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Yes, but couldn't you then apply the same materialistic approach also to pain for example and explain it away as just some brain activity? Yet people live as if the experience of pain is real and modify their behaviour to avoid it. No one thinks their own pain isn't real.

But also yes, psychotic people too feel like they are really being followed by CIA which an outside observer can recognize as a delusion.

But why should this even be either-or? Why couldn't it be that the brain is tripping and the supernatural is also happening? I think mushrooms probably can trigger the brain into a state that can happen other ways too (fasting, long meditations, experiences of supreme beauty, the overview effect, near-death experiences etc.) These brain states are probably what religions are on about and why they have even appeared in the first place.

My experience was that the brain state I was in was very unusual and made me more humbly appreciate more the mystery of all being and in that state disproving the existence of god through logical arguments seemed like such a silly human endeavour, as if a termite is trying to gnaw on a temple. Like, "Sure, go ahead?" (and I'm not bashing logic, I too rely on it every day)

I ate mushrooms 10 years ago and it made me realize how little humans really know about existence, despite how confidently some people assert that there's no god. I didn't directly communicate with god or anything, but in some way the experience broadened my mind to be less dismissive about the idea of a higher power.

There's also the 1,5h documentary Rise of the Warrior Apes which is sort of a "prequel" to Chimp Empire. It was filmed over a period of 20 years in the same location and documents how the researches originally came upon this unusual chimpanzee tribe. The production values are not nearly as polished as in Chimp Empire but in my opinion it was still an interesting watch if you find this kind of stuff fascinating. The researchers themselves talk a lot in this.

Well, the Hebrew word for adversary or opponent is satan. Regardless of whether you actually believe in satan or god(s), I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to point out that there are lots of adversarial things happening in the world at the moment. All sorts of things in opposition to peace, to harmony, to human flourishing, etc., which are the good things any sane human would pursue.

I think the main goal of an opponent, concrete or imaginary, is to leave you in a discouraged state. When you get discouraged, you start to lose your momentum and your will to live. You become anxious, paralyzed and confused, which is to say: easy to defeat. This is exactly what an adversary would want you to do.

So, to answer the question: I do everything in my power to not get discouraged. I keep on trucking, being productive, helping out people, taking care of my loved ones and maintaining a positive, lighthearted mindset. I am hitting back by the sheer audacity of staying cheerful in these times, because that would absolutely enrage an enemy that wants to see me discouraged and defeated.

Make a habit of spotting things in your life that you can say you are grateful for. A lot of good things in life are taken for granted and you only realize you had them when you lose them. It takes some practice and effort to start noticing these, but when you do, it enhances your enjoyment of the present moment.

To me, it's his position that makes those words seem more credible. Once you hit the peak and have everything one could dream of you lose your illusions and realize that the craving still goes on and it's much more wise to just count your blessings. If you would hear those words coming from some poor pleb you would doubt that "They just don't know what they're talking about, how could they know? They're poor and don't have anything. Of course money and status and power is the answer?"

Also, I'm not sure if it was intended as advice to anyone other than himself. I was under the impression that Meditations was his private reflections towards the end of his life, not intended for publication.

Well, you could just escape the situation and switch jobs but there are so many poor leaders out there that this same problem is probably going to manifest itself in your life again in some form, sooner or later. I would say it's more useful to learn to navigate such a situation. I would refer to Jocko Willink's advice on this as he's the real expert in leadership. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp4hvVZFnfg

When I hit my own rock bottom a couple of years ago I stumbled upon Jordan Peterson's lectures about meaning and the bible. It helped my rational mind understand and accept that the rational mind isn't the be-all and end-all and there is something transcendent outside of it. Whatever that is, you can aim at getting better at "dancing" with it and the better the dance the greater the sense of meaning. YMMV but it worked for me.

(the lectures were "2017 Maps of Meaning" and "The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories")

I've found that for me the only way to get rid of this kind of addiction is to make it impossible to engage. Any "softer" approaches will eventually fail.

I had a bad habit of checking all kinds of unimportant stuff in bed just before going to sleep but then I got rid of the smartphone and bought a dumb phone. I don't really long for that habit anymore because it's simply not possible to engage in. The withdrawal feels harsh at first but you can just soldier through it and eventually it gets easier.

I don't know the answer to your question, but I think this[0] video might help to visualize the mind-boggling scale of the world (in the video you can substitute dollars with human beings). And it's only one billion visualized so in order to go through the entire human population you would have to watch it 7.9 times which would take something over 10 hours.

As the dollar meter keeps running relentlessly you can imagine yourself being one split of a second somewhere there, and then you can imagine the sea of people working hard at compilers, optimizers, math etc. blasting you all at once with their brilliant observations. It's only natural to get overwhelmed if you expose yourself to the aggregate of the most brilliant and productive humans, because as rare as they might be, the human population is so staggeringly big that there are LOTS of them. You might not be doing so bad compared to the rest of the humanity though ;)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg (A Million Dollars vs A Billion Dollars, Visualized: A Road Trip)

Understanding probabilities intuitively

I find it peculiar that disregarding the context (hacker news) and just focusing strictly on the content of your message I wouldn't be able to figure out which side you're supposed to be on. I could as well be reading this in one of 'their' forums, where one of your loved ones had posted this exact same message, word for word, to ask advice from their group on how to deal with a loved one affected by fake news (== you).

Unfortunately, I don't have any solutions. This seems like a viciously hard problem. I saw a VICE clip[0] about some survivors of covid-19 in an ICU, and even after going through a near-death experience firsthand they were still hesitant about taking the vaccine. This suggests to me that this issue originates somewhere too deep in the lizard brain to just be reasoned with using the real facts.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqUy8915gBg

It's hard to say anything without knowing your situation in detail, but to me you sound more like you're just deeply lost rather than your life is messed up beyond repair. If you really focus and put your heart, soul and effort into something you can make astounding progress in just a few years, so mid-thirties does not sound too old in that regard.

You seem to have a felt sense of wasting your life by continuing to live it like this. That would imply that on some level you know that there's something you could and should be doing instead that you would be satisfied with, and your emotional systems are trying to signal to you that you're not doing that now. I would suggest you work on these crude signals and try to articulate the vision that's embedded in them into words to bring it into a form more comprehensible to yourself.

Here's a few questions: what would a properly lived life look like? What would you need? What could you do in your (lowly, confusing) situation to help yourself if you decided to do things properly, and humbly started to grab the opportunities that are presented to you right now, no matter how small and beneath you they might appear to you?

Really good heaphones. It's been years since I bought them and I'm still amazed almost daily just how good music can sound.

I'll admit that the cost upfront was not exactly cheap, but if you divide the price by the useful lifespan (my previous headphones lasted for 8 years) it becomes a no-brainer.

And how exactly would non-linguistic animals suddenly gain linguistic ability? They better hope everyone around them is tripping on the perfect dose too otherwise they’re just gonna perceive it as meaningless babblimg

I don't think this has to be an sudden event? Apes are already communicating with each other and have the relevant structures for communication in place. It isn't impossible for me to imagine that mushrooms with their creativity-heightening effects might offer insights to an ape on how to improve the utilization of that which is already there, making their communication more refined, precise and expressive. It also isn't impossible to imagine that in a group of social animals better communication would likely increase the probability of survival and leaving offspring, thus influencing evolution.

I think this video[0] fits nicely to your situation. JL Collins lays out how to invest for your retirement using index funds, explained in simple and commonsensical terms.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T71ibcZAX3I

Maybe try it once and see what happens? It probably turns out to be a lot less scarier than you think

I've found that the stick only works when starting from a lowly place to get up to speed. Envy, resentment, anger etc. are very draining and unstable sources of motivation and it's hard to build a long-term strategy upon them. At some point genuine interest should take over as your motivation so you don't burn yourself out.

How essential the banking apps are in your everyday life? If you don't need them to be available all the time, maybe you could store your iPhone somewhere behind a time lock and schedule specific times when you deal with your banking needs?

I bought a dumb phone. Now it's impossible to waste time on the phone (only calls and sms). The transition period was brutal, though.

After being stuck for years in my life, what helped me, to speak metaphorically:

I believe everyone has a barrel right in front of them that's full of all kinds of things they're trying to avoid acknowledging: harsh truths about themselves and their life, shirked responsibilities, excuses, lies, self-delusion, the little games that they're trying to get away with instead of behaving properly etc.

The barrel is so hideous to look at that we rather not look at it at all and go around living our life pretending as if it doesn't exist. We subconsciously believe that it will somehow disappear if we just don't acknowledge it for long enough time, and because almost everyone else around us is also doing the same thing we get the implicit social cue that the barrel is nothing to worry about.

Additionally, some things in the barrel are impossible for ourselves to perceive because every human being has genuine blind spots and also because our brains actively modify our perception to hide things from us in order to maintain our psychological sanity, a self-image of ourselves as a good guy. People need the help of others to scour their blind spots and typically they react to this discovery process so badly and emotionally that we rather just keep silent to not upset others, even if they seem eager to really want to see the truth about themselves. It's no joke to have your erroneous self-image blown to pieces by truth.

Rather than a quick fix to being successful, rectifying the barrel is a long and a humbling journey and a task for a lifetime. However, as I've taken my few first steps along this path, I can say it seems to work better than anything else, and so to me it doesn't matter if it takes time because it seems a worthwhile pursuit to invest the rest of my life in. I only wish someone would have shown me this way earlier so I wouldn't have wasted so much time, but as the saying goes: "What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end."

I just ignore it. Nature is thrifty in all its actions, so this current madness will eventually come to an end too. I like the attitude of Charlie Munger, and whenever I feel like my head is starting to spin too fast I think about the wise things he has said about the madness of crowds, keeping your head straight and focusing on your duties right in front of you.

When the only tool you know is a hammer you tend to just go around smashing things

Someone who's ignorant does not realize it because realizing it would mean that they're not ignorant anymore.

I think it's useful to maintain a discipline of mental hygiene and to isolate yourself from the constant flood of news, good and bad. If you get too focused on the success stories you'll be constantly worrying about whether you're missing out on something good, which impedes your ability to actually get anything done exceptionally because you're doubting your own thing and your own place in the world all the time. In the wise words of Charlie Munger: "Someone will always be getting richer faster than you. This is not a tragedy."

Bob Seger - Shakedown

I don't think life is meaningless, I just think existence as a human being is ultimately so overwhelmingly sad that it's enough to turn anyone nihilistic. The proper way is to accept the sad state of affairs voluntarily and then try to make the best of it and that'll provide you with enough meaning to bear your existential suffering. That's the best you can hope for, really.

(This is what you do if you get diagnosed with terminal illness btw: you get your affairs in order, you gather your loved ones and you try to make the best of your limited time left, and it'll be good enough)

My experiences have been either alone or with good friends at home settings, in a small intimate club with pleasurable company, and at a rave with lots of unknown people. Always with proper spacing between experiences (usually a year).

Doses between 60 and 100 mg of crystal that I have tested with Marquis reagent to be MDMA, as accurate as that test can be (there's no substance testing available for public in my country).

I had read beforehand that the comeup can feel uncomfortable especially right before the full effect hits. During my first experience I was kind of surprised how restless and annoyed I became at everything and I attributed it to not being able to be alone (I'm an introvert). On subsequent experiences alone I have come to realize that it's just part of the comeup for me and now I know to just ride it out. I read somewhere that MDMA triggers the release of norepinephrine which would make sense. One of my friends also commented that during comeup he too gets quite annoyed, to the point of ready to fight someone.

Basing on my experiences, the long comeup and the additional agitation is why I find it surprising to recommend MDMA for psychedelic crises. A benzodiazepine like Xanax has a quick onset of action and calms people down which makes more sense to me for these kinds of situations.

Interesting. For me, MDMA comeup is 45 minutes of restlessness and agitation. I'm not sure how I would be able to tolerate that if I'm already at a point where a medical intervention is needed to calm me down. Though the actual effects of MDMA would be wonderful for processing the difficult emotions, I agree.

This is particularly true when the people whom you criticize are manifestly doing quite well in general compared to you.

In these cases someone might be doing hundred things right in their life and the one mistake is what catches all the attention and provokes criticism. I feel like if only humans could view themselves with the same ruthless no-excuses mentality as they do view others they would immediately realize how much there is in their own life to fix and fixing all that would probably keep them too busy to unnecessarily point fingers at others.

(I'm not saying that criticism is always unnecessary, but that there's probably all kinds of low-hanging fruit in people's own lives that they're not just able to perceive. This blind spot of course applies to me too which I find frustrating at times).