Joshe

Are your needs of a "profound" nature? Or are they simple and basic? It seems you're putting the cart before the horse. You have to handle the fundamentals before you worry about the profound. Profound comes later. Also, one of your biggest sticking points is in how you relate to the world. You are mad at the world for not noticing you and accepting you as you are, and you don't like the way they are and how they don't care, and you really, really wish they weren't like that - so you act out. This is normal, but your response to cast them out and isolate yourself from them is an unhealthy one. You want to use "profundity" as a tool to place yourself above them, but this is like a band-aid for a gushing wound. Both you and they are limited and everyone is doing the best they can with the information available at the time. The healthy response is to forgive them and yourself and work on uprooting the expectations and negativity sitting underneath it all. Characters such as yourself can be very stabilizing forces in the world if they can get to the bottom of this error and learn to forgive themselves and the others. People like you NEED the world to respond to them because you're oriented that way. That's actually a strength, but you need to figure out how to resolve cynicism, resentment, and forgiveness. I think you'd be one happy mother fucker, and probably quite successful with people if you would do this. And I think people would love you how you want to be loved if you'd build a bridge for them to do that. Put all your shame, ego, and resentment away. Teachers like Leo and Ralston aren't the best for this. I think James Allen could do you wonders. Stick with him and only him for the next year or two. You could get started with this one: Just listened to the first 5 mins. Gold! - "It is of no avail to fret and fume and chafe at the chains which bind you; you must know why and how you are bound. " - "You must cease to be a disobedient child in the school of experience and must begin to learn - with humility and patience - the lessons that are set for your development." Also, you might check out "As a Man Thinketh".

That's because alcohol is a major sleep disruptor, which I think is largely what makes hangovers so shitty. The bad sleep alone would be enough to bring about a shitty day. Then, compound that with toxins and dehydration. Saying you don't get hangovers is like saying aspirin doesn't thin your blood. There's no way around it if you ingest enough. And even ingesting 6 beers would cause impairment on some level. I get what you're saying though - alcohol does have a way of connecting you to emotions. I often go through a roller coaster of emotions when I drink and I do find it interesting and sometimes even useful and even cathartic because it makes releasing emotions very easy - so I think it does have some value. Also, I do find insights and ideas while drinking, but I find them when sober as well. It's just that when I'm drinking, they feel different and branch in different directions. As far as cognitive improvement, IME, there seems to be a very short window of enhancement but the threshold seems too easily crossed to ever be useful. Also, I've wondered if any enhancement is largely due to being more decisive and trusting my gut more. Certain brain games would reward that if intuition and pattern matching are built up enough for the specific game/exercise.

Is this it? Or maybe even take the knight with the rook instead of the bishop.

Truth-orientation = the degree to which a person tolerates local destabilization in order to improve global model accuracy. 😂 I have a pipe dream of building a model of the mind, and this is just one module. It's a huge project though, and other things take priority, but damn, it would be fun to work on this full-time. Cheers!

Yeah, you're right. Maybe "truth capacity" is better to describe the mechanism and "truth-orientation" is better to name the value. Everyone says they care about the truth. But what actually determines it? Tolerance/capacity.

@Entrepreneur Folks around here don't easily say their Apex isn't THE Apex. What they believe to be the ultimate is just impermanent conscious dust. They don't realize, there is no fucking apex. lol. But oh... how much safety it provides and how it serves the ego. They think because they explore "levels" of consciousness they are onto something. Unable to see what they're doing. As if the abstraction that they've defined as the "first" level of consciousness is any lesser than the abstraction of the "highest" level their human brains could comprehend. And oh boy, they want to fuse themselves with that highest level (ego 101). Their hierarchy is made of the same impermanent conscious dust as everything else they're trying to transcend, but they can't see it yet. They're constructing elaborate justifications for why their particular preoccupations are cosmically important rather than just... their preoccupations. lol I wouldn't be so brash if they weren't so arrogant.

Staring down at green carpet, wondering where I was and why I was suffering, in the midst of chaos and trauma. My father stormed in after drinking, slammed the door, the ornament hanging on the door fell off, then he punched my mom in the face and told me to give her a hug while she was crying and then to go to my room, which had green carpet. Hell of a first memory, ey? lol Chaos needs managed.

I think there's a lot of truth here as well. My intuition is telling me you don't like the world and the way it is, and your current situation is a manifestation of your wanting distance from it... more so than a manifestation of structural constraints. And there's nothing wrong with that per se, so long as you acknowledge it and accept the lot that position manifests. I think you need to forgive yourself and others for being faulty and rejoin the humans. Everyone is doing the best they can.

Sleep is the biggest lever for most people. It's not so obvious when you're young, but as you age and grow in awareness, you see how poor sleep is a mother fucker for nearly everything. The downstream effects of chronic poor sleep are huge. Increased stress, anxiety, and depression, and basically manifests hell on earth because it the effects accumulate and compound. So many people's lives suck because their sleep sucks, and most of them are oblivious as to why. They just live with it and never really understand the consequences. You need a decent level of awareness/metacognition to be able to put it together fully. Ever wonder why some days you're on top of the world and others days you're down in the dumps immediately on wake? Sleep is likely the biggest factor. Listened to this recently: https://www.audible.com/pd/Why-We-Sleep-Audiobook/B0752ZQR33

Damn bruh.

The financially desperate demographic is huge, so of course there are tons of offers out there to solve this problem. I'm sure there are some legit courses on how to sell courses. Not all of them would be useless. But I wouldn't even look for courses on how to make money. The macro steps for building a course are simple. One sequence might look like: 1. Validate your idea with market research 2. Make the course 3. Package it well 4. Make it accessible 5. Distribute 6. Collect market feedback and reiterate until you get buyers. You just have to flesh each of these out. AI would likely serve you better than random courses. For example, at each phase, you can ask AI "what are the most common mistakes at this stage?" or "what is the likelihood my project would fail and if it were to fail, why?" or "why do most endeavors like this fail?" or "what is the actual difficulty level and level of effort required for this stage?". AFter you ask enough questions and get clarity, the pathway might light up.

Neediness happens when wanting gets mixed with a lack of self-respect, self-trust, or inner stability. The outcome gets psychologically attached to something deeper, like safety, identity, self-worth, etc.

Yeah, that frame makes compassion and love for other easier for me as well. Although I admit, I don't hold it as often as I'd like to.

I added it back. I didn't feel sure about it. Glad you like it!

Good point. I don't live like I'm playing a game. It's only in specific reflection that I would see it that way. And it is more common to view others as playing games than oneself. There might be something to seeing others as playing games that prevents compassion/love from blossoming. Good thinking!

The impulse to call out other people's games is itself a game - a common one. We're all just humans playing meaning-games together. And there's no shame in that. Without games, there'd be nothing to discuss. But it's easy to get caught up in thinking your game is superior just because it's more coherent or truth-aligned. We're all on this forum because we're seeking recognition and resonance - we want our existence to matter in relation to others. We just play different games to achieve that end.

I could see how these metaphysical mechanics would usually serve to spiritually bypass the underlying fragility. For most, it would be a coping mechanism and a magic pill solution to avoid the work becoming antifragile.

True dat

Engage with the nuance bro. You don't get to flatten all distinctions and then tell everyone your flattened frame is basic common sense. lol. Nice try.

Also, how one deals with "uncertainty" is near the root as well. Neediness = fear-driven attempts to eliminate uncertainty and to secure safety. So, maybe part of the solution is courage has to be cultivated. And/or you have to cultivate groundedness in the absence of guarantees.

@UnbornTao Totally agree. In my first reply I had something like "it's helpful to distinguish between want and need", but I removed it after I started thinking about the complexity it invokes. It feels like "want" becomes a need at a certain point, so I started thinking of "desire" as the base phenomenon on a spectrum of intensity, but then couldn't figure out the rest of the framework. Also, it's not so simple because you can have both an intense want and an intense need. Where things become unstable is when not getting an intense want is mistaken as some sort of existential threat. So neediness seems to have to do with your relation to the desire - how high you believe the stakes are or thinking your safety will be compromised if you don't get it. At the end of the day, I think neediness is a symptom of a fragile self. Find what is fragile and make it not fragile.

OP is asking for mechanics. “How does it really work”. It’s like they’re saying they want a deep understanding of how an engine works and some distinguished mechanic chimes in: “combustion”. Anyone have any insights into the mechanics of it?

Problem solved! lol