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It's not normal at all. It's only normal for PUAs trying to do cold approach, which is not how dating is typically done. If I'm remembering correctly, I've already given you my advice on this topic. You need to make friends and build a social circle. I understand that may not be an option given that it's lockdown, but you can't really be surprised then when girl after girl flakes on you. If you are intent on going through with the solo cold approach thing, I think it's foolish, but there are likely some things you can do to reduce flaking. 1) Make sure you are texting her right away as soon as you get her number. A simple "Hey it's StarStruck from X" is usually enough. She should text back, especially if she just gave you her number. Now when you text her for your date, she sees who you are and that she replied earlier to you. Some PUAs even send a picture so the girl remembers. I've never done that, but you can experiment. 2) If the date is more than a couple of days out, you can't just wait until that day to contact her. That's basically a guaranteed flake. Keep in contact with her during the week leading up to the date. And keep it light & fun, you're just keeping the connection alive. 3) Schedule dates earlier. Usually the sooner after you just got her number the better. The more days in between, more of the chance that you're getting dropped. 4) Another sneaky PUA move you can do is on the day of the date, you text her "hey I'm going to be like 30 minutes late, can we push until X time?". The reason being that this gives the girl a chance to flake on you and cancel if she was going to do so, without you wasting your whole day. 5) Make sure your dates are convenient and low commitment. As much as I might dislike our modern flakey dating culture, what I've found is that some girls will simply not go on a date with you because it's inconvenient and requires too much investment on her part. She has to drive, or go somewhere she's not familiar, or risk spending two hours on a dinner date that will suck. Ideally she is willing to make that kind of commitment, but good luck with that if you're doing cold approach. I've found it pretty rare unless you had an exceptionally good interaction or the girl just has nothing better to do. Usually you need some of both. 6) Make sure you're getting her on social, not just her phone number. And make sure your social media is good, with regular posts and / stories if you're using Instagram. That's a super easy way for you not to just be another random phone number in her mind, but an actual human being. She can go through all your posts, watch your stories, all with no extra investment or neediness on your part. The flip side of this is that if your social media sucks, then this will backfire. Maybe she thought you were cool during the five minutes on the street, but as soon as she see's your bathroom selfie picture with mirror stains, she's out. So get that going well. If you do all of this you'll definitely up your odds. You will still get many flakes, but just not as many.

@Don Wei It sounds like you’re experiencing the stress of leaping into the unknown. You’ve taken a gamble on your dreams and you don’t know if it’s going to work out or if there’s any light at the end of that tunnel. Things are chaotic, unstable. A grounding practice of meditation could certainly help. Find ways to be calm even within the chaos, so to speak. Get outside, laugh with friends, etc. Inevitably you’re going to want to create a more stable situation. But if that’s not in the cards at the moment, you can still do what you can to ground yourself.

Unfortunately I don’t think it’s that simple. Excess C02 is only a fraction of the damage being caused to the environment right now. It’s arguably not even the most significant, given that the earth could regulate excess C02 in other circumstances. But when you’ve got massive deforestation, soil quality degradation, key species die off, etc etc, excess C02 becomes even more problematic. And it’s not as simple as blaming corporations either. That would be nice. But corporations as just one piece of an extremely complex socio-political-economic system. You can’t just say “it’s the corporations” without the addressing the entire system. But of course addressing the entire system is far more challenging. In fact, it’s not even clear what the solution is at that point, which is quite scary. People talking about using technology like carbon capture machines or blotting out the sun, but do we really have any idea what the consequences of that will be? So far we have a very bad track record of understanding how our technology will affect an incredibly complex system like Earth. There are dangers to climate alarmism. But there’s also dangers to people rolling over and hitting the snooze button. We need to strike a balance. I agree with what @Girzo said, it’s extremely complicated. @Alysssa It is scary to see. Ultimately I feel it’s good that people experience a little bit of fear and frustration, it at least shows they are paying attention. The challenge for those of us who are aware is to eventually go beyond that fear. To be in fear is to still be in ego. You cannot ultimately create environmental harmony from fear, only love can do that.

Yeah we get these clowns every once in a while. These are the same dudes that have never heard of foreplay .

It is lit, but it quickly becomes unlit if you start having problems getting it up. In my experience, it’s not just that you’re desensitizing yourself, it’s that you’re actually rewiring how your body expects to have sex. If every time you look at porn you jerk off for 10 minutes, your body will expect to finish in 10 minutes when you actually have sex. That’s the pattern your body knows. Arousal -> 10 minutes of stimulation -> ejaculation. Conversely, you can use this to your advantage and wire the sexual habits you want.

...but actually lol

@paradiseengineering How’s your diet/exercise? If you’re watching porn or jerking off, stop. You could be wiring some bad boner habits. Otherwise I’d say you just need to relax. You don’t need to do anything to get a boner, boners just boner.

Careful with the ad promotion. That will get you banned here.

@RoerAmit Because mastery is about much more than actually mastering a particular domain. It’s about how that process transforms you. And how through it you can find deep fulfillment. Anything that takes you 10 minutes to master will be meaningless, because there is no journey to get there. It also ensures that only a limited number of masters can exist in any given domain. Because you cannot possibly master many, many different domains in one lifetime, only the select few who dedicate themselves to that level will make it. As it should be. You will learn patience, persistence, and true self-esteem through the mastery process. So don’t get it twisted. You might be God, but you came here to learn. That is what you chose. Don’t let your impatience cloud your judgment. Surrender to the journey.

Supposedly Jed McKenna is not a real person. He is a fictional guru based off the “real life” teacher of Ken McMordie. The books are mostly written that way for good marketing. It makes them interesting and controversial to read.

Spiritual ego is my favorite ego

Yes in my experience Green does. Green loves to talk about connecting to and accepting your emotions, even the ugly ones. More or less, which in my experience is what happens at stage Green. Stage Green is big on authenticity and getting in touch with your primal, “true” self beyond social conditioning.

Like more like a bunch of Orange pickup artists going Green. Green is all about community and “back to the earth”, which is likely why it appears to be Purple or maybe even Red. They may be embracing some ideas from those colors, but in of itself this feels very Green to me.

I will be visiting The Venus Project today. If you don’t know about it, The Venus Project is a SD Green / Yellow techutopia based off the work of Jacque Fresco. It promises to form what is called a “Resource-Based Economy”. Feel free to drop any questions you might have and I will ask them. I am not affiliated with The Venus Project in any way, just looking to learn more about solutions to our collective problems.

@SQAAD Well let’s consider what being a “billionaire” actually means. When people say “I want to be a billionaire”, they are not actually talking about having a billion dollars. Because money is totally relative. Given enough inflation, a billion dollars could be worth next to nothing. If everyone made a billion dollars a year, it would carry no significant weight. You’d just be average. So what people really want when they say “I want to be a billionaire” is “I want to be at the top of the wealth pyramid. I want far more wealth than anyone else”. That’s what being a billionaire is. It’s wealth polarization. Someone has, and someone does not. Now you could say “well it’s fair they have more wealth than anyone else because they worked harder and / or provided more value to society”. But regardless of the justification, a society of polarized wealth is what you’re agreeing to by having billionaires. So yes, it seems to me that anyone who wants to really be a billionaire is coming from quite a bit of ego. It’s a Win/Lose scenario. They can only be a billionaire if others are not. However, our cultures comes with ready made excuses for this. Beliefs about individualism, meritocracy, freedom, etc. It’s assumed that everyone should be focused on making as much money as they can. Who doesn’t want more money? Thus, I don’t think you have to be a psychopath to become a billionaire. You just have to follow many of the stories our culture has provided. Ignorance is as powerful as psychopathy.

Nothing in particular. I’m not big into engineering. I would look into Jacque’s book The Best Money Can’t Buy. They also have a Youtube channel for the Venus Project where I’m sure you can find more specifics.

@blackchair It sounds like you’re evolving for sure. And maybe you peak at some of the higher stages. But you’re most likely not solidly at indigo. Most people don’t even make it to tier 2, let alone tier 3.

My conclusion: I visited the Venus Project to learn. Learning includes both discovering things that work and things that don't work. And I believe I found some of both at the Venus Project. I do not believe their ideas for building a resource-based economy and getting rid of all government are possible any time soon. But when I toured their facilities, 99% of what I saw was not related to that. Mostly what I saw were engineering models for transportation, housing and urban design. Ways for buildings to be safer. Ways for cities to converse more energy. Ways to make transportation more efficient. Jacque Fresco was not an economist or a business man. He was a scientist and engineer at his core. That is what he did best. And that is what the Venus Project should be focused on. Forget the resourced-based economy. It's not going to happen, and we don't need it to happen. We can largely remove the deleterious effects of the current money-economy without actually getting rid of money. And if we do eventually want to get rid of money, great. But we are not there yet. Proponents of TVP may say that I am ignoring root causes by saying they should leave out the resource-based economy. And perhaps I am. But you cannot always address root causes. Addressing root causes is an ideal. Sometimes you have to address symptoms and work within the parameters of what you got. Focus instead on the engineering. I'm not an engineer who can validate Jacque's ideas, but I suspect many of them are very good in that department. And much more feasible than restructuring the entire global economy / political system.

They're definitely starting small and looking to baby step things. They really don't have any other option. My pleasure

It is taking a long time and I don't suspect they are close. Especially since Jacque died, who was basically the visionary. I imagine it's not as simple as calling Elon Musk up on the phone and asking for a couple million dollars. Their plan is to build something so they can attract future investors with something tangible. But of course even that takes funding and people who believe in it.

Yes there's quite a lot of problems with it, some of which I feel I have a much better understanding of now that I visited. The biggest gap for them seems to be resources. They simply cannot afford to do what they are planning on doing and not been able to raise the necessary funds to do so. Of course even if they were successful in fundraising, the question remains whether it would actually solve the problems they claim it would solve. I am skeptical, especially in their belief that they can get rid of money / government anytime soon. However, the majority of Jacque Fresco's work is engineering designs related to transportation, housing and urban design. He really was an engineer at heart. And some of those designs seem much more tangible, practical and possibly implementable.

They do not have a solid projected timeline. When asked, Roxanne did not even provide a ballpark figure. As far as integrating into current cities, I only got a few details. They mostly are interested in building from scratch. It also seems that some older cities would have to be demolished entirely.

They do. Personally, I have my doubts about many of their solutions.

As soon as Elon colonizes Mars

Roxanne (the co-founder) was very critical of Trump. Apparently she knew people who got swindled in some of his earlier "business" deals. In general though, they don't care much for democracy or believe our current political system can solve any real problems. So I doubt they voted.