Nilsi

What’s pragmatic about expressing things “fully with all their flaws even though it takes more work”? If you’re in a business meeting and start rambling about things that could be conveyed more efficiently through high-level concepts, that’s not pragmatic at all. The same applies in scientific contexts - when there are well-defined, abstract, and complex concepts with very precise meanings, it’s probably a good idea to use them. I’m actually picking up more of an artistic sentiment in what you’re suggesting - which seems to be a desire for vivid and lively ("feminine") expression over jargon or abstractions. Nietzsche was very much a master of this. His language is so dynamic and rich that, even before you grasp his ideas intellectually, you feel their impact on a visceral level through the sheer force of his words. This also reminds me of Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation, a classic in 20th-century literary criticism. Sontag critiques the “masculine” or “phallogocentric” tendency to reduce unique artistic expressions into rigid interpretive frameworks. She advocates for a more “erotic” way of engaging with art - one that is more sensory and descriptive than rational or interpretive. The same theme is also very much front and center in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. They criticize the trend in psychoanalysis (and continental philosophy in general) of interpreting every unique human expression as merely a complicated symptom of some underlying universal condition, like the Oedipus complex, or whatever. So ironically, and correct me if I’m misreading you, it seems like what you’re advocating for is actually an approach that’s strictly anti-pragmatic in nature (and what could be more anti-pragmatic than the feminine?). Maybe I’m just projecting, idk.

What drives you to dedicate yourself to exploring such a wide range of topics like politics, science, anthropology, and psychology? Is there a specific goal you’re working toward with all this knowledge, or is it more about the pursuit of understanding itself? And how do you decide which subjects are worth focusing on over others?

Congrats on picking up and reading a book (seriously). That also seems like the perfect book for you, so even better! If you were to go deep into people like Jean Piaget, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, James Mark Baldwin, etc., I might develop a crush (no homo).

I'll make a separate thread to answer this in the near future; there's so much to say on that.

The reality is that if you want to become financially successful, you'll have to set aside your ideals for a while and be ruthlessly pragmatic. There's no way around learning the fundamentals of business - like sales, marketing, basic economics, etc. - if you want to get your venture off the ground. Once you've reached a certain threshold of basic business aptitude - meaning you're earning enough to survive by providing some kind of service or product to customers - you can start developing your business in accordance with your higher values and "purpose." This will be a slow and steady process, though. If you try to get too fancy too fast, you'll just undermine your ability to profit from whatever you're doing. In my case, this involved dropping out of college to work in a call center and grinding away 60-hour weeks to develop myself into a highly skilled salesman. Now, I comfortably make five figures a month and can work from my phone anywhere in the world, which opens up a lot of possibilities for "individuation" again. I'm basically trying to express Whitehead's idea that “[one] advances by extending the number of important operations which [one] can perform without thinking of them.” In other words, you advance in business by mastering all the fundamentals at each "level," working yourself up toward something that is increasingly aligned with your highest values - or becoming more "individuated," so to speak. Really, this is just basic evolutionary dynamics, which you probably intuitively understand. But when it comes to one's own life, things are naturally very murky and obscured by all sorts of emotional and psychological turmoil.

From my experience, platforms like LinkedIn aren't frequented by executives themselves but by those tasked with a company's communications - whether that's the marketing team or various departments sharing their work with counterparts in other organizations. This engagement is primarily directed toward what Lacan refers to as the "Big Other": the imagined executive who eagerly consumes a company's LinkedIn content but who, in reality, is merely a figment of our collective imagination. What I'm suggesting is that you're unlikely to reach anyone who actually makes crucial decisions within a company through these channels; it's more a simulation of networking than genuine interaction with key decision-makers. PS: I work in high-ticket sales and find LinkedIn to be utterly useless and an enormous waste of time for doing any serious business.

From what perspective would such a sentiment even make sense? Certainly not from a human one. If you want everything you're talking about, you first need to become human - perhaps the most violent and radical move of all. You're still arguing from the standpoint of a transcendent observer, privileging rational thought over direct experience. Even Peter Ralston isn’t radical enough for me here. He doesn’t fully acknowledge or emphasize the significance of the human "Lebenswelt" ("life-world"), which makes sense given that his life has largely been spent in isolated contemplation and martial arts - both of which are, in a sense, rather "inhuman" practices to begin with.

@Carl-Richard The irony of this discussion is that you talk about belonging, yet you refuse to give up your transcendental perspective on reality. How can you truly belong if you don’t even accept being human? That’s my ultimate question to you.

Sorry, but this is such a load of nonsense and intellectual posturing that it's not even worth going into in detail.

That’s a lazy argument. What does it even mean for someone to do "everything on their own"? No thoughtful person would seriously claim that their conclusions about life or themselves arise in a vacuum or that these insights are entirely their own. It should be obvious that no thought is completely unconditioned. This doesn’t imply there’s no room for original insight - there certainly is - but every insight is inevitably shaped by an individual’s cultural and historical context, along with deeper structures like language. The real issue isn’t whether we can think independently, but whether the structures that shape our thoughts can be formalized into some universal truth or ethical imperative about reality. The hubris lies in assuming that the Real exists in a pre-determined, structured way and that we can somehow grasp this structure through a transcendental subjectivity that is not itself conditioned by the reality it claims to observe. However, this isn’t an argument for detached, ironic subjectivity. The point of contention isn’t whether there’s a drive to interpret the world through a "grand narrative." There obviously is, for anyone who isn’t pretending to be too cool for such notions, like Kim Gordon or Jean-François Lyotard. That might pass as a cute posture in one's early twenties, but becomes increasingly cringe when held seriously, much like a 40-year-old guy still showing up at frat parties thinking he's cool. These things should be self-evident. Ultimately, my claim is that an authentic existentialism cannot simply be dismissed as immature "New-Age-ism" or whatever. If we’re going to make progress, that’s where we’ll have to take the argument. I stand with Heidegger in accepting, as a final conclusion, a meditation and regression into a pre-Socratic immersion in life, which could be likened to the tenth Ox-Herding Picture in Zen: This immersion naturally brings with it a desire for belonging, stability, and similar concerns. Yet, as a subject, I am still faced with the responsibility of making choices and value judgments within a uniquely subjective context. As Sartre put it: “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.” To conclude with Nietzsche: "I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible" - to justify and affirm my existence on my own terms, fully aware that such a task is utterly impossible.

And how does that look like in practice?

I’m curious, would you describe yourself as religious or spiritual (what you call „new-age“)?

Gerhard Richter - Erschossener 1 (1988) 100 cm x 140 cm; Catalogue Raisonné: 669-1; Öl auf Leinwand

Love - Gaspar Noë (2015) Mulholland Drive - David Lynch (2001) Eyes Wide Shut - Stanley Kubrick (1999) Pulp Fiction - Quentin Tarantino (1994) Trainspotting - Danny Boyle (1996) PS: I don’t know jack shit about movies, but those are the ones I spontaneously remember enjoying the most.

Read it, it’s a good one.

The fact that a British person wouldn’t know Oasis is all the evidence of closed-mindedness one could ask for.

You have a second brain right at your disposal.

In this context, you’d likely want something like vinpocetine, which is a PDE-1 inhibitor with vasodilatory effects specifically targeting cerebral circulation. You don’t need a boner while on DMT - unless, of course, you think you do, lol.

It’s not just a cultural artifact. Is it not clear that the "new-age," as a dialectical moment of modernity's pursuit of universalism, could only have arisen precisely within this context and is then ontogenetically recapitulated when an individual transitions from an "orange" to a "green" stage of development? The "new-age" is a particular discourse centered around the idea of a universal spiritual core to all human beings. There have been many examples of people pushing the boundaries of "spirituality" far beyond this discursive formation. But, of course, your "scientific" frameworks do not capture this reality, as they are incapable of grasping such outlier phenomena, let alone developing an empirically verified language around them.

Profitable traders make calculated bets on macroeconomic trends based on their specialized knowledge or access to non-public information (which is technically illegal). And these people manage hundreds of millions of dollars, which makes the small profit margins of reason-based investments significant enough to earn a good living. As a private investor, your best strategy is to increase your income by developing a real skillset and diversifying your investments as widely as possible. If you have a gambler’s mindset and are chasing big profits, you'd better put in the work to become highly skilled in whatever field you're dedicating yourself to.