trenton

I left a comment on his most recent video telling him not to get himself killed for the sake of YouTube views. He probably won't stop, but it's worth a shot.

It took me a lot of practice to get from 1700 blitz to 2000. I know a young prodigy at chess club who has an online blitz and bullet rating of 2500. When it comes to longer time controls I have a small edge and I play a little bit better until my time gets low. I lost pretty badly in the tie breakers though. If I study him I might figure something out for blitz. We have some pretty close and tense games otherwise. One bit of hope for me in blitz was a bughouse tournament I played in and won. My time control was excellent despite having only five minutes for the whole game and I was stalling for my team mate. We ended up thing for first, but I proved that I can excellent time control even though I often end up "living off of the increment" in 3+2 games for blitz. I started on lichess back around 2017 at 1700 in classical and rapid. I have been practicing constantly and have been on this kind of slope of gradual improvement overtime. I have some bumps and peaks, but overall I have been getting better all along.

@cookiemonster I normally don't play on chess.com so my rating there is low. I typically play on lichess.org with my rapid and classical being around 2200. My blitz is around 2000. I tried to break 2100 in blitz, but the closest I got was 2080. My peak rating on longer games was around 2270.

I have the right stuff to make it happen. Other players recognize my talents and agree that I am under rated. I played black in this game against an International Master and won. https://lichess.org/guK01WfB Am I willing to make my entire life chess? No, and there are world champions like Kasparov and Carlsen who also play sports and are politically active. Some grandmasters are also psychologists or engineers. If I were to do something aside from chess it would be restructuring our society such that we appreciate the significance of emotional mastery which is completely overlooked in education. This vision I have resonates with me most emotionally because all my life I struggled with self manipulation in which I tried to push away my most authentic emotions to convince myself I was someone else. If there are other people who struggled in this way, then I could make my life about teaching society the limitations of education and how to overcome them. One of the consequences would be to prevent suicide, but there would be a much broader impact beyond that. This leaves me with a big decision because these two directions for my life are good, but the second resonates with me most emotionally. I don't yet know how to actualize the second and I still don't make enough to get away from family. This leaves me with some uncertainty and feeling split as to where I should go. I will keep researching other methods for actualizing the second vision.

@Ineedanswers I want to live my life without self manipulation. Self manipulation can take on many different forms. I can manipulate myself into being self sacrificing, greedy, spiritual, caring for mankind, and more. It becomes a great source of suffering when I convince myself to be a different way. This self manipulation can be hyper rational as a means of rejecting my emotions and gut intuitions. If I could effortlessly live my life without self manipulation such that I live in a flow state allowing life to happen to me naturally, then I would be so happy that it makes me cry. The only thing to do after that is to help others stop self manipulation so they can happily be themselves.

@Kross I felt like that a lot through years of my life. I would criticize myself for enjoying my suffering as if I should not enjoy it, creating more suffering in the process. First of all, you need to check if you take pride in painful memories of the fact that you suffer in a unique way. This is the subtle joy you get when you replay painful memories repeatedly. So far I tried telling a psychologist about this kind of self manipulation, but they seemed stumped, I find Leo's book list on emotional mastery more helpful. My psychologist guessed that it could be low self esteem and that if I somehow feel unworthy, then it could cause us to feel that we deserve to suffer or be punished. It sounds like a good guess that could apply to some people. I was actually working on this aspect of my life earlier today. I found that my most limiting beliefs are my meta beliefs. This includes beliefs like "my beliefs should be true" "I should not be self deceived for the sake of emotional comfort" and "I am in control". These are well intended, but these beliefs can create these emotional problems if not examined carefully. There is a snuck premise in these beliefs which is that I need a world view to tell me what reality is. This comforts me by keeping me grounded in my sense of reality, but really this comes from the fear of reality collapsing as I question the very experience I'm having. As for control, our self judgement can be used to imply that we are the cause of things happening whether they are good or bad. If the idea of not being in control scares you, then this could be a source of self judgement and emotional turmoil that makes you feel even less in control. Meditating on these desires and observing them can be a good start. This can then be turned into some kind of spiritual masochism in which we tear our worldviews apart. This can lead to a form of suffering mixed with pride, and if you let go of the pride, you let go of the suffering. If you have a habit of doing this, then part of your mind will not want to change even if you are suffering. You could then try letting go of your meta beliefs just as an exercise to see how it makes you feel, and then it gives you a window to change this habit. For me my suffering was mostly internal and consisted of self judgement rather than thinking of problems in the world of with others. I don't know what your specific beliefs may be, but I hope this gives you a start. If nothing else, you can try recognizing that you do love suffering, and in this sense you never really suffered which gives you a window into spiritual healing. Maybe this does not make sense to you, but at least recognize that to reject the fact that enjoy suffering creates falsehood and it results in a spiral of emotional instability. If you start from self honesty, then you are on the right track.

There were a lot of pick pockets when I went to England, France, and Germany with my sister and my high school. While I was watching the street performers in London, it was night and they were spinning on their heads and singing songs. A suspicious couple walked up behind me and tried to pick pocket me just as the music was getting loud. I was suspicious, so I was listening to the movement behind me carefully. They quickly unzipped my back pack to try to reach two fingers in and grab something, but I felt the vibrations and took off my back pack, turning around to confront them. They walked away, but they didn't get anything. There's a lot of pick pockets in these areas that target American tourists. There were also bullies in school who messed with my back pack and tried to steal my things because they were jealous of my good grades. Maybe this made me more sensitive to pick pockets.

I have an honest perspective on family, crime, sexuality, and personal responsibility. I lived out this perspective when I was a child. Blue reacting to red: I come from a family of criminals who were constantly abusing drugs and stealing money. I needed to take personal responsibility for this and recognize that my family is a terrible example for me. My father told me that I could be the one to break the chain of crime in the family after he was routinely stuck in it. I understand that people are more likely to become criminals of they drop out of school like my father. Unlike him, I will be a sharp, disciplined student with straight A's. (Which I did actually.). My school was also a bad example for me. I only had one detention in my life which was when the teacher was bullying me believe it or not. Aside from the teachers blaming children for the problems in the world, sexual impropriety was common. There were grade school children flirting with girls, humping them, twerking, and all sorts of inappropriate things. This all continued into high school, in fact 6/7 girls are expected to experience sexual harassment by the time they graduate. I chose not to participate in the actions of other children, so I stayed to myself, away from them. I don't want to get myself in trouble. I was bullied by multiple students who were jealous of my grades and stole my homework. I was one of those students at one point. I stopped caring about doing my homework and nearly failed. When I realized my selfishness could have hurt me by getting me held back, I snapped and became a straight A student. During this time I also copied some of the inappropriate behaviors of other students so they would think I'm funny and be my friends. I never really felt comfortable with the sexual topics every student talked about, and I struggle to find how people are supposed to handle these topics. In fact I started laughing at kids for being gay even though I had gay thoughts and I was afraid of looking girly by admitting I like Justin Bieber. It is unacceptable that sexual harassment is so commonplace, but it is unhealthy to isolate myself from other people when bad behavior is this common. I did it to my family as well. This makes me feel lost and confused as I try to figure complicated situations myself. This lead to hyper rationalizing in response to emotions I did not like or understand how to handle. This is an interesting example of stage blue mixed with resistance to mainstream culture or my environment. Normally I would be a conformist at this stage, but instead I became an individual who questioned society and loved my own uniqueness. There are definitely qualities of multiple stages if I take into account my reaction to religion when I was young. I first wanted to know by which standards should I evaluate which religion was correct. It still rubbed me the wrong way even though my family was Catholic. I felt that I would lock myself into a narrow perspective which I would spend my life defending with wallpaper over my doubts all the way to my death bed. I still felt that religion was somehow partially right, but that converting to any religion would be limiting and problematic. There are definitely qualities of stage blue in this post, but I have a negative view of conformity because of how personal responsibility contrasted with my environment. Perhaps there are qualities of yellow like being a lone wolf and being open minded. I did a lot of self reflection while I was away from everyone else.

@Knowledge Hoarder I think if we were preparing for the worst case scenario, humanity should be taking steps to mitigate the damages of water wars. Since there were nuclear stand offs in the past it makes sense to ban nuclear weapons, taking them out of the equation when it comes to water wars. World superpowers don't want to do that though. Secondly, there is the mass extinction of sea life. If some economies like Japan depend on sea life, then they need to switch their dependency to other food sources like vegetation. The point is that vegetables take the least amount of energy to make, especially when comparing it to raising cattle. That would take a lot more resources. Maybe other nations should rely more on vegetation. I don't know what to do about the rising sea levels displacing millions of people and destroying farm lands. A bunch of them will probably die if other nations are not willing to take all the refugees. This will also lead to the migration of mosquitos, which is why the U.S.military thinks climate change is a national security threat. I guess we need more pills For preventing malaria. It is the impoverished and undeveloped countries that will be hurt most of all even though they are the least responsible. It will likely lead to various genocides because of water conflicts caused by droughts. I would imagine that helping underdeveloped countries finish developing while eliminating poverty would help them to more effectively respond to The climate disaster. If corporations were taxed more, maybe it would help finish the development of Africa. The earth is expected to heat by 3.5 degrees at the rate we are going even though we are technically in an ice age. For some reason Leo does not seem very concerned about climate change. He says things like "a couple of degrees won't kill you.". I would like to know what he sees that we don't . Maybe he thinks the fear mongering and political biases are making climate change seem worse than it actually is. I would love to know what science there is to back that up.

That makes a lot sense. Why should we assume that one education is the best for everybody? The world needs engineers so our philosophers have air conditioning and proper plumbing. Normally students are not given freedom to choose their education until college because most of the courses I took in high school were required. I still think math, english, history, and health should be required. It is the advanced courses like calculus that make no sense to require just like studying Shakespeare's plays. Some of the required courses are superfluous and not everybody needs to take them. Maybe required math should stop around algebra and geometry. How much freedom do you think students should have in high school? How far should required courses go on various subjects?

A common complaint about how philosophy is taught is that people are not taught how to think. The main goal of teaching philosophy should be to help people use their minds as effectively as possible. Instead of this, philosophy becomes studying the history of delusional men. Studying mankind's mistakes can be useful if you learn from them and grow as a result. This does not help as much if students merely debate what a text from centuries ago meant. students can't really know for sure unless they ask the old men. In compulsory philosophy courses students should contemplate questions like "what is the mind and how should it be used.". These individual answers can then be improved upon through teaching logical fallacies that philosophers made in the past. Rather than giving students a philosophy on how to behave, it would be more interesting to let students be their own philosophers and then use history to supplement and improve their thinking.

@vizual given the amount of people who fall for conspiracy theories that kill them, I can see the significance of learning about epistemology. Philosophy can teach us the importance of self reflection as we question everything we believe, making us more open minded in the process. I find it disappointing that philosophy is not even an optional course when it could be a special AP course, encouraging students to get college credits as well, saving money in the process. Maybe schools are afraid of making philosophy courses required because some people feel deeply threatened when questioning their relationship to reality. It could cause an existential crisis for students being exposed to the truth of no self for the first time. I can still see amazing benefits in helping students to tolerate difficult questions and not knowing. This could translate into tolerance for radically different world views, reducing political violence as people think carefully about what they believe.

In my work place at Kroger I recognized that my co-workers don't like to think about the harsh reality that many of us feel like a waste of potential. We feel like there is almost no expression of creativity and it creates a recipe for long term bitterness. This ties into life purpose and self actualization very well. I prefer to face these unpleasant realities rather than sweep them under the rug. this resulted in feeling intense sadness, frustration, and anger which is sometimes mixed with suicidal thoughts. I would like to have an optimized approach to confronting harsh realities so that I can get the most growth out of them. I often approached these things in a way that leads me to feeling devastated and stuck. My intention is to grow from facing what most people wouldn't. I found that there are no job opportunities for creative expression in the company unless I move to corporate Kroger. Otherwise in jobs like the one I have people try to cope for the lack of creative expression through pet contests. I could do it, but I have a bigger task at hand. It looks like I would have to start college over after getting an associate of science degree. I end up feeling lost and overwhelmed by everything I could do. It looks like my best bet is further focus on the life purpose course or keep trying to gain something from the book list. Otherwise I would need to find a way to generate value outside of a normal job. I am doing some chess coaching which is a start, but there is probably more I could do. I end up putting a lot of pressure on myself to achieve something special. Letting this go helps me sleep at night. There is still a strong urge to live a life beyond mediocrity and it comes with these emotional reactions.

@Gianna I'm glad you found this helpful. I understand that for many people who are not philosophically minded it seems crazy to consider the idea that suffering is an illusion. I wonder what it would take for a society to apply these insights. I remember in high school there were some talks about teenagers getting depressed and committing suicide. These teachers were doing there best to tell people some of the signs that indicate that a student is suicidal. In spite of their efforts, many students still quietly struggled with a lot of emotional problems and did not know what to do about them. For a long time I was also struggling with domestic violence and drug addiction in my family. I felt like I was constantly fighting myself and my suffering felt very real. If these insights were shared with schools, I know their good intentions would pay off. This is similar to my conclusions about my life purpose in that I generate unique and overlooked perspectives with which I can derive powerful truths through my unique way of thinking to approach complex issues in counterintuitive ways.

@Gianna I meant that I do this in a physical journal. It has a different feeling compared to doing it online when it feels closer and more personal. I also feel pressure to keep posting when I commit to these online projects. I did an online journal a while back before I purchased the life purpose course and book list. Aside from the journal, what I discuss with my brother is specific to our life experiences. secondly, in order to resolve inner emotional tension, it takes a lot of different perspectives. Overtime, you can observe your thoughts and emotions and watch how they gradually evolve in terms of how you react to them. This happens through many small insights, gradually being integrated into your psyche. Do you have a thread about low self esteem in which you expand on this topic? The most powerful insight weakens suicidal thoughts a lot. Although you can moralize to yourself about suicide being selfish and use this to avoid killing yourself successfully, it is not optimal. It is far more powerful to recognize that the desire to die comes from love in that one seeks to reduce suffering. If you hesitate to commit suicide, then this is also a form of love when the desire to survive conflicts with the desire to die. If there is hesitancy, then there could still be hope. Rather than having these desires conflict with each other, one can meditate and observe both desires while releasing attachment to both. If one attempts to make the desire to live win out, then although this is another form of love, it backfires if the desire to die is repressed and not fully resolved. This leads to further inner conflict and backsliding into depressive episodes full of hopelessness. Through this counterintuitive move to release both the desire to live and the desire to die, one can begin to recognize the deeper underlying truth. The truth is that love is your essential nature and nothing can truly separate you from it. This also means that evil is an illusion, therefore harsh moral judgements about your behavior become untenable. This insight is what is being missed by most of society and it could save a lot of people's lives while fixing self esteem issues. This is how one can move from suicidal, to getting by, to optimally coping. I am currently checking my coping mechanisms to see if I am getting by, or can I optimize them to discover something powerful and counterintuitive as this can lead to a massive difference in our thinking. It is possible to self reflect so deeply that you can experience a state of consciousness in which you realize that all suffering is love, and in this sense you never truly suffered as outrageous as it may sound. you could feel as if all of your suffering was an illusion and you were never hurt at all. This makes me feel like crying in a good way. This might have been what Jesus meant when he said "the kingdom of heaven is found within.". My brother struggled with the philosophical and religious sounding insights and he found it helpful to study ego defense mechanisms as a form of practical psychology. You can find a list on Wikipedia and ask yourself "how do I use these defense mechanisms?"

@Gianna thank you for this affirmation. I have studied multiple books on life purpose and emotional mastery from the list. I notice that I am coping with all of these things far better than I used to be. I am glad to see that the book list is worth my time and this investment has made me better in areas of my life that schools did not teach. I am continuing to look for the most optimal ways to be an emotional conductor. I am far enough along that I am able to help other people like my brother cope with low self esteem, and with more growth I could be even more help to him. I will journal about some of these ideas for a few days before making a similar thread in self actualization or life purpose section as the initial intensity is fading away. This is my goal behind facing difficult truths.

@Hap E-Boi that sounds useful. I never heard of the Reid diet, but it makes sense to avoid foods that worsen overstimulation. I find myself lying awake at night for hours. Sometimes melatonin works, but not always. I also remember I eat a lot of cereal and oatmeal. What did the Reid diet look like for you? I'm 22 and still eat a lot of cereal.

@Tim R I think a related question is "how do we know humanity is evolving at the rate it should be?" you pointed out that many species are not evolving fast enough and going extinct. How are we so confident that we are evolving fast enough. I don't know how to evaluate that this is the rate of evolution humanity needs at this time. Everything I was told in science, botony, biology, and meteorology contradicts these assertions and we could be underestimating their political biases. Meanwhile, not everybody is affected equally. The impoverished nations will suffer the most, so humanity as a whole should survive in spite of the water wars. I remember that water wars is the main issues that got me concerned about politics to begin with as I think of it as the biggest threat to mankind aside from maybe nuclear weapons combined with water wars.

I am 1.9 on primary and 2.9 on secondary. there were some good questions. One interesting question was "I feel bad when my actions cause emotional harm to other people.". I used to feel very bad about it to the point that it became dysfunctional. Now I don't worry about it as much because I hurt myself a lot in the process of worrying about it. It sounds like a bad quality, but it doesn't have to be. In fact many of my behaviors were linked to autism spectrum disorder because people don't understand me. I thought I would be higher for primary, but I don't hurt people in purpose... Usually. I remember one was "love is overrated.". The way I usually think about love, it cannot be overrated because it reveals to me that all evil and suffering are illusions and everything is perfect. For this test I figured they meant the usual way of thinking about love. In this case I think of people who get to use emotional manipulation on me through various social games or people assuming they have to have a relationship or a family or they can't be happy. I am perfectly fine on my own. It is not that I'm afraid of other people, it is just obnoxious. It is worth noting that my parents were both drug addicts and there was domestic violence that could weigh in this evaluation of love. I don't think the second part is reliable. I really had no idea what I was doing with those words. Maybe I got less then have of them right, but that was very hard and I could have easily done worse or better.

This is a very interesting to me from a spiritual and personal growth standpoint. I have so many memories both good and bad that I could integrate lessons from or release the emotional significance I attach to them. If I released all of the emotional significance, it would almost be like a blank slate. Maybe it would be like transcending time if ego cannot exist without memories of a past or aspirations and fears of the future to give context to "me." I would like to spend about 1 month alone so I could write out all of my memories and meditate on the emotions attached to them. I do a little bit every day and I can tell it is hard to do because I have to go to work, occasionally fight with my family as we play a bunch of power games with each other through emotional manipulation, and I am practicing against strong chess players for my tournaments. If these were not concerns for me, I could get a lot of inner work done and I could be a considerably different person in terms of my consciousness. Currently, my work allows for one week vacation at most. I do my best to stay out of the fights because when I'm angry I'm more likely to say something stupid, yet I also feel harassed. as for my memories, I often have inner conflict regarding my interpretation of past events. This can lead to harsh self judgement, intrusive thoughts, and other limitations. How much do you think this kind of spiritual practice could accomplish? Maybe I should start by writing out all memories good or bad that has a strong emotional charge.

@Knowledge Hoarder that was a very interesting study done on conspiracy theorists. This is probably what more people need to be taught in order to prevent them from subscribing to these theories to begin with. What other studies do you know of?

@Leo Gura that makes perfect since. It is not feasible to reform every child rapist, hence criminal prevention is key to addressing crime. I could apply the same thing to ideology, COVID, education, and more. It is not feasible to heal everybody in the hospital, therefore many are expected to die for a lack of ventilation. This is probably a better approach than convincing conspiracy theorists. I remember another saying that when you learn something wrong once, you have to relearn it 7 times. It would be easier to work with a blank slate because many conspiracy theorists may use the fact that I voted for Biden to discredit anything I say. This would be attacking the messenger, and there would be nothing I could do at that point.

If I were to talk to people who subscribe to one of the many dangerous conspiracy theories, then I would try to redirect their efforts toward something better rather than convince them that they are wrong. In this process I try to be as non-judgemental as possible. For example, if a person subscribed to the theory that the election of 2020 was rigged and Trump won, I don't think I can convince them they are wrong. Instead I would tell them how elections are rigged and what can be done to stop it. This includes the need for a constitutional convention to address term limits and campaign finance reform. Other measures include stopping the abuse of lobbying, gerrymandering, and voter suppression. Many people on supported the for the people act until Republican leaders told them it was the leftists trying to push their agenda. Many of these conspiracy theorists might agree to sign a petition calling for a constitutional convention. Another example are the human trafficking conspiracy theorists. Without necessarily convincing them they are wrong, they might be willing to refocus their efforts to favor measures like ending child marriage or training police officers to better detect the victims of modern slavery. Do you think this approach could work for some of these people?

@Roy solid perspective. I have been reflecting on this and I see that hypocrisy is rarely something serious. It is usually minor things that we overlook in the heat of the moment. I think it is more precise to say that I am not really afraid of hypocrisy, but rather I am afraid of the social consequences of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy itself is really no big deal unless people start using against others in a way that only serves to heat up conflict even more. It is similar to my fear of sexual fantasies because I am not really afraid of the thoughts themself. These thoughts don't kill anybody. The consequences of acting on these thoughts could be terrible. Acting on crazy thoughts hasn't been a problem for me since I was a young child. I hope further clarity on what I am really afraid of helps in future responses. I want to be at ease with myself without the fear of doing something that other people would use against me to hurt me. The fear doesn't seem rational, maybe I will try to think if I ever did something stupid because of these thoughts. Whatever the case, it was always out of love and thus not really evil or wrong.

I notice a common pattern in my behavior and I don't know if this is common or not. It leads to me not socializing with other people in order to avoid looking like a fool. An example goes as follows. When my sister is angry with me I often feel unfairly attacked. If I think her anger is unjust I notice myself getting angry about the fact that she is angry with me. When I notice these thoughts I don't express them because I expect the outcome of expressing such thoughts to only make the situation worse. This leads to me saying nothing or making long pauses in which the messages I try to express are not understood. Many examples appear in my thoughts when I see a behavior in others I dislike. I notice my thoughts beginning to mimic some of the behaviors which if I were to express them it would lead to hypocrisy. An example could be If somebody starts gossiping in order to make me look bad. My thoughts then make me feel like I'm about to start gossiping about the fact that they were gossiping. As a result I don't address others when they act unfairly. This leads to worsened self esteem and isolation. Maybe it happens because of a tendency to catastrophize about the worst outcome automatically. Even if I weren't a hypocrite in my thoughts I am still convinced that I would make a situation worse if I expressed that I were unfairly attacked. This makes me feel trapped and hopeless with the only option being to get as far away from toxic people as possible. If I end up acting on hypocritical thoughts then that would make everything worse.