catch a glimpse of an alien; but there would always be a kind of malevolence about the whole thing. I would often wake up scared. Normally on my back. One suspicion is that maybe I momentarily stop breathing because I'm on my back, it's possible, I do know I snore, so possible sleep apnea? I don't really know how to interpret these dreams really. I do have an interest in the paranormal, and there is something about the possibility of aliens that I find unsettling, it's one of those things where I think it's mostly bullshit stories, but there's a tiny sliver of doubt about my conviction. I found films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind fairly unsettling as a kid, and maybe that's embedded itself in my psyche. A boogeyman of sorts to be scared of.

Are we living in a story? Whenever I think, I seem to do it with the baggage of my history, places, people, events, phases and the story arc of my life. It seems inescapable, like without all this stuff going on it would all be incomprehensible. Everything is history it seems, no sooner has a new part of the story happened than it becomes yet more past. There are two clues that my story is a fiction. The first clue is that I know how and what I think about my past has changed over time. How can something really be true if it changes? The past is malleable and can be re-configured as new insight comes in. The second clue I'm staring at. It's my complete immersion in this moment, it is something which never appears to go away, yes, it changes but it's ever present. If something is unchanging then that is truth, non-fiction. The story of me is a fiction couched inside a truth. The raw sensation of a me with all my mental baggage and history is truth itself; my mental baggage and history is a fiction and so am I. I am both a fiction and a truth together. The paradox is resolved by realising that I am the ever present moment, but I'm not its content. I exist and that is truth, but I am not the story of a me.

Agreed. I realise you're talking just about beauty. It's the projection of value that's the problem though. Beauty in itself is not a problem. Why shouldn't we all look beautiful if we want to do that? I guess by value you mean either "how useful is this person to me?" or "how do I compare with others in my social hierarchy?". But there are other kinds of value - such as expressing yourself, which @mandyjw mentions.

What sort of life do I want? I've never really been very future oriented. What I mean by that, is that I've never really given much thought to the big things in life. This has become acute as I've learned to mostly live in the moment; whereas before I would have had anxiety and constant mental rehearsal about future events, I have none of that now. The great pay off for letting go of the future, is peace right now. But perhaps I've gone too far? The only reason we get motivated and excited by the future is that we have a certain anxiety or itch that needs to be scratched right now. I see it all around me, friends making plans out of some sort of neurotic restless need for peace. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to elevate myself above others, it's just that the pattern seems clear. We want to buy a home, because we believe it will make us happy and secure: because we are not happy and secure right now. We want to party with our friends, because we are feeling unconnected and bored right now. We want that holiday because we are stressed right now. We want a girlfriend, because we want intimacy and love right now. We want all these future things because we are imbalanced in the moment. So when I'm asked "Guillermo, what do you really want?", I feel that I'm simply listing a set of unmet needs and desires. Is that really the right way to guide myself into the future: neurotically? This feels wrong. On the other hand, what other guiding principle do I have at my disposal? So far the best thing I've come up with is to live purely in the moment, this feels like the most aligned way to live and the least stressful. But. I want a girlfriend, I want warm sunny weather, I want to tinker on my own projects, I want to work when and how it suits me, I want spontaneity with friends and family, I want connection, I want to be recognised for my skills, I want collaboration, I want my own time, I want to stay healthy and fit, I want to own my own home and space, I don't want to be beholden to anyone at all, I want to stay financially healthy. Maybe one way is to have a grand big picture of the future. I have fifteen years in mind. By then I'll be properly old and health concerns will start to kick in, and I won't have that energy and drive any more. Most folks here would probably say something along these lines: dream big, don't worry about how you'll get there. My only concern is wasting time, I don't really have it to waste. Yes, my future goal can shift around to a degree, but if I'm going for it, it's all or nothing. So far I've spent well over ten years just drifting in limbo, I know it's a phase, I now know I needed it to mature and to "fix" myself. I feel the pressure of commitment intensely, it goes against my high value on freedom. Being committed doesn't feel freeing, being committed to something big that doesn't work out doesn't feel worth it. Doing nothing, is also a tragedy.

The problem is not the beauty, the problem is the value. Making a judgement about someone's value or making a judgement about your own value is the source of the dysfunction. We're constantly comparing ourselves to each other - media and advertising exacerbate this - and we suffer for it; mostly through our pockets or self esteem.

@Holygrail the subtlety is the following. If we become aware of something, then there must be something to be aware of. It must have a quale attached to it, qualia are awareness. But the qualia are completely relative to each other. Imagine swapping all the high notes on a piano for the low notes, or everything that's dark becomes light and vice versa. Swapping qualia doesn't affect awareness. It's only the juxtaposition (pattern) of qualia that matters. Imagine a baby who is born who sees everything as a negative image to your vision. It would make no difference to their experience. They could still describe exactly the same things as you, they would still wince looking at the "dark" sun. So, if qualia are only important in relation to each other, then the fact that you always experience blood as red and the sky as blue, must mean that "red" and "blue" qualia have become attached to blood and sky at some point. There's no inherent importance to the fact that blood is "red" and sky is "blue". See?