eleveneleven

Seconded: Why do you think you need to abandon acting to self-actualize? Why can you not use acting as a tool for actualizing yourself? Why are they separate things? I'm also in a creative field. Like you, I was competent by the time I was 20 because I had started practicing my craft since I was very young. But when I was 20, I wasn't doing the work that I was passionate about and instead was working a bunch of bullshit jobs, same as you. In the back of my mind, I was waiting for "when I have enough money" or "when I have some breakthrough." I attached my identity to this passion of mine, and so ironically I couldn't be creative enough to see all the myriad of ways I could have made a living from the art form I was good at. I could not humble myself and take risks. I needed other people to see how great I was to feel satisfied, and I couldn't take the risk that they would hate what I created, so I would endlessly procrastinate. So my unsolicited advice: You don't have to let go of acting. Just don't make it such a deep part of your identity. Make it a form of expression for your true self. Get creative and find a way to make a living from it in a way that other people don't usually think of. Let go of being "the best" (which is hard in this society), and just be you. The road less traveled has less competition. This is not an easy thing to do and mentors at your school probably will give you the same old advice they give every aspiring actor, which puts you in direct competition with people who are just as good or better than you. Schools tend to rigidly hold to a certain way of doing things and don't show you how to think outside the box. They will be against any rule-breaking. Very little advice will be good. You will probably end up crawling around in the dark for awhile, not knowing what you're doing because there will be no defined path if you don't follow others. That's good, though, because few people are willing to do that. Most people give up. When you get to the other side, you'll be a rarity. When I was 20, the problem was that I thought there was only one way that I could do things--the same way everyone else did them--and that slowed me down for years. Don't be like me. It doesn't matter if you're "good." That's totally relative. "Good" by what standard and in whose eyes? What matters is that you fill a need that has not yet been filled in the world, and that you do it with heartfelt intentions. Find that.

A song about feeling the Presence. Though a lot of Björk's songs touch on this, this one is one of the more obvious ones. Ironic that one of the lyrics is "I'm no fucking Buddhist, but this is enlightenment."

It totally works. I used an SRS (though it wasn't SuperMemo specifically) to memorize the basic Japanese kanji (over 2000 of them). I find that SRS programs like SuperMemo work best for memorizing discrete bits of information that are easily categorized and referenced. "Facts" basically. Works great for learning vocabulary, and I think it's a revolutionary idea, as long as the user understands its limits. It is for memorizing, not learning. However, in this day and age, we underestimate the important role that memorizing can play in learning. When we have things memorized and easily retrievable in our brains, it makes learning (putting the facts all together in a model) and being creative a lot easier. It frees up space for other things, rather than having to struggle to remember basic stuff.

Minor point perhaps, but people keep saying, "This or that is illegal/legal," but in what context? Laws differ by country, and sometimes even in different territories within the same country (as is the case often in the US, for instance). In some places (perhaps in certain theocracies), I would imagine that doing cold approach or something along those lines probably would be illegal. In a more developed country, it's unlikely that it would be illegal to just walk up and randomly talk to a stranger.

Yep, this is also a possibility, especially when there's no discernible biological source for the problem (no antidepressants, no menopause, no unusual levels of stress). Sometimes a person themselves may not even realize what the problem is and may be in denial about the fact that they simply don't find their spouse attractive anymore for whatever reason. The good thing is that over the course of a long-term relationship, attraction will tend to wax and wane; that's not abnormal or anything. If you're conscious about it, you can cultivate that attraction again by focusing on improving yourself and whatnot. Pleading with her for sex will probably just make the problem worse, though. I agree with some of the others that it may require working on your "swagger," as it were, but of course if you're only doing that for her, then it probably won't work either, because you'll be doing it out of neediness or to get something from her, which a woman can smell from a mile away.

I'm not offended. I just think there are many different possible ways to approach this issue, depending on the person's specific situation, and my suggestion was merely one approach. One can look at it this way: If you're having trouble communicating with someone because you are hungry and haven't eaten in awhile, and that person is holding the only tray of food in the world that you're allowed to eat from, then you can easily see how there's a potential for drama there. There are ways to mitigate this; just two of the many options could be: 1) Allow yourself to eat from a different plate, satiate your hunger, then go communicate and work together without the burden of that immediate neediness. (What I suggested, basically.) 2) Transcend hunger. Learn that hunger is not the root problem, and that you can't be ruled by your stomach. (What you are suggesting, essentially.) I could see both strategies being useful, and being good advice or bad advice depending on the situation. It depends on where the person is in their life and what direction they need to grow in next. Maybe they are not ready to master their sex urge just yet. For some people, you can tell them to transcend a bodily urge all you want, but it doesn't address the current problem they're dealing with, and in that case it would be bad advice. They would just end up running themselves in circles. And other times, the person is ready to deal with the deeper issue instead of the more superficial one. It depends.

No. What he needs is what I say he needs. My assessment of the situation is right and yours is wrong. Any other way of approaching the situation or viewing it through some other perspective is wrong and not what he needs. He totally could not benefit from viewing things through several perspectives at once. ( )

That's rough, man. Trying to get someone to do something they don't want is sort of a lose-lose situation, though. Even if she agrees, it will be grudging and the sex will probably not be that awesome. Have you considered having sex with a different woman? One who actually wants to have sex with you, and doesn't need so much convincing? That doesn't mean you need to cheat (which I certainly don't recommend); you could inform your wife that you will seek out another sex partner, so that it takes that duty off her plate and she doesn't have to stress about it anymore. This also doesn't mean you have to ask her for permission (it's your body, after all); just informing her, though, will allow her to be able to make her own decision about how to respond, and then you can negotiate from there if she has a problem with it. I'm all for building a deeper relationship with her, but that can be hard to do if you're super hard up and your brain keeps getting distracted by the needs of your dick. (You won't be able to help approaching her with the "hidden agenda" of sex.) It's sort of like trying to do work while you're hungry and you can't stop thinking about food. If you can find a way to meet those bodily needs in some way AND deepen your relationship with her, then you'll probably be able to approach her with a clearer head and less neediness.

Dude, you're never too old to follow your path, if that's what life is calling you to do. What else are you going to do while you're here on this earth, anyway, right? If you ever feel old and need encouragement, just find someone 10 or 15 years older and ask them, "Do you think 26 [or insert whatever age] is old?" Chances are, they will say, "Hell no, man! 26 is SO young. When I was 26, my life was filled with so much possibility! I wish I hadn't squandered it. Now I'm too old!" Then it will be their turn to find someone 10 or 15 years older and have a similar conversation, lol.

Eh, putting aside the contradiction (sometimes life is filled with paradoxes and logical contradictions, and that's okay), I can kind of see what OP means. Most life advice I've ever been given was useless or even harmful over the long-term because: 1) Let's say you are on a certain path and need advice moving forward. Most people won't give you advice to help you on your path; they will give you advice that will help you get on their path. In other words, they assume that you want what they want, and few people have the self-awareness to realize that other people have a different agenda than they do. 2) If you are a very flat-out weird, unusual person, then you will need to take a weird, unusual approach to solve many of your problems and most of the people around you will give you the wrong advice. Even seemingly simple questions like, "How should I learn what I need to learn to make a living?" can take on a complicated dimension if you try to do what everyone else does or what is just "common sense." I learned this the hard way. For example, most people have totally different intentions when it comes to career and relationships than I do, so following their advice (even just by default) led me WAY off my path for many years. Unless the advice is about something very concrete, like "How do I change the brakes on my bike?", it's 9 times out of 10 useless (at least in my experience). The weirder of a person you are, the more useless advice will be coming from most people. The voice within gives much better "advice."

Maybe this'll help: https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-get-up-right-away-when-your-alarm-goes-off/

I second what a lot of people here say: Just go make your game. Right now. It's really not as complicated as it seems. You feel called to do something, so do it. Anything else is a distraction. You don't need to "study" computer science at a university; just learn as you go, if that's what you're called to do. The information you need is out there for free, and nothing teaches quite like practice and experience, anyway. Every "requirement" you set for yourself is a distraction. It's actually easier to slog through a bunch of math classes that you hate than it is to face The Thing that you truly want to do, because doing what you really want takes courage, the ability to surrender to destiny, and the ability to let go of all of the results that you're attached to. Creating work that you genuinely love also takes extreme vulnerability, and this is all but impossible for most people. This is why people usually just go to school instead and take up a career that they don't like that much. No one else can tell you what your life calling is, but I will tell you that it probably doesn't have a name or fit in a neat little box like "computer science." Still, since it's your calling, you should be able to recognize it when you see it.

Dude, how can you say that when you don't even know this person's health situation? How do you know that they, personally, can go months without food? While MOST people can probably fast for a few weeks and be just fine, it really depends on how much fat the person has stored in their body and also how fast their body burns calories (their metabolism). Someone who is very overweight probably could go for months without food and survive, but not everyone can fast for months without starving to death. If someone simply doesn't have enough stored fat, they could die (probably not in a week, but certainly over the course of months). It's ridiculous to give someone that advice and make sweeping statements like "you don't want it enough" if they have trouble suppressing a basic biological process for self-preservation. And I'm saying this as someone who fasts intermittently and does see some benefits. Everybody's body is different, and when someone's body wants to fast, the body will say so, but forcing it is just silly and potentially dangerous.

I clicked on this thread because I thought it was going to be about how Leo literally isn't wearing clothes in the videos, and actually what appears to be a shirt is part of his body, and hence he is naked in the videos and none of us realized. (Or that he isn't wearing pants and somehow OP knows this.) Have to admit I'm a bit disappointed.

First, be sure that what you are disciplining yourself for is something that you actually want deep inside--not something that society merely conditioned you to want. Otherwise, you will have to use superficial and temporary tricks to increase "discipline," but in my experience that's not too sustainable. Your true self is wise to the games and will resist pointless work. Once you have a good reason to do something, though, then I've found that the most important thing is installing the right habits. Willpower is a highly exhaustible resource, so start with the habits that increase willpower directly and help your sense of well-being: meditation regular exercise (whether it's formally at a gym or just frolicking around outside) cutting out negative thought patterns reducing your exposure to negative people whose bad habits rub off on you reducing your exposure to popular media (it's often very negative and can drain your motivation without your even realizing) improving your environment Working on the infrastructure of my life made it WAY easier to get stuff done. I tried all sorts of things, but I was fighting a losing battle until I was able to admit that my environment was dragging me down and that too much of what I did every day was not in line with a wider life purpose. Installing good habits became way easier once that was taken care of, and once habits are in place, you don't need to apply as much willpower or "discipline"; your brain will just automatically go through the motions.

Let me preface by saying that I have no idea, and this is just wild speculation, but... When I lucid dream, it's not quite that simple. Not everything is instantly possible, and often even if I know I'm dreaming, I have to practice being able to perform miraculous physical feats before I can do them--or sometimes I have trouble controlling the dream at all. This seems to be related to my relationship to the dream environment and characters, or my belief in my ability to perform a certain action. Just like "real life," more things just happen to me in the dream, than my controlling them. Also, I can't seem to control what dream characters do. They seem to have a mind of their own. So here comes the speculation part: the Buddha is just a dream character to you, so he would only be as capable of performing miracles as you are of believing that he could. This dream is from your perspective after all, not the Buddha's, right? You're the dreamer, so it is up to you if the Buddha can fly or Jesus can turn water into wine or whatever. You'd have to become enlightened and perform miracles yourself to really find out. That's just my theory, though, as I said. Could just be BS. Who knows what this experience is and why we even have it.

A long time ago, this used to happen to me when pulling close to my max, though it almost always happened during very warm and humid weather for some reason (during the summer). Once I started working out somewhere that was better air-conditioned, this seemed to stop. Now I live somewhere much less hot, so it hasn't been an issue at all. Looking back, though, this might have been related to blood pressure (which can be affected by the temperature). And I second what everyone said. If you're not breathing correctly during the workout (for example, if you're holding your breath without realizing), you could severely injure yourself by running your blood pressure up too high all of a sudden. When you're just starting, there's a natural urge to hold your breath when you're making a lot of effort (like your last few pulls before failure), so make sure you're not doing this unconsciously. Here's a pretty good explanation of breathing during workouts from an experienced body builder: http://scoobysworkshop.com/breathing/

Huh? Don't see how it's "playing the role of his mother" to suggest that the first step to solving these kinds of tricky blocks is to end resistance and self-judgement. But hell, if it's motherly to suggest not brute forcing things when brute force has proven itself (for years) to be a poor strategy in a specific situation, then just call me the holy virgin and latch onto them hairy teats. Whatever works. And I guess I know for a fact that it does actually work. At least, it worked for me. Nothing else worked. Whether it would work for him or not is a mystery, but at least I can offer a perspective from someone who has been there. In my experience, your approach is the complete opposite of what works. Again, though, I can only offer my specific experience. What I offered is neither mollycoddling, nor is it reasoning. Just because something doesn't amount to shaming someone for their behavior, doesn't mean that now it's coddling them. There is more to life than these extremes. So shaming someone and encouraging them to resist their laziness might not work now, but it will work in the future, according to your speculation. Hell, maybe it will. Maybe that's how shaming people works. But probably not. Personally, I don't think it does. From my own experience, it absolutely does not work, either right now or in a long timeframe. Self-judgement only continues the cycle. You just keep hitting your head against the wall without actually stopping for a second and investigating the root issue. Change comes after acceptance; it doesn't come out of resistance. And if someone is not extrinsically motivated by anything, they will never change until they find intrinsic motivation, but it's hard to find that if you spend your time continually searching for extrinsic motivators that only temporarily work. The laziness is a sign that your reasons are not important enough to you. From there, you can develop self-discipline organically, for reasons you actually believe in (and not the ones society told you to believe in). And, yes, this can take years to figure out. But sure, maybe nothing will "work" on him, and he'll just keep posting in the forums and being "angry." So what, though? Maybe that's his destiny. Maybe he incarnated on this Earth with the specific intention of bothering you; in that case, he's fulfilling his life purpose already and there's nothing to change.

? Dude, are you actually trying to help this person with his issue, or are you just using him as a venting board for things that personally bother you? Will calling him a "cry baby" and implying he's not an "adult" get him motivated or give him perspective on this problem? Will going on about how "unconscious" he is make him more conscious? Probably not. When I was younger and had a similar problem to OP, everyone and their mom was lining up to shame me subtly or overtly about how I needed to be an "adult" and do what all the other "adults" did. Guess what? It didn't work--because every person is different and has different motivations, and it just so happened that mine did not align with the vast majority of people's motivations. Some people are not motivated extrinsically hardly at all, and Dr. Phil style tough love won't work on them. Look, when I was deep in that shitty cycle of feeling lazy and useless and unmotivated, and having to force myself to get work done (which did work temporarily), the funny thing is that I actually was guilty myself of shaming people who surrendered to that lack of motivation and were honest about their laziness. It was projection. It pissed me off to see other people who were like me, but didn't try to hide it.

Yeah, just telling someone "Oh, just don't be lazy by not being lazy! That's the solution!" doesn't work on its own for a lot of people. Some people are not motivated by anything at all, even by the idea that they're "wasting their life." If they were, then they wouldn't be lazy. This is especially a problem for people who had a childhood where they would use distraction, laziness, and hiding as a form of escape from their household situation, and they were never conditioned to see a connection between action and favorable results. If everything always felt futile, what is the point of action? Intellectually, you and I may realize this is a false belief, but it doesn't matter if we are emotionally conditioned to respond to work with "Meh, what's the point?" I say this from experience. I am/was one of these people. Just ignoring the feelings of laziness and pushing through them for a burst of motivation works temporarily, but because it doesn't solve the root problem, you will just go back to your unmotivated baseline soon enough. Brute forcing it does not work. However, there is hope. I did get over this. The thing is that I simply had to figure out how to do things differently from most people, so I found I couldn't follow a lot of people's advice on it. The basic problem (at least for me), is that I needed a reason. No reason was ever good enough to do anything. Society's pressures didn't work. The notion that I could make money and be wealthy only temporarily worked. The idea that I would have better access to sex partners if I was "successful" only sort of worked. At the very bottom, the root problem was that I simply didn't give a shit. I just didn't (and still don't) care. So nothing that anyone could say about how I'm wasting my life or I need to just "do it" could ever motivate me. Deep inside, I had a sneaking suspicion that it didn't really matter what I did in the end, so I just did not care. So, how does a person who doesn't give a shit get stuff done? I didn't really start to figure this out until I was in stage greenish territory. The answer was weirdly counter-intuitive: it was to never have a reason to do the things I did. To never become attached to any end goal in particular. It was to look deep inside and see what was naturally blossoming inside of me creatively--what I naturally wanted to do--and accept whatever that was without judgement, even if it was nothing. Almost like a miracle, I suddenly had a creative renaissance in my life. In other words, once I stopped judging myself for being lazy, this body began to produce stuff spontaneously. There was little effort involved after that. It was like swimming downstream. Even to this day, though, i struggle a bit with judgement. I keep thinking, "It can't be this easy." But it is. Once you're in flow, producing is easy. The hard part is letting go of the judgement and letting go of doing your work for any reason other than as an end in itself. Judgement and ulterior motives will block you creatively like nothing else will. Hope this makes sense.

One of the greenest places in the US (in my experience): Portland, Oregon. If you live in other parts of the US (which are mostly heavily orange with some strong blue in the middle parts of the country), I recommend visiting to see what it's like. I used to live in a very, very orange city before, so it was quite a shock when I came here. The heavily green culture helped me a lot with spiritual development, though, and finally shaking off the cocoon of orange. It's not hard to find stage green and sometimes stage yellow people here.

Alanis Morissette. Most people know her more for her earlier Orange-tinted work (which North American culture finds most relatable), but these days she appears to be at green/yellow. (As she moved into green and beyond, her music changed and became less "mainstream" you could say.) This is a good example of a song with aspects of both green and yellow, I would say: This one as well, I would say: There are many more examples in her recent work. Her husband's work is at a similar stage.

Rather, never put Descartes before the horse. Har, har.