Carl-Richard

Would you save your mom or your father?

A comment I found under this video (where Frankie Muniz expresses the common opinion that "he hates Skyler"): It encapsulates the crux of my earlier point about how the show is a lesson in ego identification. When you skip all the manipulation, the excuses, the scheming, the justifications, of going through all the experiences from start to finish and just look at the pure endproduct, you see through all of it. And when Bryan goes through the logic with Frankie, you see how he quickly understands how ridiculous it is. Which is another point on how ego identification works: it is so engrossing and captivating in the moment, you get hypnotized by it, but when you step back, you see how ridiculous it is. This happens a lot when people have an argument and then step away and realize that they might have been acting foolishly. They realize they were so engrossed by a very particular and limited story, they couldn't see outside of it. And that's of course one of the main mechanisms of the ego: it works by limiting your attention and pulling you into a limited point of view. And it's maybe not so coincidental that we use the words "acted foolishly". You in some sense realized it was an act. It was a role you played. And that's how shows can reel you in to their story even if it's all an act. Because there is fundamentally no difference in terms of the mechanism of how it happens. And that's also maybe why somebody I know is unable to watch Breaking Bad because they think Walter is that much of an asshole and watching it is seemingly just too frustrating: she is unable to drop her role and identify with the character.

Maybe more for simple knowledge-harvesting use, but for more creative use, then maybe not so much. Then, at the end of the day, it comes down to your own conscientiousness and grit. You can write an essay yourself in a sloppy way and only read over it once and phone it in, or you can write it with great rigor and read it over 100 times and make it better. Same with AI; you can make AI do it all in one go and settle with that or you can give it 100 prompts and refine whatever it produces. Socrates worried writing would make our memory weaker (and presumably make us dumber), meanwhile it serves as an incredible technology that frees up our memory for more important things. AI can be said to do the same thing. If you are using it to do important things, your focus on those important things will most definitely be enhanced. Maybe you will lose some skills you used to have, but to think about it as a net negative is maybe not the way.

@Cred I was pointing out your use of the word "caring". "Caring" can involve an expression of insecurity or self-deception, that's all. And we often don't know where the insecurity or self-deception begins or ends and where authenticity begins or ends. That's an ever-unfolding process, and we're free to do whatever within that. And I can agree with the general logic, but I would say it's not limited to ADHD. Everybody I look at who push themselves way past what they want and repress the consequences of that (and that is most people who have a "job"), develop this kind of depression and lack of embodiment, and they are as neurotypical as they come. I always looked at people in high school who talked about how they wanted to become a certain person in a certain profession, and I was always like "really?". And not coincidentally, years later, I could see them struggling, or using drugs (like Mike does; I'm referring to regular use of weed). And most people I see have this "lowered" consciousness or emotional state, not truly passionate, not truly tapped in, just getting by and forgetting about why they feel the way they feel. There was recently an article in my country about the rampant use of alcohol by politicians; probably the most neurotypical profession there is. And just the alcohol culture in general, it exactly fits this dynamic of "drowning out" whatever you are truly feeling when you finally get off work and have time to feel. This disconnection, alienation, repression, is ubiquitous. It has to do with swallowing whatever outside standard was put in front of you and not introspecting into how you yourself feel. But sometimes you don't know better or you don't have the privilege to choose, and again, sometimes we want to pursue our insecurities or self-deceive ourselves. That's our prerogative as humans.

By only listening to the piano, you would never guess it's from a Black Metal song. The melodies are just superb. The composer of the piano parts (Mustis) is truly musically tapped in.

Her voice is like a laser, hits you right in the soul.

Was scrolling through my YouTube channel and found an old RuneScape PK video from 2009 (when I had just turned 12 lol). I gotta say I'm surprised by the production value and actually good English lol.

Insight becomes a problem when not operationalized, integrated, accommodated. I.e. it only becomes a problem when turned into an unsolved or unsolveable problem, a neurosis. And that's a question of attention and perhaps applying your intelligence in the right way. "Rationality" in the proper sense. If you cannot deal with your own "intelligence", even after trying, perhaps you're not that intelligent after all. It's one thing to haven't tried. It's another to have and failed or keep failing. Maybe you're only intelligent in a very limited and narrow way (e.g. "intellectually"/conceptually/linear-analytically and not emotionally, intuitively, self-aware-ly, recursively, relationally/systemically, integratively, holistically).

This is not baseless critique. This is careful consideration of the evidence 🤖

I've always been a guy to ventilate my room to avoid "stale" air, but I always blamed CO2.

If you had become omnipotent, you would rebel and curse against your own omnipotence, because "why am I limited to being omnipotent when I could be limited? Damn this existence!". That's the curse of being a human, always crybabying about something. Relinquish your human crybabying. Relinquinsh control. In relinquishing control, you gain absolute control. Because if you are nothing, nothing needs to be any way other than what it is. And then you realize you are God creating everything and it's just the limited human that is crybabying about everything.

4 weeks is nothing. Give it at least a year, ideally 3-4 years, before you can say you have "kicked it". The work is very likely not over (although it could be). And by work, I don't mean that you will necessarily start smoking again, but you will probably run into the idea many times.

A good heuristic for a business is take something you use every day (e.g. an app, a service, a software, a tool) and find a way to improve it or simply make your own little spin on it. When you do that, 1. you have knowledge about that thing and you know the standards you yourself would expect, 2. you know that it's a product people will use (by virtue of you and others already using it). If it's a simple thing like a simple app (or even something not quite so simple), you can easily create this with ChatGPT. Ask ChatGPT how to go about creating the app or service (and use ChatGPT to do things like coding, etc.). The thing here is to work with ChatGPT recursively, don't let it make something all in one go and then proceed to marketing it. Tinker and improve it until it's really up to your standards. The only thing you really need then is get eyes on the product, and this is only a question of scale and starting capital if you do this with Meta ads and a graphics design app like Canva and you have more than average skills in that domain (which can be trained). I did this quite successfully while recruiting research participants for my university studies. As for concrete examples, I'm planning to do this with a brain training app I use every other day (I want to make a simple and straight-to-the-point version that recreates everything I use every day and only that, and I know people will use it because I know I use it and others use it that way). It's also a funny example, but Jan Esmann the spiritual teacher who was a painter was using Photoshop and figured there was a plugin he could need but it didn't exist, so he bought a book on C++ and taught himself how to code and created that plugin, and then he licensed it and thus he created a software company and that became his main source of income.

Food tends to do that.

I might be old school, but a business starts with an idea. The methods come afterwards. The methods are usually not a problem. You know where to find them. They are ubiquitous, especially in the era of ChatGPT. It's the ideas that are more rare to come by (unless you are fine with essentially copying somebody else and creating your own market space for it and perhaps creating your own tiny little spin on it or outdoing them marketing-wise somehow, which is also possible in the era of Meta ads). And if you don't have an idea now, keep it in the back of your mind. It may come in a week, a month, a year, 5 years. This is what Jeff Bezos calls long-term thinking. It's one of the most powerful ways to achieve anything in life. Thinking about something for one moment, vs thinking about something for years, is about the same as one person vs 1000 people thinking about something.

Your takeaway was not that medication may stop working and may give serious and debilitating side effects and that there is a way to achieve essentially the same results by incorporating the correct habits and techniques? It's the last few minutes of the video that really count. I don't think you did watch the full video, or you weren't paying attention @Cred Everything you're talking about flies right in the face of Dr. Mike's entire lived experience and existence as showcased in the video I posted. ADHD people may care a lot about social status, about getting degrees, about doing structured learning. They might just have to use some techniques and habits to adapt to it. The techniques Mike showcases are essentially ways of hacking your brain and your work habits to simulate project-based learning. Learning how to live always contains an element of strategy and adaptation. Even if you're thinking you're taking the path of least resistance in everything you're doing, you're working on top of layers and layers of adaptation and strategy. They might just sometimes be less deliberate, less conscious. You can be highly deliberate, highly conscious in your strategy and adaptation, that's what self-development is about.

@integral Sounds like trying to say "epistemic" with a congested nose.

I think Breaking Bad is a quite stark showcase of a certain concept of what you could call the "Anti-hero's journey": the main character is called to adventure, facing challenges, overcoming fears, and returns to the society transformed, not to share the fruits of that journey with the society, but to destroy it.

Did you watch the video?

Why? Why?

I saw a comment that said ADHD meds helps them procrastinate. It's like if you have no strong goals, more dopamine just means any and all goals become stronger, so you will be just as bad off if your problem is sticking to a goal. Maybe your goals are just wrong. That's what life purpose is about: finding a strong goal that drives your action. It reminds me of when @Cred said "ADHD minds are insensitive to meaning". Well, maybe it's sometimes more they lack meaning so they become ADHD.

How is amphetamine a "non-stimulant"? I cba with you guys 💀💀💀💀

@integration journey This is truly the most insightful and revealing and inspiring video about ADHD you will ever watch. Mike went from being the worst in the class, to being the best in the class while medicated, to experiencing side effects from the medications and eventually losing the effect from the medications and then finding out a way to get off the medications and still function at a high level. It's truly a hero's journey:

Hopping on Ozempic without seriously trying anything else is like letting ChatGPT write your entire job application in one go. It's just laziness, and of course it produces side effects when you don't approach it intelligently.

In public.