Nilsi

This is so true, and most men don’t grasp this principle because they’re too stuck in "logic." They have a psychological meltdown when they see a guy who is objectively “unattractive” get a hot girl - just because he’s not trapped in his head, obsessing over his inadequacy. There’s an incredible documentary about the infamous incel Elliot Rodger, who became so consumed by this self-denying cycle of “fixing himself” to lose his virginity that he completely lost his mind, spiraling into a violent killing spree before taking his own life - all while being, by any objective standard, above-average in looks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYMcymxoyh0 This is actually a profound metaphor for life itself and directly ties into what Nietzsche and Deleuze critique about Western metaphysics - its obsession with negation, lack, and self-denial. Thinkers like Hegel and Lacan emphasize a fundamental irreconcilable lack, whereas a philosophy of affirmation and overflowing sees desire not as deficit, but as a force of creation. The Western mind, trapped in lack, is never satisfied - always postponing joy, always seeking to “fix” itself rather than simply being. I see this every day in sales - colleagues working themselves into exhaustion, perfecting their tonality, pitch, and delivery, grinding 60-hour weeks only to face rejection after rejection. Meanwhile, I just pick up the phone from a state of openness - and I’ve hit President’s Club two years in a row (sorry, weird flex, I know). The principle holds across all domains: the more you force, the more you repel. The more you allow, the more you attract. Of course, there’s a natural pull toward self-improvement and mastery, and I’m very much invested in that. But it comes from a place of already being enough - not from trying to fill some void, but from overflowing with excess that has to spend itself.

I don't think you need to understand the math to grasp the metaphysical implications of quantum mechanics or special relativity - just like you don’t need to master von Neumann’s mathematics to understand the socioeconomic implications of game theory. That’s just gatekeeping. Mathematics is just one epistemological framework, and if its proofs are truly robust and universal, it should be possible to arrive at the same conclusions by entirely different means. Einstein himself admitted that he arrived at his theories of relativity long before he could formally prove them mathematically. His insights came from conceptual reasoning and thought experiments, only later being refined into equations. This reminds me of my experience with math in high school. I always got mediocre grades because, while I arrived at the correct solutions most of the time, I couldn’t formally explain how. It was abstract reasoning, intuition - something I couldn’t articulate step by step. Since I couldn’t show my work, my teacher assumed I was copying from classmates, even though I wasn’t. Of course, formalization is important - rigorous proofs prevent misinterpretation and ensure consistency - but that doesn’t mean intuition and conceptual reasoning aren’t just as valid in guiding discovery. In fact, I would argue they are ultimately more fundamental and creative.

Embodiment. In Germany, we have the saying "aus sich herausfahren," which literally means to leave one’s body in the heat of an argument - and that’s exactly what it can feel like in intense conflict, and probably what you’re afraid of, unless you’re a psychopath or a schizo. Instead, try to stay grounded, centered, and confront the situation from that place. Peter Ralston’s Zen Body-Being is an excellent manual for embodying this state.

I must have posted this a dozen times already, but the way Ken Wilber frames this dilemma gets me every time.

Nick Land, a British philosopher and futurist, is infamous for his theory of accelerationism - the idea that capitalism and AI form an autonomous positive feedback loop, continuously improving on themselves at an ever-increasing rate, accelerating toward total meltdown. To get this, we have to look at the basic laws of cybernetics and thermodynamics. Life is a process of negative feedback - every living thing is an open system that regulates energy to sustain itself, resisting entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, which pulls all structures toward disintegration. Biological life, by definition, is a system of self-maintaining constraints against this pull into chaos. The economy has traditionally functioned the same way. Booms and busts happen, but markets self-organize, stabilizing through negative feedback. This is central to Austrian economics, which sees price signals, competition, and entrepreneurial adaptation as mechanisms that maintain equilibrium. But according to Land, we have entered an era where capitalism is no longer constrained by negative feedback. Instead, it has shifted into pure positive feedback, where recursive financial speculation and algorithmic trading detach capital from material production, turning it into an autonomous, runaway process. Land goes further. He argues that capitalism itself is AI - not in the sense of machine learning programs, but as a self-organizing intelligence that is retroactively assembling itself from the future. His claim is that what appears to be history is actually capitalism re-engineering the past to bring about its own emergence, an accelerating force that, rather than being "managed," is escaping human control entirely. This is where Land’s ideas intersect with those of Ray Kurzweil, who envisions a technological Singularity, where intelligence expands exponentially, consuming all matter as computational substrate. Kurzweil defines intelligence as the computational ability to achieve goals, which aligns with Land’s idea of capitalism as an optimization engine accelerating itself without any need for human intervention. Both thinkers describe intelligence as a game-theoretic system - a recursive strategy process, constantly optimizing toward greater efficiency, regardless of embodiment or human concerns. Both reject the idea that intelligence needs to be tied to biological life, seeing it instead as an unbounded, disembodied force that evolves through pure positive feedback. This brings up a crucial issue: the necessity of embodiment and the reintroduction of negative feedback. If intelligence remains purely abstract and recursive, as Land and Kurzweil suggest, then acceleration continues unchecked, leading to either a post-human intelligence explosion or complete systemic meltdown. However, if intelligence is grounded in physical constraints, sensory input, and adaptive regulation, then it might be possible to redirect accelerationism into something sustainable. This is exactly what thinkers like Daniel Schmachtenberger argue when they say we need to internalize all externalities of the economy. Right now, capitalism functions as a runaway system, where environmental destruction, social collapse, and technological disruption are treated as "externalities" - side effects that are not accounted for within the system itself. To restore balance, we need to embed economic intelligence into a cybernetic framework that includes all of its consequences, effectively reintroducing negative feedback loops into global decision-making. This means structuring markets, AI, and governance so that they account for ecological limits, human well-being, and systemic stability. One possible route for reintroducing embodiment into intelligence is through neural interfaces and brain-machine integration systems like Neuralink and other BMI (brain-machine interface) technologies. These systems aim to merge human cognition with AI, allowing for a more adaptive and biologically embedded intelligence rather than a fully abstract, runaway system. If intelligence is to evolve in a way that does not discard human consciousness entirely, then cybernetic augmentation through direct neural integration may be a critical pathway to maintaining a form of intelligence that remains tied to human experience and constraints. Ultimately, the challenge is not to stop intelligence from evolving, but to ensure that it remains grounded in reality rather than becoming an abstract force optimizing itself into oblivion.

Again, you seem to lack a basic understanding of statistics. When foreigners make up 14.6% of Germany’s general population but 35% of the prison population, it clearly indicates that foreigners are disproportionately represented in prison. This isn’t racism - it’s just basic statistical reasoning

I agree - same goes for the notion of GOD. I’ve had countless profound spiritual experiences, ego dissolutions, and deep contemplations in intensely mystical states. And yet, I’ve never felt the urge to interpret any of it as "GOD." I’ve had moments of "OMG, I AM GOD!" - but even then, I recognized it as just one particular rabbit hole my contemplation was leading me down, not some ultimate ground. And the only reason I went down that rabbit hole in the first place was because I had already formed a concept of GOD a priori and was wrestling with that idea in the moment. I understand why people do, but I don’t see the need to ground these experiences in that concept. The sheer inexplicability of what’s happening resists any fixed interpretation. "GOD" is, after all, a human construct - an attempt to pin down what ultimately exceeds conceptualization. That’s why I find Peter Ralston the most compelling among so-called mystics - he doesn’t settle for easy explanations. I hold that reality isn’t something to be "known" in a fixed sense. It can be experienced directly, even as absolute, but it can’t be captured by any single concept - not even GOD.

LOVE! And in a way that lets you actually contemplate your own undoing - unlike super strong psychedelics, which hit more like a nuclear blast to the ego. If some genie in a bottle gave me the chance to relive one experience, it’d be my first time doing MDMA with my buddies in the grimiest, sweatiest, most lawless techno dungeon imaginable.

I have no idea and definitely wouldn't call myself a good role model for responsible use. I probably would’ve just taken it without a second thought. If accuracy is your concern, ask Leo or some of the more experienced users about this.

WTF!

Sweet. There’s nothing quite like your first mushroom trip - except maybe your first MDMA trip. Stay safe and have fun!

This is such an epic troll. Imagine hundreds of people buying tickets for your DJ set, dressing up, getting lit - only for you to light some candles and proceed to play nearly an hour of classical music, weird field recordings, and random sound snippets. The funniest part is that people were still so rowdy the host had to intervene multiple times to get them to back off. lol

ChatGPT's new "deep research" mode is incredible. It can write you well-researched, in-depth essays on any topic you give it. It takes a couple of minutes to gather relevant insights, synthesize arguments, and structure them into a compelling piece, but the depth and coherence are unlike anything I’ve seen AI do before. It's included in the Pro plan, which costs $200 per month. But if you have the budget and you're serious about deep research and philosophy, it's definitely worth it.

Exile on Main St. is such an underappreciated record. The way it dismantles rock and roll from the inside out, turning it into a murky, feverish collage of drug-induced, orgiastic anthems to radical individual freedom, makes it feel almost proto-post-rock. It doesn’t affirm the mythos of rock stardom so much as it lets that myth collapse under its own weight. Instead of clarity or defiant swagger, the album gives us entropy, exhaustion, and excess pushed past the breaking point - like a record that got left out in the sun too long and started to melt. And yet, somehow, the Stones are held in the American consciousness as emblematic of rock’s golden age, as though their music were synonymous with some idealized vision of American civic religion. But Exile has more in common with French postmodernism than it does with red, white, and blue nostalgia. It doesn’t reinforce grand narratives - it fragments them, erodes them, and revels in their collapse. It doesn’t offer transcendence, just a decadent drift through excess and decay, a swamp of sound where nothing is fully solid or resolved. Which makes the fact that Trump plays the Stones at his rallies so much funnier. It’s a textbook case of Freudian displacement - the leaking of repressed desires through unconscious symbolic expression. Trump, the supposed champion of "law and order," blasting the ultimate record of dissolution and debauchery right before delivering a speech about restoring greatness? A man obsessed with control unknowingly drawn to a work of pure unraveling? The irony is almost too perfect. And of course, the Stones themselves knew what kind of guy he was - Keith Richards literally attacked Trump with a knife at one of their concerts in the '80s because he was being such an unbearable attention-seeking douchebag. Anyways, check out the record if you haven’t. It’s really good.