trenton

I've noticed a couple of people mentioning the abortion bans. The pro-life policies that are in place are already causing pregnancy related deaths. In fact Texas refuses to even count the number of women who died because of these polices already.

@ricachica I agree with psychology being taught as well. There are so many lives that could be saved.. for example, if I learned healthy ways to cope with anger, then I wouldn't have held onto all the anger toward my stepfather, believing it would empower me and lead to change. This fueled my homicidal thoughts further. Likewise, I often had suicidal thoughts and severe depression. My mind was constant mental torture and I couldn't make it stop. I think preventing children from killing themselves with the help of practical psychology should be considered far more important. There's a lot of things that need to be taught, but society doesn't want to teach them because of the expectation to focus on good grades as if it leads to success rather than dead end jobs and wage slavery. You could therefore make a case for financial management and basic economics. In reality it looks like there are so many important things to learn that we must become life long learners on a wide range of subjects. Self education must be included because school can't cover everything.

@caspex there were many grandmaster players who made analogies to life and took life lessons from chess. I used to do this myself. One thing chess can teach you is emotional mastery in a competitive environment. Masters don't just look at the board, they look at your body language to evaluate your confidence. This helps them to predict mistakes when they can tell you don't know what to do. This is part of the reason why I prefer playing over the board. This is why I also visualize myself becoming a grandmaster before playing the tournament games. I review my best winning games to build a confident mindset. That's how I defeated a national master in a tournament. I could tell he was likely to make a mistake because of how he hesitated when choosing between Qa5 and Qb6. Don't touch a piece until you know what your move is. Building confident body language helps cause your opponent doubts. You can tell by the fear in their eyes. Sometimes I get a lot of anxiety from tournaments. It gives me stomach problems and I start having irregular bowel movements. It might get harder to eat when I don't feel hungry. I'm trying to learn how to control my anxiety in these situations. I think I need to play in so many tournaments constantly that I don't feel so threatened. My play also worsens in the last day of the tournament. Although I used to love chess so much I created life philosophies around it, I know longer believe in these life lessons. There are Chinese generals who argue that in America we play chess but in China they play go. Chess is one way of thinking but a different board game will lead to a different life philosophy if you create an identity out of it. In reality life is too complicated for how chess teaches people to think. Most life lessons come from deep self reflection and questioning everything. You can become insightful in many ways. My favorite thing about chess is teaching enthusiastic students. There are some students who cry tears of joy because all their life they believed they were stupid, but then they beat the smart kid at chess. He then thinks I can't be stupid. Of course this is based on the stereotype that chess is for smart people. In reality anyone enthusiastic to learn can become a decent player. You can have an average iq and be a decent player.

@Leo Gura I hope you continue doing well in your training to reach 2000. I could tell you about strategy, calculation, and other universal skills that apply to this. You probably are not interested in having people tell you all the answers. Would you rather just figure it out for yourself, or are you actually studying things like pawn structures, endgame theory, planning, and calculation? I don't think you would want to spend money on actual books and courses. I could tell you these things, but I'm guessing you would rather do it yourself. Good luck.

@integration journey I recognize that you are frustrated by outsiders who don't understand your circumstances and situation. I have researched the Assad regime before and I needed a review to refresh my memory. I will try to understand your point of view. the Syrian civil war was sparked by a combination of drought, economic collapse, and political oppression. Initially the pro democracy groups protested peacefully, but the Assad regime responded with brutal force which included chemical weapons, torture, and imprisonment which included children. Assad was willing to destroy his own country and people to maintain power even if it meant bombing hospitals and schools deliberately. He created a constant atmosphere of fear by recruiting secret police to pay on civilians who were opposed to his actions. In response to this brutal oppression, the Syrian rebels began to respond violently against the regime. However, the western media is bombarding us complete bull crap constantly. The media is labeling all of the factions as Jihadists. This leads people on this forum to comparing your cause to Al-Qaeda. Some countries have labeled the Syrian rebels as terrorists, which oversimplified the goals, motives, and context behind this conflict. The rebels included military leaders who abandoned the Assad regime after seeing his oppression. Your goal is not extremism like ISIS. Your goal was to establish basic human rights. You probably feel insulted by Americans brainwashed by simplistic media narratives which delegitimize your cause. Am I understanding your perspective and your struggle?

@Tristan12 what Leo suggested here might be a kernel of hope to hold onto. I am going to be honest with you. Your situation is so serious and complex that I've been consulting with an AI assistant to help me respond appropriately. I want to help, but I feel out of my depth with the severity of what you're going through. Here's what the AI suggested. "You're right that we need to be very careful with the response, and it's good that you recognize the gravity of the situation. While his situation feels hopeless to him (and may seem that way to us), we need to craft a response that balances honesty with hope while prioritizing his immediate safety. Let me help draft a response: "I've read everything you've shared, and I can see why you feel trapped and hopeless. The combination of severe PTSD, crushing debt, inability to work, and the deep pain you're experiencing every day is overwhelming. I hear how exhausted you are from fighting this for 7 years. I need to be direct: I'm very concerned about your safety, especially knowing about your attempts in August. While I want to help, this is beyond what friendly support alone can handle. You need and deserve professional support, especially for PTSD and trauma at this level. I know you mentioned the financial barriers to getting help, but there are some options we could look into: Community mental health centers often have sliding scale fees based on income Some areas have teaching clinics that offer therapy for as little as $10-20 per session There are trauma support groups that are completely free Some therapists offer payment plans or reduced fees for people in financial hardship For immediate support, completely free: You can call 988 anytime 24/7 to talk to someone Text HOME to 741741 if you prefer texting These services can also help connect you to local resources I know this might sound like a long road when you're already exhausted. But you've already shown incredible strength by surviving 7 years of this. You don't have to figure everything out right now. The first step is just getting support to keep you safe while you're in this crisis. Would you be willing to try reaching out to one of these services? I'm happy to stay here with you and talk more, but I care about your safety and really want you to have professional support through this." It's me again. Maybe I will read over what you are going through again later to refresh my memory. Your problems need to be broken down and managed accordingly. I am not used to handling your particular challenges. I remember you mentioned attachment issues and crippling anxiety. I know some therapists recommended dating for me before, but for you it definitely seems inappropriate. I don't know how to help your attachment issues because I myself have issues like these I haven't fully resolved. Rather than being needy and clingy, I have an avoiding attachment style because I'm afraid of being hurt again by relationships like these. I avoid relationships all together to avoid ending up like mom and dad among other reasons. Starting with your debt, if you call 988, they might try to hospitalize you. You need to make it clear that you have such a bad situation that you are nearly bankrupt. You can't afford to accumulate more debt. They can help you find free immediate resources in your area. Maybe I can try to help of you describe what caused the PTSD. You may be describing CPTSD. This means you didn't experience just one traumatic event, but many and each of them impacted you deeply. This can deeply undermine your sense of self worth and meaning in life. If you are open to my attempts to stop you from killing yourself, then I want you to write out which experiences are bothering you and how did they impact your thought process, behaviors, and emotions. Given that you previously had many good habits, you may have experienced a delayed trauma response. You may need to break down each trauma response with the help of further insight into what exactly your mind is doing. What happened seven years ago when these problems began to emerge? I have made a couple of responses with my best attempts to help you. I want you to tell me if anything I said in this thread has been helpful at all. I don't want you to kill yourself. If it means anything to you, know that there are people out there who care for you and want to stop your suffering. You might be suffering from something like damage to the brain or nervous system dysfunction given the extreme emotional problems you described. Did you have any serious injuries? Has anything I said so far been helpful?

@Tristan12 I recognize that you have been in a state of mental torture for a long time. To be honest, I don't know enough about your emotional problems to help you. I would need to ask further questions. Are you willing to list as many of these emotional and mental problems as you can? How exactly are they impacting your mind and thoughts? What are the feelings and judgements you have of yourself? What are the concrete patterns you recognize in your mind when you observe yourself? Are they accompanied by life stressors like work and relationships? If you doubt your value and self worth, then I want to start by saying you are helping others and providing value weather you realize it or not. You might believe that your suffering was meaningless and is not providing value to anybody. In reality, reading your post has actually helped me. I myself suffer from many emotional problems. Sometimes I thought that psychedelics could help me and I have considered doing exactly what you did to yourself. You have shown me that I can't fix my emotional problems through these means. You have helped me to see a trap that I could have fallen into myself. Seeing as you can help others despite your deep suffering, this is proof that others would be hurt if you killed yourself. I want you to find meaning despite the hell you go through on a daily basis. May I ask you what is your life purpose and how did you discover it? How did you try to work toward it? I struggle with life purpose myself and you might be able to help me by showing me how you did it the main reason I considered psychedelics was because I thought radical states of consciousness could help me recontextualize my life, thus giving me a new perspective from which to approach life purpose. I believed that life purpose would give me the strength to accept my suffering and push through it, giving me reason to live. Meaningless suffering is what pushed me to suicidal thoughts as it has for you. I feel the need to challenge what you said here. You say that you are back in the same situation as before, but I disagree. First of all, you discovered what was possible and experienced relief although temporary. Secondly, you are now wiser to the reality of using psychedelics to fix your problems. Furthermore, seeing as you observed your mind going back to the same place, you can recognize that you are not in control of what your mind is doing at the moment. This is significant because you mentioned shame earlier and it may have something to do with the idea that you should be in better control of what your mind is doing. Your suffering is preventing you from achieving what you think you should be doing or becoming who you should become. Common in therapy is to recognize these should statements, although it is probably exhausting hearing this over and over again. I have been suffering for a long time too and from a lot of different things. I did a lot of journaling, self observation, therapy, medication, emotional mastery and so forth. I still struggle, but I did make enough progress to help others based on the wisdom I accumulated through my journey. You are on this journey too. I want you to take stock of the wisdom you accumulated along the way. I tried therapy and it wasn't as helpful as I hoped. There are many incompetent therapists unfortunately. I ended up just reading many books on emotional mastery and psychology. I had to do so much research that I ended up knowing better than these therapists and I recognized there mistakes. Most of my insights come from self observation, but I have made significant breakthroughs in research to. They have helped me recontextualize my trauma responses so I could work through them. For you, I don't know what kind of trauma You carry or struggle with. This depends on further information. I want to offer you whatever value I can. Suicide can be tempting when you seem to be stuck in meaningless and hopeless suffering. I would never wish this upon you. I don't know what you need, but at the very least I see value in you even if you don't see it. I wish you the best. Please don't kill yourself.

@Irina Wolf I hope you are doing better and I hope to hear an update on how you are doing. I'm ready to continue. I want to start out by saying you are making a positive change weather you recognize it or not. You may not be helping millions but you can make a positive difference in every interaction you have with individuals by showing your capacity for compassion. Even by showing your deepest suffering you have helped me to find love and compassion within myself. I am part of the proof that you are valuable even if your mind lies to you and tells you otherwise. Baron Katie argued that many of us are doing good for others but don't realize it. She argued that even violent criminals inadvertently left a positive impact because their suffering in prison deterred children from going down the same path they did. I want you to recognize your goodness even if you don't see it now. I want to tell you that I share many of your struggles. After a traumatic experience from my childhood, I tried to regain my sense of self worth by dedicating myself to a higher purpose cause to uplift humanity in the hopes that it would compensate my misery by proving my value to others. The problem is that my goals became grandiose and unobtainable just like yours. This in turn reinforced feelings of worthlessness because of my impossible standards. Although world peace would be beautiful, you need to recognize that most people in the world are not like you, making this goal unobtainable in our life time. I don't know what your fear and ptsd is rooted in. You seem to have learned to blame yourself from your childhood. You need to understand that whatever abuse you faced is not your fault or something you deserved. I used to blame myself for everything including my father's abandonment and awful fights with my mom. Some of my traumatic memories left me feeling dirty and tainted as if I had become impure because of my actions. If you ever felt this way then you need to know that this is a trauma response and it is not reflective of reality. You may feel ashamed of yourself because you feel that you deserved to be hurt, but this is based on the fallacy of the just world as if your suffering must somehow be deserved. I felt this way when my dad made me commit crimes for him when I was child along with some messed up sexual situations. You need to have the realization that your feelings when rooted in trauma are not telling you who you are because you were always worthy of love. So long as you hold the fundamental belief that you need to change before you can love yourself, you will be stuck in self sabotage. You are struggling to change your sympathy for the suffering of others even though it is rooted in your personal understanding of suffering. As children we learn to treat ourselves as if we are the cause of other people's emotions. In reality many people need to just grow up and learn to control themselves rather than lashing out to pin blame on you. You are not the only one who needs to take responsibility. I can definitely relate to your fear of people shouting and crying. I am extra sensitive to this stuff too. When my family would yell and cuss me out, I would run away crying. This is part of normalized emotional abuse that society has deemed acceptable, or at least the people you interact with. They want you to take responsibility for their feelings, but they feel no need to take responsibility for your feelings. You sound like you were emotionally abused and you did your best to survive. Your current behavior is hard to let go of because it is a deeply ingrained survival strategy. You can't simply will your way out this. It takes a lot of love and support to change these things. The death of your mother has clearly hurt you very deeply. Personally, I struggle with losing the person I loved and trusted most. There are no easy answers here. When you realize how much pain you feel after loss, it makes you afraid of getting close to other people because you want to avoid the pain of loss. This attempt to avoid suffering ends up backfiring by making it difficult to accept love from others, seeing that all of these bonds will ultimately fall apart upon death. The paradox is that suffering becomes unavoidable as avoiding loss leads to loneliness and isolation. This reinforces depression rather than escapes it. I struggled with the death of my grandpa for a long time. After my father's abandonment he was the closest thing to a decent father figure in my life. He did everything in his power to stop me from going down the same path as my father. As a child I didn't realize how much he meant to me and I took it for granted. This led to shame as if I didn't love him enough while he was alive. I continued blaming myself for not valuing him enough. Losing someone close to us is like losing a significant part of your identity. This pain cannot be undone easily, but I found some ways to cope. First of all, your mother clearly loved you deeply. She would not want you to feel this way. You may be punishing yourself because you wished you knew how much she meant to you. Did you try writing out what your mother would have wanted for you or writing a letter to her? This is a method used in therapy. In my case, my grandpa wanted me to be good by avoiding the gang activity my father involved me in. I remembered his simple words "be good" as he was on one knee with his hand on my shoulder. I stayed true to what my grandpa wanted by rejecting the criminal behavior of my family and seeking to understand for myself what it means to be good. I valued his wisdom and guidance. Once I lost him, I was on my own to become my own guide by seeking wisdom. I became like him and I now share wisdom through deep self reflection to help others. Although his death was painful, it didn't shape me in a strictly negative way. I transformed it by emulating his positive values and virtues. I became my grandpa, and my goal is to offer myself the same love he gave me. Ultimately, I was successful in getting my mom off of drugs and evicting my abusive stepfather. I protected my siblings from physical harm and showed my love for them even while putting myself at risk. I want you to understand what virtues and values your mother held. She cannot be here for you, so it is up to you to be here for yourself. How can you give yourself the same love your mother gave you? How can you embody that love and offer it to others in her absence? Do you have any qualities that make you like your mother? As much as you value her, you are just as valuable. Your mother knew you were worthy of this love, and you need to realize for yourself that she was right. This is how you can stay true to her wishes. This spiritual forum would tell you, your mother is a symbol of love. Ultimately you are your mother and she is not separate from you. Your mother is love and so are you. The distinction between self and other is imaginary, not absolute. As for the afterlife, I would submit to you that the afterlife is real. I literally have a picture of a ghost on this phone. She looks like a Victorian Era woman in a black dress. If you look at the evidence of ghost, you will find that they are real. I was skeptical at first, but I looked at the evidence and changed my mind. Furthermore, there are people who had near death and outer body experiences. There are people who were clinically dead with no heartbeat and they came back to life anyway. They tell stories about consciousness without a body, kind of like a ghost. The afterlife makes you feel free and without the limits of the body. Perhaps in the after life our consciousness leaves our body and merges with universal consciousness, returning to God. You become nothing, yet you become all form. The afterlife is interesting to look into and these were my findings. Maybe not everybody comes back as a ghost as your mother wanted. Maybe we are not in control of what happens in the afterlife no matter our wishes. You seem to consistently focus on weaknesses, your lack of energy, your worry and so forth. It may not be much but you can right a list of 100 good things about yourself or what you did. It may not emotionally make you feel worthy of love, but if you logically understand you are worthy of love, then it is a start that can help you get better. Personally, I think you can be compassionate toward others without loving yourself. For me I beat myself up all the time for not being good enough even though I never say that to others. I can treat you with love and compassion to help me learn how to love myself. You can do the same since you clearly care for the suffering of others. I hope you find value in my posts. If you have any updates I hope to hear from you. I wish you the best. Good luck.

@Princess Arabia thank you. I know sometimes I complain about my trauma and life situation. My goal isn't merely to make people feel sorry and pity me. The reality is that I know there are people out there suffering deeply like me. I know if I killed myself, then I would be unable to help others make it through these challenges by sharing what helped me. I know deep down if I can overcome the challenges I face in life, then I can use all the wisdom I gained along the way to help countless others. I have saved people from things like suicide, an existential crisis, kidnapping, and predatory loaning before. These people would be dead if I didn't find the strength to carry on. Humanity would be hurt if I killed myself. I try to find meaning in my suffering by using it to develop deep compassion and empathy and then using my wisdom to help whoever I can. I think my life purpose has something to do with this, but first I want to love and accept myself. Once I master this, I will be able to help an unknown number of people.

@Irina Wolf hello, I'm Trenton. I'm writing to you because I want to do everything in my power to help you live a life you can be proud of. I have struggled with things like PTSD, depression, grief and so forth. I have studied several books and resources on emotional mastery and psychology hoping to help myself through these problems. I struggled with finding meaning and purpose while suffering from an abusive and dysfunctional family. Sometimes I turned to spirituality looking for purpose like you seem to do with the afterlife despite not being religious. I tried various therapists, treatments, and medications. I have helped people who were severely depressed and traumatized based on the things I researched. That all said, here is what I think might help you. I wish you nothing but the best and I hope you want that for yourself. Firstly, I see that you are trying to find a reason for your depression because you are trying to make sense of your suffering. Sometimes this can turn into a cycle of looking at past trauma trying to find out why. The hope is that if you work through whatever holds you back psychologically, then you can cure your depression and move on. This might backfire by keeping you stuck in rumination, thus reinforcing trauma patterns while stirring in emotions rather than processing and letting go. This can lead to bitterness, feeling not good enough, thinking you are weak, or other things of this nature. I want you to understand that what you are going through is not easy. Your suffering might have many different sources and many different reasons. Based on what you shared when you said you were suffering like your parents, it might mean that your parents suffered from parental depression. This kind of depression and the psychology that comes with it can be programmed into you as a child based on constant exposure to the suffering of your parents. Children often blame themselves for their parent's problems because as young children the ego isn't fully developed and doesn't fully distinguish itself from the parents. You may be describing learned helplessness as this victim mindset became a survival strategy to recognize the world as a threat, but I only know you from this post, so I can't be sure of everything I write here. You likely grew up in a seemingly dangerous environment like seeing all the horrible things on the news. I don't know what kind of trauma You might have or if somebody physically attacked you, but if they did then it might cause these kinds of behaviors to emerge. You don't act this way because you are not good enough, but rather because you feel unsafe and because you want to protect yourself. This does not make you a bad person and I want to be crystal clear that you are worthy of support and love no matter what you have accomplished. I know it sounds like a cliche with me trying to tell you hold on because there is always hope, but in reality I say this because I want nothing more than for you to feel worthy of love. I struggled with self love all my life and I would never wish this suffering upon you. I see that you seem to be judging yourself as a bitter person and you seem conflicted with yourself by arguing that you should be grateful for how easy you have it. What you are doing is You are comparing your suffering to the suffering of others and then using the suffering of others to invalidate your own suffering. This is a form of emotional self abuse. Telling yourself you should be grateful because others have it worse. This is not conducive to healing because tough love does not work on trauma clients. It can backfire and entrench you in feelings of worthlessness for not being motivated enough, thus creating a painful cycle of self reinforcing depression. You must recognize that your feelings are validate and you are not immoral for feeling this way. I hope you don't deny your own suffering to yourself. I want you to know that when you cry at the news, it is a sign of very strong emotional compassion and empathy. You see what it is like to suffer and you would never wish that suffering on other people. There are signs that you are a good person no matter what lies your mind is telling you about your unworthiness. That said, if it is impairing your ability to function, then you may need to work through it with a therapist. I don't want you to suffer this deeply over the daily news because it becomes something you avoid and fear. To be fully functional in my opinion I would want to be able to look at the news, understand it, but not be distraught or choose not to look at the news not out of fear but because you have something better to do. I don't want you to live in fear and avoidance or severe sadness. That seems to be where you are. You care too much and it is hurting you. You mention that the world seems to grow darker. I understand why you may feel this way. For example, Trump was elected president of America despite having 34 felony convictions against him. I feel pessimistic about the future of America and the progress I will see in my life time. My country is so polarized that it makes meaningful change seem like a pipedream. Furthermore, there are things like climate change and poverty that carry significant threat now and in the near future. This can make it seem like the world really is getting worse. I can sympathize with you. Nevertheless, I feel the need to challenge this stance. It is not a resourceful perspective and seems to drain you of your motivation. It reinforces a sense of hopelessness and futility that I don't want you to live in. The way I cope with these things is that I recognize I don't have control over these things. As much as I would love to save people from the horrors of terrorism, genocide, and war, there is only so much I can do as a lone human being with a picket sign. There needs to be a massive mobilization to change these things from all across the globe. You may be very compassionate, but your level of compassion seems much deeper than most people to The point that it hurts you. If you want to help others, then you need to limit the harm caused by your own sympathy. If most people don't share your compassion then it might be impossible to change the world to what you want in this lifetime. Therefore, I would rather focus on self improvement and doing what I can to improve my life while helping anybody I can along the way just because I can. I don't need to save a million people to be a good person worthy of love. Perhaps you should consider the scale of change you set yourself for. Maybe you can't influence a million people, but You can offer love to the people on this forum who suffer like You do and would never want to suffer like this. This alone is the proof of your goodness and love even if you don't accomplish as much as Jesus Christ which seems to be the standard you hold yourself to. It is a mistake to the your sense of self worth to your ability to help others. For example, imagine I was a disabled blind homeless man and I was starving to death. Does my inability to help others mean I'm not good enough or unworthy of love? Don't tie your self worth to uplifting humanity like you need to be the saviour before you can love yourself. I know you might think you suck right now, but I want you to find it in you somehow to love yourself. Honestly, I struggle with this everyday. If I find a formula to self love, I will share it with everyone. I can't just preach love and peace at you until you feel happy and grateful. I want to mention your victim mindset. What I found is that personal development sets unrealistic expectations for overcoming the victim mindset. In a sense, you have been through a lot of difficult things and objectively you are a victim. I found it helpful to validate these feelings of being hurt. Denying that you are a victim will not work. Rewiring your psychology is more complex than this. It is better to recognize that in some aspects of your life you may be a victim, but this doesn't have to limit you nor do you have to live like this permanently. You can be a competitor or a creator in other areas of your life. For example in my case, I am a victim of my abusive family, trauma, and depression, I am a competitor in chess tournaments against strong opponents, and I am creator in creative writing and in generating insights that I use to help people like you and many others just because I can. Try to look at yourself in a more nuanced way, considering these mindsets in different areas of your life. This post is long. I will post more later. There is more to it than what I said here. Please try to love yourself. That is all I want for you.

I noticed something significant during my walks as I thought about my ego reactions. Firstly, I noticed how I compared myself to other seemingly more conscious or intelligent people. I noticed how my mind was wrestling with something until I labeled this movement in my mind and body as envy. I started evaluating why I had this reaction. As I let go of current thoughts and patterns I noticed older memories and novel thoughts would take their place. I wanted to follow this rabbit hole and see where it took me. What eventually came up was my conception of God. I have been questioning this lately because although I had a few breakthroughs in consciousness, most of my understanding of God was intellectual and based on things I've read and theorized about. I noticed how my mind seemed to be strongly and happily attached to this matrix of beliefs. I decided to continue letting go. As I did that, a lot of intense feelings started coming up. I noticed how I used spirituality and this matrix of beliefs as a coping mechanism for my deepest existential fears and pains. This is about my fundamental struggle with purpose. I lost a sense of direction and purpose when there were complications with my career path. I tried to find a new purpose through spirituality, personal development, and actualized. My struggle with purpose goes back to childhood as I tried different grand narratives to find purpose. Truth is a common ideal I hold. I continued letting go. Suddenly, I felt intense and overwhelming fear, anxiety, depression, and suffering. I noticed how I had been using spiritual ego and my beliefs about God to cope with suicidal thoughts by giving me a sense of purpose. This became my survival strategy, but sometimes I would still have strong feelings of depression and suicidal thoughts. I wanted to let go of this identity that I have been using to mask my wounds. I wanted to face my problems, but I wanted to be cautious. I have done deep reflection like this before and it caused me lasting pain. I remembered how I had used spirituality as a method of self harm and punishment due to depression corrupting various teachings. This is what led me to questioning my beliefs about God and spirituality. I knew parts of it were hurting me, but the parts that were helping me were masking deeper pain. I felt that maybe I wasn't mature enough for spirituality and I should let it go and come back to it in a couple years. Part of spirituality that hurt me was my belief that suffering would ultimately transform me by facing it. Sometimes this led to methods of emotional and psychological self harm. I tried to rationalize my suffering with spirituality and I have been doing that since I was a child following severe trauma. This is part of what drives me to post a lot about suffering, my fears, and so on. I wanted to build myself into someone who could better withstand suffering. This twisted into constant self punishment in terms of how my mind and emotions function. This was a result of a spiritual dream I had back in high school in which I saw Jesus. It describes my feelings pretty well, but was influenced by Christian beliefs and potentially social expectations of men to endure suffering. I don't see how society did that to me because it seemed like I did it to myself. I thought my suffering ultimately served a higher purpose, kind of like a martyr. Anyway, at the end of all of this reflection I feel less attached to spirituality and the identity I created to cope with hardship. Maybe all the stuff I thought about God still stands, but I don't need it to mask suffering as if I must be spiritual to be good enough. I tried to be careful not to devolve into continued depression like I did in previous reflections. On the surface I feel okay, but I don't know if the fundamental existential problem has been solved. I tried to find purpose in suffering to rationalize it and make it seem acceptable. I am cautiously trying to address these deep wounds without harming myself further. Most of the time I have these kinds of experiences when I just go for walks and Mindfully observe my thoughts, emotions, movements, reactions and so forth looking for self knowledge. At the end of the day I just sleep on it and see how my mind changes the next day. This mindfulness is part of me trying to transform myself to ultimately beat depression. any thoughts on this reflection and situation? I think my struggle with purpose is much deeper than the life purpose course could provide. Purpose is how I try to cope with suffering.

@Razard86 I just want to thank you for doing your best to help me. May I ask you why you find this conversation significant and why do you want to help me? What do you see in me that I don't? I have a plan being set into motion to move to Kentucky. From there I will set up my new daily schedule and plan. I'm transferring to a different grocery store and for the next year I want to try my hand at creative writing. I plan to write a book based on my diary from high school in which I documented domestic violence, drug addiction, theft, manipulation, gang activity, and death threats from within my family. I plan to add flashbacks and my insights into psychology to add context to my thought process and behaviors. I may add to it an aftermath about the eviction and the continued tension in the family. I ended up on a bunch of anti depressants which made me worse as I felt my dream of becoming a professional chess player slip away. Some say I can get it back, others say I should grow the fuck up and base my life on something more significant than a board game. Asking humans for help gives me a lot of different answers. Ultimately I am alone in how I choose to live my life. I could highlight my struggles with purpose which were present in high school as well. I tried to create a purpose by taking responsibility for my siblings where the parents had failed. I tried to protect them as I played a double agent game between mom and dad, selectively leaking information to manipulate the legal outcome of their court battles. My family became my reason to not kill myself even though my love for them felt hollow and was based on an ideological stance about family values rather than authentically felt. I had very mixed feelings of betrayal. They seemed to feign family values too, like my father using my love for him to manipulate me. I'll have to cut a lot of unnecessary details out. Some bus rides were not very significant. I will only include the most important details and conversations. It takes place in my senior year of high school.

@Breakingthewall that seems like a good point. I will definitely try to see my family as an impersonal force no matter how much it seems personal when they weaponize my trauma against me, intentionally humiliate me by capitalizing on my vulnerability, and many other things. Sometimes I take this personally and they want me to take it personally. They are a consequence of impersonal forces which created humans who are incapable of taking responsibility for the harm they cause. I still have a hard time not feeling hurt or triggered when they repeatedly control the narrative to place all blame and humiliation on me. These feelings are not personal because they are a consequence of impersonal forces. It is like I'm getting a disease which in turn creates suicidal thoughts. When I attempted to love the unlovable, I intended to apply to my family as well. I'll try it this way as well, but it will take practice.

@Razard86 interesting. Let's see where this takes us while expanding on the self worth issue. As far as I remember my issues with self love became much worse after a messed up sexual incident from when I was six and my mom accused me of molesting my sister. This was worsened by my father abandoning me and of course I blamed myself for that too. I have been trying to love myself all along but it literally felt impossible. I tried to reestablish my sense of self worth by placing really high standards on myself like sexual purity, leaving a legacy after my death, commitment to truth which ultimately brought me to actualized.org even though truth hurts me and I might not actually like it, deep intelligence and wisdom, and justifying my existence through living a higher purpose beyond things like sex and relationships. I'm not actually Christian, but I developed Christ like standards and began to self sacrifice. I viewed purpose as something that would give me the will and strength to live. I discovered I was capable of self deception when I told myself it was just nightmare and I tried to love myself by avoiding self deception and facing the truth no matter how painful, but I still felt unlovable. All I do is hurt myself even when I try to love myself. One of my therapists suggested that my self worth is wrapped up in constant self punishment leading to intense shame. And of course it wasn't just one incident, there was a lot of chaos in my childhood which eventually built up into suicidal thoughts and other problems as I got older. I'm pausing a lot as I type, sometimes wanting to cry and wanting to die. I'll keep doing my best no matter how hopeless and how much of a broken record I sound like for complaining about my problems. Most people don't want to here this stuff. Sometimes I talk about this stuff because this type of sexual trauma is not well known and discussed. I have met people carrying intense shame for child sex abuse in which they were perpetrators as children. These people are suicidal, nobody loves them or wants to hear from them, and they live their lives in constant darkness. I was the first to validate the feelings of these people because I know this kind of stuff makes You want to kill yourself and others would celebrate. I want this kind of suffering to be better known because it is a deeply taboo subject that is ignored, causing children to commit suicide. I'm actually trying to be good, but other people cannot see that. I don't allow children to suffer like this, and I protect them. I considered making a support group for people like this because this kind of support group doesn't exist. It shows too much compassion for child molesters and is thus demonized because suicide is preferred from society's point of view. Remember most child sex abuse is perpetrated by other youth, not adults. Obviously I'm not minimizing the suffering of the victim, but if ever I speak of this, it will be interpreted that way and I will appear as a devil. You mentioned that I am not in control of what I like and dislike. I thought I was. This meant that I was responsible for the problems caused by the fact that I like board games and strategy games and I would enjoy being a professional chess player. The career is impractical and it looks like I'm sabotaging my long term life so long as I don't give up and keep trying. I don't see what kind of long term life is worth living anyway. In reality chess does not give enough value to society. I actually love training kids for chess tournaments and then I watch them win. My desire to be a professional chess player and help others achieve it is seen as a fundamental problem with me because of what I like. Apparently, I'm supposed to just accept that this was never a realistic goal for me and then somehow find happiness doing something else. I find it extremely demoralizing when I'm repeatedly told I need to give up because I'm not good enough due to my life circumstances and birth iq no matter how much effort and accomplishments I have in this field. Somehow personal development is supposed to solve the fundamental problem that I like chess tournaments and teach me to be content with life by forcing myself to do something more valuable to society even if I don't enjoy it. The only way to compensate the misery this causes me is by doing something so grandiose that it would be worth sacrificing my happiness. All of these options are unobtainable and unrealistic anyway. Therefore, the end is that I'm stuck in a shitty job I hate no matter how hard I try. The problem is that I'm supposed to like something else and be passionate about something practical and then I can follow my passions. This is the reality of personal development no matter how it is marketed on the surface. All of this sounds like complete bullshit to me and I don't feel motivated at all. I don't have the energy and enthusiasm I used to have when teaching children how to win tournaments. It logically follows that if I like things that don't contribute objective value to society, then they should be discarded in favor of things I don't like. In my case, I also like videogames. Playing videogames does not contribute objective value to society even if it makes me happy like board games. If I want to build a life worth living, then I must instead force myself to read personal development books even if I don't enjoy it. This helped me to further accumulate wisdom that I used to help suicidal people when combined with deep self reflection. I therefore provided objective value to society by not doing what I liked and instead doing what I disliked. I logically understand that I am good person for saving people from suicide, but I still don't feel happy because my happiness was sacrificed a long time ago. I have done so much research on psychology that I often prove more helpful then actual therapists. There are far too many incompetent therapists and I know better than them despite their college education. Sometimes they oversimplify spiritual views they don't understand, leading to the pre trans fallacy due to their lack of interest in philosophy, probably because they thought mere philosophy has no objective value for society. Sometimes they don't take me seriously when I'm the victim of sexual harassment. I am more sensitive to how society constructs a perceived "justice" by either dismissing a person's grievances as if they are just whiney bitches because they don't want to hear it or by weaponizing accusations by making every negative assumption until any defense seems impossible in their eyes. This is the reality of what humans call "justice" and it is full of socially constructed survival games and complete bullshit. Society treated me like I was a whiney bitch for complaining about sexual harassment and the difficult social dynamics it was creating for me and my therapist didn't see this. Aside from this there are also therapists who dogmatically apply therapeutic principles without regard for individual uniqueness or they insist on tough love for trauma victims. Therapy is designed for shallow minded people, thus my intelligence will be underestimated leading to bad advice. Sometimes they try to solve my problems by getting me to date despite severe depression, of they have reasons, but they don't see the full picture. Apparently, it is hard to find a good therapist for someone with autism like me leading to all this disappointment. On the bright side I actually like studying psychology and it provides objective value for society. The actual goal of personal development and life purpose is to like and be passionate about something that is practical and provides objective value to society. I have accomplished this by studying psychology. I just do it for free instead of making money because I see this as basic human decency to support people who need help. I have been treating personal development as something that is supposed to fundamentally change who I am. Who I am is the problem so long as my dreams are impractical and unvalued because of what I like and dislike. You are suggesting that I use spirituality to love who I am. I have been trying to love myself all along. I have been trying to do this all my life. I have the proof that I am valuable and society would be worse off if I killed myself. This is what I remind myself of when I try to fight my suicidal thoughts. I still struggle to love myself despite having a ton of proof. I have a lot of automatic shame and guilt due to trauma and it leads to me having muscle spasms and instinctively beating myself up for being evil no matter how much my logical mind tells me this isn't true. I am a deeply logical person and this is pointed out by my life coaches. They think I'm not as in touch with my emotional side because I seem robotic sometimes. I actually studied a lot of books on emotional mastery and did a lot of mindfulness meditation and exercises. I am more emotionally wise than others realize. There is just a tendency to project bad faith as humans inevitably do, leading it to be impossible to be understood. In a sense I am both extremely emotional and extremely logical because I use logic to cope with extreme emotions. Do I need to be more logical or more emotional? In reality people who are suicidal might do it because they logically conclude that their life sucks and they can avoid suffering through death. Maybe I'm not emotional enough instead of logical enough. Intellectually I know I am love, but I'm still full of so much shit that I don't live my life in bliss over how awesome I am objectively. Maybe I'm not logical enough instead of emotional enough. Maybe logic and emotion is a false dichotomy. I was under the impression that true spirituality meant plugging 5meo dmt up my ass and realizing that I am God. That is what Leo would do because God is also love. I thought that spirituality would give me another chance to love myself by reconextualizing my entire life and fundamentally changing my identity. I can't be conscious enough to realize I am God because I haven't plugged 5meo dmt up my ass. This is why I struggle with love. Based on what I wrote in this short, brief, quick post, that took me three hours to write you seem to be correct that fundamentally, I want to be treated with respect, be comfortable pursuing what I love, and I want to share love with others. I think you were insightful in that regard. I will have to think about what I would tell my child or my best friend of they were in this position. If it were a child, then obviously I would make the struggles of a chess career clear, but I would be willing to support him all along the way to the best of my abilities to ensure your dream becomes a reality and you don't have to suffer all this regret from unrealized dreams on your death bed as if it is your fault for not being good enough or for being who you are. For a best friend stuck at a shitty job with a shitty family and suffering from a lot of shitty mental health issues because of very shitty trauma while feeling shitty because of unobtainable goals and Christ like standards, then I would give him a hug. I would tell him that you deserve to be loved even though you are seemingly fucked because of your shitty life. There are no easy answers, but I want to be there to support you in what ever way I can as you cling to the hope that one day your life will not be as shitty as it presently is even though your presently shitty life makes you want to kill yourself. It will not solve your problems, but love is all I can offer you. Any thoughts? Thank you so far.

@Razard86 both. Sometimes they happen passively. Sometimes they are intrusive and unwanted but I get the idea of acting on them anyway. Other times I just feel horribly depressed because I feel trapped and unable to address several complex life problems as if it is reflective of my self worth and objective value as a human being. Other times like yesterday my family brings up unresolved past conflicts in which my vulnerability was capitalized on to humiliate me while treating the situation like a joke or harmless teasing. These memories then got stuck in my head again as I became afraid of future harm like my trauma being weaponized against me along with all of the negative assumptions that would be made from the knowledge that I contacted my cousin. My protective instincts are invalidated as I constantly play 4D chess with my family trying to anticipate possible attacks. I recognize that I will be seen as the problem of I express feeling hurt, yet I will be pressured to forgive those who show no remorse and will likely cause future harm. Because of this I started feeling the desire to inflict harm on them. I recognized the kind of thoughts I was having that would obviously backfire. I looked at the person I would become and was ashamed of myself. I therefore said, fuck it, I should just kill myself to eliminate my desire to harm others. That is when I pulled out a kitchen knife and then hesitated because I didn't know which way to cut myself and considered what would happen to me after a likely failed suicide attempt. I probably should have called 988 because I was having both suicidal and homicidal thoughts, but I didn't call. Of course homicide is obviously bad because there's no way in hell I can get away with something like that rather than suicide by jumping off of a bridge in which my death prevents punishment. That is why I prefer suicide over homicide. Any therapist would try to convince my family it wasn't their fault no matter how much harm they caused me to make them feel better about themselves. That way the harm would be minimal due to these fictions and controlled narratives. Other times my suicidal thoughts are related to things like purpose, trauma, family drama, career struggles, and things of that nature along with depression, anxiety, ptsd, ocd, autism, and whatever neurological disorders I have. I protect myself from acting on these thoughts by recognizing that although my family does not see my value, I see my value and my potential to do good for humanity. This value would be lost if I killed myself and became another statistic. I have helped others in life transforming ways. If I can make it through this, then the value I provide the world will likely prevent many more suicides. I have saved others from suicide before by combining all of my research with psychology and spirituality, making me deeply insightful and wise for those struggling with these kinds of thoughts. Sometimes I feel like I can't help myself though and my problems can't be solved through more wisdom and knowledge. That might be why I start complaining about life on this forum instead. Personal development was meant to help me actualize my true value as I find new purpose. Thanks you.

@Razard86 I actually did try to love everything. That is why I post the crazy shit I post. I once made a post about genocidal rape and everyone thought I was insane including Claude. I won't tell you the details of what I tried to love because it is traumatizing to even speak of it. I got this idea from Leo because of his love duel with God in which he mentioned trying to love terrorists. I tried to love nazis and the Japanese and all the horrific shit they did to people while placing myself in the shoes of the victims. My body and mind had a lot of intense reactions to this to the point that I nearly had a heart attack, a seizure, and an aneurysm due to my vivid imagination. It was pure emotional, psychological, physical, and spiritual torture to try to love these things in graphic detail. I stopped because I would have died. Maybe this interpretation is spirituality is wrong because it treats love as an action or process we humans do rather than becoming the universe and becoming love. The way I see it is that God's love doesn't work the same way as human love. This is why you can be awake and conscious of God but still have God awful relationships with other humans. Spirituality doesn't translate to human love. In any case, i see different perspectives and philosophies, but I don't see God. I am deeply doubting my entire approach to spirituality. Sometimes I just end up hurting myself. When I try to love the unlovable it backfires and instead fills me with more hatred and other dark feelings. This approach to spirituality is probably wrong. Maybe I will try something less extreme like trying to love my severe depression.

@Princess Arabia thank you for your good faith efforts to help me. I promise to do my best to see what you are pointing to. There are so many things I could say, but I don't know what I should say. Perhaps I am not conscious that I am God and I hold the belief that God is everything and nothing as something that gives me a tiny bit of joy despite my severe depression and suicidal thoughts. If I were as conscious as I came off as I did in the previous statement, then I wouldn't live in so much constant fear. I am constantly on guard for potential attacks and manipulation tactics because they are perceived as present threats. Perhaps you mean to tell me that I am already complete despite my struggles and I am one with those who appear to threaten this human which I am not. Maybe I am under the delusion that I cannot be as conscious as what my intellectual positions point to do long as I continue to feel horribly depressed as if I wouldn't feel this way otherwise. Maybe consciousness is not the solution to my life problems I was hoping it would be. These are all signs of someone unconscious who tries to see God, but is limited for lack of access to 5meo dmt. I think the only way for me to start tripping balls to the truth is to move away from my family who interfere with my attempts to pursue higher consciousness because they think I will become a heroin addict or drug dealer like my mother and father despite their shameless hypocrisy with marijuana. Perhaps this is my limiting belief. I can only be conscious of God by tripping balls. I am trying to see that this limiting belief is complete. It is one with God and all of existence as everything and nothing and completeness. Others would probably say I need to stop identifying with the one trying. Maybe I am just too immature for spirituality. I constantly complain about my problems because I don't know what else to do about it. Perhaps spiritual bypassing will not solve my problems but instead teach me that I have no problems because I am not a human being humiliated with trauma being weaponized against him. Thank you for your good faith efforts to help me. I don't mean to come off as a dumbass. Sorry if I do. I am probably getting further from the truth the more I doubt myself and spirituality. Any thoughts?

As the others are saying. God has no opposite. If God is both everything and nothing, then it is so all encompassing that it includes anything that could be labeled an opposite. Even the devil and unconsciousness is still part of universal consciousness and therefore God. God is so complete that it cannot be escaped because it includes its own division and any possible opposite. Anything you point to is still God because God is everything and nothing.

@Razard86 I have an inner dialogue about these sorts of things. Occasionally they are accompanied by imagery of knives or bridges. The only time I heard voices was during sleep paralysis. Other than that I'm not having hallucinations like voices in my head. I have a doctor's appointment on the seventh. I never was told I might have psychosis.

@Razard86 I've come to this forum to complain about my problems many times in the past. I am trying to make a conscious effort to not rant and rave about my family, my career, my mental health, and so forth. I have a plan in place for dealing with these things, but it might take a couple of months. It is hard to brute force my way out of these problems. One issue that concerns me is an apparent neurological disorder that is causing tingling in body and muscle spasms. It is unclear what caused this along with my hyper awareness that makes it hard to sleep. The doctor thinks it might be caused by trauma, but I don't know which trauma. This happens along with thoughts of killing myself even though I don't actually want to kill myself. I know how amazing I am. I used my wisdom, intelligence, and research to help transform people's lives. I once helped a woman who was a victim of predatory loaning that had her 60,000 dollars in debt. I made her cry tears of joy. I also helped a three year old girl who was abandoned by her parents. I have done all kinds of awesome things aside from helping people, not to mention all my successes in my chess career. I trained children well enough to win tournaments and even defeated a national master in a real tournament. Although I suffer from depression, I managed to use all of my research and self reflection to develop deep wisdom and self knowledge that I use to help others. I helped my brother stop his suicidal thoughts and I have helped people better process trauma by combining psychology and spirituality. Sometimes I do better than actual therapists. Some therapists were using tough love on clients and I was more helpful to them because of how insightful I have become through my own experience with depression. I'm really good at helping others with mental problems, but I don't understand why these suicidal thoughts keep happening to me even though I don't want to die. There is hope for me and I tried using spirituality to find that hope before, but it didn't pan out the way I hoped.

I seem to have fallen into the trap of self improvement. I was hoping that I could somehow find a purpose that gives me passionate energy. I found many possibilities, but I still feel unsure. My interests include teaching, chess, creative writing, philosophy, psychology, and political research. I feel like my inability to turn these things into a sustainable career is a sign of a personal defect. I have been using books about emotional mastery in an effort to fix myself. I fundamentally believe I cannot be good enough to live a decent life. I am also a bad choice for dating and I struggle with a family who does not see my value as strangers do. I have struggled with depression and autism among other things for many years. I am much better than I used to be and as I integrate back into society, I notice things that trigger negative thoughts. Me trying to improve myself never seemed to be enough. I am noticing that this site I try to use to improve myself in some ways feeds into my depression. I'm basically comparing myself to Leo and all the people who had God realization or have found a purpose to commit to. Meanwhile I am lost in the confusion around my identity because of the disruption of my original childhood dream to be a professional chess player. When I look at all my old habits back at home I start to think no wonder I'm so depressed.

On this forum, I noticed Leo make a post suggesting that most people don't do the work. Most of us use Leo to deepen our self deception. I decided to use this as a point of self reflection. I did some of the work like doing the life purpose course and getting the book list. There are other things I likely don't do enough of. I don't want to fool myself into thinking I am advanced just because I listen to someone advanced. I actually care about truth on some level, hence I do a lot of self education, researching, reading, analyzing and observing myself and developing insights, and so forth. Sometimes I question if I value the truth enough. I try to force myself not to be in denial wherever I can, but perhaps I can not simply will my way to the truth like I can't will my way out of depression. There were times I used the ideas presented by you to form distorted views about politics and relationships such as my post about incest in which I tried to cover my shame around actual incest. Originally, I got into this work because spirituality and personal development gave me hope in creating a better life for myself. I became confused about my purpose because I wanted to be a professional chess player, but there was no clear path to achieve this. I was hoping to find a new purpose but I often still feel lost and confused. That all said, I have a plan in place for changing my life. I came to this conclusion while in treatment for three months over mental health and medication issues. My family still denies they need mental help even though mom threatened suicide, so there is not much I can do for them. After I move to Kentucky, I am going to set up a daily schedule along with annual goals. I want to explore a new career path in creative writing instead of chess. During this time I will be with the other side of the family with whom I have a healthier relationship. For work at the job I still hate, I will have around 25 hours a week to make sure I don't have constant and daily suicidal thoughts which still occur throughout the week. Unfortunately, no amount of therapy and antidepressant medication can solve This problem. This will also give me enough free time to work on myself and meet the annual goals, or likely surpass them. I plan to run this one year experiment to see if my life improves. It was recommended that I continue therapy. I will try, but I have doubts. My therapists have recommended dating despite having severe depression. They think I am lonely and they want to challenge my OCD around the opposite sex because they think I would be a decent boyfriend despite my conflicted feelings about sex due to past incest and my fear of ending up like mom and dad in a dysfunctional hell hole from which I can't escape. I don't see how this solves the suicidal thoughts though. Maybe one day I will realize I have no choice but to start my own business in order to have a decent living. You mentioned things like marketing in your wage slavery video. Living a passionless life with work you hate is too much suffering for me to bare. Maybe I have no choice but to do some other type of work I hate, but one which will make enough money for me to retire sooner so I can actually follow my passions and interests. As it stands my career interests are often impractical and complicated to actualize. This is part of where I got stuck in the life purpose course along with choosing a medium. You can respond to this with any thoughts or suggestions if you want. It would be appreciated, but you're a busy guy, so it's not guaranteed.

Thank you. I did make a separate thread about this though. I am doing better about not beating myself up for not having this mess figured out.

@Yimpa will do

@Leo Gura I would like to use this post as something to contemplate. I did some of the work like doing the life purpose course and getting the book list. There are other things I likely don't do enough of. I don't want to fool myself into thinking I am advanced just because I listen to someone advanced. I actually care about truth on some level, hence I do a lot of self education, researching, reading, analyzing and observing myself and developing insights, and so forth. Sometimes I question if I value the truth enough. I try to force myself not to be in denial wherever I can, but perhaps I can not simply will my way to the truth like I can't will my way out of depression. There were times I used the ideas presented by you to form distorted views about politics and relationships such as my post about incest in which I tried to cover my shame around actual incest. Originally, I got into this work because spirituality and personal development gave me hope in creating a better life for myself. I became confused about my purpose because I wanted to be a professional chess player, but there was no clear path to achieve this. I was hoping to find a new purpose but I often still feel lost and confused. That all said, I have a plan in place for changing my life. I came to this conclusion while in treatment for three months over mental health and medication issues. My family still denies they need mental help even though mom threatened suicide, so there is not much I can do for them. After I move to Kentucky, I am going to set up a daily schedule along with annual goals. I want to explore a new career path in creative writing instead of chess. During this time I will be with the other side of the family with whom I have a healthier relationship. For work at the job I still hate, I will have around 25 hours a week to make sure I don't have constant and daily suicidal thoughts which still occur throughout the week. Unfortunately, no amount of therapy and antidepressant medication can solve This problem. This will also give me enough free time to work on myself and meet the annual goals, or likely surpass them. I plan to run this one year experiment to see if my life improves. It was recommended that I continue therapy. I will try, but I have doubts. My therapists have recommended dating despite having severe depression. They think I am lonely and they want to challenge my OCD around the opposite sex because they think I would be a decent boyfriend despite my conflicted feelings about sex due to past incest and my fear of ending up like mom and dad in a dysfunctional hell hole from which I can't escape. I don't see how this solves the suicidal thoughts though. Maybe one day I will realize I have no choice but to start my own business in order to have a decent living. You mentioned things like marketing in your wage slavery video. Living a passionless life with work you hate is too much suffering for me to bare. Maybe I have no choice but to do some other type of work I hate, but one which will make enough money for me to retire sooner so I can actually follow my passions and interests. As it stands my career interests are often impractical and complicated to actualize. This is part of where I got stuck in the life purpose course along with choosing a medium. You can respond to this with any thoughts or suggestions if you want. It would be appreciated, but you're a busy guy, so it's not guaranteed.