Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 17
I really liked this guy's take on solitude:
What I find most interesting about this is how when you're young, socializing feels exciting and new, but as you gain more experience and mature you realize that most of socialization is just noise. It's shallow, it gets weary and repetitive, and it just isn't meaningful or satisfying compared to the depth of contemplation. I have felt this way since high school. I can socialize, but the rewards of it feel shallow, like I'm collecting pennies out of a public fountain when I could be swimming in my own gold vault like Scrooge McDuck. It took me a long time to realize what makes socialization work. The shallower the mind the more value socialization has. The deeper the mind, the less meaning socialization has because your own mind is more rewarding and profound than anything a human could say to you. What are you really going to talk about with a human? You're going to talk about something profound like God or Love? Why? When you could connect to God or Love so much more deeply sitting alone in a closet. But to someone who has not made that decade's long investment in building up their philosophical mind, that kind of connection to reality just doesn't exist. So for them going out with a gaggle of friends to a nightclub is meaningful. I can go to a nightclub, I can make it fun, but it is not meaningful to me so I cannot sustain the activity. After a certain point it feels like a waste of my life.
Eventually you exhaust socialization. You exhaust clubbing, partying, small talk around the dinner table about the news, internet debates, arguing with others, trying to convince or persuade others that they are wrong and you are right. You exhaust asking people how their day is going, or what's new. In the end, what does it matter what's new, how someone's day is going? It's just some minor variation of the same petty human drama, over and over again. In the end, you realize that all of it is meaningless. These things only have meaning if you are lost in the dream of them. Once you exhaust that dream or finding something existentially deeper, that way of life becomes inferior because it's just too existentially shallow. But most people live that way because they don't even know anything deeper exists, and also because their survival demands it. You can't have solitude if you manage a company or work in a team on some big project. I can do deep solitude because I developed financial independence, which few people have. Even wealthy people don't really have it, since they have to keep running their businesses like rats in a wheel. So even the ability to have solitude is a precious thing most humans couldn't do until retirement.
Warning: This is just one perspective on socialization. Keep in mind that I'm very introverted, so that is my bias. If you're extroverted this perspective and lifestyle will not work for you. And even if you're introverted, you need to learn to socialize before you make a retreat into solitude. Especially if you are young and lack social skills, do not use this perspective to bypass developing those skills. I am not telling you that all socializing is bad. Socializing is a critical skill and plays a critical role in human life, even for me. So be careful not to misapply this blog post. Remember that the perspective in the above video came late in his life, after he exhausted socialization. Notice that he did not do a bypass. It would be inappropriate to adopt his perspective in your 20s. With maturity, age, and burning through your karma, you can grow into solitude as he did. I also recommend that you have phases in your life where you are highly social and phases where you go into deep solitude. These alternating phases are very beneficial to your development.
It's almost February! Which only means one thing: The Tucson Gem, Mineral, & Fossil Show is here!
Every February I travel to Tucson Arizona for the largest gem, mineral, and fossil show in the country to shop for dinosaurs. It's actually not a single show but a constellation of over 10 shows all held in one city at the same time. If you've never been, it's a crazy load of fun. It's like Disney World for adults. Bring the whole family for a real dinosaur adventure.
Here's a taste of the stuff you'll find there:
Dinosaurs, fossils, trilobites, giant shark teeth, mammoths, geodes, crystals, jewelry, meteorites, African masks, ancient coins, drums, strange curiosities you never knew existed, and much more.
Tucson Mineral Show Schedule & Information
Bring $100,000 with you because you'll want to buy everything.
Much of the misinformation in right-wing circles around post-modernism can be traced back to a single source: Stephen Hicks' book Explaining Postmodernism. Jordan Peterson based his views of PM on this book. But this book has poor scholarship and presents a cartoon version of post-modernism.
The following video explains the problems with Stephen Hick's book, adding much nuance to the cliched strawman of post-modernism commonly presented by right-wingers:
Ideological people, and right-wingers, cannot understand post-modernism because to understand it requires enough openmindedness to set aside your own paradigm. Hicks cannot properly do that because he's a Randian Objectivist libertarian.
My challenge to you is to be able to see each paradigm on its own terms: pre-modern, modern, post-modern. You should be able to steelman each one and see reality from any of those three lenses without being emotionally or ideologically attached to any of them. Then you will have mastered the situation and gone beyond all three. That's where the real gold lies.
This is an announcement for folks who have been trying to access the Life Purpose Course videos.
About half of the videos are down. I'm working with my video hosting provider to fix that. There have been some unusual delays on their end. I hope to have it fixed within a few days.
My apologies for the downtime.
It's amazing to see how little politics has change in 2000 years. The fundamentals of politics do not change. Which makes it the more appalling that most voters do not understand these basics enough to make good voting choices.
People have forgotten how degenerate populism can be.
It's crucial to notice that every system of government has a healthy and corrupt form. The problem isn't so much which form you have, it's the corruption that seeps into it. Any great system of government that you can imagine, I can imagine how to corrupt it to make it bad. This is why today's populism is so foolish, it assumes that just because its populist its inherently good. Furthermore, left-wing populism can also get corrupted. Corruption is not limited to any one party, class, or ideology. That's the key insight. And the key trap is to blame corruption all on your ideological enemies.
Also notice how various forms of government hybridize in complex ways. There is not pure monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, oligarchy, capitalism, socialism. In practice they all hybridize with each other in corrupt ways. An authoritarian wannabe monarch will hijack democracy by stoking populist rage and align himself with oligarchs to hold power while proclaiming the virtues of socialism or capitalism — depending the peoples' mood. There is no such thing as an authoritarian without his circle of elites to whom he expropriates wealth and power and who defend him. Authoritarianism is an alliance between a strong-man leader and a small circle of the rich and powerful with whom he is chummy, and between whom they all divide the stolen wealth. It works this way in North Korea, in Russia, in Africa, in America. The most important thing to understand about power and fame is that they are wealth extraction tools.
Africa is a land of stunning natural beauty, but it is an evil land if you want to build a thriving civilization.
When you die and go to reincarnate, God asks you, Easy mode or hardcore mode this time? If you choose hardcore mode you spawn in Africa :D