Is life short? --> I blinked and I'm 20

[Sugarcoat]

And so what if it’s short? You’ll probably reincarnate again sooner or later. Why would life only appear once? If it could happen this lifetime it could another.

[shree]

If blinking ages you, maybe just stop blinking so much. 

[Yimpa]

Blink and you could also experience this:

 

[integration journey]

7 hours ago, Michael569 said:

@integration journey good question! Let me think about that and get back in a few days. 

Thanks!

[Lila9]

Maybe it has something to do with being present.
When I’m truly present, time seems to slow down.
Moments stretch, details sharpen, and everything feels more vivid.
Like life is breathing in high definition.

 

[LordFall]

You’re an immortal being in spirit and you’ll be biologically immortal in your lifetime so I wouldn’t worry too much about it. 

[Michael569]

On 4/19/2025 at 9:43 PM, integration journey said:

what advice would you give to your 26 yr old self? 

I thought about this a bit more. What advice would i have wished to have 8-10 yrs ago.

1. Find a mentor - someone to help you grow and mature and help you acquire skills and traits that online content and parents can't teach you. Especially essential if you want to follow a life purpose which includes building some sort ot small businesses with integrity. A good mentor will also teach you to take criticism well and to even crave it. If you can't take a feedback, you can't grow. 

2. Learn to be comfortable with uncertainty - I've always been opposed to pursue areas in life where i was uncertain how or what to do or just where the future seemed too cloudy but from those lot of good things have emerged 

3. Start investing - pretty self explanatory.  And aldo don't lose time with crypto and similar shenanigans. 

4. Live in a foreign country (if you can) - i believe that my greatest growth happened after leaving my home and moving to live abroad. This is especially true if your home country is not doing too well. There is some to say about being patriotic and trying to fix things but sometimes leaving for 10 years and then bringing acquired skills back can be better.

5. Stay fit and protect your health at all times

Edited Monday at 01:11 PM by Michael569

[integration journey]

5 hours ago, Michael569 said:

I thought about this a bit more. What advice would i have wished to have 8-10 yrs ago.

1. Find a mentor - someone to help you grow and mature and help you acquire skills and traits that online content and parents can't teach you. Especially essential if you want to follow a life purpose which includes building some sort ot small businesses with integrity. A good mentor will also teach you to take criticism well and to even crave it. If you can't take a feedback, you can't grow. 

2. Learn to be comfortable with uncertainty - I've always been opposed to pursue areas in life where i was uncertain how or what to do or just where the future seemed too cloudy but from those lot of good things have emerged 

3. Start investing - pretty self explanatory.  And aldo don't lose time with crypto and similar shenanigans. 

4. Live in a foreign country (if you can) - i believe that my greatest growth happened after leaving my home and moving to live abroad. This is especially true if your home country is not doing too well. There is some to say about being patriotic and trying to fix things but sometimes leaving for 10 years and then bringing acquired skills back can be better.

5. Stay fit and protect your health at all times

Thank you for the tips! 
I left Syria at 16 because of the war and now I’m 26 in the US. 
I didn’t want to leave Syria because that’s all I knew and I was a kid but now I’m really glad I left to gain more experience and hopefully I can go back to my home country when I’m older so it can be a full circle moment! 

[LordFall]

9 hours ago, Michael569 said:

3. Start investing - pretty self explanatory.  And aldo don't lose time with crypto and similar shenanigans. 

 

We can use these posts as timestamps but what’s your thesis against crypto? I think being blanket against crypto and especially Bitcoin is a foolish statement bordering on irresponsible.

At the very least take 20 hours to research it and if you do I think you’ll see it has some of the most potential out of any asset class out there.  

[Michael569]

@LordFall the way crypto is being done by most people is to hope for a quick buy and sell to get rich of a quick plumets in the market. Basically lot of people have to lose money for you to gain some. Its selfish, unsystematic, unholistic and contributing to even more inequality of resource distribution.

You can totally trade stocks that way but there are better ways to go around it where everyone has a chance to benefit such as methodical long term investment into responsible funds allowing caring businesses to prosper and in exchange people can build a reasonable fund over the periods of few decades. 

Although saying that you could probably do that with cryptocurrency but i haven't seen many examples of that, maybe you have. Seeing how easily it is for bunch of scumbags to become overnight billionaires shows you the volatility of that whole system tho

Edited Monday at 07:10 PM by Michael569

[LordFall]

@Michael569 Yes I agree a lot of the altcoin markets have no value and fundamentals and are just scams. Bitcoin is different though and the idea is that the absolute amount that you buy today is not inflatable it’ll just keep going up as more dollars are put into it.

The problem with only believing in traditional finance is it also works as a pump and dump scheme. The purchasing power of the USD has fallen by 96% since 1913 and will predictably fall much more as they print more money. So your tech stock that you buy today and have to pay capital gains tax on when you sell is also only payable in dollars.

The whole fiat system in and of itself is a leaky bucket that ensures our holdings are devalued over time.

[UpperMaster]

5 hours ago, integration journey said:

Thank you for the tips! 
I left Syria at 16 because of the war and now I’m 26 in the US. 
I didn’t want to leave Syria because that’s all I knew and I was a kid but now I’m really glad I left to gain more experience and hopefully I can go back to my home country when I’m older so it can be a full circle moment! 

Wow. That's crazy. Yea full circle indeed.

[UpperMaster]

11 hours ago, Michael569 said:

I thought about this a bit more. What advice would i have wished to have 8-10 yrs ago.

1. Find a mentor - someone to help you grow and mature and help you acquire skills and traits that online content and parents can't teach you. Especially essential if you want to follow a life purpose which includes building some sort ot small businesses with integrity. A good mentor will also teach you to take criticism well and to even crave it. If you can't take a feedback, you can't grow. 

2. Learn to be comfortable with uncertainty - I've always been opposed to pursue areas in life where i was uncertain how or what to do or just where the future seemed too cloudy but from those lot of good things have emerged 

3. Start investing - pretty self explanatory.  And aldo don't lose time with crypto and similar shenanigans. 

4. Live in a foreign country (if you can) - i believe that my greatest growth happened after leaving my home and moving to live abroad. This is especially true if your home country is not doing too well. There is some to say about being patriotic and trying to fix things but sometimes leaving for 10 years and then bringing acquired skills back can be better.

5. Stay fit and protect your health at all times

Thank you for taking the time to think and write this. This is great.

[Michael569]

17 hours ago, LordFall said:

s not inflatable it’ll just keep going up as more dollars are put into it

Everything is prone corrections and loss of value, Bitcon isn't protected form this either. 

17 hours ago, LordFall said:

The problem with only believing in traditional finance is it also works as a pump and dump scheme.

Yeah sure, market shenanigans are a problem. Real estates, the way they are priced, are one giant scam but you still have to live somewhere. Same way, regardless of what schemes are going on, the world works on a cash/debit and credit basis so you can't just pull yourself out of it. 

17 hours ago, LordFall said:

The purchasing power of the USD has fallen by 96% since 1913 and will predictably fall much more as they print more money.

I don't understand the depth of financial markets enough to be able to tell whether this is a relevant information. Yes it sounds scary but I feel there is more nuance to it. Like the reason for drop being that we simply have more people and so the cash is distributed among larger volume of people so the dollar has naturally devaluated across decades as there is more physical money going around.  

You could say that currency devaluation is a well recognised event documented across human history. Roman currency has progressively got devaluated by mixing the gold with copper and lead, in some 300 AD (or maybe earlier) which caused massive inflation on the market. This phenomenon is well documented across Europe. Same happened in some American colonies during the early days of separation from the English Monarchy. 

17 hours ago, LordFall said:

So your tech stock that you buy today and have to pay capital gains tax on when you sell is also only payable in dollars.

you can invest in certain bonds and stock that are tax free, although you still pay the brokage fee which I'm sure is the same or cryptocurrency. 

17 hours ago, LordFall said:

The whole fiat system in and of itself is a leaky bucket that ensures our holdings are devalued over time

that to me sounds like something taken from a podcast or a statement on Instagram reel without context. I don't mean to dismiss the argument but once again I feel there is more to it. 

Edited Tuesday at 01:08 PM by Michael569

[LordFall]

8 hours ago, Michael569 said:

Everything is prone corrections and loss of value, Bitcon isn't protected form this either. 

Yeah sure, market shenanigans are a problem. Real estates, the way they are priced, are one giant scam but you still have to live somewhere. Same way, regardless of what schemes are going on, the world works on a cash/debit and credit basis so you can't just pull yourself out of it. 

I don't understand the depth of financial markets enough to be able to tell whether this is a relevant information. Yes it sounds scary but I feel there is more nuance to it. Like the reason for drop being that we simply have more people and so the cash is distributed among larger volume of people so the dollar has naturally devaluated across decades as there is more physical money going around.  

You could say that currency devaluation is a well recognised event documented across human history. Roman currency has progressively got devaluated by mixing the gold with copper and lead, in some 300 AD (or maybe earlier) which caused massive inflation on the market. This phenomenon is well documented across Europe. Same happened in some American colonies during the early days of separation from the English Monarchy. 

you can invest in certain bonds and stock that are tax free, although you still pay the brokage fee which I'm sure is the same or cryptocurrency. 

that to me sounds like something taken from a podcast or a statement on Instagram reel without context. I don't mean to dismiss the argument but once again I feel there is more to it. 

I didn't consider the increased population in terms of the lowering of living standards, that's an interesting point. It doesn't tell the full story but it's worth taking into account. The standard of living in the US has dropped by about 20% in terms of economic standards since the 1970s. There are various reasons for it but devaluation of currency through fiat is definitely one of them.

Transferring your labor to the most solid asset class possible is basically the only store of value you have and it seems to me that Bitcoin is amongst the most fundamentally sound forms of that. I'm open to a conversation on the specifics of that as I'm not an expert I just do a lot of research but I don't think any of the points you've made discredit it. Asset allocation is the key part of investing and putting it all in crypto would be wild but not having a significant exposure to it in my humble opinion is a bit foolish.  Especially as the US government is going big on crypto and potentially disrupting the whole global financial order so it's once of the only assets that stand a solid chance of benefiting from that chaos, real estate is another one as if global supply chains are disrupted building more of it will be hard and the existing supply will just inflate in price. 

[Sandhu]

Try not blinking, time will slow down

Edited Wednesday at 01:53 AM by Sandhu

[Michael569]

12 hours ago, LordFall said:

Especially as the US government is going big on crypto and potentially disrupting the whole global financial order so it's once of the only assets that stand a solid chance of benefiting from that chaos,

I agree with the points you made and perhaps the point I made about dismissing crypto currency with a wave of a hand was too hasty...seems like that was probably the case. Yet I can't help but agree with this in two ways: 

• Yes, US government is going big on crypto but not in a good way. You saw what happened with Trump Coins. I'm sure that was an extreme example but a system that allows someone to almost become overnight the richest person in the world seems quite unstable and prone to major corruption to me 
• the notion of "benefiting from the chaos" indicates to what I said before that crypto is potentially unholistic and it hurst the system because it is mainly about wanting something for nothing and wanting to profit of other people's loss.

Edited Wednesday at 08:42 AM by Michael569

[WikiRando]

Bonds today are crap. Holding bonds is outdated investment advice from a time when bonds were actually, safe and stable with good yields. Bonds are only for giant institutions who are usually regulated and can't hold anything else, are chasing stability (not that bonds are actually stable) , or can make use of bond liquidity in ways us normal people do not. Bonds and cash will be the first things to implode when the current monetary system collapses. And that's not an if, it's a when.

Bonds are the bedrock of the financial system but that's why they will be the first column that buckles

Meanwhile we have technologies like Bitcoin which is truly a marvel and prevents this whole currency devaluation thing. If you are only looking at it through the lens of volatility and buy/sell price changes, you're missing the technology of what bitcoin IS and focusing only on its market performance. And then there's new stuff like Bitbonds (bitcoin backed bonds) 

On 22/04/2025 at 7:36 PM, Michael569 said:

Like the reason for drop being that we simply have more people and so the cash is distributed among larger volume of people so the dollar has naturally devaluated across decades as there is more physical money going around.  

 

 

You don't need to print more dollars to give money to more people. You simply need to divide the existing money into smaller denominations, which is the ass backwards of what is happening.

The problem is that the underlying value of the money is being devalued period. They don't care about more population because value of existing currency can be preserved by infinitely subdividing it, through issuing  smaller denominations of that currency. Clearly this never happens. Because that's not how things work. When you devalue the currency, you are not helping this, you are doing that in spite of this. 

As you yourself mentioned, currency devaluation is a story as old as time. The part that you might be missing is that it's dire in all cases - it's directly tied to the rise and fall of civilations and the collapse of their systems. Which is why I said the collapse is a matter of when, not if. Devaluation is real and severe. In fact, it's a bigger problem than most think, because people just see their stocks and assets going up in dollar terms and they think they're getting richer. 

 

Edited 16 hours ago by WikiRando

[WikiRando]

Another thing on the population size. When the poplulation increases, the size of the economy also increases so there is a balancing effect because there is also now more goods and services generated by the bigger economy for that bigger population.

 If you keep the dollar amount constant without devaluing it, it will find its own balance, with each dollar (or subdivision) being worth some amount goods exchanged for some currency held my someone. So again, printing more dollars has nothing to do with it.

It's devalued because of excess spending, debt, centralization, greed, and just the function of how a society goes through its rise and fall.

Edited 16 hours ago by WikiRando

[Yimpa]

I blinked and got diagnosed with eye ulcers.

Not a joke, I could have literally gone permanently blind had it not been for my providers!