The Renaissance Man

TL;DR - Got a feeling that you can really do A TON of work with low dosages, and that I felt a culture of trying to up the dose ASAP, which may actually not be that productive for 99.9% of people, and that a better approach would be to milk low dosages and increase them over many months or even years, instead of weeks. And sincerely asking you guys what you think about this, I'm open to being 100% wrong. When listening to Leo, and even researching the psychonaut community, I got a feeling that the goal with a new substance is to go as high as possible, while also remaining safe. So you start low, but with the goal of ultimately increasing the dose ASAP to the max you can manage while remaining sane. Maybe that was a distortion of my interpretation, or maybe just a reflection of what looks like Leo's practice, not recognizing his goal is very specific and philosophical in nature. Anyway, after having a low-dose experience, I was really surprised by how much I was able to unpack. For a dose that with eyes open felt like being sober, and with eyes closed the effects were super subtle, I really got the feeling that you can really push it super far, a lot more than I thought. Both in terms of exploring consciousness and emotional processing. If we approach psychedelics as a tool that you're going to use for multiple years, possibly for the rest of your life, I feel like it makes the most sense to actually try to milk as much as possible from low doses over multiple trips, before ramping it up. And I feel like this can have a whole lot of benefits: Making the new state almost entirely understandable This can enable you to learn to work with it more masterfully, since you understand how it works Lower doses are less overwhelming and scary, if at all, and so they're pleasant and encourage further development You can still direct your focus (may require skill), and go into intense territory on your own terms instead of being forced into it You can more easily connect the experience to your sober consciousness, possibly allowing you to make huge progress in your sober practice, partially or even totally recreating some parts of the experience while sober And after you reach the limit with that dosage, you end up with a solid understanding over the substance, skill in directing your awareness and focus, and a series of positive and rewarding and non-scary experiences that you can more easily integrate in life. And from that experience and skill, you have all the tools to up the dose and truly make a lot of it while still keeping it pleasant, non-traumatizing, safe, and so on. I do think high doses can have their own place, but aside from 0.1% of people, most would probably benefit more from this gradual approach and mindset, and actually develop a terrific skillset for exploration with fewer resources, and can make their medium dose produce the same level of insight as another person's extreme dose. Then there's the 0.1% that may combine the two and go to the extreme, and you can still do that, but a lot more gradually. This is the feeling I've got, I'm not experienced enough to make recommendations, to be clear, I'm here to ASK YOU A QUESTION, because I really don't know. So I'm asking you beautiful people, What is your view and why?

Same, I experienced this with living with my family + going to the gym. Really can't be ignored.

@Basman I find you can use it for idea generation, even when contemplating, and then you evaluate yourself the validity of the ideas it gives you. You can make it challenge your perspective, help you answer questions... but always treating the ideas as if you had generated them, so you treat them as they are: ideas, not truths. May seem obvious, but sometimes when the ideas are not yours you forget. I don't know about therapy and mental health, I feel like serious change requires something beyond the conceptual, and you don't get it with AI. But sometimes change starts with an idea, and in that sense it can help. Can it replace a therapist? I have never been to a therapist, so keep that in mind. If I had to give an answer, I feel the effectiveness of a therapist goes beyond the knowledge they give you. The personal connection and the accountability may be the things that make the most difference. And AI can't give you that.

@Majed The trap is also in how you get SUCKED into certain environments without noticing their corruption. I now recognize the same principle in Leo's rant against the pickup community. And I see it in marketing, politics, etc. There's a pattern: You start by despising certain manipulating behaviors, as all of society does. Predatory marketing, manipulation and lying in your relationships, etc. You can't see how anybody that's not morally underdeveloped could ever say such things. But on the other hand you have such a strong need for money, or sex, or love, etc. So you take one of two paths: You never satisfy that need and somehow settle (most people) You go on a journey to solve that need once and for all, but you promise it will be the "ethical way". If you go and solve that need (path #2), what happens is that it's typically very, very hard to learn that kind of stuff. So what does hard mean? That a multi-month or even multi-year journey is required. All that time, diving deep into that bubble that is marketing, pick up, politics, sales, wall street, etc. in order to succeed. Time is a key component. It takes so long that it's enough time to forget, literally, about the way you viewed the field before you started. You're now totally immersed in it, manipulation slowly becomes the new normal. By the end of that journey, to succeed you had to learn so much, to change your behavior and worldview so much... You literally became a different person during that journey. It's hard to naturally view that world from the outside, because it becomes the new you. ESPECIALLY IF YOU GET GOOD AT IT. If you don't have a strong, conscious, intentional value system grounded outside of these activities, it's incredibly deceiving. Incredibly. Hard to describe to someone that's not been in it. My theory is that you literally forget about your old values in regards. It's as if your whole, complete system of reference shifts without you noticing. So it becomes super hard to even question the ethics of your actions, because when you're in there, the metric of judgment is not the same as before. It's now one that's highly corrupted. There's no uncorrupted system of reference left, unless you consciously look for it and maintain it. This shift in your actual system of reference makes the deception 2x as hard to spot!

@mmKay I use disposable ear plugs by 3M. They're cheap and incredible.

@Antor8188 Works especially well if you don't shower. Girls will jump on you.

@Jannes There are ways of making money that are not stressful. You can look for those proactively if you need to, while you grow and explore life. A remote job, an office job, etc. I get how even one hour a day can be taxing. Most haven't experienced it, but I have renounced good money in the past for stress reasons. The INFP picture is great if it serves as inspiration, but don't box yourself to that alone. Don't label yourself. Those categories are always rough trends. You make the rules. There are no rules. I always feel a great weight is taken off my shoulders when I remember this.

@Leo Gura You still haven't answered @Emerald's observation on why you hang out on the forum. That was a major point of hers. I actually get what you're saying in the blog post. Conceptually, but I get it. And I also get how you wanted to protect introverts from feeling guilty from having to socialize even if they're not cut for what society considers "normal". But there's a massive difference between totally being alone and a tiny bit of connection. Even if the scale goes from 0 to 100, the difference between 0 socialization and 1 socialization is massive. Think about it, even the man making the video you shared is making videos on YouTube! Maybe the "sharing wisdom" connection is deeper than normal socialization, and that's why he posts on YT and you post on the blog & forum. But it still fulfills the basic need of connection Emerald talks about. Am I onto something? If you stopped posting on the forum, not making videos, not posting on the blog, would you start feeling a crippling loneliness eventually?

@Something Funny Cold Turkey for PC (everybody uses this one), and I use AppBlock on Android

Exactly, wild shit

@Something Funny Download an app blocker and block it until like 8-10PM when your productive day is over anyway. (strict mode, so you can't deactivate the block during block hours). Seriously, do this. You can always uninstall it if you don't like it. I've been using app blockers for a year, so I'm talking from experience.

@Jannes The problem is that you don't know what's possible. I don't mean this in a woo-woo way, but in a really practical way. That's why I put emphasis on marketing, or in general business skills. It's impossible, and I mean impossible, to even fathom the possibilities from outside. There's people that have the knowledge to become millionaires in a year if you strip them of everything. (I'm not one of them lol, but I can start to see how that would be possible). For example, imagine person X that is left without a dollar in his bank and zero people in his network. Key thing he still has: the skills to solve the other person's problem in exchange for money. He sets up a LinkedIn profile to look professional and an expert. Posts a bunch and sends people connection requests to gain some credibility. Then he starts contacting his LinkedIn connections pitching a SOLID offer, maybe guaranteeing to work for free if they don't achieve the result. A lot of people would accept something like that. And since he has the SKILLS, he can deliver on the promise. There you go, done. He starts making money. Even the idea to set up this 3-4 step system stems from marketing/business knowledge. Imagine all the ways and opportunties that he sees and you don't. Marketing is not a career path. Marketing is how you make money from your skills. Here's the problem: You have a life purpose Therefore, you invest a lot of time in it, and you become a master, as Leo suggests If you're a master, it means you have valuable knowledge that's hard to earn. You've earned it in the process to mastery. If it's valuable, someone's willing to pay for it, or a form of it. Problem: nobody knows you're a master. Real Problem: you don't know how to solve the problem above. And there can be more problems, maybe you don't even know how to package your mastery so that somebody could want it, and you could live off of it. Business knowledge is the solution. Leo gave you the roadmap to point 3 with his course. But I suggest you don't wait until you're a master to learn how to make money from your valuable skills. View it this way: there is a way to work on your creative endeavors full time. But you lack the knowledge to even consider how that could be possible. That's what I'm pointing at, that's what I called marketing. Imagine if you had that clarity to know, oh, if I do this, get there, then do that, then today do this for x hours, I'll get that almost mathematically. Imagine how motivated you'd be. This was just to illustrate my point by the way. I haven't made it yet, but I'm very close to it, so maybe I'll come back to you in 6-12 months with more confidence lol. I do have real painful experience with being a master at something and have nobody care or realize. I also do have the experience of the wild motivation you get when you can draw a clear line between your current situation and the life purpose lifestyle. So I kind of am speaking from experience, not yet the full spectrum though.

Super cool

Here's some amazing browser extensions I've found over the years. Behind The Overlay lets you close website overlays with one click (like cookie pop-ups, or other kinds of pop-ups, which often you CAN'T CLOSE unless you accept something or input your email). YouTube Summary AI with Gemini doesn't have limits (major pro), and it's pretty damn good. I use it all the time.

@Applegarden8 The trap is often in seeing famous personalities sharing more with YouTube than with their therapists, and thinking: see where it got them? What you often don't see is how they regret it after a couple years. Pretty much all of them. From self-help youtubers to streamers. The fact that those "big channels" know what they're doing is an illusion. Being famous for 95% of them is totally new, and they fuck up in all sorts of ways. So for every "strategic move" in terms of public communication, think for yourself. I'm saying this because I was falling for all of the traps above myself. Leo's advice above is super solid. By the way for sources you can find plenty of podcasts interviews and clips of people talking about the "public life". Look at both the pros and cons in these interviews, don't blackpill yourself. You'll see them talking about haters, comments, the benefits, their mistakes, and everything. Very valuable. Plus if you follow some people carefully for a long time you'll see them making mistakes in real time. They always need to look confident, so the new viewer doesn't know, but over enough time you can see it all.