Dylan Page

Hello. I’ve taken notice to the increasing cancer rates in young people, particularly in the ages ranges of 18-49 and would like to take more precautionary measures against it. Unfortunately, the increase isn’t high enough to justify mass screening, and therefore the only way for someone with no hereditary predisposition to get screening is through the private sector. These private screenings literally cost 2 grand per scan or more. Are there any other ways to affordably test for cancer?

@Something Funny Hey, just saw this post. Hopefully you see this reply. 1. Yes there will be a tolerance build up, as well as withdrawals if you quit. In my experience, the best way to reduce tolerance is to slowly ween off coffee and then slowly increase the dose. This avoids the harsh withdrawals while simultaneously reducing tolerance. Alternatively, you could just drink coffee like once a week and avoid the withdrawals while maintaining a fairly consistently low tolerance. The other 3 I cannot comment on as I do not have meaningful knowledge regarding it. However, in terms of psychoactive effects, I would have a strong suspicion that mixing caffeine (with low tolerance) with things like mushrooms/lsd would likely alter the experience. Whether or not it would enhance/interfere with that experience is another question. That I cannot really comment on.

Yeah not sure why I didn't google this guy. Would be very difficult to convince me that anything this guy says is worth listening to. Self-proclaimed psychic who gives pseudo-scientific health advice from information he gets via the spirit he is in communication with. I'm all for entertaining ideas that don't come from academia or the field of science generally, but they have to be competent people, not people who claim they are wizards with no provable results to show for it. Sorry my dude but this is an L. Would love to hear a rebuttal though. Being wrong about this would be quite exciting. @Adam M

Listening to this SoundCloud podcast now to honor what I said about having an open mind. There's always something suspicious about a guy constantly telling you to "buckle your seatbelts" and "sit down and relax, calm down and grab a cup of tea" as if he's going to drop a truth bomb so radical that my brain is gonna spill out of my ears. Just tell me how it is and what your evidence is for believing that. If you claim to have inaccessible, fundamentally impossible to understand information outside of your own mind and you cannot pull off anything less than a miracle I'm sorry but you are delusional. That is what this guy is saying. He claims to have the ability to go into a movie theatre and know exactly who in that movie theatre has cancer and the nature and origin of their cancer. My guy better have a fucking STACK of evidence to defend that claim or else I'm done listening to this. He legit sounds like someone trying to gaslight people who don't have the mental tools to avoid these kinds of pseudo-religious traps. I will continue to listen for a while but if this guy doesn't start making even an ounce of sense I will stand by my harsh rejection of your claims.

@Schizophonia Where are you from?

I realize I was being rude in that response but holy shit dude. Please do not spread blatant misinformation. It doesn’t take a genius to do ANY amount of google searching to realize what you just said is total bullshit. EBV is linked to the development of SOME cancers, not 99% of cancers. https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-terms/def/epstein-barr-virus#

@Adam M The world has been dealing with cancer for centuries and has no concrete solution and you claim to know what causes 99% of cancers. How fucking brainwashed can you be man. I don’t mind entertaining new ideas but this is ridiculous.

Hey everyone, I'm currently working towards a Chemical Engineering undergraduate degree and I'm taking Physics II (Electricity and Magnetism), Calculus III, Biology I and Chemistry II. I am also working a part-time job to support myself. The inspiration for this post was a test I took today for my Calculus class. Relative to most, I'm quite good at math. I'm always the one answering questions in class, I'm responsible and do my homework, show up to lectures, perform very well on quizzes, etc. However, on this exam, there were two questions that I was unable to answer. They were free-response questions that covered material we had covered in class before, but were either briefly discussed, or had strange twists to them, which under the intense stress and time pressure of the test, caught me VERY off guard. I genuinely put a LOT of energy into these classes and while I'm still learning how to be a good student, getting anything less than like a 95% just completely crushes me, especially when I'm putting in so much effort. While I think I'll be fine through school, and won't have too much trouble graduating, I would like to perform well, such that I could potentially go to graduate school. I believe I am gifted enough to do something useful in my life and would like to see that through. Everytime this shit happens, where I put in my all and somehow still get fucked over, it's like a knife to the heart. I'll improve over time, but I'd like to see if you guys have any study advice for getting through school. My coursework, at least for me, is quite time-consuming, and is mentally exhausting. I also lack intrinsic motivation a large majority of the time, and have to bully myself, gun to head, to get through some of the content. I sacrifice sleep and health to get all of my work done. There is a LOT more context to my life, and the factors that contribute to it, which affect my ability to study as well, but for now, I will leave it like that. TLDR: I tried my ass off studying for a math exam and still underperformed (Approx. a B). I am busy as fuck and cannot read the textbook three times and do 500,000 practice problems. Please, if anyone has any recommendations for navigating difficult coursework while simultaneously working and dealing with financial hardship, I would really appreciate it.

Disclaimer: I do not have cancer I've been afraid of cancer for about 6 years now. I'm 24 and my awareness of how horrible cancer is started to develop around 18, right out of highschool. Something about the randomness and indiscriminate nature of cancer, combined with my passion and curiosity for and about life makes cancer an unbelievably anxiety provoking reality. Additionally, preventative testing is largely gatekept and reserved for the rich. Modern doctors are not trained to prevent you from getting sick, they are trained to heal you if you are already sick. The problem is, cancer is one of those diseases that often can't be cured once symptoms show. Particularly with cancers regarding internal organs, where tumors are often asymptomatic and are not visible. This is one of the driving factors in my desire to become rich. It's one of the only defense mechanisms I have against cancer. Preventative, full body cancer screenings cost around 3000 dollars per scan through companies like Ezra or LifeGuard imaging, and often people will have to fly to a different state just to get these scans. Our infrastructure and education on the subject is absolutely abysmal. I would like to gather some thoughts from other people on the subject. I get this overwhelming feeling of helplessness, much different from the feeling of helplessness one might feel when he/she ideates about getting randomly hit by a bus, or struck by lightning. This disease, for some reason, feels far more likely than these random catastrophic events, and certainly much more out of my control. Diet, exercise, environmental factors, etc. are all things we have control over, but largely, your ability to maximize these things is 1. Extremely difficult and taxing from multiple perspective, is often hyper-expensive to maintain sustainably (try eating like a monk for a month and tell me how long you last. If the convenience or quality is not there, you will give up unless there is literally a gun to your head for 99.9% of people.) This puts money as the number 1 deterrent of being healthy. Now, to solve these problems, I am working really hard to make money, start my own business, etc. So that I can afford these treatments and lifestyles, but I also, as a result of that, am against the clock to make that happen. Each additional day I go by without a scan or a suboptimal lifestyle (from a health perspective) is an additional percentage of risk that is unnecessarily* forced upon me. If there is anything I can do to expedite this process, quell my fear of cancer, or acquire some kind of additional insight on the problem that might change my perspective on the issue, I would highly appreciate some feedback. Thanks!

I’m sure you’ve been asked this before but what do you think about putting your videos on Spotify?

@Leo Gura So your level of consciousness = your awareness of truth?

Anyone have any advice with this? Existential anxiety has been permeating my life for a pretty long time now. It's on a subconscious level. I can be perfectly fine, in my house, perfectly safe (as safe as I can reasonably be at that moment in time), but nonetheless, I'm legitimately quivering. Like there's a hole in my stomach, I start sweating, frequently urinating and cannot sleep no matter what. The only way I can calm myself down is by watching videos on meaning and death and human psychology. Does anyone know anything about this?

You say that I imagined my past but my memory seems to reflect the current moment. If I leave a bottle in a room and come back 20 minutes later, it’s still gonna be there. I guess I don’t know what you mean by I “imagined it”, because it seems to have validity in this reality. I guess you could say that the bottle still being there is imagined, and the laws of physics and stuff, and I guess the general concept of continuity, such that a comprehensible reality in which I can actually function is created. One of the reasons I’m concerned about this is not only due to the extremely imperative function of memory, but also the fact that my past makes me who I am, or at least who “I”, my ego, is. Saying that it never happened undermines this and destroys my sense of self, which I care deeply about. Perhaps a better way to think about this reality is that it’s imagined but it’s also self contained and in that way, it’s “real”?

I suppose the biggest problem I’m having is understanding the implications to this in relationship to my life. @Leo Gura

@Leo Gura Idk, there’s something that just doesn’t click with it. The reason I can’t take psychedelics is because thoughts that come up during trips scare me beyond reason. I suppose I need to shed those fears before I try to just go for truth head on, it needs to be a gentle and slow process

@Heart of Space yeah definitely, but even to me it’s confusing, my head is a thick forest of trees and I’m trying to figure out what’s going on. I’m only reaching out because I’m desperate, but I’m sort of figuring it out.

It’s not that I necessarily want to be dealing with this, it’s more like I have to/cannot be stable without answers to existential questions because I recognize how important they are in relation to my life. I workout, eat healthily, am financially stable, have friends, hobbies, everything. That’s not the issue. @Member

@Aaron p I can’t smoke weed without having a panic attack, not a single hit

Hey everyone, I’ve got a problem that I don’t really know how to solve. After learning so much about reality, sense data, consciousness, the brain and it’s relationship to mind, etc. I’m kind of at this standstill where I just have no idea what to make of any of it. I just sit here and realize that I don’t know shit, and I really mean, I don’t know fucking anything for sure, at all. While this notion is pretty unsettling, and quite honestly, a core shaking scare when you realize how profound it is, the hardest problem for me is that I just have no idea what to do in life as a result of this. I‘ve been trying to figure out what I’m going to do with my life for a decent amount of time now and given that I’m aware that there is “nothing to do” and that for all I know, my past isn’t “real”, everything I’m seeing and experiencing could be some drawn out illusion, and that I can be so easily tricked that any assumption about what my reality is is effectively baseless, leaves me in this mental situation of what I would call “existential confusion”. Not only do I have no idea what I want to do in life, I feel like I also have no ground from which to come up with an answer, and all of the meanings in my life currently, could just be some illusory lie that sucks all value out of it.

I guess another way of putting it is that I feel like I’m in neverland. Like this reality is just arbitrary, it gives me this weird sensation of being lost in a foreign land, even though I’ve lived here my whole life.

So I have never liked weed, but after not smoking it for like 5 months, I wanted to see if I still hate it. Unfortunately, it resulted in easily one of the worst nights of my life. I took one hit. One. After about 30 minutes, I thought of some super anxiety provoking idea (I don’t even remember what it was) and the anxiety spread through my body like a wave of energy. Normally I get some kind of mild anxiety, but this was just absolutely unbelievable. I had to walk outside for like 20 minutes. On this walk I experienced something more akin to a psychedelic than marijuana. My mind was going absolutely fucking haywire. I started seeing mental visions of my visual field twisting and turning into geometric shapes and viscerally felt the anxiety swallowing me whole. I almost stopped breathing. After it died down I still felt like shit, and didn’t sleep at all that night. I finally returned to baseline, but while I was still high, it felt like it was possible that I would never return. If I had to exist like that for more than a couple of days I would have 100% committed suicide. How the fuck can that happen to me with one hit while my friends and rip it all day like candy?

@JosephKnecht nah but I’ve done shrooms and acid in the past, both low dose, also freaked the fuck out on acid, but weed is probably worse than shrooms

@Osaid right, and we tend to use “morals” or “logic” to justify what we really care about, and that is a feeling. Whether it be the feeling of being popular, or intelligent, or whatever. The people that want to make the world a “better” place think they are doing something almost fundamentally important, but in actuality, they are trying to make it better in their own eyes. And of course, people are also motivated by running from bad feelings as well and I’m sure I don’t need to explain the unfortunate variety of all of them.

I’ve come to the conclusion that people do things for 2 reasons. Chasing good feelings and alleviating themselves from bad ones. This may seem obvious, but when I say everyone, I mean literally everyone. You could say, well a drug addict does it for sure, but what about someone chasing enlightenment? Don’t they have some kind of higher motivation? The answer is no. People seek to understand the world around them and themselves for a sense of control, perhaps the high of superiority, an escape from nihilism, and a bunch of other different reasons, all ultimately coming back to chasing highs and escaping lows. I personally pursue understanding because I am unsatisfied with chasing highs (whenever I chase a feeling the thought that it’s meaningless and shallow pops into my head) and am disgusted by nature (and hope to somehow alleviate this disgust through deeper understanding or making change in the world). But the jist of this post is that everyone is motivated by feelings! Not ideas, not logic, not morals, but feelings! Any thoughts?

Recently (past 4 months) I've had tons of health problems that seems to be coming from nowhere. I've been to every doctor I can think of, experimented in tons of ways to get rid of my symptoms and nothing works. All of the doctors said I was fine, I went to a pulmonologist, cardiologist, PCP, watched tons of videos trying to explain everything, and nothing works. My primary symptoms are: Shortness of breath, itching, joint weakness I do live a relatively sedentary lifestyle and have been working for about a month on it by making changes to my diet and exercise routine, but again, nothing is changing. I don't like the idea of taking drugs to solve medical problems unless absolutely necessary and I'm unsure on how to figure out what my issue is. Does anyone have any idea how to help me?