So tired of gurus telling me I need to suffer first to deserve happiness

[Francis777]

59 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Do not waste and abuse my time here. I pour so much of my energy here giving serious, genuine advice.

This is your own life purpose though? Your not only here because its all about us? What else would you be doing if not sharing your development with us. It's for you just as much as it is for us.

You say wasting your time but your not giving us your time purely just for us? 

Or is that not accurate? Would your happiest most productive life purpose not be in helping us? You said it yourself, what else is there to do?

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

It's not about me.

How can it not be about you "as well" when your deliberately choosing to do this because its your highest purpose, even if causes you backlash and suffering, you get the greatest "meta" satisfaction from it. Which is what YOU want. I'm not trying to catch you out, but is this not true?

[The Crocodile]

2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

The Buddha's core teach was that all of life is suffering. No one whines about the Buddha. But when I say this work is hard, then people somehow make it about me.

I had a teacher that had a pair of blue glasses with "ALIS" engraved on it for All Life Is Suffering, and the assistant teacher pointed out he didn't seem to ever quote any of the other four noble truths.

You could also strawman Buddhism as well as steelman it. You could say the four noble truths are delusional and wrong, and are only coherent within a limited unconscious view of reality.

[Tudo]

3 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

What is the alternative? To act like this work isn't difficult?

The Buddha's core teach was that all of life is suffering. No one whines about the Buddha. But when I say this work is hard, then people somehow make it about me.

It's not about me.

You guys have no idea yet what degree of suffering exists in the world. You live in a cocoon of comfort and spiritual fantasy. Life is harder than anything I say.

You are underestimating the harshness of life. I am not overestimating it. What is truly arrogant is thinking life should be easy.

The reason I didn't respond to his points is because he has been on this forum for years, always stubborn and closedminded, never willing to learn from the good advice given to him. Always with a negative attitude, insisting on his own bad ideas.

I tried to help him many times with genuine advice, and he never accepted nor appreciated it. So I will not waste any more of my time responding to him.

Making this about me it the final straw.

Do not waste and abuse my time here. I pour so much of my energy here giving serious, genuine advice. If you guys abuse it and then gaslight me for it, I will start banning such people. And when you post your final fuck-you letter here to justify yourself, I will not even waste my time reading it, never mind responding to it.

If you do not want to do hardcore difficult work, you should not be speaking to me. You should be working so hard at developing yourself that you come here crying how difficult it is.

I live in a third-world country, and I can tell you guys that life here is fucking brutal! A lot of people here would give up one of their arms to be American.

[Letho]

@Shodburrito

On 3/21/2025 at 1:31 AM, Shodburrito said:

@Letho

 

It's fascinating how you've managed to write an entire response without addressing a single philosophical point from my post. Instead of engaging with the ideas, you've chosen to focus on how you think the post was created. This is the intellectual equivalent of critiquing someone's handwriting instead of their argument.

To be fair, it is your handwriting, just AI-assisted calligraphy.

And ironically, it's you who bypassed the philosophical content. My positions were laid out plainly. Would you like me to enumerate them, scientifically and systematically? I can, however let's not pretend you’re prepared for an actual lesson in disciplined reflection. My time, unlike your arguments, is invested, not outsourced.

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Yes, I sometimes use AI to help articulate and refine my thoughts - much like writers have used editors, philosophers have used dialogues, and thinkers throughout history have used whatever tools were available to them to clarify their ideas. The medium doesn't invalidate the message. If you find yourself unable to engage with the content and must instead attack the method, that reveals more about your position than mine.

 

You’ve conflated tool usage with intellectual lineage. Philosophers refined each other’s thoughts through dialectic, discipline, and depth.

You? You hit "submit." That’s not synthesis, that’s automation. You’ve outsourced the metabolic burn of actual cognition, but want the gains. And if effort is the gym of the mind, your intellectual waistline's showing. I’m not mocking, I’m inviting you to join the fight. I’m in the ring. Are you?

 

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What's particularly interesting is the emotional intensity of your response. Your language is charged with frustration and condemnation - calling my post "the implicit downfall of society" and "spreading misinformation." I have to wonder: why does challenging the necessity of suffering trigger such a strong emotional reaction in you? 

 

Is emotional authenticity now taboo when it’s backed by reason and scientific basis?

If your AI can't parse nuance in what I’m saying, maybe it’s not advanced, maybe it’s just parroting your projections. Real thinking integrates emotion, logic, and embodiment. You're using tech as a filter to mute discomfort, I use discomfort as fuel for insight.

 

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When someone responds with this level of defensiveness to a philosophical position, it often indicates the position has touched on something personally threatening. The idea that growth might not require the specific kind of suffering you've invested in seems to have struck a nerve. This is precisely the identity protection mechanism I described in my original post.

 

Yes, it is threatening. Not to my ego, rather to the arc of human potential.

We’re watching civilization trend toward mass intellectual outsourcing, replacing effort with illusion. When someone starts worshipping AI’s output as their own, it’s not just lazy, it’s ontologically irresponsible. If that makes me a criminal in this era of synthetic cognition, then label me proudly guilty of philosophical rebellion.

 

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Your concern about effort is particularly interesting. You seem to believe that value comes primarily from struggle rather than insight. This perfectly demonstrates the exact framework I'm critiquing - the belief that suffering and effort inherently confer legitimacy. Would you discount Einstein's insights because he described relativity as coming to him effortlessly while riding a bicycle? Does a poem lose its beauty if it was written in a moment of inspiration rather than through hours of agonizing revision?

 

My insights were forged, not gifted.

I didn’t stumble onto thought; I constructed it, brick by cognitive brick, under the weight of self-imposed challenge. I wasn’t born a genius. I architected myself into one. And I’d still take that over someone whose “thinking” was pre-chewed by a language model.

 

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Of course challenge can be beneficial - I never argued against that. The distinction is between embracing natural challenges that arise versus deliberately fetishizing suffering as the only legitimate path to insight. This nuance seems to have been lost on you.

 

 

Ironically, you’re arguing against a point I never made then feeding it into AI for emotional reinforcement. That’s not philosophy, that’s algorithmic ventriloquism. Real dialogue is self-reflective. Try feeding your own blindspots into the system and see what happens. If you used AI as a truth mirror rather than a digital echo chamber, you might find it disagrees with you, violently.

 

 

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What's most revealing is your assumption that challenging Leo's framework means I'm avoiding "real growth" or taking the easy way out. This binary thinking (either accept suffering as necessary or reject growth entirely) is exactly the false dichotomy I'm addressing. It's possible to pursue profound understanding without accepting that "getting mauled by a bear" is the only ticket to insight.

 

 

This discussion is the perfect showcase of cognitive bypass.

You didn’t just take the easy way, you paved over the difficult one with borrowed articulation. I’m not shaming that. I’m illuminating it. Because every shortcut taken at the level of effort becomes a longcut at the level of depth.

 

 

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The irony is that your response perfectly demonstrates the psychological trap I described - when someone builds their identity around "growth requires suffering," they become emotionally invested in everyone else suffering too. Any suggestion that there might be alternate paths becomes threatening to that identity. Your visceral reaction to my post suggests I've touched on something that challenges your own narrative about the necessity of suffering.

 

 

 

Again, a projection.

No one here is glorifying suffering, I’m differentiating between positive stress (growth-aligned tension) and negative stress (ego-fragmentation). The difference? Self-awareness. Which, ironically, is exactly what your AI usage circumvents. Your whole critique reads like a defense mechanism dressed in pseudo-insight.

 

 

 

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If you'd like to engage with the actual philosophical content of my post - the nature of consciousness, the relativity of frameworks, or the creation of truth economies - I'm genuinely open to that conversation. But if all you can offer is personal attacks and vague warnings about societal downfall, perhaps you're not as committed to intellectual rigor as you believe yourself to be.

 

 

We’ve moved past the phase where your “post” even qualifies as a foundation for serious inquiry.

This wasn’t a debate, it was a philosophical correction. My motives are clear. Not to win, rather, to build. And, Intervoidism+ (click here for introduction) is the structure. If that demands stress and discipline, then so be it. Comfort is not consciousness.

 

 

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I wonder if you've considered that your intense emotional reaction might be worth examining. What is it about the idea that suffering might be optional that feels so threatening? What investment do you have in maintaining a worldview where growth must be painful? These aren't rhetorical questions - they're invitations to a more authentic dialogue than your initial response offered.

 

The irony is as thick as the projection behind your critique.

I'm not attached to suffering, I’m attached to what it reveals. I'm committed to truth, and truth, by nature, burns. You mistake my intensity for identity defense. It’s actually identity evolution forged through fire, not filtered through AI.

Listen up, in today's world, there's a seductive narrative that personal growth should be seamless and devoid of struggle. This perspective, while comforting, overlooks the fundamental truth that meaningful development often arises from facing and overcoming challenges that most people don't even perceive until its too late. I don't want that for people, I want to see people on the forum seeing their challenges ahead and fighting them with the power I know they have and not clothing themselves in egoic delusions out of comfort and fear; self-empathic courage is what I want to see not towards me, I'm not the winner here, towards themselves as I'm invested in seeing others win. It's not about glorifying suffering it's about recognizing that discomfort can be a catalyst for profound transformation; and I don't need to recount all of my accomplishments to show myself as some kind of hero in reflection of that because the truth is, I wasn't always this way, I forged the carving I am and I want to be only endorsing of people's capacities to achieve the same level of self-authoring and even beyond to show what's possible with the human spirit. By shying away from these challenges shodburrito there is too much of a risk of stagnation, this isn't "outdated truisms at work", its scientific reasoning at its simplest.

Proven by the way, following the very basic physics that's compounded the American astronauts deterioriation that have only recently come back to Earth after having spent 286 days stranded out in space. These four astronauts, Nick Hague, Sunita Williams, Barry Wilmore and Alexsandr Gorbunov now are all going through an extensive rehabilitation process for the impacts of prolonged exposure to the microgravity while in outer-space. Impacts which include but are not limited to, neurological impacts from disorientation to dizziness to poor coordination that leads to walking and spatial awareness difficulties with the vestibular system being thrown off, muscular and skeletal effects from muscle atrophy, bone density loss, joint instability, psychological effects from mild mental fatigue post-landing and the struggles of adapting to earth's stress and more, like they'll even have increased eye strain, blurry vision and more sensitive skin. That’s the wake-up call shodburrito, life has a physics. Whether it’s Newtonian, quantum, or existential, the framework doesn’t change, input determines outcome. You can’t escape the gravitational pull of effort. Just like those astronauts, even with all their intelligence, tech, and preparation had to pay the price of prolonged microgravity with their own bodies. Philosophy that ignores this principle isn’t wisdom, it’s ego-dressed laziness. And ego has no seat in real philosophy. Only physics does. I am only on the side of physics which doesn't exclude analyzing the long term impacts of disjointed egoic personal opinions that keeps people trapped in Plato's cave while preaching they're somehow on the same level of Aristotle and Einstein for using AI to construct and digitally send through their manifesto on sadly, what is their own personal neurosis. Which, very interestingly shodburitto, is simply AI being used to self-satisfy your own personal echo chamber there respectively, rather than enabling your personal development which only drives home my points that people should refrain from using AI at the very least on a personal development forum outside of ideation and enabling the positive direction of others. Look, while AI can process information and provide data-driven suggestions, it lacks the nuanced understanding that comes from lived experience. True wisdom emerges from personal reflection, critical thinking, and the courage to confront our own limitations, elements that cannot be outsourced to machines.

Our identities shape how we perceive and react to the world around us and being aware of this influence can help us engage more objectively in discussions, reducing the likelihood of taking differing opinions as personal affronts, to this end I recommend the reader to engage in their life experiences for the meta-discernment of their belief in one direction over another. It'll only encourage a self-awareness which fosters more meaningful and less confrontational dialogues. A forum that needs drama is one that lacks substance, introspective ability needs to advance to the next level in this space, respectively, translating for the exchange of ideas without the interference of ego. Life's complexities rarely fit into binary categories so the notion that growth requires suffering or that ease equates to a lack of development presents a false dichotomy; there's a fundamental physics here that I stressed in my first comment which reflects this nuance. Embracing attention to detail to our perspectives will be the difference to having dysfunctional nuclear weapons for personal growth versus being a trained sniper that just gets the job done on identifying our own spaces for advancement. Balance needs to the church of prayer when it comes to philosophy where its emboldened by the physics that complements this emotional integration that follows, only resulting in an adaptability and open-mindedness that facilitates the creativity for all members to better proactively respond to the fastly changing modern world. In a time as well where empathy is being replaced by a victimhood that capitalism and 'technological progress' profits from being incentivised to encourage cultural norms that make people, groups, cultures, societies and even entire countries (aka TikTok psyop) weaker rather than stronger by responding to not only the physics of reality but being mentally developed enough to self-experiment on reality where they come to their own self-understanding of these realities, rather than having to be told on a random personal development forum. If this forum ever wants to earn the depth of my respect, and I’ve said this for years, it has to stop avoiding the real work and start building systems that respond to the actual social physics at play. Not theories. Not abstractions. Real, grounded feedback loops that mirror the truth of its users lived experience. What I keep seeing instead is either full-blown denial or the more insidious kind, polite dismissal disguised as maturity to downright delusion. That’s not growth. That’s avoidance with better posture. And the problems in this thread, sorry Shodburrito, aren’t isolated, they’re symptomatic of a deeper fracture running through the culture here. I’ll keep contributing, because I care more than I probably should. But I won’t pretend it’s my smartest investment. Whether this place evolves or decays will be up to how well it honors one thing, the immutable law that effort and integrity always obey the physics of life. Time will show whether this forum does too.

Edited yesterday at 06:34 AM by Letho

[Breakingthewall]

10 hours ago, Tudo said:

live in a third-world country, and I can tell you guys that life here is fucking brutal! A lot of people here would give up one of their arms to be American.

You can live anywhere and still get brain cancer, or your father may be a demon, or be a lonely old man that no one talks to. Life is hard by definition. Life is war. The weak die and are eaten alive, like in animal documentaries. It's the essence of life: struggle, suffering, and frustration. Yet it's enormously beautiful.

[Breakingthewall]

On 20/3/2025 at 4:01 PM, Shodburrito said:

What's particularly interesting is the emotional intensity of your response

Yes, when I read it, I thought you were the one responsible for the decline of Western civilization and human evil in general. It's because those phrases are in bold; they denote absolute decadence

[Breakingthewall]

On the subject of suffering, suffering is life's mechanism for provoking an unstoppable movement, evolution. Without suffering, there is no real, radical change. This does not mean that suffering is necessary by definition; it is necessary if radical change is necessary. It could be the case of an evolved society in which suffering is minimal, but this is not the case.

If suffering is the engine of evolution, the human mind is evolving at an accelerated pace, therefore there is a lot of suffering. But this might not be the case. Imagine you are a natural mystic like Raman Maharsi, for example. Your level of suffering would be circumstantial and minimal. On the contrary, imagine you are the abused son of two narcissistic drug addicts whom everyone mistreats. You would have to make a great evolutionary movement to reach a stable point, and this would translate into a great amount of suffering. Anyway ,we are human, the conquerors of the universe. Who said fear?