LordFall

Just saw this on Reddit and figured I'd share here since it's such a great example of the phenomenon. https://www.reddit.com/r/dating_advice/comments/1xtgklw/i_31m_started_seeing_someone_younger_25f_my/ A lot of the power that women exert in society is hard to notice if you aren't well versed in power dynamics and is based on soft power and approval/shaming of behaviours that don't benefit them. If you are a man looking to build the best life possible you will be shamed in all kinds of ways for your desires and ambition so it's important to be aware of this trend. Age gap relationships are quite popular in terms of older men dating younger women(older women dating younger men is also a trend although less common) and it tends to exacerbate the gender polarity which can be quite enjoyable and mutually beneficial for both parties. Some age gap relationships involve manipulation and exploitation of the younger partner(sometimes reversed and its the younger partner taking advantage of a lonely wealthier older partner) so be sure you're coming at it form the right place but it's definitely not the case for all instances. Conversely, sour grapes is very common with humans and women tend to be better at social skills than men so their shaming hiding insecurity about their own dating lives can be hard to spot for some men that are less aware. The mirror to that would be men shaming women for being promiscuous when they are simply insecure themselves about the sex life they wish they had or their lack of screening skills and them fear-mongering about not being able to trust women. I just wanted to highlight this specific version of it since for a lot of men we only start to become very attractive in our 30s as we start to get our finances, social circle and overall life together and a lot of younger women are down to date you but you will start to get hate from older women and even other men for your dating preferences even if you are an honest, trustworthy and dependable in all your dating encounters. Attraction isn't one size fits all. A man can appreciate the depth, maturity, and presence of a woman in her 30s or 40s while also being naturally drawn to the energy of a younger woman in her 20s. Shaming men for responding to either dynamic usually comes down to controlling the market rather than any genuine concern for consent. A lot of people didn't grow up with a self-improvement mindset and don't think dating skills are learnable so they settled for a mediocre dating life or are still single and are quite mad about it.

Yes precisely. I'm all for holding people accountable and making sure society moves in the right direction but if we're gonna accept scrutiny into what happens into consenting adult's bedrooms then there are a lot bigger questions we should ask ourselves as a society. That's cool, thanks for sharing! Do you mind elaborating a bit on how that was for you? Was there an element of mentorship involved in the dynamic, that's a cool aspect of age gap relationships that can be enjoyable and beneficial for both parties I think. Also why did it end? @Valach What do you mean by this?

To be an effective human being, you should learn to produce outcomes and not obsesses over the tools that produce them. Of course making it a binary all or nothing in either way is a bit silly but I can assure you that when I was running my photoshoot business and made tens of thousands of dollars through it, I didn't use much(none actually) arithmetic to be able to conduct my business. I do think children should have more business and practical life skills classes and less theoretical classes on subjects that people at that age don't care about and mostly forget and never use beyond having a general understanding of the world. If that was the case we would all grow up to be much more effective members of society.

This is a pretty big conversation happening online right now that was started by James Talarico saying this as a provocative statement in 2021 and it being used against him unsuccessfully in the midterms. What's really cool about it is a lot of Christians are taking the side of indeed God being non-binary and being above gender which deeply offends the other half of Christians. One of the VeggieTales founders (a christian show) has been on the side of why would God have a gender and it's taken the internet by storm. https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/1xtwylj/veggietales_creator_says_god_is_not_male_in/ https://x.com/philvischer/status/2118761462646575207 I remember Leo talking about one of the greatest joys of doing self-development work is seeing how it intertwines into the grander narrative of the world and I find this case to be a cool example of that. I really enjoy the non-dual idea that dualities are illusory and will eventually collapse and it seems that surprisingly the Christian world itself is putting God through that test. Proud of the lot of them that are using epistemology to assess their faith. A lot of these ideas have been taboo to discuss for basically thousands of years so this is a testament to the value of social media that lets all kind of uncomfortable topics get discussed at scale.

Seems like he went through his own Eckhart Tolle like experience being stuck in his backyard for 7 years after having a stroke and ended up seeing life in a new light and writing this book. Looks like a banger, I'm excited to read it. By listening him to talk about it, the main idea seems to be about enjoyment of the present moment and being able to enjoy the sublime simplicity of life. He breaks it down into 12 areas that he feels represent most the concept. He's probably my favorite author of all time so I'm very excited to see how he mixes his usual practicality and historical prose with a more spiritual topic. Interesting to see him go from more achievement-based topics to a more esoteric inquiry with the one before that being a Marcus Aurelius type book on his 366 Meditations and before that reflecting on human nature and now the sublime nature of existence itself.

Currently reading Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene. I really like him as an author and I feel like he gets wiser and deeper with the wisdom he shares with each book. I've read 48 Laws of Power and Mastery by him which were really good but this is by far a better book. Best insight I've gotten so far in the book is that mastering your emotions is gonna be highly relevant to reaching most big goals. Robert writes about many known people in history who both had great emotional control and it helped them or a terrible grasp on their arrogance or need for approval and it sabotaged them. Feel free to share what you're reading right now, what you're getting out of it, and whether it's worth checking out.

Business is global, you can sell stuff from Georgia to a US or UK markets or all countries at once through being an online service provider and doing ecommerce. So what's stopping you to record and post one 10 min video in english on a Youtube channel everyday for the next month? Guaranteed at the end of the 30 days you'll be a much better speaker. You can put them on private afterwards if you're worried about embarrassing yourself with low quality content but at least you'll be posting stuff and testing how the algorithm and viewers react. Almost 100% a limiting belief. From talking to you it seems that you're not sure what you wanna do and what to commit to. I've had that problem as well and even today it's hard to fully be consistent in one thing. What helps me is finding clarity and fleshing out what my dream would look like a few years from now and what do I need to do to get there. Can you talk about the tourism business, what happened with that? Did you run into a bottleneck or you found it boring after a while? What does your dream life look like 5 years from now? Where would you be living? What kind of customers would you be helping with your business? There's a massive difference between selling ice cream on the beach to tourists and being a high ticket consultant for AI implementation for example. What do you like to do? What are you good at? What have you made money doing before? If I gave you $50,000,000 USD what would you spend the rest of your life doing? If you answer these questions we can help you find more clarity because fortunately the answer to your question is basically 100% a limiting belief and you can make millions if not billions from anywhere on earth that has internet.

That's a good point. A lot of the attractive woman privilege comes down to getting given free stuff that's of questionable value and comes with strings attached.

Wow, that's a simple but very poignant question. It does have to be differentiated depending on the context, such as a violent assault by an unknown perpetrator versus a non-consensual violation occurring within a familiar interaction. Also multiple victims muddies the water as well as the overall reduction of rape in society from public verdicts like this. They are important questions and conversations to have; I think overall the conservative attitude of don't talk about sex and sweep all uncomfortable questions under the rug has caused a lot of harm.

Russell got off easy. You can get life in prison for rape in the UK and he had many accusations. He can still claim that he's being unfairly prosecuted and his family will stick by him and he'll still be rich after his sentence is done. This sentencing will help victims worldwide as unfortunately rape is still under prosecuted and 80%+ rapists go free. A lot of Christians act as if believing in Jesus gives you a license to do all kinds of crazy things in the material realm. For most Christians I talk to, surrendering to Jesus gives them permission to quit all other forms of philosophy, morality and inquiry and they become judgemental and closed minded to anything else. I don't know if the cult label really fits and even if it does it's too vague to really nail the phenomenon but it's interesting to witness.

For me it's like all the threads connect and I have access to greater cognition and almost memories but I wouldn't quite call it that. Kinda like being drunk and not remembering what happened the night before and then you suddenly remember but instead of last night it feels like the human plot.

They should've built it around being single woman instead, it has more potential for exciting quest lines.

I think it's normal to feel threatened by AI, seems inevitable that it will make works that are indistinguishable from human work and eventually consistently surpass it. I haven't seen any that clearly do yet but you have stuff like this that sounds quite human and is pretty good. You should also remember that most human output is not that good anyway so it's not like most creations aren't already human slop. AI is going through its learning curve now but soon it'll come out with formulas to create consistent beauty on the magnitude that we haven't seen since the creation of the universe itself. I would say I have already had many conversations with AI that were equally profound if not much more so than any I've ever had with another human being. Human is trained in all the data that all of humanity has produced in all of our history so its built out of the very soul and wisdom of our species. It's easy to fear monger and look at its bad sides but it's truly a fantastic creation and work of peak art and engineering with what it can already produce today, let alone what will do in the next decades to come. It'll also allow humans to create works and projects at scale in a way that was only accessible to a few in history and allow our most talented people to create even deeper media and art. Exciting time to be alive!

After the discussion on AI in the AI bubble thread, @Joshe suggested we start a thread discussing more specifically AI applications in a business context. @something_else had good insight on a business model based around being a context-engineering agency that customizes frontier models for specific enterprise applications which indeed sounds like it would be quite profitable. I don't really have a technical background so my main use case will be to use agentic solutions to build a cutting edge CRM that automates outreach and prospect followup for my existing services. Feel free to discuss either of these applications or brainstorm/share other ways you can think of to use AI to make money! It's great to talk about the philosophical and political implications of the AI revolution but keeping things practical and actionable will give us all way more value and experience in the field.

I definitely don't have this problem fully solved but I have a few coping strategies that have worked decently for me. I was diagnosed with ADHD at 16 years old and I tried the meds that they gave me around that time but I found them to be mostly overstimulating and not that effective so I've been dealing with it on my own since then. Definitely meditate as often as possible, ideally daily. It lets me integrate that neurotic buzzing of information into more quiet and streamlined thoughts. Put your thoughts on paper or ideally in a common place book/second brain software like Obsidian. Once you start to organize your goals and ideas then your subconscious has less incentive to keep bombarding you with random thoughts and ideas. I think it does that as an overcompensation for survival. Use an LLM to sort through your seemingly unrelated ideas. Other humans have trouble with organizing a stream of consciousness style of conversation and end up confused if you throw your ideas at them but AI is made for it. I like to first write out sudden inspirations in my Obsidian then I I have conversations with Gemini about it to make sense of it. This is a good video on it by a famous ADHD researcher Russell Barkley on its main symptom: executive dysfunction. Here are the 5 main ones that he identifies 1 - Inhibit behaviour 2 - Using visual imagery which bundles Hindsight and having a sense of time 3 - Talk to yourself in the mind, verbal working memory 4 - Emotional control linked to motivation 5 - Planing and problem solving Basically we have a tendency to overthink and have trouble taking consistent action. That can lead to starting projects and leaving them unfinished over and over. It's definitely one of my symptoms but that's also the work style of a polymath that seeks to master life and reality as a whole as opposed to one specific domain. Which is why I find that plotting my life and analyzing my ideas in a long term fashion in Obsidian and with the assistance of AI helps massively to figure out the parts of my workflow are dysfunctional and harming my goals and the part that's just naturally how I enjoy to explore ideas and the world. Hope that helps.

Man to me I find the exact opposite. Only by understanding the darker side of life can you champion light and defeat those who would stand in your ways. If one tries to have a powerful life purpose that's centered around helping humanity but is not familiar with how power in human society works, he or she is bound to be not that successful in their endeavours as the status quo will fight back ferociously. Although I agree that it's important to not just read books about power and material strategy otherwise you will become too cynical and rob yourself of appreciating the more delicate and beautiful things in life. That's fair, I think it's more of a philosophy book around life purpose rather than a direct how to guide. A lot of times the way to get to your life purpose is to make a lot of money in a more practical and less spiritual industry and then build another purposeful business on the side. @Natasha Tori Maru I think it should be assigned reading in History class for all high schoolers! If everyone was taught the underhanded ways in which society works instead of vague and sanitized history, citizens would be a lot more efficient and capable of critical thinking than they are now. @Heaven Yeah the beauty of the present moment is not a new subject but I'm curious to see how Robert handles it. Have you read the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle? That one was quite good but a bit airy fairy and poetic vs the more gritty version that I'm hoping Robert writes. If he makes it like his other ones he's gonna pick all kinds of famous figures of history and how they connected to spirituality after achieving success in the material world which I'm very curious to read.

This one should work!

@something_else I think you're being quite naive and idealistic. Spiral Dynamics operates on the principle of "transcend and include," not "transcend and bypass." You make a common mistake on this forum of trying to bypass and invalidate the value and virtue of Stage Orange. A shift in the collective zeitgeist is merely potential energy; if the frustration at the status quo is not channeled by an individual or organization with specific goals and the competency to achieve them then the status quo will remain. We saw this in real time in December 2025 with the Iranian protests that gathered millions of disenfranchized people but that ultimately were unsuccessful in doing much against the regime since there were no functional process to achieve change apart from venting protesting and "collective awareness". The Pyramid of Responsibility isn't an "Orange corporate value system," it is a system that breaks how change happens vs staying in victimhood. Level 1 is a victim mindset that's basically crying about the unfairness of the world and Level 4 and 5 is where all the people that have made massive change to mankind live. I'm evaluating it based on what actually produces positive change in the real world. Having Stage Green ideals without competence is 90% useless. 10% is useful in terms of introspecting on what the world needs but the other 90% is action taking. @Ulax Can you see the graphic? I didn't realize Imgur was blocked in so many regions, I gotta find another image uploader. The forum's limit on image size makes most uploads directly to it quite hard.

@hoodrow trillson You're arguing against a straw-man. I explicitly stated that money by itself does nothing without a baseline of game, and I called purely transactional dynamics a last resort. In your head, a man is either a broke, charismatic "bad boy" pulling effortlessly, or a rich, sterile "ATM goober" getting cheated on, that sounds more like the cope to me than anything I said. Why are you assuming those are the only two options? What happens when a guy has game, stays in shape, and has a nice place, high income, and total freedom and control over his time and logistics? Why wouldn't that help your dating life? Money doesn't replace game, it scales it and overall makes your life more fun and exciting.

Money is SO important in game. Just by itself it won't do much but putting that on top of a foundation of game increases your potential results by infinity. It's a MASSIVE cope that pick up coaches spread to not worry about money. It's almost impossible to build a high quality dating life if you don't have your personal finances in order. I had a nice place by the Lake in Toronto and I would sleep with women by asking them to come have drinks by the lake with me and then take them upstairs. It was also 10 mins walk away from clubbing district. I knew so many people that lived 1 hour away from Downtown that never got laid because they had bad logistics. Living with your parents is one of the top predictors of sexlessness for men. https://ifstudies.org/blog/male-sexlessness-is-rising-but-not-for-the-reasons-incels-claim Also being able to take girls out for dinner without worrying about covering their bills or an uber. Being able to travel if single but even with a partner is phenomenal. Being able to invest in your appearance like getting a dating photoshoot, nice barber, good clothes, cologne, etc. Being able to host and scale events. You could take 2 years off of work and only focus on your dating life if you had enough savings or if you had remote income that required not much maintenance to keep flowing. You could also very directly use money to date, plenty of 40-60 year old men date hot ass younger women by sugar dating. Some of those arrangements are purely transactional with people not really valuing each other but a lot turn into real relationships and marriage. I think it's a last resort type of move to do that but overall the idea that being in financial abundance unlocks way more beautiful and feminine women than you could get without it is quite true. When I worked at a busy restaurant in Downtown Toronto I remember some hot ass servers dating investment banking dudes that seemed quite dorky but made 150-250k at like 26 years old while the pickup guys I knew pulled chicks that were not as hot because they didn't have the same financial leverage. There are way more things I could add. Dating as a whole has always been about proving yourself as a provider before you are able to bring a woman into your life with stability. There are a lot of interesting ideas about basing your game on the lover frame but when I did it myself and see other men do it, it ends in unstable and temporary arrangement because fundamentally you are not a stable man that can provide value long term to one or many women.

Either right before or during my morning routine. It makes a big difference. Also noticed huge difference with my game if I do it on a day I've worked out. The Testosterone and other endorphins raise my frame and charisma quite significantly.

I really like this model and I think it breaks down victim mindset so well. It's taken from the corporate world but it can apply to an individual's life and society as a whole. Most Stage Green people operate in level 1 and maybe in level 2 but rarely above. If we map it to Spiral Dynamics I think you only start to touch Stage Yellow with 3 and above because you really need to do a lot of work researching the world and getting work/business experience to start to understand what a possible solution would look like. Listen man if you find people that complain a lot but don't take action towards fixing their problems and others problems valuable then I mean good for you. I think it's very surface level way to live life and at best you're pointing out problems that you wish somebody else would fix. We'd have to get more specific at to which subset of people we are talking about but my grievance are mainly with people in 3 main buckets: - People who complain about the economy and cost of living but don't research and learn new skills in terms of personal finance and business. - People who complain about the government but don't similarly don't take any action to join or create an organization that can help their community or country and never make effort to build a relationship with their elected officials. - Men and Women who complain about the state of the dating market but don't take much strategic action towards solving their problems and instead blame the other sex for their lack of success.

@something_else My main issue is people using Stage Green talking points as an ego defence to justify their own lack of efficiency. I think you've made good points around classifying those people more as Stage Blue people grasping at Stage Orange rather than actually Stage Green. I think that leads to idealism and their points although perhaps having a surface of validity are fundamentally naive, inefficient and shallow. Healthy Stage Green would look like an individual with a productive relationship to the economy that uses his extra time to help social causes. If we're looking in terms of an organization it would be one that changes its goals from being about profit motive to now being about productive betterment of mankind. Perhaps like a Soup Kitchen or an engineering firm focused on sustainable energy. I would say both the individual and organization cross into Stage Yellow when they are able to use powerful societal systems to bring massive leverage to their cause and decouple their output from mere human energy. In other words actually developing the tools to fix the problems as opposed to just identifying them and voicing them out or crying about them if you wanted to be less charitable. If we are to bring it back to Communism since we talked about it before, it would make sense to classify it as a movement with Stage Green ideals but that failed to get past Stage Blue due to its rejection of Stage Orange. It thus got nowhere close to the Stage Yellow efficiency that would've been needed to transform society to the degree that they were aiming at.

@Natasha Tori Maru glad you enjoy his writing as well! There aren't many authors that produce similar work to his; truly fascinating books. I assume that's the part that subconsciously scares a lot of people. I've also seen a lot of feedback saying they dislike his historical anecdotes and the reader would've enjoyed a more to the point type of narrative. Which seems a bit silly to me since both there are a lot of books that do have this dry and straight to the point writing style and the historical context tie in is what I find to be one of the most valuable aspect of his work. Yeah I would agree for 48 Laws of Power and Laws of Human Nature. Haven't read 33 Strategies but I've read the 50th Law, his book co-written with 50 cent, I thought that one was similarly quite good. What didn't you enjoy about Mastery? I thought it was quite profound and I enjoy some stuff he wrote about like going back to your childhood genuine interests for clues for your life purpose. It definitely lacked the practicality of some more direct books like Alex Hormozi's books on business for example but I think his aim was to be esoteric and not a how to guide.

Of course. You also don't have to be a master programmer to use AI effectively for a few processes inside of your business. AI is also good at allowing for more remote work due to being able to dictate to your phone and have something like Claude work behind the scenes while you're on a hike for example. It's like asking if business is possible without the internet; yes there are plenty of shops that don't have social media or any web presence today. It limits their scaling potential but they can make a living just fine.