Joshe

Christmas offers time off from work, decompression, and a sense of belonging and connection rather than striving. Receiving gifts makes people feel good and cared for. People in general are in better moods during the holiday season. I’ll take it.

Because if you chase a dream with a known failure rate of +99.99%, you can easily screw your life up. “Acknowledging” risk isn’t the same as mitigating it. My version of mitigation would look something like: work your ass off for 5-10 years - saving as much money as you can - and work on your craft as a hobby during those 5-10 years, then shoot for the stars.

I should have mentioned I'm working off an intuitive hypothesis here, which is the beliefs are symptoms of instability, not the root cause of it. Lazy people don't buy courses, don't make multiple forum posts, don't keep wrestling with being stuck. Lazy people disengage. OP is doing the opposite. Over-engaging, flailing, trying everything. The motivation is there. Something else is blocking movement. The standard frame says effort is available if you choose it. OP's experience contradicts that - they try but it don't work. They have no alternative explanation for the gap, so they think: "I must be defective". They've diagnosed themselves as lazy because it's the only explanation they can come up with to explain their resistance. Also, They've been told so many times they're lazy that they believe it. But their actions contradict the label. They're acting like someone who wants out badly but can't find the exit. This intuition led me to believe they’re stuck due to fear of not knowing how to find a viable way out. If I'm right, It's not a matter of beliefs/mindset so much as it is practical advice and forming a safe trajectory they trust. Not mentioning this upfront could have caused some confusion, haha.

@Natasha Tori Maru My argument is simply: If I'm right that legitimate fear is causing immobilization, before they can act, they need to be able to see a viable path forward that resolves the fear - not by addressing it directly, but by clarity of a safe trajectory. That's my theory. Without that, fear locks up the system and no amount of willpower, courage, or perspective reframing can unblock it. It can be mitigated to some extent with mindset, but it's not guaranteed and mileage varies. Sometimes, the obstacle is external and real, and treating it as mindset problem is wrong, counter-productive, and even harmful. Yes, that is what it looks like after the engine is running. Anyway, good talk! 😁

No formal diagnosis needed. Chronic fear is a normal response to chronically unsafe conditions. If your situation is unstable and precarious with no safety net and no clear path forward, chronic fear is the correct signal - your nervous system is working as it was designed. It is "normal operation" to freeze and shutdown when risk is high and every visible move looks unsafe. That's what all organisms do. 😂 I understand this chronic fear we're speaking of because I lived with it for many years. The problem was financial uncertainty - ambient fear was always present. The only way for the fear to lift, aside from actually making the money, was knowing I could solve the problem. Having a workable path to the solution. But I wasn't immobile because my circumstances were different. I had a bit of runway and I had high self-efficacy. Without those, I likely would have been paralyzed myself. Courage = fear + belief that I can handle it (self-efficacy). Without self-efficacy, courage is just desperation. Not everyone has courage, or can have it without considerable self-development. Some of us get lucky. Telling someone without self-efficacy to "have courage" is like telling someone without legs to just stand up. 😂 For real. I agree to a degree. But perspective adoption doesn't work like plug and play. You have to first have the circumstances to discover them, and just hearing about them or contemplating them isn't enough to plug them in. The problem with "it's all perspective" is it assumes you can mindset your way through anything. Which is flattering when your structure is already fine because you get to take credit for your ability to rise above. "Don't complain about digging this ditch for 10 hours at $12/hr bro, it's all a matter of perspective!" Perspective is a nice thing to have after you've solved the problem. Not as useful when you're drowning in the chaos.

@Natasha Tori Maru I agree that addressing the fear directly would just be more destabilizing. I'm thinking OP feels like "My life conditions don’t support long-term stability" and there's chronic background threats, an unstable foundation, and behavioral freeze. My intuition is that the immobilization is fear-driven. I'm suggesting they find a credible path forward. They need a visible, workable path that leads from where they are now to some version of security. Once that path is visible, the fear loses its grip and they'll be able to move. I can't say what all will go into that, but no amount of inspiration or mental gymnastics or reframing is going to work without addressing the actual real-world problems. OP needs actual answers as to how to move forward. The questions I initially asked could identify some of the blockers, which could inform a strategy for getting the answers to construct a path. Basically, they need clarity of trajectory that maps cleanly onto reality to unfreeze, is what I'm thinking. As long as they're stuck in the "I'm lazy or broken" frame, they can't see the structural problem because they're using that to answer the question of "why am I not moving?". If the problem is your character, there's no structure to examine, no blockers to identify, no path to build. The only path available from this frame is "try harder" or wallow in shame, which perpetuates the loop of immobilization. Your example of acting despite fear - that works when there's a clear action to take. But what about chronic fear with no obvious action? Which I think is the case here.

Ah yes, a "nuanced reasonable person". 😝 I was referring to a specific situation where fear has a grip. The order is correct for the vast majority of people. Also, you don't use passion. It uses you. It's emergent. You discover it when you pay attention to what you're drawn to. So IDK how you can "use" it to push you through anything. It's not like caffeine. lol You can't use passion like how you can use inspiration. I think these two are often confused. It's like: Safety -> Curiosity/Inspiration -> Repetition -> Competence -> Meaning -> Passion. Telling OP to find their passion is like someone who inherited a house telling a renter "just focus on what brings you joy, money isn't everything." Easy to say when shelter isn't consuming your bandwidth. I made this point elsewhere: No one comes out the gate passionate about Excel spreadsheets or accounting. It's only after they get good at it that they form a passion for it. Maybe a lot of confusion comes from us using different definitions for passion: Passion as appetite: strong positive feeling toward something Passion as devotion: compulsive drive toward mastery in a domain I'm using #2 only. If someone says "I have a passion for travel". They're talking about #1. As much as "passion" is a topic around here, I feel like it needs deep contemplation.

First and foremost, money buys security, freedom, and optionality. There is intense fear that these things won't come. If that fear is the dominant signal (which I intuit it is), engaging in something one enjoys does nothing but distract from that fear as it accumulates in the background. The pressure mounts and mounts. Calling them lazy, telling them to suck it up, or telling them to find their passion, does not address the fear! Nothing else matters as long as the belief that there is no way out persists. Fear says "you need security NOW" Security requires sustained effort over time Sustained effort requires some degree of psychological stability Psychological stability is impossible while fear dominates So fear prevents the very action that would resolve it "Find your passion" or "suck it up" does not pick this lock. They only distract, guilt-trip, and shame. The solution is to remove the blockers preventing one from realizing they can do something about the fear - realizing there is a way out. Once they see there is a way out - a credible pathway with a clear sequence of actions that leads from here to security - only then can they move. The correct order is: Safety -> Stability -> Passion -> Mastery Not: Passion -> Grind -> Success -> Safety lol

True, this is a common blocker. But some can't muster the energy to figure out if or why they should walk the 70 miles. They don't know that the 70 miles is even the right thing to do. They have other blockers. Energy levels is a big one. OP mentioned sleep problems in another thread. Running on fumes makes everything much more difficult.

You talkin to me bruh?

Lazy would be "I don't care about improving my life". Since you want to improve, you're not lazy. You're dealing with a structural problem. What is so hard about working hard? Are other things using up all your energy? Are you stuck in indecision? Do you fear committing to a specific path due to uncertainty or FOMO? Are you too distracted with other things you feel compelled to do? There's a reason or reasons for your resistance. All you have to do is find out what they are, then restructure. Restructuring takes time. You will have to endure an acclimation phase. Accept that, given your current structure, motivation and willpower will only come AFTER you gain momentum, not before. But they will come, so long as you restructure. There is no mind trick to solve your problem. No special alignment trick. You gotta remove the blockers.

It's risky as hell bro. Biggest risk is lost time you can't get back and wasted effort on acquiring skills you can't easily market. Thousands of hours invested in something that does nothing to pay the bills. This is the most common outcome. Proper support would be to account for risk. The hardest thing for artists is they have to spend years or decades making bets that their efforts will eventually pay off, and for the vast majority, they never do. That's just the reality. I'm not saying it's unlikely, reality is. Also, energy turns to shit when you don’t get reality feedback relatively quickly and often. This is a huge psychological cost that is never acknowledged. Can you really just push through for 5 years without reality feedback that what you're doing is working? You can, but the longer the feedback loop, the stronger your financial and psychological grounding needs to be. Ignore this at your own peril. My point assumes you care about not wasting time. If you don't care about wasted time, then maybe the risk drops significantly.

Too risky without massive talent in making music. And even then, still too risky. Even with massive skill, without capital, you’d need a lot of luck with exposure.

I have no reason to believe there's a lobby or a chooser. I don't think death is a state you'll ever be in. All I've ever known is consciousness, so I suspect experience just continues, though not through any soul progression or anything like that.

Time to move on. She doesn’t actually want to be friends so much as she wants to avoid feeling bad about hurting you. You might be looking at 3-6 months of suffering. You can speed the process up by thinking of her as little as possible. It feels impossible to move on, and it’s very painful, but you have to do it. Time will erase the pain and she will become a distant memory.

Death will be exactly like your experience before birth. There was not even a perceiver to perceive nothingness. At first glance, this can seem scary. Until you realize that if nothing can be known on either side, the only thing that can be known is in-between. So the in-between is all that can be known - all that can exist. In other words, you must exist, because it's impossible to know non-existence.

@Natasha Tori Maru @theleelajoker Thank you for taking the time and your thoughtful replies. I appreciate it. My case is a bit unusual. I'm no longer a spiritual seeker. I dropped the search because I saw what it offered and wasn't very interested. For a long time, I thought it was a matter of me just not putting in the work. Then, I figured out the path itself is not compatible with how life wants to express through me. Curiosity + construction + coherence-seeking. That's my engine. It doesn't matter if it's me or God acting these things out. It just matters that they are acted out. From my perspective, whether I experience inner peace or not is secondary to this expression. I think life is expressing through you as surrender and peace, and through me as exploration and creation. I don't experience mine as ego - just a different way of participating. I don't treat one as higher than the other. If I wanted to optimize for inner peace, I agree that your orientation would be better for that. It's possible I just never progressed far enough on the spiritual path and just said fuck it, I quit. But it's also possible the spiritual path can rightly be rejected. I agree that a higher intelligence is animating all of life. That recognition persists as a hum in the background, but I choose to not amplify it by surrendering my faculties, as I've done that before, to the detriment of what I am. @Natasha Tori Maru Thanks for the additional clarifications and your contemplative effort. Means a lot.

Lol, yeah. This error is very common actually. It's what happens when your model of humans doesn't properly account for demographics.

Yes, it’s a transition. You always wake up into a story. I once had a dream where I was being chased and I jumped off a cliff into water, but it was so high there was no way I was going to survive, so instead of landing in water, I landed in pure blackness. While I was there, I thought there was no way out but then I realized the dream wasn’t over if I didn’t want it to be. So I turned the emptiness into water and rose out of it. “What was it like before I was born?” and “What will it be like when I die?” are the same question. Also, if you have experience with anesthesia, that’s helpful.

You mean something like this: This seems like the "flood with zone with shit" strategy.

😂😂😂 This is brilliant!

This is hilarious. DOJ fucked up big time and released "redacted" files but the redactions were just black rectangle shapes placed on top of the words in Adobe Acrobat. They didn't actually delete the text, so you can just highlight it all and copy/paste to see the redactions. 😂😂😂 Jesus Christ, the fucking incompetence. Not sure how many files are like that but this is some funny shit, nonetheless.

@Natasha Tori Maru I've had a taste of that state as well, but one thing I noticed was missing in that state was thinking. Thinking was replaced by perception of experience and action. My actions were prompted by the environment and pre-existing behavior patterns, no thinking involved. But I don't see how this state could persist in a situation where one has to generate new strategies and actions over long timeframes where you're trying to oppose reality to create something new. Maybe it could persist in environments where you're already established and competent, but what happens in an environment where things actively resist you over long periods of time, where failure and friction persists? A few questions: In such a state, is it possible to have "values" or a "vision"? If there's no thinker, where are the values and vision located? Surely inside a self structure? And a really interesting question: Is it possible to think without activating the self structure? What if thinking itself requires a self structure? I intuit that more often than not, it does. You can see a tree without modeling yourself in relation to it, but the moment you think "what should I do about this tree" - you're back, because thought positions things in relation to each other, including you in relation to possibilities. I'm not sure it's possible to impose our will onto reality without thinking and activating the self structure. My main idea is: the non-dual state is incompatible with strategic thinking. I'm not saying you can operate from both, just that you can't operate from both at the same time, and you have to choose one or the other based on goals and circumstances. From my experience, when thinking turns on, the self turns on. Self just comes with the territory. If I care about imposing my will onto reality, I need thought, and therefore, self. I want to shape reality, not to experience it with no friction. I accept friction as the cost of imposing my will. No self, no long-term goals. That's a high price to pay for equanimity. lol Just some exploratory thoughts.

Identity is speaking from a comfortable perch. As a human, if you ignore what serves you for a decade, your life will fall apart.