SwiftQuill

Philosophy is bullshit. The bald man is bullshit. Spirituality is bullshit. Nonduality is bullshit. This forum is bullshit. Textbooks are bullshit. If you want to know something, you must find out for yourself. Of course, if it's something practical, technical, factual, you can (and should) seek external sources. But if it's something profound, you must look inward. How does society work? How does it really work? Why do humans behave the way they do? Why is life structured like this? Why are we even alive? What's the purpose? No bullshit. No spiral dynamics bullshit. No actualized.org mental masturbating. It's possible to answer these types of questions. You must become mad. Paranoid. Ill. You must become obsessed, for a long period of time. And only look inward. See what is the logical pattern in these questions, and in your lived experiences. When you discover the truth, you also feel it. Once you discover it, it's no longer an opinion. No longer open for debate or discussion or gaslighting. Truth is true. Truth contains all other smaller, fragmented truths. You then can detect an incomplete truth. The Truth doesn't deny it, it simply contains more than the incomplete truth. And if they keep trying to sell you the incomplete truth as the Truth, well, they aren't wrong in a sense. But it's incomplete. I recommend writing down your findings. It is possible to have a strong epiphany about something and then forget it. Some things are too abstract to be applicable to day to day life. But it's also possible to not answer your question. If you aren't obsessed enough, or if you don't feel it, or if you haven't had sufficient, diverse life experiences, these truths may not be accessible. I've suffered greatly. But at least now things make perfect sense. Certain truths are nasty. Still worth chasing though. Edit: I'm using truth, insight, epiphany, interchangeably here. Edit 2: Engaging with your Life Purpose also helps experiencing insights.

@Yimpa I have a giraffe as my pfp here, and on discord, and as my phone's wallpaper, and as my blog's background, and I've written a novel titled "Invisible Giraffe". Also on the topic of this forum, my next major life goal (after I complete my Master's) is to bootstrap a small business to assist in CV editing services and mock interviews and career planning. I've been doing a lot of research on the topic. Which is why this thread interested me. And your pfp is cute as well.

I'm a software engineer with 4 years of experience and I've had about a hundred interviews. The topic of job interview skills specifically in the tech industry is very very wide. You need to do a lot of research on many topics. Here is a short list of important points you should consider: How to stand out: I've figured the best way to stand out is to communicate why you want to work for that company in specific. Let me give you an example: "I am very interested in this company because it's one of the largest and most famous IT consultant companies in (your country). I've done some digging and I learned the company offers high value courses to its employees because it has a partnership with Microsoft, which is something I value a lot. I've not see many companies with a Microsoft partnership so this alone got me interested." Ideally, you would specify that you love the niche within that tech industry (tech for Finance, or tech for Healthcare, or whichever it is the business). One other method I use is compliment the project. For instance, if they ask me at the end of the interview, after presenting me the company and the potential project I'll be working for, I'll say something like "I'm very interested in this project. I've never worked on a project that involves such a variety of tech tools before. This alone I believe would be a great learning opportunity for me, to be exposed to a new software architecture and different technologies. On the topic of tech questions: This is by far the most obnoxious and hardest part in tech interviews. Bullshit IT questions - often times they will ask you questions regarding your field. In my case, it's .net Core. So the interviewer asks me about .net core libraries I've used, .net core architectures, the programming patterns, SOLID. I am a good programmer but I'm really bad at explaining concepts verbally, without even looking at code. So I suggest you look up "Programming language X interview questions" and see which are most common. Bullshit algorithm question - not super often, but once in a while they ask you an arbitrary question to test your logical reasoning skills. A question might be "How many light bulbs are there in your entire neighborhood?". There's no right or wrong, they ask you just to see if you can form a step by step method to calculate the value. Bullshit coding test - I hate this the most. Often times they will make you do a coding exercise in the worst IDE imaginable like leetcode and expect you to perform as well as if you were coding normally. For this, I recommend trying a sample set of exercises and mastering them (binary trees, reversing characters in a text, converting json to text, etc). As for O(n) complexity, to solve those, try to use dictionaries when possible. On the topic of overall interview questions: Bullshit personality questions (your biggest flaws, your biggest strengths) "Tell us about a time you screwed up in your past project and how you learned from it" (I hate this one a lot) Sallary and negotiations: So you want to study the market beforehand. See other job ads from your area, for the same role. Try to get an average value. Maybe if you can't find job ads with the sallary, look up a study - there are plenty of studies on IT roles and sallaries per location. If this is your first time in the tech field, be humble. Don't go for a high sallary yet. If you've been in the tech field for a while then THE OPPOSITE. DON'T LOWBALL YOURSELF.

I don't usually preach people on what they should or shouldn't do with their lives but I strongly advise against gambling.

@Carl-Richard I guess we just agree to disagree. I trust my own assessment of SD. You don't. I don't think it's naive at all to use models this way. It's a rough indicator of where you are.

Or, hear me out, you just read the model and ask yourself how many traits you possess from each stage. And how many values you embody from each stage. And you assess yourself according to what makes the most sense. One more thing you can do is NOT impose your assessment on someone else, like Leo does all the time here. Maybe give people the autonomy to self-assess without derailing discussions all the time by saying someone is stuck in stage orange or stage green or whatever.

@Carl-Richard I understand you insist that I've "likely" mimicked green or yellow after being exposed to the SD model I get it. That it's a concern you have about people who learn about the model. That said, I don’t feel it applies to me in this case. I’m not claiming any stage to boost my ego or self-image. I genuinely don’t care about appearing ‘Yellow’ or ‘advanced.’ I’ve simply gone through a number of internal and external transformations over the past five years that make Orange a very poor fit for where I currently am. At the same time, I’ve seen enough of Green to recognize its limitations, and I’ve moved beyond it for the most part. Not just in theory, but through lived experience. Also, I’m 27 now. The years between 20 and 30 are often some of the most foundational in a person’s life. First serious job, living independently, taking on real responsibilities, maturing emotionally, forming (and ending) relationships, rethinking values, etc. That’s been very much the case for me. So yes, I’ve changed. Not because I read SD and want to brag about being yellow. But because I’ve lived. The model just helped me make sense of that process. If knowing Spiral Dynamics makes all self-reflection invalid, then the entire model becomes useless. Just intellectual gatekeeping dressed up as theory. No one passes your purity test. I’m not here to play mental gymnastics. SD is a tool for insight, not a cult filter to discredit lived experience.

It's not about being attractive or not. It's about being accurate to the person I am today. I'm not going to pull up a maths test I did in highschool and use it as point of reference to see if I'm good at maths. Not if I took maths in college a year ago. I get you want to dismiss everything past the point of knowing the SD model. I get it. And I simply disagree that using the period from before knowing it as a good point of reference. I personally have evolved a lot in the past 5 years. As for the SD personality test bullshit: - "Are you a pluralistic thinker?" There is no such SD quiz. There are some quizzes but they're not too good in my opinion. My opinion is you just read the model, or watch Leo's videos, and see what resonates to you most. And if you insist on using the past as a point of reference, I can clearly distinguish a long period when I fit the stage orange, and a long period when I fit stage orange. And unlike Leo insists - no, I have not regressed from green to orange. The fact I've learned more things, suffered more, and introspected more, doesn't mean I've regressed. I can write a whole book on why stage orange is problematic. Not just out of theory, but out of lived experiences. Same with stage green. So in my case in particular, since I 100% don't fit into orange (way past it) and I've also exhausted green (perhaps not 100% but most of it) I would feel comfortable saying I'm yellow. By the way I don't care about competition. This attitude of "I'm going to bullshit myself into believing I'm yellow because my ego likes it" no I honestly couldn't care less. I rather be a healthy, functional, successful stage Blue, than a toxic, ideological, self righteous stage green (or above).

Coding (it has increased my productivity like you would imagine) Planning and editing my master's thesis Editing my novels Editing my blog posts Therapy/venting Analysing career goals (how the job market will be in the future) Researching small business ideas (niche, cost of investment, ability to delegate, products/services) Assessing text bias (e.g. copy pasting content from CNN or Wikipedia to see how legit vs how woke it is) Summarizing books and movies Straight up testing chatgpt's ability Comparing different ais (copilot vs woke gemini vs chatgpt)

@Carl-Richard i just beg to differ. I think if you have a decent level of self awareness you can look at the model and assess yourself relatively accurately. This is like a personality quiz. I won't pick "highly agree" on the question "I clean my room frequently". As for the suggestion of assessing yourself from before you learned of the model, I don't think that works with people like me who have learned about it years ago and in the meantime gone through transformations. My biggest criticism on this model really is people overuse it in this forum. Not everything should be analysed should this lens. Not all individuals, events, actions, groups of people should be analysed through this. It's still just a limited model.

Woke Hollywood

According to you, anyone who studies psychology loses the ability to self reflect. Because their knowledge of psychology clouds and distorts their self perception. It's an extremely reductive conclusion to arrive at. [Insert here more references to the bald man's videos as evidence to my bad conclusion]

@Lyubov you make a great point summarizing the sample of this community. But the way I see it, you don't have to be fully financially successful to be outside orange. I think it's mostly mindset. I can look back at a few years in the past (ages 18-22) when I feel I fit the definition of stage green perfectly. In fact, when I first watched Leo's video on stage green, I cried. I teared up during the part of the video where he lists the stage green values. But the past 5 years I went through a lot. I became somewhat financially successful. I also found my life purpose. I gained a lot, and I also suffered more than most people my age. I also became a lot more open minded. I used to demonize centrists and right wingers but now I can steel man them. And I discovered a serious, really dangerous side in various stage green perspectives. Stage green has a self righteousness problem. And it lacks open mindedness. I would not say I embody yellow 100%. Perhaps I'm 50/50 green/yellow. The biggest reason I consider myself yellow now is not because I've acquired more beliefs. It's because I've explored green a lot and dropped many of its lenses. The spiral dynamics model is fantastic. But I worry people misuse it a lot in this forum. Especially Leo. The act of calling any criticism directed at stage green and refer to it as "stage orange" misrepresents spiral dynamics.

I'm willing to grant actualized.org viewers are likely higher on the SD scale than average. That being said, I'd say 95% of people here are stage green. I have zero issue considering myself stage yellow, regardless of the bald man having called me stage orange multiple times. "Stage orange" is this forum's favorite enemy, equivalent to how feminists call men "misogynists" or how right wingers call others "communists". It has become a thought terminating cliché.

Like this entire forum.