Yes it’s similar for me. It’s strange because before I used to get very anxious when stoned and it was a generally unpleasant time.
But then I spent one year at home getting stoned and playing competitive video game Dota 2. And doing that seemed to melt my anxiety away. I learned how to be confident in my thoughts and perceptions under an alternate state of mind. The proof was winning a a match or seeing some strategy of mine pan out. And I learned when to ignore others and not let their thoughts influence me. I learned how to live in the present.
Clipping
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web > Anxiety and weed
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36948697]
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web > Protect your kids from irreparable harm
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36911091]
The way I explain this is, “my job is not to protect my kids from harm, it’s to protect them from irreparable harm.”
I’ve had this instinct whenever my kids are on the jungle gym to say, “slow down!” “That’s too high!” etc. but I usually catch myself and think, “if they fall is it a cry or a hospital visit?”
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web > Independently wealth musicians
[https://klangmag.co/lifers-dayjobbers-and-the-independently-wealthy-a-letter-to-a-former-student/]
Look at your favorite artists, alive or dead, the ones who you have always aspired to be as a professional. Chances are they have had one of three types of musical careers. Every professional musician I’ve met has fallen into one of these macro categories. I know it seems like an overgeneralization, but it continues to prove itself to be tried and true in my experience, so just hear me out.
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Independently Wealthy Artists: These artists come from affluent backgrounds, allowing them to focus on their craft without worrying about financial pressures. They have time to practice, create, and perform because their financial stability is often supported by family wealth. This privilege gives them a significant advantage, but Max acknowledges that while they may produce excellent work, their experience isn’t representative of the average artist.
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Lifers: Lifers are artists who dedicate their entire lives to making a living from their art, often struggling financially and working tirelessly. They perform, tour, and release music constantly to survive, but this lifestyle is particularly difficult in the modern world of streaming platforms, which pay little. Lifers face ongoing challenges, especially in big cities where living costs are high, but they are driven by their passion for their art.
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Dayjobbers: These artists balance their artistic pursuits with a steady job outside of the arts, providing financial stability. Max encourages Billy, who is considering this path, not to view it as a failure. Instead, he sees it as a practical approach that allows artists to sustain their creative practices while ensuring peace of mind. Many famous artists, like Philip Glass and John Cage, had day jobs to support themselves while they created.
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web > A religion of one
[https://notebook.drmaciver.com/posts/2023-06-20-17:00.html]
One of the subjects that always comes out flat is that I practice a sort of religion. We’re a congregation of one person (me) and not that interested in converts.
Whenever I try to explain it, it comes out sounding like either a joke or some very dry philosophy. Honestly it started out that way. But this matters to me, at quite a personal level, even if I don’t know how to show it.
The joke version goes thus: I believe in a supreme being, in that I think beinghood is closed under union, thus the set of all beings has a superema (a maximal element).
I didn’t say it was a funny joke.
(Technical nitpick: Beings are actually closed under interaction, not union. As a result this gets tricky when you bring relativity into the picture. Don’t worry about this.)
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web > Adult stage theory
[https://meaningness.com/misunderstanding-stage-theory]
Lagging emotional and interpersonal development is common among the STEM-educated. STEM education teaches you systematic cognition, i.e. rationality. Unfortunately, it doesn’t teach you how to systematize your emotions and relationships. It’s common for the STEM-educated to explicitly denigrate and ignore those domains as inherently irrational. Those who say “I skipped stage 3,” meaning actually “I am emotionally and interpersonally underdeveloped,” are often smug or defiant about it. STEM education may produce a quasi-religious identification of the self with rationality: rationalism.
https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence
Stage/Mode 3: Communal 4: Systematic 5: Fluid Objects Egocentric desires Relationships Systems Subject Relationships System of principles and projects Meaning-making Relationships Symmetrical, unstructured Asymmetrical, formal roles Meta-systematic Ethics Compassion, consensus Procedural justice, responsibility, principles Nebulous yet patterned; collaborative improvisation Epistemology Can put oneself in other’s shoes Can take perspective of structured social system Can relate systems to each other -
web > Warriors and scholars
“The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.” — Thucydides
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web > Post-rationalism (rational magic)
[https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/rational-magic]
You might call it the postrationalist turn: a cultural shift in both relatively ‘normie’ and hyper-weird online spaces. Whether you call it spiritual hunger, reactionary atavism, or postliberal epistemology, more and more young, intellectually inclined, and politically heterodox thinkers (and would-be thinkers) are showing disillusionment with the contemporary faith in technocracy and personal autonomy. They see this combination as having contributed to the fundamentally alienating character of modern Western life. The chipper, distinctly liberal optimism of rationalist culture that defines so much of Silicon Valley ideology — that intelligent people, using the right epistemic tools, can think better, and save the world by doing so — is giving way, not to pessimism, exactly, but to a kind of techno-apocalypticism. We’ve run up against the limits — political, cultural, and social alike — of our civilizational progression; and something newer, weirder, maybe even a little more exciting, has to take its place. Some of what we’ve lost — a sense of wonder, say, or the transcendent — must be restored.
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web > The well-being gap between liberals and conservatives
Conservatives report significantly higher levels of happiness than liberals. On the other end of the spectrum, liberals are significantly more likely to experience adverse mental and emotional conditions. Some have argued that these differences in negative psychic states may explain most of the persistent divergence between liberals and conservatives in subjective well-being measures.
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web > Stage where relationships are everything
[https://peopleiveloved.substack.com/p/looking-to-tarot-for-answers]
Josh was less ambivalent, his father had passed a few years before we started dating and he was older than I am. He was in the stage I am right now, the one where everything besides relationships seem pointless.
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web > American exceptionalism
As a Brit who moved here in 2001, a huge problem is American exceptionalism.
You guys are told from birth that you’re the greatest country in the world and are all going to be anything you want to be. You actually deserve it. You should have that Ferrari. The supermodel girlfriend. The amazing life. Then reality kicks in around 17-18.
Healthcare? Nope. Mental health care? Get outta here. Paid time off? No guarantee. Minimum wage? In the toilet. Wage increases? A joke. Chances are you’ll die poor and alone but you’re watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians
The rich get richer, the poor suffer. And most people are poor. Then you throw social media into the mix, showing you the lives people are living that you want to be living.
It induces rage. You were promised this from day one. You don’t get it. It’s not fair! But luckily, you live in a country that gives you unfettered access to high powered weaponry available in any strip mall, and cheap ammunition.
People snap. Mostly young white males but that’s not exclusive. Gun laws are so weak almost anyone can get an AR-15 and a bucket full of rounds. Rather than commit suicide, let’s take out as many people as possible before biting the bullet.
Could you do that with a car or truck or knife? Yeah. But it’s sure as shit way more easy with an AR-15, and you get to see the fear in people’s eyes as you end their lives.
That’s the problem.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. It reminds me of a scene in the show Sopranos where Tony is talking to Svetlana (Russian woman with a prosthetic leg) and asked her why nothing appears to get her down and she says, “That’s the trouble with you Americans. You expect nothing bad to ever happen, while the rest of the world expects only bad to happen. And they’re not disappointed.”
Exceptionalism is so baked into our psyche that we completely miss it as a possible and likely explanation for the problem.
And therefore, untangling that exceptionalism to dig at the problem would be in a very real way like dismantling what it means to be an American. I just don’t see that happening because it would unveil a darker ugliness about ourselves that we’d rather not deal with. It is much easier, more convenient, and frankly lazy to place the blame on others and guns and mental health and incels and so forth.