Ponder
5mo ago
I have found that watching podcasts has improved my ability to communicate. If you find a podcast where the host speaks in the style that you aspire to then watching that podcast can help you implicitly learn how to communicate in that style.
The other thing that might help is calming supplements/nootropics. They can help you relax and be less nervous in social interactions. You have to consider how they interact with any drugs/supplements you are taking and find ones that make you calm without making you too tired to socialize. Typically, calming nootropics will have GABAergic effects. Some that work for me are apigenin (found in chamomile), coriander (found in lavender), and lemon balm.
Ponder
5mo ago
If you weren't reading external sources, would you notice these issues in your day to day life?
Mostly yes because I initially noticed something IRL that caused me to dig for explanatory data. The triggers are things like:
- Wanting to buy a house, so I dig to understand the market conditions.
- Not having success on dating apps, so I dig to understand why and if this is a common problem for other men.
- People around me talking about things they encountered on the internet and me digging to understand why I was so out of the loop.
However, once I have the information that I need I don’t stop digging. At that point it becomes unhealthy and causes anxiety. I agree that I need to reduce the time I spend reading news/social media, and I need to be more intentional about filtering the information to get just the small amount I need.
Ponder
5mo ago
I’m a straight male, but I have gay male friends/acquaintances. I feel like being direct and honest is a great communication style when I interact with gay male friends/acquaintances. I’m open-minded and non-judgmental, which seems to make people at ease about being authentic and honest around me.
I get the impression that gay men are much more upfront and direct about their intentions and desires when flirting/dating. This communication style avoids misunderstanding, and it signals maturity and self-confidence.
Other possibilities to consider besides online dating include:
- Letting certain friends know you are single and looking so that they can connect you with potential matches.
- Going places that have an overlap of hobbies you enjoy + potential men you’re interested in dating.
Ponder
5mo ago
I used to play Magic: the Gathering and there is a card called Ponder, so that was part of the inspiration for my name.
With social media and cell phones I remind myself that most information is just a variant of something I already know. I’m trying to restrict my media diet to only things that are new/novel information + improve my life in some way. I’m getting better at not scrolling through things because it is very rare to find anything worth my time anymore. My biggest weakness is wanting to stay up to date on economic conditions (like the housing market, because that does impact my plans to buy a home).
For meeting people to date I do well at getting attention at the bar, which I only go to a few times a month. I have a rule to always exchange contact info and wait at least a day so we are both sober. Usually, getting the attention at the bar is enough satisfaction for me and then I don’t feel like putting effort into arranging a date. I have a very low sex drive. I’m fine being single and dating feels like too much effort unless I meet a really low-maintenance woman.
The other places I connect with people are men’s circle and book club, but I don’t meet potential dates there.
With money I think it is a feeling of injustice mixed with anxiety. The economic system feels unfair/random. It gives too much advantage to those with inherited wealth, social manipulators, and unethical people. Working hard provides no guarantees of wealth and often people will take advantage of your work ethic to get you to work for less money than you are worth. The economic system encourages all parties to view each other as disposable/replaceable objects to be discarded when something better comes along.
I also believe that I have undiagnosed autism and it caused setbacks in my career, which led to missing out on a lot of passive wealth gains in the last 4-5 years.
I also think part of why the issues in my OP bother me so much is because I have nostalgia for the past (around the 90s). I felt like the world made more sense. I had a lot of untapped potential and hope for the future. These issues are kind of variances between that time and today.
Ponder
5mo ago
The Reddit algorithms get me to waste more time than I would like. Intuitively, I know they are feeding me variants of the same things and that it is all a waste of time. I need to do better at not opening the app. I don’t use Snap/Instagram/TikTok at all.
I feel a little bit of conflict about cutting all news and social media out though because I like to stay connected and informed. I want to be able to keep up with IRL conversations (which often involve online trends and news) and know about trends that can impact the stock market.
Ponder
5mo ago
In 2019 the us median numbers were around:
- Salary for a new graduate: 51k
- Rent payment: 1,100
- House price: 258k
In 2023 the us median numbers were around:
- Salary for a new graduate: 56k
- Rent payment: 1,400
- House price: 420k
Since 1/1/20 the S&P 500 has increased by at least 67%. If someone owned a house before March 2022 they were able to lock in a 30-year mortgage rate around 3% (vs. around 7% today). People with wealth had huge gains in the last 4 years and those gains will continue to generate more passive wealth in the future.
A new grad isn’t going to be able to save/invest much. Meanwhile, the people with extraordinary returns in the last 4 years are generating tons of passive wealth because they locked in a low mortgage expense and have more money to invest/save. They are also earning passive income faster now because they have a larger asset base.
When inflation is normal for long periods of time and mortgage rates are similar between new/existing homeowners this wealth disparity effect is much less of a problem.
For a new grad starting around $0 (or in debt) to build substantial wealth they need to be on a path to earn much more than the median salary and/or make sacrifices to greatly lower expenses (like living with their parents for a few years after college).
Ponder
5mo ago
Does anyone have tips for dealing with feelings of anxiety/hopelessness?
I feel like my mental health is being negatively impacted by things outside of my control and that these things are going to get worse in the near the future.
- Social media is doing a lot of damage to people’s mental health, attention spans, and ability to connect with people outside their bubbles. Over time social media continues to become more addicting and gets better at identifying people’s emotional buttons and how to push them. This results in anxiety, anger, conspiratorial thinking/paranoia, and other mental health problems. The people in power have no incentive to address any of these problems because they get money/power from the status quo.
- Economic policies have exacerbated wealth inequality. If you don’t already have substantial wealth then it seems nearly impossible to build much wealth through selling your labor. Asset ownership seems to be a much more viable path toward wealth generation but young people that didn’t inherit wealth are at a huge disadvantage in this system.
- AI is going to make it harder for people without wealth to build wealth because it devalues their labor.
- The shift to online dating has made it harder for many heterosexual people to find meaningful long-term relationships because it selects for superficial traits. There are fewer places where it is acceptable to flirt in-person which makes it harder for men to attract women by demonstrating character/virtue over time. Additionally, the high ratio of men to women on dating apps makes many men feel invisible and many women feel overwhelmed.
- Politicians are not addressing these problems in any meaningful way and are actively making things worse by distracting us with bullshit.
Ponder
5mo ago
As others have said some judgement is helpful (example: a doctor telling you that you drink too much alcohol and it will cause health problems). It can help you see self-deceptive or self-destructive behavior that you can’t see on your own.
However, some judgement is unhelpful or mean-spirited. In that case here are some techniques to make you care less about judgement from other people:
- Remind yourself of times when you were right and others judged you as wrong. This increases the confidence in your own judgement and decreases the confidence in the judgment from others.
- Remind yourself that only you know what it feels like to be you in a specific situation (perspectival knowing). Nobody else has that same way of knowing the situation and therefore you are in the best position to make judgements about the situation.
- Assume the person passing judgement is jealous/stupid/evil. Therefore, the judgement has far less weight.
- Exposure therapy – Finding practice situations (without real consequences) where you will likely face negative judgments and practice not caring about it. It will desensitize you to judgement from others.
To reiterate another comment: judgement is something you need carefully and thoughtfully balance. If you are too dismissive of judgement it can lead you to having delusions of grandeur.
Ponder
5mo ago
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When my bicycle was stolen and nobody provided useful assistance.
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When my rent went up a over 15% and my landlord refused to negotiate even though I’ve been a good tenant. They claimed their expenses went up that much but I did the math on the publicly available property taxes and determined their costs did not go up anywhere near as much as they raised rent. They ended up causing a lot of tenants to leave and then had to offer new tenants lower rates.
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When I was in a job that was paying me below what they would pay a new employee for the same position. I had good reviews and they expressed appreciation for my work, but they couldn’t negotiate salary due to HR policies. I'm pretty sure they ended up paying a new employee more than I was making when I eventually left.
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LSD and MDMA being schedule 1 drugs (no currently accepted medical use) when they both were being successfully medically used at the time of scheduling. I believe MDMA or psychedelic assisted therapy would be beneficial to me but people have made it illegal for me to participate in it.
Ponder
5mo ago
Thanks for the response, the way you explained it makes a lot of sense to me.
Next, consider the elements of harmony and where the other person stopped being an “us” and started being a “them” to you: are they being unkind, untruthful, disloyal, ungenerous, too serious, or under-involved?
In the triggering situations I almost always find what I believe is strong evidence of the other person being unkind or untruthful. I realize that they will never value me like they value the other relationships in their life. My model of them suggests they view me as a “them”, and there is nothing I can do to change this.
In many situations I just accept this and move on to doing other things, but sometimes the trigger is very strong and I start going down the path of dark/anti-social thoughts. It is like I find the triggering situations are a significant injustice and therefore I’m allowed break social norms in order to make things right.
The problem is I don’t want to go down the path of dark/anti-social thoughts. Even if I can find some unorthodox solution to the injustice it is almost always a case of winning a battle, but losing the war. The dark/anti-social thoughts also start bleeding over to other situations where they don’t apply.
Ponder
5mo ago
When I feel like people aren't being reasonable/rational then my mind often starts to treat these people as objects and obstacles. I start coming up with autistic machinations that are often dark and anti-social.
Normally, I'm a very polite and cooperative person that tries to see people's good intentions. Sometimes I'll encounter a situation that is very frustrating where my normal approach doesn't work.
Do you have any advice or tips on how I can avoid ruminating on dark/anti-social thoughts when I encounter challenging situations where cooperation doesn't work?
The pattern seems to be something like: I encounter a frustrating situation then I start brainstorming a lot of ideas on how to solve the situation without any ethical filters. If any of the ideas seem like they might work then I continue thinking about that idea even if it is dark/anti-social. At some point I realize the thought is dark/anti-social and that I shouldn't think of such things. Then I try to avoid the thought, but part of me gets obsessed with thinking it all the way through. If I ignore it then the idea will manifest itself again if I can't find a better solution.
Ponder
6mo ago
increasing longevity
According to marketing literature:
- Bioavailable CoQ10 - CoQ10 functions as a carrier to transfer electrons across the membrane of the mitochondria to drive production of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), or cellular energy.
- NAD+ precursors (including Nicotinamide Mononucleotide and Nicotinamide Riboside) - may help support overall cell proliferation. NAD+ levels decrease as we age which leads to the belief that lowered NAD+ levels are responsible for lower energy levels
- Astragaloside IV (a compound in Astragalus membranaceus) - can enhance telomere length. Telomeres are protective caps on the end of our DNA, which helps ensure proper DNA replication. However, the older we get, the shorter our telomeres become. Due to this, telomere shortening is often seen as a hallmark of aging.
- Peptides - I have no idea about these but they are building blocks of certain proteins needed by the skin, like collagen and elastin.
Personally, the first 2 seemed to give me a mild energy boost for a few hours. It is hard to say if they did much beyond that. I was only taking them 1-2x a week and not daily.
I would enjoy seeing more discussion on these because my research is from a biased source (a nootropics seller).
Ponder
6mo ago
History is filled with many examples of violence on massive scales (wars) and violence initiated over religious/superstitious beliefs (like the Salem witch trials). There are still wars in today’s world.
This desire and use of violence is part of the human condition. John has an attitude that helps him remain vigilant and alert to the fact that humans have the potential to resort to irrational and gratuitous violence. It seems like part of why John is like this is because it is an adaptive strategy to anticipate what might trigger violence in humans so that he can avoid triggering it in other people. Of course he is assigning incorrect probabilities to the violent outcomes, but the strategy still makes sense directionally.
Ponder
6mo ago
This probably isn't the exact post that you were looking for, but I think you will find it interesting and related to what you asked about. It is about how people's views on X becomes distorted by taboos and shift when the taboo is lifted.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KpMNqA5BiCRozCwM3/social-dark-matter
[Social Dark Matter is] anything that people are strongly incentivized to hide from each other, and which therefore appears to be rare. And given that our society disapproves-of and disincentivizes a wide variety of things, there is a lot of it out there.
By the Law of Prevalence, any given type of social dark matter is going to be much more common than your evidence would suggest, and by the Law of Extremity, instances of that dark matter are going to tend to be much less extreme than you would naively guess.
Ponder
6mo ago
Ponder
6mo ago
I agree with this answer. Religion allows small groups of people to slowly reshape the culture as it attracts new members. The religion grows stronger as the mainstream culture grows weaker, which can eventually lead to the religion re-shaping/replacing parts of mainstream culture. A historical example is the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire.
States with Religious Freedom Restoration Acts have stronger religious protections than those that don't.
Traditional religions in some people's eyes have lost their credibility/safety so there seems to be an opportunity to create a new religion that is better aligned with modern scientific beliefs.
Ponder
7mo ago
Something I've done before is to print off a map of the area. Whenever I go somewhere new for the first time I highlight it on the map. Then when I went for a leisurely bicycle ride I would look at that map and choose a path that would lead to somewhere I hadn't highlighted yet.
I'm sure you could do this digitally too: download something that tracks where you walk/ride then specifically look for areas that you haven't been to.
Ponder
7mo ago
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/W5HcGywyPoDDdJtbz/trigger-action-planning
- Choose a goal (a desired outcome or behavior)
- Identify a relevant trigger (something that will happen naturally)
- Decide on an action that you want to occur after the trigger
- Rehearse the causal link (e.g. with deliberate visualization)
Basically, you can find the trigger that causes undesirable behavior and change it through intention and repetition. You can also build productive routines using this algorithm.
Ponder
7mo ago
I have no personal experience buying from the current sellers. It is still legally available as a research chemical in the US. The main issue is trusting that the supplier has sufficient quality control. Places that sell it are science.bio, Trafa Pharmaceutical, and edengrows.
You might be able to get an off label prescription from a doctor to pregabalin which might have similar effects. However, I don't have personal experience with anything similar to Phenibut, and they can often vary in effects significantly even though they are structurally similar. See: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/18/know-your-gabapentinoids/
Ponder
7mo ago
turn into a cool guy who dances with babes at the club. Is that possible? Has anyone actually done that?
Yes, I have done exactly this. I did it through the use of psychoactive substances, mainly Phenibut combined with extended-release caffeine. For me Phenibut increases social confidence, reduces self-doubt, reduces self-censorship, makes music sound amazing, and makes me want to socialize. It is like alcohol without the impairment. This was back when you could buy Phenibut from reputable nootropics vendors, but that is no longer the case as of 2023. Also, Phenibut can be addictive if used more than once a week and it is dangerous to combine it with alcohol/benzos/opiods/CNS depressants.
I found it fun just getting the attention of hot women even though I have a low sex drive and I wasn’t trying to get laid. I became way more interested in figuring out why what I was doing worked, how to optimize it, and the limitations of it. I started reading about psychology, cog sci, pharmacodynamics, etc.
The simple lesson is that I had a part of me that was shutting down a different part of me that wanted to connect with people. In Internal Family Systems language I had a manager that was shutting down the exile that wanted to be playful/fun because the manager thought I should always act logically/rationally and the exile’s plans were dangerous and stupid.
Furthermore, becoming the cool guy has pros and cons:
Pros:
- It builds confidence and skills
- Reduces social anxiety and this somewhat persists when sober
- Increases interest in psychology/cog sci
- More friends
- Feel way more optimistic about life and people when under the influence of Phenibut.
Cons
- New friends are flaky and only want to be around me when I’m in party mode
- The newly learned confidence is mostly tied to the environment (club) and mental state (not sober) so the benefits are limited in normal situations
- Sleep cycle gets interrupted due to staying out late
- I became more jaded and cynical about people. Other people like me when I’m clownish and not when I’m being thoughtful and sober.
- Damage to professional reputation if you’re the guy in club every weekend.
- Probably could have found a better use of my time.
stupid pop music
This will probably work better for you if go to EDM clubs or festivals. You want to go where there are people that use MDMA or other drugs that increase openness and friendliness to strangers.
In conclusion, you can use drugs to change the activities you enjoy and to make it easier to connect with strangers. However, I would advise you to think long and hard about how that will impact you if you succeed because it probably won’t be as rewarding as you expect.
Ponder
8mo ago
There is research that synthetic fertilizers reduce the nutritional quality of foods.
There is research on if synthetic fertilizers pose a risk to human health and contribute to the development of chronic disease (I'm not sure how conclusive it is, I haven't dug into it).
Ponder
8mo ago
https://www.meaningcrisis.co/ep-48-awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-corbin-and-the-divine-double/
The last section, "An Aspirational Process Towards A More Angelic Self", can probably steelman this much better than I can.
Prayer is something like a process that affords you the ability to transform directionally towards an aspirational self (symbolic). If you believe your aspirational self has the qualities that you are asking for in prayer, then the action of praying can help start the process of bringing those qualities to your current self.
Ponder
8mo ago
Generally, some ways a person might become less impacted by their feelings are:
- Internalizing ideas from Stoicism. There is a difference between the event and how we frame it. The feelings we experience are caused by how we choose to internally frame the event. We can choose to internally frame events in less distressing ways.
- Realizing that some feelings are influenced by extra information that we add to events. If someone is rude to you then we might add the assumption that they don’t like us. We don’t know this for sure, it may just be that they are having a bad day. If we add a mental note that this extra information is tentative instead of certain then the feelings associated with it may be less intense.
- Exposure Therapy. For example, working in a retail sales setting makes people less sensitive to rejection if they face it a lot in their job.
if someone who's sensitive starts creative endeavours they will be better than average?
Yes, it can help in certain situations, but it takes some training to make it work to your advantage. It is probably similar to how certain physical characteristics make people better at certain sports, but they have to (1) be interested in the sport (2) train themselves to use the physical characteristic advantageously.
Ponder
8mo ago
'relevance realization'?
I was using relevance realization to mean the process by which things motivate people, what arouses their energy, what attracts their attention, etc. Right now you probably aren't paying attention to the wall or the furniture even though it is in your environment, there is a process that puts it in the background as not important.
I feel like paragraph 1 is a fully general argument against e.g. having fun, randomly reading wikipedia pages to learn new things, or really anything other than 'working in the domain you specialize in', unless i'm misunderstanding, which is plausible.
You can find anything relevant, including just having fun. A drug addict finds drugs highly relevant and salient. I was indicating that there is a process that causes people to find certain things relevant and causes them to background other things. Relevance changes depending on context too (such as when someone is at work, and when they are at home).
but if you can't get anything out of talking to random people at a reasonable frequently you're doing it wrong.
It isn't that you can't get anything out of it. It is that you have limited time/energy and you can get similar things more efficiently. If you read certain books you will gain knowledge you find relevant at a faster pace than if you spent that time on small talk.
Figure out what sources of media they consume daily and try to follow the same sources. If they get their information from social media find some of the people they follow, or what podcasts they listen to. Eventually, you will pick up on the some of the common references/background culture. I find most people are highly likely to be interested in currently trending events. If they reference an older piece of culture it is often somehow connected to a current event.
I will caution you that trying to force yourself to fit into social settings in this manner may lead to burnout and mental health problems. If you learn to enjoy doing it than that is great, but if it feels like a forced social performance that you hate doing then it may cause problems in the future.
Another option that might be available to you is telling people that you suspect that you are on the autism spectrum/neurodivergent. This may lower what they expect of you in social situations. It shifts the framing from you are having trouble fitting in because you haven’t put in sufficient effort to you are having trouble fitting because the neurotypical norms cause you mental distress/burdens/anxiety and your disability prevents you from substantially changing this.
People are usually accommodating and don’t ask a lot of follow-up questions. If they do just being familiar with autistic masking, autistic burnout, and special interests will probably be sufficient to answer any questions they have.
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