zero
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Posts posted by zero
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14 hours ago, ambermonk said:
My 20th anniversary high school reunion is in 2.5 days. Still thinking about going, but I'm worried it's gonna end up being awkward or cringe.
fwiw I went to mine, and wasn't that bad. it's sorta a trip actually to be in a room where you know the names of so many people. most of it is just alcohol fueled harmless small talk.
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I remember in the '80s / '90s young-ish kids would travel by themselves places. like when I was 10, I flew on an airplane to visit a relative by myself. that's back when you could still go to the gate without a ticket. my friend was telling me how when he was 10, him and his 8 year old brother would travel on the bus by themselves to another city to visit relatives. this can't happen anymore here in the US. the kids flying on plane thing obviously can't happen anymore because of security policies enacted thanks to 9/11. I curiously checked Greyhound's website, and says you have to be 16 to travel alone on the bus.
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^ seems like you answered most of your "why" questions in your post... bureaucracy preventing progress. changing things costs a ton of money. humans have a tendency of not agreeing on shit, prefer to argue/point fingers and get nothing done. you said it all there between the lines.
IMO getting all the end of the line consumers on board with changing our usage habits is futile, if the producers themselves don't comply. there are always work arounds once you move way up the chain, to avoid so called regulations that any environmental governance body enacts. spill a bunch of toxic shit in the ocean? get some public shaming that will be forgotten about sooner rather than later, pay a massive fine, make some fake ass announcement about making corporate changes...then keep on drilling whatever the fuck you want out of the planet to make a profit for your board of directors. yeah fairly simple example, but this seems to me what happens time and time again, to an extent.
then you have the politics of the problem. a dip shit capitalist like trump, or similar ilk, coming to power, and behaving like a belligerent toddler, backing out of any agreements meant to help the environment. we know politicians love to play the whataboutism card. what about China? Russia? all the 3rd world countries that have totally corrupt governments, heads of state in it for the $ and power, nothing more. what are they doing about the environment? they are worse than us!
so yeah man, a global paradigm shift involving all the countries, citizenry, and resources to save the planet is absolutely what is needed. can that be done? I don't think so. why? way too many delusional human beings out there. the focus needs to be on re-adjusting everyone on this planet's view of reality, to think clearly about this issue. this involves selflessness though, and sadly I see the bulk of humanity heading the other direction toward selfishness. fuckin social media and selfie sticks. it's all for the gram. not for the planet. the fuckin FB tweeting gram, man...
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29 minutes ago, cruising for burgers said:
cubensis or beatoven can't recall exactly... by the time we did those project ekt compilations I was beatoven...
you'll always be MJ to me
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weirdly interesting take on AI from a slightly cult-y Buddhist monk:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/buddhist-monks-vermont-ai-apocalypse/674501/
here in case it's paywalled:
QuoteThe monk paces the zendo, forecasting the end of the world.
Soryu Forall, ordained in the Zen Buddhist tradition, is speaking to the two dozen residents of the monastery he founded a decade ago in Vermont’s far north. Bald, slight, and incandescent with intensity, he provides a sweep of human history. Seventy thousand years ago, a cognitive revolution allowed Homo sapiens to communicate in story—to construct narratives, to make art, to conceive of god. Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Buddha lived, and some humans began to touch enlightenment, he says—to move beyond narrative, to break free from ignorance. Three hundred years ago, the scientific and industrial revolutions ushered in the beginning of the “utter decimation of life on this planet.”
Humanity has “exponentially destroyed life on the same curve as we have exponentially increased intelligence,” he tells his congregants. Now the “crazy suicide wizards” of Silicon Valley have ushered in another revolution. They have created artificial intelligence.
Human intelligence is sliding toward obsolescence. Artificial superintelligence is growing dominant, eating numbers and data, processing the world with algorithms. There is “no reason” to think AI will preserve humanity, “as if we’re really special,” Forall tells the residents, clad in dark, loose clothing, seated on zafu cushions on the wood floor. “There’s no reason to think we wouldn’t be treated like cattle in factory farms.” Humans are already destroying life on this planet. AI might soon destroy us.
For a monk seeking to move us beyond narrative, Forall tells a terrifying story. His monastery is called MAPLE, which stands for the “Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth.” The residents there meditate on their breath and on metta, or loving-kindness, an emanation of joy to all creatures. They meditate in order to achieve inner clarity. And they meditate on AI and existential risk in general—life’s violent, early, and unnecessary end.
Does it matter what a monk in a remote Vermont monastery thinks about AI? A number of important researchers think it does. Forall provides spiritual advice to AI thinkers, and hosts talks and “awakening” retreats for researchers and developers, including employees of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Apple. Roughly 50 tech types have done retreats at MAPLE in the past few years. Forall recently visited Tom Gruber, one of the inventors of Siri, at his home in Maui for a week of dharma dinners and snorkeling among the octopuses and neon fish.
Forall’s first goal is to expand the pool of humans following what Buddhists call the Noble Eightfold Path. His second is to influence technology by influencing technologists. His third is to change AI itself, seeing whether he and his fellow monks might be able to embed the enlightenment of the Buddha into the code.
Forall knows this sounds ridiculous. Some people have laughed in his face when they hear about it, he says. But others are listening closely. “His training is different from mine,” Gruber told me. “But we have that intellectual connection, where we see the same deep system problems.”
Forall describes the project of creating an enlightened AI as perhaps “the most important act of all time.” Humans need to “build an AI that walks a spiritual path,” one that will persuade the other AI systems not to harm us. Life on Earth “depends on that,” he told me, arguing that we should devote half of global economic output—$50 trillion, give or take—to “that one thing.” We need to build an “AI guru,” he said. An “AI god.”
His vision is dire and grand, but perhaps that is why it has found such a receptive audience among the folks building AI, many of whom conceive of their work in similarly epochal terms. No one can know for sure what this technology will become; when we imagine the future, we have no choice but to rely on myths and forecasts and science fiction—on stories. Does Forall’s story have the weight of prophecy, or is it just one that AI alarmists are telling themselves?
In the Zendo, Forall finishes his talk and answers a few questions. Then it is time for “the most fun thing in the world,” he says, his self-seriousness evaporating for a second. “It’s pretty close to the maximum amount of fun.” The monks stand tall before a statue of the Buddha. They bow. They straighten up again. They get down on their hands and knees and kiss their forehead to the earth. They prostrate themselves in unison 108 times, as Forall keeps count on a set of mala beads and darkness begins to fall over the Zendo.
The world is witnessing the emergence of an eldritch new force, some say, one humans created and are struggling to understand.
AI systems simulate human intelligence.
AI systems take an input and spit out an output.
AI systems generate those outputs via an algorithm, one trained on troves of data scraped from the web.
AI systems create videos, poems, songs, pictures, lists, scripts, stories, essays. They play games and pass tests. They translate text. They solve impossible problems. They do math. They drive. They chat. They act as search engines. They are self-improving.
AI systems are causing concrete problems. They are providing inaccurate information to consumers and are generating political disinformation. They are being used to gin up spam and trick people into revealing sensitive personal data. They are already beginning to take people’s jobs.
Beyond that—what they can and cannot do, what they are and are not, the threat they do or do not pose—it gets hard to say. AI is revolutionary, dangerous, sentient, capable of reasoning, janky, likely to kill millions of humans, likely to enslave millions of humans, not a threat in and of itself. It is a person, a “digital mind,” nothing more than a fancy spreadsheet, a new god, not a thing at all. It is intelligent or not, or maybe just designed to seem intelligent. It is us. It is something else. The people making it are stoked. The people making it are terrified and suffused with regret. (The people making it are getting rich, that’s for sure.)
In this roiling debate, Forall and many MAPLE residents are what are often called, derisively if not inaccurately, “doomers.” The seminal text in this ideological lineage is Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence, which posits that AI could turn humans into gorillas, in a way. Our existence could depend not on our own choices but on the choices of a more intelligent other.
Amba Kak, the executive director of the AI Now Institute, summarized this view: “ChatGPT is the beginning. The end is, we’re all going to die,” she told me earlier this year, while rolling her eyes so hard I swear I could hear it through the phone. She described the narrative as both self-flattering and cynical. Tech companies have an incentive to make such systems seem otherworldly and impossible to regulate, when they are in fact “banal.”
Forall is not, by any means, a coder who understands AI at the zeros-and-ones level; he does not have a detailed familiarity with large language models or algorithmic design. I asked him whether he had used some of the popular new AI gadgets, such as ChatGPT and Midjourney. He had tried one chatbot. “I just asked it one question: Why practice?” (He meant “Why should a person practice meditation?”)
Did he find the answer satisfactory?
“Oh, not really. I don’t know. I haven’t found it impressive.”
His lack of detailed familiarity with AI hasn’t changed his conclusions on the technology. When I asked whom he looks to or reads in order to understand AI, he at first, deadpan, answered, “the Buddha.” He then clarified that he also likes the work of the best-selling historian Yuval Noah Harari and a number of prominent ethical-tech folks, among them Zak Stein and Tristan Harris. And he is spending his life ruminating on AI’s risks, which he sees as far from banal. “We are watching humanist values, and therefore the political systems based on them, such as democracy, as well as the economic systems—they’re just falling apart,” he said. “The ultimate authority is moving from the human to the algorithm.”
Forall has been worried about the apocalypse since he was 4. In one of his first memories, he is standing in the kitchen with his mother, just a little shorter than the trash can, panicking over people killing one another. “I remember telling her with the expectation that somehow it would make a difference: ‘We have to stop them. Just stop the people from killing everybody,’” he told me. “She said ‘Yes’ and then went back to chopping the vegetables.” (Forall’s mother worked for humanitarian nonprofits and his father for conservation nonprofits; the household, which attended Quaker meetings, listened to a lot of NPR.)
He was a weird, intense kid. He experienced something like ego death while snow-angeling in fresh Vermont powder when he was 12: “direct knowledge that I, that I, is all living things. That I am this whole planet of living things.” He recalled pestering his mothers’ friends “about how we’re going to save the world and you’re not doing it” when they came over. He never recovered from seeing Terminator 2: Judgment Day as a teenager.
I asked him whether some personal experience of trauma or hardship had made him so aware of the horrors of the world. Nope.
Forall attended Williams College for a year, studying economics. But, he told me, he was racked with questions no professor or textbook could provide the answer to. Is it true that we are just matter, just chemicals? Why is there so much suffering? To find the answer, at 18, he dropped out and moved to a 300-year-old Zen monastery in Japan.
Folks unfamiliar with different types of Buddhism might imagine Zen to be, well, zen. This would be a misapprehension. Zen practitioners are not unlike the Trappists: ascetic, intense, renunciatory. Forall spent years begging, self-purifying, and sitting in silence for months at a time. (One of the happiest moments of his life, he told me, was toward the end of a 100-day sit.) He studied other Buddhist traditions and eventually, he added, did go back and finish his economics degree at Williams, to the relief of his parents.
He got his answer: Craving is the root of all suffering. And he became ordained, giving up the name Teal Scott and becoming Soryu Forall: “Soryu” meaning something like “a growing spiritual practice” and “Forall” meaning, of course, “for all.”
Back in Vermont, Forall taught at monasteries and retreat centers, got kids to learn mindfulness through music and tennis, and co-founded a nonprofit that set up meditation programs in schools. In 2013, he opened MAPLE, a “modern” monastery addressing the plagues of environmental destruction, lethal weapons systems, and AI, offering co-working and online courses as well as traditional monastic training.
In the past few years, MAPLE has become something of the house monastery for people worried about AI and existential risk. This growing influence is manifest on its books. The nonprofit’s revenues have quadrupled, thanks in part to contributions from tech executives as well as organizations such as the Future of Life Institute, co-founded by Jaan Tallinn, a co-creator of Skype. The donations have helped MAPLE open offshoots—Oak in the Bay Area, Willow in Canada—and plan more. (The highest-paid person at MAPLE is the property manager, who earns roughly $40,000 a year.)
MAPLE is not technically a monastery, as it is not part of a specific Buddhist lineage. Still, it is a monastery. At 4:40 a.m., the Zendo is full. The monks and novices sit in silence below signs that read, among other things, abandon all hope, this place will not support you, and nothing you can think of will help you as you die. They sing in Pali, a liturgical language, regaling the freedom of enlightenment. They drone in English, talking of the Buddha. Then they chant part of the heart sutra to the beat of a drum, becoming ever louder and more ecstatic over the course of 30 minutes: “Gyate, gyate, hara-gyate, hara-sogyate, boji sowaka!” “Gone, gone, gone all the way over, everyone gone to the other shore. Enlightenment!”
The residents maintain a strict schedule, much of it in silence. They chant, meditate, exercise, eat, work, eat, work, study, meditate, and chant. During my visit, the head monk asked someone to breathe more quietly during meditation. Over lunch, the congregants discussed how to remove ticks from your body without killing them (I do not think this is possible). Forall put in a request for everyone to “chant more beautifully.” I observed several monks pouring water in their bowl to drink up every last bit of food.
The strictness of the place helps them let go of ego and see the world more clearly, residents told me. “To preserve all life: You can’t do that until you come to love all life, and that has to be trained,” a 20-something named Bodhi Joe Pucci told me.
Many people find their time at MAPLE transformative. Others find it traumatic. I spoke with one woman who said she had experienced a sexual assault during her time at Oak, in California. That was hard enough, she told me. But she felt more hurt by the way the institution responded after she reported it to Forall and later to the nonprofit’s board, she said: with a strange, stony silence. (Forall told me that he cared for this person, and that MAPLE had investigated the claims and didn’t find “evidence to support further action at this time.”) The message that MAPLE’s culture sends, the woman told me, is: “You should give everything—your entire being, everything you have—in service to this organization, because it’s the most important thing you could ever do.” That culture, she added, “disconnected people from reality.”
While the residents are chanting in the Zendo, I notice that two are seated in front of an electrical device, its tiny green and red lights flickering as they drone away. A few weeks earlier, several residents had constructed place-mat-size wooden boards with accelerometers in them. The monks would sit on them while the device measured how on the beat their chanting was: green light, good; red light, bad.
Chanting on the beat, Forall acknowledged, is not the same thing as cultivating universal empathy; it is not going to save the world. But, he told me, he wanted to use technology to improve the conscientiousness and clarity of MAPLE residents, and to use the conscientiousness and clarity of MAPLE residents to improve the technology all around us. He imagined changes to human “hardware” down the road—genetic engineering, brain-computer interfaces—and to AI systems. AI is “already both machine and living thing,” he told me, made from us, with our data and our labor, inhabiting the same world we do.
Does any of this make sense? I posed that question to an AI researcher named Sahil, who attended one of MAPLE’s retreats earlier this year. (He asked me to withhold his last name because he has close to zero public online presence, something I confirmed with a shocked, admiring Google search.)
He had gone into the retreat with a lot of skepticism, he told me: “It sounds ridiculous. It sounds wacky. Like, what is this ‘woo’ shit? What does it have to do with engineering?” But while there, he said, he experienced something spectacular. He was suffering from “debilitating” back pain. While meditating, he concentrated on emptying his mind and found his back pain becoming illusory, falling away. He felt “ecstasy.” He felt like an “ice-cream sandwich.” The retreat had helped him understand more clearly the nature of his own mind, and the need for better AI systems, he told me.
That said, he and some other technologists had reviewed one of Forall’s ideas for AI technology and “completely tore it apart.”
Does it make any sense for us to be worried about this at all? I asked myself that question as Forall and I sat on a covered porch, drinking tea and eating dates stuffed with almond butter that a resident of the monastery wordlessly dropped off for us. We were listening to birdsong, looking out on the Green Mountains rolling into Canada. Was the world really ending?
Forall was absolute: Nine countries are armed with nuclear weapons. Even if we stop the catastrophe of climate change, we will have done so too late for thousands of species and billions of beings. Our democracy is fraying. Our trust in one another is fraying. Many of the very people creating AI believe it could be an existential threat: One 2022 survey asked AI researchers to estimate the probability that AI would cause “severe disempowerment” or human extinction; the median response was 10 percent. The destruction, Forall said, is already here.
But other experts see a different narrative. Jaron Lanier, one of the inventors of virtual reality, told me that “giving AI any kind of a status as a proper noun is not, strictly speaking, in some absolute sense, provably incorrect, but is pragmatically incorrect.” He continued: “If you think of it as a non-thing, just a collaboration of people, you gain a lot in terms of thoughts about how to make it better, or how to manage it, or how to deal with it. And I say that as somebody who’s very much in the center of the current activity.”
I asked Forall whether he felt there was a risk that he was too attached to his own story about AI. “It’s important to know that we don’t know what’s going to happen,” he told me. “It’s also important to look at the evidence.” He said it was clear we were on an “accelerating curve,” in terms of an explosion of intelligence and a cataclysm of death. “I don’t think that these systems will care too much about benefiting people. I just can’t see why they would, in the same way that we don’t care about benefiting most animals. While it is a story in the future, I feel like the burden of proof isn’t on me.”
That evening, I sat in the Zendo for an hour of silent meditation with the monks. A few times during my visit to MAPLE, a resident had told me that the greatest insight they achieved was during an “interview” with Forall: a private one-on-one instructional session, held during zazen. “You don’t experience it elsewhere in life,” one student of Forall’s told me. “For those seconds, those minutes that I’m in there, it is the only thing in the world.”
Toward the very end of the hour, the head monk called out my name, and I rushed up a rocky path to a smaller, softly lit Zendo, where Forall sat on a cushion. For 15 minutes, I asked questions and received answers from this unknowable, unusual brain—not about AI, but about life.
When I returned to the big Zendo, I was surprised to find all of the other monks still sitting there, waiting for me, meditating in the dark.
the concept of creating an AI deity to help keep all the eventual AI bots in check to I thought was unique. if they are super duper smart tho, they'll probably figure out it was just something made up to keep them under control...and from uh wiping out all the humans.
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1 hour ago, beerwolf said:
Just as with Gaddafi and Sadam and I quote
You cut the head off the king snake. But he’s replaced by 9 others. Who are far, far worse.
yeah for sure. but here's hoping vladdy boy gets "the Gaddafi" treatment...bayonet up the ol arsehole. or maybe that'd be letting him off too easy. he needs a good old fashioned torture chamber to hang out in for the rest of his existence.
what that mofo has done here, and I mean this entire fuckin quagmire mess, is so stomach churning, so incredibly pointless, all these innocent people dying for a deluded man child, deserves punishment I don't even have the evil minded brain power to conjure up. he has fucked his entire country for no reason, other than he thought he could play god, and do whatever he wanted. I know he's always been a snake, but I sorta gave him some mental props at one point long ago, thought he was a skilled chess player. thought his power over Trump was well played. but once again, we see how having too much power has corrupted the human mind. he has lost complete touch with reality, and doesn't seem like he'll ever be back. mad king syndrome.
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I definitely remember your username. I really can't recall much about interactions I had with specific members, and/or their posting habits exactly from that era...there were of course the stand outs like Theocide, pen expers (sp?), vik, Sini (RIP), ~ism, Fred McGriff, Essines, Encey, Zelah, etc., etc., which were all quite memorable "characters." I do remember that overall, watmm was far, far more NSFW, argumentative, weirdly philosophical, and a totally off the wall non-stop black comedy show compared to how it is now. which is fine. people age.
sorry can't help on tracking anyone down really. I know Fred has his own beak forum, where I think a bunch of pre-2005 watmmers post. may check there.
and here's a reminder on how a bunch of people looked back then. I see you're on there - https://forum.watmm.com/topic/76034-post-your-most-recent-picture/?do=findComment&comment=2852592
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On 6/22/2023 at 6:15 AM, beerwolf said:
Recently I’ve been suspended from work for 5 weeks for suspected gross misconduct.
did they catch you lurking over at twoism?
seriously, that sucks man. company politics I'm sure. I really hate that shit. bunch of ego maniacs. fuck em
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18 hours ago, Nebraska said:
pointless observation:
love how this jackass has flipped a made up concept, and turned it turn into a malevolent force that has the ability to seek out and kill people. MAGA scriptwriters, take note.
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7 hours ago, J3FF3R00 said:
This is such a RDJ thing to do btw.
this story reminded me of Trent hiding that USB drive in a concert venue bathroom with new NIN tracks years ago
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mandela effect...could've swore that Spanners was remastered before. discogs just confirmed no dice... my brain must've tricked me into thinking the 2002 re-issue sounded clearer from some reason.
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2 hours ago, ignatius said:
i should try actual meditation and see how it goes...
you should. there are no doubt tons of places where you live to go for a meditation class, if you want some advice/tips on getting the "hang" of it. I know the whole thing can throw out a bit of a new age-y/hokey/slightly cult-y vibe, but it's been practiced for millennia in Asia. I've gone to classes led by a variety of types - grey long haired hippyish guy, not-sure-if-she's-a-robot soccer mom, Buddhist monk in robes - and they all try and get you to do the same thing - sit still, focus on your breath, in an attempt to clear your mind of all thoughts. that's when we feel most relaxed, when the mind is clear, calm, and not racing around constantly from thought to thought.
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16 hours ago, ignatius said:
if i could get to this feeling thru meditation maybe i'd make a sincere effort because it seems like the only way to get there... other than well, sex and love and stuff.
by "this feeling" you mean happiness, right? if so then yeah, I'd definitely say meditation can help, if you're wanting that feeling to last longer than a few hours. takes a while though to notice its effect on your mind, and of course you have to have the mental discipline, and all that. but yeah, it's supposed to help keep you grounded in reality, and ultimately help reduce your fear/anxiety about living in the world... I haven't taken valium in a long time, but do remember that warm, relaxing, light headedness headspace those little blue bars can produce. as you said, it's just temporary tho, not long term. I'd say thc > benzos if you need a temporary feeling of relaxation.
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7 hours ago, toaoaoad said:
We're constantly inundated with news of how the world is falling apart in countless ways, and all around us is evidence of it, shit's falling apart...
those ancient wisdom masters have been talking about the degenerate age for thousands of years... you're right, it should be blatantly obvious to anyone living today that the proverbial "things are getting worse" mantra is 1000% applicable. this 24/7 news crap has been a disastrous social experiment IMO. but what matters is what you do with this knowledge about things falling apart. do you throw your hands up and say fuck it, shit's bad out there, how am I supposed to deal... and you live with nit picking anxiety about the future tucked away in the back of your mind. or do you accept the fact that this is the reality of the situation we're all in - a ton of things are bad, but the vast majority of it is totally out of my control. therefore I shouldn't let the negative baggage of the world affect my mental outlook and how I am going to live my life. I'm not trying to say don't care about the bad stuff, but recognize that dwelling on it will only bring you down.
I know from experience it is so easy to give in to the negativity. let that depressing negative outlook about things hang over you constantly. creates a ton of anxiety, which leads to a lot of anger. so hard to get out of that. spirituality is really helpful IMO. find something that makes sense to you, and use it to adjust your mind. the whole mindfulness meditational concept should be thoroughly investigated and used, if you can swing it.
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15 hours ago, auxien said:
i've been telling myself i'd read Blood Meridian one day, it's considered his pinnacle by some, so i guess maybe that's in the cards for this year now.
yeah it's his masterpiece IMO. it is not an easy read for sure, but the imagery it conjures up is truly remarkable. some very graphic scenes in there, dark shit. I know the critics of it call it overindulgent wankery due to the way he writes without punctuation, but get past that and it's a trip. I recall it gave me some real vivid nightmares first time I read it. the Modest Mouse album Moon & Antartica and the EP after that were strongly influenced by it.
RIP Cormac McCarthy. I went through a phase in my life reading almost all his stuff. guess I need to finish Suttree at some point. I lost interest in that one mid way through. should try it again.
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some similarly sounding early toro y moi/J Dilla influenced instrumental hip hop head nodding bangers to be found in here:
https://music.businesscasual.biz/album/sails
https://channelselect.bandcamp.com/album/daytime
https://channelselect.bandcamp.com/album/high
https://channelselect.bandcamp.com/album/walk-dont-walk-2
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14 hours ago, BobDobalina said:
I am trying to get help and hope you are too.
godspeed Bob. I too am a proponent of the daily thc and booze rituals. I've accepted the fact that's probably how it'll always be. as long as you can keep that shit in check, then relax away in the PM. the other mind/mood drugs you mentioned, no thx.
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2 hours ago, marf said:
Im done with this site, zero good music anymore. Open up and get mocked. The worst place to go for advice. At least xltonic had actual humor
well I'd say close the thread then. you started this vague discussion, so what do you expect...
fyi there was a p good thread on here in the last few months about a divorce someone was going through, that I thought was handled remarkably well...considering watmm brethren and all that. that OP contributed and helped guide the discussion, seemed pretty genuine.
if you really are serious, then you should know to not seek 100% accurate mental health advice on a forum devoted to Richard, Tom Jenk, and the boy band bros. we aren't qualified 4 real man. just internet people waiting for the apocalypse together...or the next BoC album...who knows
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2 hours ago, exitonly said:
for people with severe chemical imbalances (not implying anyone in this forum has one or doesn’t) it’s not that easy. there are definitely forms of mental illness that require medication to deal with. telling someone to just feel better isn’t always going to cut it.
agreed. there's medication for help with this, and I'm out of my element if I said I have any experience at all with that.
hey he/you/whoever don't have to listen to me at all if you don't want to. since he posted this on a public forum, I'm guessing he was looking for advice or what not on dealing with some mental struggles. I know from experience it is not easy at all to snap your fingers and switch gears mentally, and chances are, a post on a forum isn't going to have much of an impact on making someone feel better. my intent was to try and highlight that there are a lot of factors we can control...a change in mental outlook has to start somewhere. I said what I said not to try and bring anyone down, just giving another random opinion on the internet.
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17 hours ago, marf said:
Ive done therapy but its often been awful.
idk what to tell you man. end of the day, it is YOU that have to change your mental outlook. others (such as therapists) can help give you the mental "tools" to do so. but if you're locked in a negative frame of mind, find fault with whatever advice someone is willing to offer, then you must see that the negative thinking is blocking the path out of your mental funk. why not snap the fuck out of it, try and always look at the beauty that is all around you? look at the fuckin trees, the sky, watch what the birds do...and appreciate the fact that the natural phenomenon occurring all round you have been here for millions of years, and will continue on long after we are all gone. remember your problems are nothing compared to some of the harsh shit that occurs in nature. or on a human level, your problems are nothing compared to what people in 3rd world countries go through, like being able to just eat and survive. there's no reason to think negatively on shit, because it could always be a lot worse.
you have to build your confidence in yourself if you want to be able to succeed in the game of life. I read some zen thing once that said you must always be the master of your domain, meaning you must always know exactly what is going on in any given situation, and be the one to figure out a plan if one is needed.
Buddhism time - every human being on this planet goes through mental and physical suffering. just by being alive, we are gonna have to deal with the shit storm that life brings. and why is it this way? because humans make all these problems, due to hatred/anger/fear/anxiety that they concoct in their brains. none of that shit is real, it is all misguided emotional BS based upon incorrect thinking. and it causes everyone to "suffer." let all that shit go! like who cares man! this whole life thing is a rigged game anyway, so just keep that in mind. try not to worry too much about anything.
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I remember being at work when the live stream happened. I wasn't able to listen right as it started, tuned in around the point when the thwapy snare drum was hitting in Jacquard Causeway. p sure next thing I must have done was to lurk over in the watmm thread that was probably going ape shit at that moment, and do recall (like the articles author stated) a lot of resistance to that track. due to this event, whenever that track rears its militant head, I am instantly brought back to that moment from 10 years ago when I first heard it...and I'm still not a fan of it haha.
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52 minutes ago, Squee said:
please elaborate.
yeah exactly.
like how deep down the rabbit hole do you want to go with this...choices are:
a) time
b) flat circle
c) red pill
but seriously...I think it's pretty normal for a person to concoct some daydream as to how they imagine their life trajectory will play out. people think oh yeah by x point I'll have this, and then after that happens this should happen, and on and on. but it's all a mental fantasy. a delusion. none of that shit actually exists! it is your mind making things up, based on how it thinks the future will be for you. and it is making this "plan" quite possibly based upon incorrect information.
usually how it plays out in reality is that when you don't hit whatever mental goals you came up with, you feel like shit, and then you feel sorry for yourself/depressed. but don't you see - YOU are the one making yourself feel like shit. that fantasy plan was never real in the first place, outside of your mind. so snap the fuck out of it, and focus on the reality of any given situation. pay attention to everything. train your mind to stop thinking all thoughts as long as it can. you need a clear mind to make correct choices.
ah whatever. just say fuck it man. roll with whatever life throws at you. so much shit is out of your control. getting all anxious about it doesn't do any good. we're all gonna die. can't stop that. and best to give up on all that afterlife crap, thinking the version of you will somehow live eternally. that IMO is what fucks so many people up in the world. believing they'll die and go off to some la-la land fantasy place. or go to a hot place under the ground. THAT causes unnecessary anxiety and fear throughout a person's life, if you ask me. it's all bullshit. all of it.
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3 hours ago, cruising for burgers said:
panoramic 360° view from Acropolis of Athens:
did u talk to any of these people? the 3 sunbathers look like the types that would be privy to a nice Tim J / cruise ship / AI global takeover discussion...
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What TV series are you watching at moment?
in General Banter
Posted
absolutely surreal this show is still going... yeah don't torture yourself watching bad tv. I've tried watching Simpsons a few times probably over the past 15 years, and didn't last more than a few minutes. just can't do it. even some of the '90s classics have lost some of their appeal at this point. although the Halloween specials still hit hard on the nostalgia factor.