The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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You still there, hopefully?
First of all: you have severe psychomotor weakness that is nearly certainly reversible and a sign that all this may be an embarrassingly crude biochemical failure along the lines of generalized stress-related inflammation (also could somewhat explain early balding) – go get checked out if you haven't yet; go see another shrink if you have. If shrinks have failed you, get ketamine. Beg or buy some crypto even if this leaves you butt-naked, go to your local Tor drug market or whatever is the way these things are done in your place, find a ketamine dealer with decent reviews, do an injection (or find a deadbeat acquaintance who will help). This has permanently cured and indeed fully fixed a number of people with treatment-resistant suicidal depression that I know of.
Now if you need some motivation, I'll answer your actual question. If you need more help with the advice above, write a DM.
When I feel like there are no reasons for me to keep living, happiness is a delusion and my existence itself is an exercise in sad absurdity, I remind myself that all of this has happened before, and was proven false, and every time I ended up being grateful in retrospect for gritting my teeth and pulling through: the sun is still out there, just hidden by clouds or the Earth or some ceiling I put myself under. This is a metaphor, but also a literal description. Deep in the depressive state, sunlight which is normally so pleasant doesn't feel real; it is important to keep in mind that what has changed was my perception, and it may change once more. The same applies to my ideals and long-term goals, including my ideological commitment to immortalism. When so diminished, it looks like mere letters on a screen, dead words; but it would be presumptuous of a diminished subhuman to make a decision to sabotage the plan of the master who is temporarily absent. Think of your better moments: they are not gone completely. Although not everything, much can be salvaged.
Death isn't some sweet relief either. Relief is a sensation, not absence of sensations; and in your current state it might be hard to decouple ideas of sensation and of suffering, and accordingly of the sensation of lacking suffering and lacking existence. Yet the difference exists and is profound. You cannot really conceive of death.
And needless to say: it's just interesting to see what happens next. Even if you don't feel excitement, you have to recognize cerebrally that is should be there. We may be on the precipice of a species-ending event, or the Rapture itself may be just around the corner, or the worst sort of Apocalypse and tyranny. People are mocking such expectations because they pattern-match to unfounded ancient millenarianism, but I think it's the other way around: ancients were just too smart for their times, and they saw that there is no logical reason to expect humanity to go on in its known shape forever; so they speculated about some Big Thing ending it. We are creating an unprecedented new kind of sentience (or at least intelligence) – if anything could be the Big Thing, this is it. Among the hundred-odd billion members of the Homo Sapiens lineage, quintillions of beasts with consciousness who have seen life in this Universe, you have been privileged to be present in this generation. Stay for a while to see the main event, at least.
I also think of people who would miss me. This isn't just dumb pity: I care about interesting stories that could be told. In general, most people – very much including smart, unhappy people – being taken out means that there are fewer worthwhile stories that will get told, fewer fates that ennoble the notion of living. That's just sad.
Again, your posts give the impression of a major yet reversible health condition that may not be limited to a major depressive episode, the psychomotor thing isn't the end of it. Listen to this shit: «I know I will never a good job, I will never recover my "smartness", I will never be in shape again». You've put on some weight but that's a nothingburger in the age of drugs like tirzepatide; basically you only need to wait a little for it to become commodified as tens of millions of fatasses conjure a market. Double-digit percentage of normies is virginal at your age – well, in terms of sex at least; the society is absolutely fucking young men over.
Identifying with your smarty-pants test-acing persona is more worthy of self-flagellation than losing those smarts, IMO; we live in an age of intelligence commodification anyway. But e.g. here, a month ago, I see a sharp and alert mind – so your self-perception may be skewed, or predicated on silly entitlement.
Hair can be transplanted or replaced with a hair system. You being gay is largely irrelevant to your parenthood plans seeing as women don't want to bear under realistic scenarios, you'll have to wait for an indirect solution anyway. And now this is a big thing: if any of this feels shameful, you must learn to hold the internalized shame in contempt, and hate it and all those who have made you its host. These are reactions installed in you by a hostile, homicidal yet retarded societal structure that is barely viable itself, via a backdoor of prosocial aspirations and empathy. You pursuing having a hairline, or whatever, for practical reasons, is enough of a concession; this scum is not entitled to dictating which methods you can use.
And, last but not least. Academia is oversaturated and artificially over-competitive, so academic careers suck, many academics love driving each other to suicide, PhDs are basically chimpanzees if chimps could learn statistics and had bigger dicks. It's a dysfunctional and worsening environment where miserable people compete in biting off more than they can chew, chasing pennies, and passively-aggressively gaslighting each other to reinforce their own delusion of still liking their projects. For some freaks of nature like Aaronson it's salvation, but for many more it's probably worse than neurotic bullshit like modelling or Korean idol industry. This is particularly true of hardcore STEM like your physics. Despite false advertisement, academia is not a place for people with mental health issues! Many smart, nerdy guys (of whom there is overproduction as well) who got hooked on educational rewards (due to paucity of other kinds) assume that this is their ivory tower, their Castalia, their natural path to success, far from the peons; they are being deceived, and not even for any good reason, it's just a mission-drifting remnant of a once-strategically relevant MIC subsidiary. Now, all of this doesn't apply to all of academia, it has an almost-perfectly opposite side, but the point is, more than half is this exploitative bullshit for tryhards – and you can fail to get into the other half, for reasons other than not being clever or strong enough. Go get fixed and learn2code while it still matters. You may not have enough time to start earning much, but you'll see a radically less fucked-up culture.
Also, some years ago I've written this. Maybe it'll be of interest to you, though it rehashes some of the points in this post. (Nice to see mow I'm at least consistent – so, not a word model that just spews out plausible verbiage).
That person is still alive, by the way, and has made a decent career since then. Apparently quite content with having failed the attempt.
Genuinely great post, man, thanks for writing it.
OP doesn't even need to wait, I got semaglutide from this chinese source for roughly 7USD per 2mg, and it's worked wonders for the past 2 months.
I'd love to know more. How do you handle reconstituting and injecting it? What's your weight loss been like? Any other effects?
I assume that the website you're getting it from is a compounding pharmacy.
I'm not huge but I could stand to lose 10kg or so, and if I can take a weekly shot to make it happen, I would definitely consider it. Only the price has kept me from trying it so far.
Oh it's nothing so official. I don't have a prescription for semaglutide, so I've had to find sources that don't ask for it, the chinese website I linked is one such source. If you press "contact" on that website and send a message to the guy, he'll send you a whatsapp phone number, though which you chat with him about what you want, I bought 10 vials of 2mg semaglutide. Payment is through a payment processor like moneygram or wise, but in the end these are just middlemen which also accept credit cards (though there are some annoying verifications you have to go through, I had to send a picture of my drivers license).
I took a picture of what actually arrived, inside sealed packaging depicting some sort of chinese female-targeted face mask (so it better evades customs), you can see in the background the other 9 flasks.
To reconstitute it, you need to buy bacteriostatic water (I bought it from here, no need for prescription or anything). You need 2 different syringe types, the first one I use is a 1ml syringe to draw up water from the bac-water bottle and reconstitute the solution, and a second 0.3ml insulin syringe I use to actually inject. Most of the complexity of doing this water manipulation is being aware that drawing up water creates a vacuum in the bottle, so when you draw up 0.25ml in your insulin syringe, you first need to inject 0.25ml of air inside the bottle to maintain the same end-pressure. You need to also buy alcohol prep pads to clean every surface that the needle will touch (the top of all bottles, and the skin) about a minute before the needle goes in.
Semaglutide is a lot more stable than other peptides at room temperature, in lyophilized form at room temperature there was basically no degradation after a month, which means that you can keep it for a while in that form without risk. Reconstituted it's also stable at room temp for a few weeks.
Now onto the effects and protocol:
First, the main effects: this stuff has a massive, just massive dose-dependent effect on appetite. In my default state, I need to eat around 3500 calories (at my current 230lbs, around 27% body fat level) not to feel hungry going to bed. Semaglutide at the 1mg/week level made that drop to needing 2200 calories to feel completely satiated at the end of the day. It both seems to cause food to stay in my stomach longer, and cause hormone signalling to make my brain not crave food. I've lost 2 to 3 lbs per week over the past month following my current 2000cal/day diet. I did not notice any other effects apart from appetite suppression and very, very slight and infrequent nausea. I'd suggest to have a formal diet plan if you want to lose weight, and semaglutide will make it effortless for you to stick with it.
I started not with the injectable version, but with the oral version of semaglutide called Rybelsus (which I got without prescription from indiamart). The oral version has much lower bioavailability, so you need to take it everyday in the morning on an empty stomach with max 100ml of water and wait at least 30min before eating anything else, otherwise the absorption is shit. The recommendation is to start with the 3mg/day version for a month, then upgrade to 7mg/day for a month, then again to 14mg/day, at which point you can switch to an equivalent injectable dose of 0.5mg/week (this shows just how badly semaglutide is absorbed in the gut). The important thing to know is that semaglutide has a half-life of a whole week, so the equilibrium point of a 1mg/week dose is really 2mg flowing in your blood, which you get to after about a month at the same dose.
I didn't follow the recommended dosing, I did 10 days at 3mg oral, then 10 days at 7mg oral, then 2 weeks at 0.5ml/week injectable, then 2 more weeks at 1.0ml/week injectable. The whole point of going up slowly is to prevent gastrointestinal side-effects, which are by far the most reported side-effects in trials. I didn't get much stomach disruption, but I did notice that I got it more with the injectable than the oral, so I think it's the sudden spikes of semaglutide that are to blame, this made me switch to a 3x/week injection with smaller amounts, and it seems to have solved it. Insulin needle injections are nothing like the intramuscular vaccines or anything, the needle is absolutely tiny and doesn't hurt at all, like, me pinching my leg fat to create a suitable injection site hurts more than the needle going in.
images:
https://ibb.co/8drpxw4
https://ibb.co/RzD6hLG
https://ibb.co/2nf6txP
https://ibb.co/J3mnkVW
https://ibb.co/FnTsLhz
Thanks, that's super helpful.
I imagine I will stick to the oral version if I do take the plunge. Taking a pill is easier than explaining to my girlfriend why I'm shooting up once a week. Looks like the price from Indiamart is about half what I would pay from a UK supplier.
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