Joshe

I suppose it's possible the majority of people have not truly considered the implications. I'm always interested in the question: "What were you wrong about in the last few years that you felt certain about?". And if people don't have an answer, they're likely reinforcing their models, not updating them. But at the same time, confidently standing by what you believe to be true is good practice for the conscious person to gain wisdom. Proceeding with confidence is how we find out if our conclusions are wrong, and it's better than proceeding with doubt and reluctance. You can't get the 30-year-old's hindsight without the 25-year-old's committed positions. Mistakes are the necessary infrastructure to wisdom. Be wrong 10,000 times and actually register that you were wrong and eventually you will have been wrong so many times that the patterns of "how" you were wrong will become obvious. But this requires staking out positions and checking them for coherence. But some minds could care less to address incoherence while others feel compelled to. Most people don't care when they're wrong or when there's something in the system that doesn't fit - they just move on. But if they were to understand their error, they would increase in wisdom and understanding, which compounds over time. But I don't think everyone has sufficient drive or access to this. I don't think wisdom can proliferate because in order for that to happen, you need a specific type of psychic makeup that just isn't prevalent in the population. Wisdom is an emergent byproduct of contemplation and correction - two activities most people are not very interested in. Uncertainty feels bad. Being wrong feels bad. The human nervous system is optimized to avoid both, so it's optimized against the very process that produces wisdom.

I wouldn't view it that way. It's not a hierarchy. The best we all (young and old) can do with this is hold onto things loosely and keep in mind that our future selves will likely disagree with many of our current certainties. That said, we have to act on the best information we have. In other words, we have to take risks and act with conviction, but we need to make sure we have the courage to be wrong and not mistake our current convictions with certainty. This sounds like basic stuff, but it's not, because we literally can't see how we are bullshitting ourselves while we are bullshitting ourselves. 5 years ago I was certain I knew why I was pursuing my life purpose. Later, I found out my certainties were justifications for my ego. But they felt completely true. I couldn't know it wasn't true at the time. This feeling certain and the inability to know is what needs to be accounted for as we proceed - being open to the possibility that even our deepest held convictions may one day be seen as the ego doing what it does best: hiding in plain sight.

Time is a prerequisite for some of the deepest knowledge. When I was 18, I saw how I was a fool at 15. When I was 25, I saw how I was fool at 20. When I was 35, I saw how I was a fool at 30. And so it goes. It takes time (decades) to understand and integrate this fully. Once the pattern is crystal clear, one becomes more careful with what they claim to know about the self/subjective experience. Most everything that I’ve ever told myself was important was revealed to be a working of ego and falsehood, including my spiritual search and my life purpose. The very things I staked my life on - for decades - turned out to be built from ego. No matter how intelligent, earnest, and thorough a student is, one thing they can’t see or know is how their beliefs will hold up over time. A mature teacher understands this and is humbled by it. It allows them to see the delusions, not because they’re more intelligent, but because they’ve had more time and experience, which, unlike knowledge, cannot be given to the student. The only way for the student is to live through decades and hopefully they will see. Building metaphysical sand castles is an interesting and pleasurable hobby, but when you look at the why and machinery behind the building over a span of 2 decades, the hobby eventually exhausts itself after one sees all the stories they’ve told themselves were true in order to justify their building. But this isn’t a given - it will only be seen if one is open to it. Now, at 40, this is where I’m currently at. I’m not sure what’s next but I’ve finally learned the lesson and I’m not building sandcastles anymore. Lol, this sounds like something you’d say at an AA meeting. Actualizers Anonymous. Self-deception prefers to hide inside our strongest convictions. There are blind spots that cannot be accessed through introspection alone. There are dimensions of self-deception that only decades can expose. For me, the need to construct and inhabit elaborate meaning structures wound down after enough cycles of watching them collapse, which took a lot of time.

Sometimes the feedback is correct but the tact isn't. I've asked myself: why care what a person across the internet thinks or gets wrong? 100% it's mostly entertainment + ego. In the grand scheme, it makes no fuck. But I'll forget about the grand scheme sometime within the next few days. Integration is continuous but slow.

You encounter perspectives, you integrate them, and your understanding becomes more nuanced. Do you call that "conscious expansion"? Are people who make a hobby out of exploring and integrating perspectives more conscious than those who don't? What actually "increases consciousness"? Intense awareness/focus on specific perspectives? Intense awareness on consciousness itself?

AI bot crawling could slow it down too. If you don't want that, you could add a rule in your robots.txt file to prevent it.

Check out these channels to get a sense for what would go into production of cooking videos without narration: https://www.youtube.com/@cookingeveryday https://www.youtube.com/@cookrate-meatdelish2320 https://www.youtube.com/@michaelandthekitchen.subsc2619 There are tons of successful channels like this. If I were you, I'd find as many as I could and study their production and marketing techniques. I recall seeing one that would was selling their own custom designed cookware at the end of the video, and it was pretty cool. That's just one way you could make money. I definitely wouldn't be trying to sell other people's products though, because you won't make a lot of money that route without a ton of viewers. You'll have a very hard time getting eyeballs if all you do is a blog and sharing images. You'd need to strategically grind out high quality videos. I would mostly focus on Youtube and social media and I'd link to the full recipe on your blog, which gives you the opportunity to capture email addresses. If I were going to do this, I'd get several cameras and mics strategically set up around my cooking area and start experimenting with that early on. Ideally, I'd want my kitchen to be a like a studio that I didn't have to disassemble after every video. You might want to figure out which angles are best for stuff like cracking eggs, whisking, how you add spices, etc. Basically, flesh out the style and common patterns early so you're not always analyzing every little detail. It's a big project, but it would be interesting.

Cloudflare is cheaper for domain names because they don’t price gouge on renewals and they offer free whois privacy and SSL. Plus, they have free DNS and your site is way faster with their CDN, and more secure because they have free bot fight mode and lots of other stuff. It’s crazy what you get for $10/yr. @Judy2, some of the best cooking channels I’ve ever seen are faceless. It’s like ASMR cooking. Many of them have millions of subscribers. I’ll see if I can find them.

"I will not be moved by this" - said with serious energy and conviction about how unmoved one is. Feedback only stings when it's possibly accurate.

I was actually just fleshing out an insight regarding perception, using people in cars in traffic to illustrate how what we see visually obscures what's actually there. It goes something like this: "Imagine you're driving in traffic. You look around and all you see are cars — a sedan, an SUV, a big semi-truck. You don't really see the people inside them. Logically you know there's a person in each one, but your visual experience is dominated by the vehicle. The car becomes the thing. Now imagine a big semi-truck cuts you off. You feel intimidated, maybe angry — and without thinking, you've already built a mental image of the person behind the wheel. Probably some big aggressive guy. Then the truck pulls over and a 5'2 skinny dude hops out. You're surprised. Why? Because your brain assigned the properties of the container to the person inside it. Now imagine the tops and sides of every car on the road suddenly disappeared. All you'd see is a bunch of regular human beings sitting in chairs, gripping steering wheels, spaced out in rows — not interacting, just sitting there. The whole scene would look kind of absurd. But nothing actually changed. You just removed the layer that was distorting your perception. Now go one step further. Remove the skin. Now all you see is muscle and bone. And suddenly everyone looks the same — the person from the truck, the person from the little sedan, all of them. The differences that seemed so significant vanished because they only existed on the outermost surface. That's what's happening with hot girls. Beauty is the car. It's a surface layer that dominates your visual experience so completely that it replaces the actual person in your mind. You're not 'looking up to' them — your perception is being hijacked by the outermost layer, the same way the semi-truck hijacks your perception of the driver. You don't need to fight it or be angry about it. You just need to see it for what it is — an incomplete perception, not a hierarchy." Surface layers are real, but they are just a fraction of the whole story. The mind compresses reality into usable symbols. The most salient symbol often becomes the operative agent. Projection fills in missing depth. The symbol replaces the underlying complexity.

Maybe something to work with and build on: A thought is a unit of cognition. It is an intangible, abstract, representational unit of cognition that occurs in consciousness. Other units of cognition: mental images, concepts, intentions, judgements, predictions. Perception is different than cognition. You receive it. Cognition = organization / manipulation - it works on what shows up in perception AND on prior cognitive products Intuition is the perception of pre-conceptual cognitive organization. Consciousness - the field of appearance and experience Perception - direct apprehension of what appears (external and internal) Intuition - understanding before it becomes something you can think about - maybe unconscious cognition, lol. Cognition - manipulable representations (thoughts)

There's nothing wrong with it but to take it too seriously isn't a good idea IMO. I wouldn't mess around with plastic surgery or injections. You end looking like a fuckable 50 year old lizard (Bill Burr joke). Everyone ends up looking the same, stretched out puffy faces. It's sad to see. Maybe get your ears pinned back if they stick out too much. Hair transplant. These are fine, but I wouldn't mess with the face too much. Maintaining a tan can do a lot, but then you gotta worry about skin cancer and leather skin as you age. Putting lots of energy into what you're going to wear, what color accessories you should buy, what shoes to wear - it's just all too much work and not enough pay off. The older you get, the more precious your energy becomes, and ain't nobody got time to be matching outfits. Commiting to and maintaining a project all about managing other people's perceptions probably isn't a good idea long-term. Your comfort and resources are more important than managing expectations. You have to manage some, but habitual looksmaxing is not the right balance. If your body and attire are clean and you're not overweight and pasty, and you keep up basic hygiene, good enough. I've always kinda pitied women for basically being forced to live this way.

No bro. You gotta take the stick out of your ass. Say: "Sup? I'm that guy you exchanged numbers with". And wait on her response. If she doesn't like that and don't respond, wait a day and say "Sorry, I just realized you might have given your number out to multiple people. I'm the guy from freemasons."

Interesting. Never thought of that of before. Thanks! I'll need to let that idea stew for a few months, lol.