StartAtTheEnd

• StartAtTheEnd 4 Apr 2026 23:36 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Vadim Golub’s comment on: Scratch­ing the sore: how plea­sure re­lates to suffering

  Well, good and bad does not exist in an absolute sense, but they can be local truths, and ahimsa is a fine choice. The only bad systems are those that don’t work out. It’s a bit of a low hanging apple but I consider communism to be such a system. While we can create our own subjective reality, there are natural laws which restrict the set of workable realities.

  Most ideals are impossible, we can only approach them, not reach them. It’s fine as long as we recognize this, but I find that unreachable ideals sometimes turn people bitter because they make reality seem flawed in a way which is impossible to solve. Comparison is the thief of joy, so it’s dangerous to compare to perfection (which, of course, is the reason perfectionists are less happy in general).

  Truth is defined in a way which implies “one truth path”, but there’s no such thing. I’m really just explaining the pros and cons of various choices that I’ve made, so that you can know the consequences of integrating them into your worldview in advance.

  I think anger is the easier ‘poison’ to defend, one often becomes angry about injustice, and so anger can be used for good. Malice is harder to defend, but at the very least, every poison is its own antidote. The more alcohol you drink, the higher your tolerance will be. If you grow up in a bad environment, you will be more equipped to deal with imperfection than somebody who did not. Even exercise is a poison which makes us more resistant to the consequences of even harder exercise. In this case, the tolerance you’re building is muscles. Traumatic events are poisons which strengthen the mind. Life has a quality in which it grows under that which threatens it, and all fatality occurs when the rate of adaptation is too low, or the threat is too sudden. So it’s a fight between “rate of adaptation” and “rate of change”.

  You’re decribing mechanisms in which the damage accumulates—trauma which is never overcome, grudges which are kept forever, stress and cynicism which just slowly gets worse and worse until they destroy a person. I might have to concede here—let’s see. There’s poisons which one cannot build tolerance towards (a lack of sleep seems like one), and poisons which only some people can use for their benefit while others are destroyed. Finally, I mentioned earlier that natural laws prevent some things from succeeding, and we can call such things immoral. It’s very possible that malice is similar to communism in that natural laws prevent it from being used for good purposes, which makes it “objectively bad”. But I’m not yet convinced that this is the case.

  You’re right that some things can only exist as exceptions to the rule, but this class of things are countless. Society wouldn’t work if every job was “baker”, or if every person alive was a child. So differences are absolutely vital, and we cannot prove the qualities of a person by their rarity, or by the ratio of such a person that society can tolerate before it collapses. I’m afraid this is another argument in favor of “the dose makes the poison”, or at least “Balance is good and evil is that which is out of balance”.

  I agree that the average and the true middle are different. I agree about the importance of trust too. I’d put it like “The maximum stable size of a group is governed by its coherence, which is the cooperation and trust of its parts”. But since the need for coherence threaten the unique qualities of the individual, I think we should de-globalize and have more communities rather than bigger communities. Very bad things happen to social dynamics once the network density gets too high. It’s more pleasant to be in a group of 5 than a group of 50, and it’s more pleasant to be in a community with 1000 members than a community with a million, and I think there’s natural laws behind this as well.

  That will allow you to reap benefits in healthy society

  Yes. So the limit of how healthy I can get away with being depends on the health of my environment. It’s no good to be a naive person in a malicious environment, just like it’s no good to be a malicious person in a good environment. My self-improvement is being limited by society because I’m being “pulled” towards the average. The more out of alignment you are with society, the larger any “correction” will be. A naive person in a extremely hostile environment will undergo experiences which rapidly makes them less naive, but somebody who is 98% in alignment will have to work hard in order to find the tiny difference which puts them 99% in alignment. But I do reap rewards for my mental health, like those who do Yoga reap rewards from their physical health!

  What protects things against changes? Against tending towards the average? I find that it’s isolation, gate-keeping, detachment, illegibility, hierarchies. Even shibboleths and such. A sort of entropic protection against updating towards a worse (or just different) state than one is currently in. How do you stay pure around perverts, sensitive to noise around people who yell, optimistic in the face of failure? Researching this is another hobby of mine.

  Magnanimity is a strong virtue

  Some would put it in the category of delusion, but I think that it’s often a self-fulfilling state. Sort of like how people who consider themselves lucky find more opportunities. This sounds a bit like spirituality, “belief can move mountains” and all that, but it seems true. A kind of placebo which actually affects physical reality.

  All-permeating tranquility and glorious silence

  I suppose that the lower only hurts through comparison. It can be freeing as well to update ones point of reference downwards because everything else seems better after. But the human sense of aesthetics does protect against that which is bad. If I lived in India, I’d have other standards of hygiene than I do now, but something inside me resists lowering these standards, and I think that’s for the better. About people, I’m conflicted. One should accept people precisely as they are, but on the other hand, I find it beautiful when people work hard for the same of appearance, be it grooming, having manners, remaining positive, or polishing their image. I’m influenced by Nietzsche who defined art as “deception with good intentions”. The quote I sent a few comments ago called rational people “inartistic” and I’m making the same criticism for the same reasons. Truth seeking and disillusionment conflicts with meaning-making and aesthetics. Aesthetics and meaning both add value to things, so they protect against nihilism and life-denying attitudes.

  While I think it’s a shame to focus on the screen, you do you. The insights I share should still be helpful in reaching such a state, even if you sometimes have to do the opposite of what I’m recommending. I’ve used two means to get where I’m at, both with limited success. The first is tricking the elephant into wanting the thing that I also want. The other is considering life to be a video game (why can some people be in the top 0.1% in a video game and yet in the bottom 5% in life? If they experiencedf life as a game, wouldn’t they suddenly do well?). I don’t think I’ve shut down the DMN, but I’m slowly learning to live with ADHD, somehow.

  I’m curious why no futures are good enough. I’d have to get out of my comfort zone to achieve my dreams, but there’s always a path. If somebody else took over your life, would they also fail at achieving any good ends? If no, I think you have self-imposed limitations you can remove.

  When “I am” is followed by other words, it’s a self-imposed label. You could even call it a sort of roleplay. But the world does not work without roleplay. In the structure of a company, each person plays a role over which they are responsible (this also mirrors software engineering principles, and probably generalizes to other fields which I’m no familiar with). Even physically, in a car for instance, each component has a role and a protocol for how it interacts with other components. It’s the same biologically, each of our organs have a specialized purpose and is capable of signaling the components which are relevant for them to interact with. Thus, roleplaying is not merely social pretence or the ego investing too much into an idea, it’s a principle which apples to creations which get things done in reality.

  You say “I experience it”?

  Got me there. The lazy answer is that self-awareness allows me to experience myself. A proper answer is more complicated. Do you think a corporation is many things, or just one thing? What about a human body? A car? If they’re multiple—how do you decide the level of recursion at which you stop dividing? If they’re just one—what is the limit for seperation before the cohersion of the structure is so low that you consider it multiple?

  You’re asking questions which makes one doubt the I. But you can ask these questions about anything, and make anything seem unreal. I don’t think it’s the ‘I’ which has to prove itself in front of these questions, I think these questions have to prove to the I that they have value at all, that questions have value, that theory is allowed to propose the idea that my experience of myself is wrong.

  I know the purpose of asking me these questions, but I’d personally rather anchor my concept of self more strongly than reduce it. I’m trying not to be enlightened, as I enjoy being a fool

• StartAtTheEnd 29 Mar 2026 16:04 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Vadim Golub’s comment on: Scratch­ing the sore: how plea­sure re­lates to suffering

  His conclusion isn’t incorrect, and he got there by the same kind of reflection which may lead to enlightenment. But he likely lacked empathy, which lead him to question the validity of empathy. If he had had empathy, even these realizations wouldn’t have been much of a danger, as the affective/​emotional empathy is harder to destroy through thinking than the cognitive empathy is.

  Being dangerous is not bad in itself, sometimes the tree of liberty needs to be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants. The world has a tendency to degenerate unless one maintains it like a gardener removing weeds. But the unreasonable and ill are much more likely to default to violence, so the majority of the violence which occurs will be a net negative.

  I think it’s true that “the dose makes the poison”, and this makes it so that good and bad things don’t exist in themselves. Nietzsche even wrote “Health and sickness are not essentially different, as the ancient physicians and some practitioners even today suppose. One must not make of them distinct principles or entities that fight over the living organism and turn it into their arena. That is silly nonsense and chatter that is no good any longer. In fact, there are only differences in degree between these two kinds of existence: the exaggeration, the disproportion, the nonharmony of the normal phenomena constitute the pathological state.”

  I don’t like the framing that society needs to protect itself against those who harm it, but I do believe that the peoples of a society must protect themselves from elements which would harm their society (this subtle difference is important because society, considered as a super structure emergent from its parts, tends to not represent the interests of its parts).

  I must also have benefited positively from thinking too much, since I’m basically devoid of malice by now. Even when I want enemies gone, it’s for practical reasons and not due to hate.

  The wise use of thinking is to breakthrough to that holistic level

  I feel like the east is really good at doing this by default, and that the west lacks this ability. The same is argued in the book The Master and His Emissary. this division can also be described as a lack of balance between the objective and the subjective, between machine-like efficiency and humanity, between qualia and replication, between materialism and meaning, and between rationalism and intuition. Perhaps “IQ vs EQ” as well. I’ve come to the conclusion that thinking itself might be pathelogical. Which reminds me, have you heard of the idea that language is a parasite? (I didn’t read that paper, it just seems like a good introduction to the idea). It’s a memetic entity with people as its host. I suppose I’m talking about language in the negative sense that people tend to talk about ego.

  Anyway. I see what you mean about “the doubter dissolves”. I kind of did that to my own doubt. Just like how enlightenment tells you that it’s real, my experience of the world also considers itself real. It’s a reality, my reality. I don’t particularly care if other, conflicting realities may exist. You seem to rely a little more on the idea that enlightenment has to be true/​real (your elephant seems to want this reassurance), whereas I’d be content with it being a state of mind. Your theory may be correct, I just happened to think of a counter-argument. But any belief and statement can be countered, attack is infinitely easier than defense, so my counter-argument doesn’t actually matter. My bad.

  I don’t think “deriving pleasure from overpowering another” is sufficient for wanting to hurt someone. I like games because they make power dynamics possible. But we’re only enemies inside the ring, we’re friends playing the roles of enemies. But I do believe that evil mostly stems from weakness resulting in the mind employing self-defense tactics. Almost all psychological self-defence consists of hurting those around oneself by throwing ones own burden onto them, venting to them, draining their energy, fishing for compliments, using them as a means to achieve safety, manipulating them (e.g. guilt tripping), etc. (and this is why an abundance mindset leads to a large reduction in evil, and enlightenment seems like a state of abundance). And as you say, seeing the world as an extension of yourself means that benefiting oneself and benefiting others is the same thing. In a state of poverty, the framing is “self vs world”.

  Decoration remains even after awakening

  This might sound weird, but I consider the disillusioned eye to be perverted. The purpose of decoration is hiding that which is under, and that which is under is rather crude and unattractive compared to the surface. The underground world is ugly, the person below the mask is a mess, the face without makeup is imperfect, the “behind the scenes” of every performance is filled with problems. Now that I think about it, the state of enlightenment you’re describing is not disillusioning per se, but the process which results in enlightenment rubs me in the wrong way because it’s essentially the opposite of enlightenment (e.g. doubting everything to achieve the state of non-doubt)

  An existential threat is something that threatens the integrity of the organism

  I was wrong if you meant existential threat such as the emergence of superintelligence. I took it to mean “existential crisis” which I still believe is psychological. Most people might ask philosophical questions as they get older and reach higher states of awareness, but it’s only excessive anxiety (manifesting as doubt and the need for certaincy) which keeps one stuck with these questions. Many simply go “I am”, and this is an assertion, not the answer to a question, but an axiom which doesn’t bother to question itself. The immersion (grounding) is too strong, and the process which disrupts and disorients is weaker than the stimuli in the surroundings. It’s like when you’re about to wake up from a lucid dream and you rub your hands together, feeling the friction between them in high detail, and thus stabilize the dream.

  I disagree that everyone thinks about questions relating to meaning. Meaning is a feeling, not a logical conclusion, so thinking about it analytically is a mistake. People justify effort to themselves, e.g. “Do it for your family”, or “work so that you can feed your dog”, or “If I improve, maybe somebody will love me”, but this internal conflict is emotional, it’s still attached to illusions of self and to subjectivity (the first-person view). The third-person view, and the analytical and detached nature of philosophy, is unable to find an answer because it’s detached. Meaning is a property of the first-person perspective, it dissolves when you look at life from the outside. Hence the importance of immersion.

  Reflection only happens when something is wrong. Only anxious minds get stuck in reflection because they don’t achieve the feeling of resolution which is required to go back.

  While I do have answers to questions, because I too have been anxious for most of my life, these are past conclusions and simple deductions. I no longer consider the questions meaningful nor the answers necessary. I simply am. Reality is what I can get away with. ‘Good’ is what I like, ‘Bad’ is what I dislike. If I want something to happen, I make it happen. Nobody is to blame for anything, everyone is fully responsible for everything which happens. I’m just a player who loves the game. When we play Minecraft, we don’t ask “What’s the meaning of zombies? And we don’t write long dramatic texts like “What’s the meaning of our struggles? We collect items only to lose them, the sun rises only to descend, we heal hitpoints only to get damaged once more”. In other words, the problem is that one thinks there’s a problem to begin with. The solution is to deny the problem, not to solve it. The existence of the problem is not a fact, it’s a perspective, an interpretation.

  And how do you know that, seriously?

  I experience it, just like I experience ornaments. And all information must come from the senses, right? So experience is the highest source of truth we have access to. Well, perhaps consciousness is first, experience second, senses third, and reasoning fourth, or something. I just don’t think that reflection is more correct than what is being reflected upon, as that is like putting the map before the territory.

  Yes, there are times when I doubt I’m being sincere with the effort

  I didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t putting in effort, but my own motivational system tends to do what I just described (I solve my ADHD with coffee, which makes me more anxious. It’s not ideal). When I really want to do something, the feeling of effort does not even exist, because there’s no friction. I think the feeling of effort might come from internal conflict between desires.

  It’s constantly anxious with regards to the future

  You’re intelligent, so you should be able to make plans which secure a better future for yourself. You may have problems which make it harder for you than most, but you’ve probably found that, on days where you can be proud of what you’ve accomplished, your elephant lets you relax.

  In short, when the brain judges “If I continue like I am now, everything will work out”, the elephant is happy. Jordan Peterson went as far as saying “The vast majority of positive emotion that you’re going to experience in your life is a consequence of pursuing meaningful goals.”, but the meaning is actually the substance which helps one believe in it and move towards it without doubt. It’s the absence of meaning, and not the existence of pain, which makes a goal feel not worth it. This is the default process, anyway. You can live accordingly, disrupt it, do neither or do both at once. Whatever works for you. You know yourself the best!

• StartAtTheEnd 28 Mar 2026 18:44 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Vadim Golub’s comment on: Scratch­ing the sore: how plea­sure re­lates to suffering

  Especially considering how humane awakened people generally are

  I’m sure some kind of meditations make you more humane, but not all of them. The quote on the bottom of that page is rather long, but here’s the first bit:

  “I learned that all moral judgments are ‘value judgments,’ that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ I even read somewhere that the Chief Justice of the United States had written that the American Constitution expressed nothing more than collective value judgments. Believe it or not, I figured out for myself–what apparently the Chief Justice couldn’t figure out for himself–that if the rationality of one value judgment was zero, multiplying it by millions would not make it one whit more rational.”

  Reflecting too much on things doesn’t always make you wise. It causes things to disappear—sometimes meaning, sometimes morality, and sometimes the problem which was being reflected on.

  That something appears false upon reflection does not mean that it is false. The self feels like an illusion if you think about it enough—but so does everything else. Reflect on the concept of illusion, and that too will lead to contradictions. There’s fundamental problems with searching for fundamental truths. Thinking, itself, undermines thinking, like how a fire burns what fuels it and destroys itself.

  We are indeed that field

  That is consistent with a lot of different theories, but I think our consciousness is too tied to our bodies for this to be true. Unless you restrict consciousness, so that the parts of us which feel qualia is part of the body instead of said consciousness.

  Which as they say resolves itself on awakening

  The awakening process itself happens in the brain, how do you know that you’re describing something external from the human brain at all? Enlightenment might feel how you describe, but feelings don’t leak information about reality.

  Analogy of gold and ornaments made of gold

  I’m already in a state where I’m aware of this difference most of the time. It’s a great example though, as average people can understand it. However, it takes a lot more insights to even start understanding how limiting language is. There’s no such thing as a chair—everything which can be used as a chair can be called a chair. It’s also not possible for men to be unmanly. Whatever a man does is, by definition, necessarily manly. Bad things don’t exist, as “bad” is a judgement and not a trait. I could keep going, but you probably know these already? There’s too many to write out, but the more you know, the easier it is to find even more.

  Their substratum, is “real”

  This seems accurate. But I previously wrote that only physical matter exists, so I agree that the matter which makes up gold exists, and that ornaments do not. But ornaments are not illusions in the sense that their substance is false. The gold does exist in reality, so I don’t want to deny reality.

  By treating the gold as “ornaments”, I create a local story, which seen from the outside is a sort of overdramatization or perhaps decoration of reality. This decoration adds meaning. It’s not entirely wrong to call it “illusion” when one buys into this story and experiences it as real. However, delusion is only bad because it’s dangerous, and it’s only dangerous when it disrupts the ability to predict the future. Decorating reality doesn’t change the structure of reality, for the same reason that installing a HD texture pack into a video game doesn’t affect the physical meshes or the physics engine. It would indeed be dangerous to think that one could fly and then lean out the window, since this class of incorrect beliefs could lead to death. But I think rationalists reject even this decoration.

  I also think it may be impossible to live in “the real world”, and that it would be very unhealthy in case it was possible. It’s often good to turn off the brain and live in the world of experience, but that is still a human experience from a human perspective, and thus decorated in a sense. One of these decorations is “morality”, and not even Ted Bundy is logically incorrect that the value of human beings isn’t an absolute truth. I’m not sure if these are nama or rupa, but I think you’re correct that some of these cause unnecessary suffering. But I think it’s a mistake to throw them all away. I throw away those which seem like a net negative to me.

  Most likely your strong capacity for analysis helps you to disentangle from it

  I agree. I also had a lot of suffering to reflect about. Half of that suffering was removed with psychological means, the other half was removed through self-improvement. I’m the kind of person who stops suffering when life is good, but I’m aware that some people always suffer even when their lives would be judged as good by everyone else. I’m not sure which situation you’re in, but the worries of your elephant might be rational (even if exaggerated). When a person judge themselves to be in the top 10% or so in social status, the elephant usually feels pretty good about itself. This is the case even for me who is naturally high in neuroticism.

  As for understanding, I think it came to me because I had nobody to rely on except myself. It’s similar to the brain not having any escapism to grab onto doing meditation. Remove all alternatives and the brain will usually accept its situation and make the best of it. But learned limitations (e.g. learned helplessness) can also get in the way, so they should be dissolved once they’re not useful anymore.

  I don’t model it as complexity. What I’m doing is ‘introspection’. But I don’t know why I’m better at it than most people, coule be experience or genetics. Deadlines close in time also feel like dangers close in space, so I can tell that the brain might use the same tokens for Soon (time) and Near (space). When many similar things become one, the calculations involved become much simpler. But some things cannot be calculated. I’m not sure how I taught myself to think in a way which can handle unsolvable problems, but I must say it’s nice.

  What is experienced as an existential issue is actually a philosophical issue, which is actually a psychological issue. “The hard work I put into tasks does not result in a reward which makes the trade feel worth it”, this triggers a sort of reorganization, a reflection on the state of things. The brain then looks for something reliable to re-orient itself with. But a brain which is good at seeing through things will be unable to find anything reliable/​absolute/​fundamental to support itself. Forever.

  People who are psychologically healthy do not have existential issues. They don’t have the answers, but that doesn’t bother them, because they also don’t have the questions which seek answers.

  It’s rather questions whether there is any “I” at all

  There is an I, but it might only be real in the same sense that ornaments are real. I keep my sense of self because I’ve judged that the positives outweight the negatives, not because I don’t agree that it might be an illusion.

  Not identifying with ones problems is probably healthy, because otherwise the ego would feel shame about having problems. It would also feel bad every time its actions went against its identity. For instance, a person who identifies as strong and competent might prevent themselves from getting emotional because the ego protects the self from anything which would contradict and invalidate it. Hmm, that is probably also why being objectified feels bad. The brain protects itself from being devalued because that’s the same as being disrespected. This is because value is a social currency, and because people who are deemed more valuable enjoy better treatment. The broken window theory applies to people as well. I notice that some people are talked over (cut off) more than others in conversations, and that this correlates with their social standing in the group, even if nobody verbalizes or otherwise acknowledges this hierarchy. You can identify people with low self-esteem (self-assigned social ranking) because they let themselves get talked over more. They also take up less space, and avoid being in the middle of open spaces. I’m ranting again, but it’s extremely useful to be aware of just a few dynamics of this type, and once patterns like this are tracked subconsciously, it becomes effortless to do so.

  I only doubt that it’s possible in my case

  Your brain is probably going “Am I guaranteed the end of suffering? No, well, then I will only half-ass the effort”. You likely asked yourself about the probability of success because your elephant used that as an excuse to avoid acting on your advice. By the way, a thing which might stop rumination is attempting to do the opposite—ask your brain to complain as much as wants for a short while. Then write it all down, I suppose (it’s up to you what you do with it after). Remembering so many negative things at once might be painful, but it would give you a clear picture. You might feel better just by processing these things, but your elephant might also demand solutions. “Do the exact opposite of the naive solution” forms an entire category of solutions, though I only know a handful of its members.

  I do think you’re on the way, too. A different path than mine, but it seems like a realistic goal

• StartAtTheEnd 23 Mar 2026 22:04 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Vadim Golub’s comment on: Scratch­ing the sore: how plea­sure re­lates to suffering

  I don’t need to know what it is, I only need to know what properties it has or has to have.

  Do you know Conway’s game of life? It’s turing complete, and the structure, life, calculations, and the information—are all the same thing. So you cannot remove information without removing life. You cannot do a calcuation with no squares. There is no distinction between a foreground and the background, or between a structure and its substance.

  I think that human beings with thoughts are similar. Maybe not to the same extent. But you can’t really remove all the bias from a person without also removing some of the person. I can remove the noise from my computer, but it requires removing the fan, and most people don’t model these costs mentally. They think “optimization” means “improvement”, as if they could do an unequal trade. When people try to improve humanity, or society, they think they can remove just one aspect of something without removing others, and gain only benefits. SSRIs might help against depression, but is that really all?

  This bias is so strong that Nietzsche argued that making society more evil would be less harmful than attempting to remove evil elements. The condept of Chesterton’s fence is only a first step towards realizing the consequences of naive attempts at improvement.

  The field in which it all arises may itself be conscious

  If consciousness is emergent, it’s very possible that it is. However, while we can describe something with math, which makes it feel as if things are made out of math, and as if math is some underlying reality, I think this feeling is misleading. I think it’s the brain confusing the map for reality. I think it’s more likely that there’s no distinction between foreground and background.

  And since the human perception is literally made out of human, and occurs in human, we can’t be sure that the way we experience consciousness is how the universe would experience itself if it was conscious.

  It helps me to let go of the psychological grip

  Isn’t it enough to feel that it’s real and independent of yourself? You can let go and grasp again as you please, come and go whenever you want.

  When my reality turns into a nightmare, I perceive it as real, but not as absolute. Being in a nightmare is a bit like a headache, it’s real but you know it’s temporary. It can also be considered a ‘bad place’, and one can move to a better place physically or psychologically. Bad places are real, but they’re local, so one is not trapped. In either case, the self is the creator of this nightmare, it can always be destroyed. It also helps knowing that, as long as your mind doesn’t break, it can’t actually hurt you. It’s also very unlikely that the mind gets stuck in a really bad state for extended periods of time. My worldview allows for “A reality” which is not “THE reality”.

  Something that appears at one time and disappears at another

  Makes sense. I still consider it real, just arbitrary rather than fundamental. It’s like.. The name of a folder on a computer. A folder needs a name, but it can be any name. No name is false, and yet, if you don’t like the name then you just give it another. Through this way of thinking, I can create the world that I myself experience, and consider it real, but also allow myself to switch out parts that I do not like. Each little piece is something that I can accept or reject, and with some effort I can change pieces or create new ones.

  It means that self-rumination is turned off

  I see! Enlightenment helps with that, but reducing anxiety to zero should be enough. And funnily enough, I no longer ask “what it all means”. Such a question does not point to a more real, underlying reality, but rather to a less real, derivative model of reality. In my hierarchy, experience comes first and theory comes second.

  But it’s easier said than done

  Your case is interesting, you dislike the dream so much that you sometimes wish you were never born, but you’re also really attached to it. I love the dream, but I think I might be less attached than you are, it’s pretty interesting. I’m not actually all that good at math, I just have a good spatial intuition and borrow concepts from it. And yeah, it does feel as if the world is made out of principles, but I think these principles are aspects of the human mind, after all, “duality” is one of said principles. Yin/​yang, light and shadow, hot and cold. But when we meditate, we can collapse some of the usual dualities.

  In my case it’s slightly more complicated

  Yeah, most didn’t apply to you, I was ranting about how human beings tend to trip over their own legs. A lot of human behaviour ends up being the person hurting themselves. So we’re our own worst enemy, even when we blame other people and other things (like society, or reality). I suppose everyone does this, myself included, but that people do it less as they get older and attribute more things to themselves.

  Profound experience of peace and tranquility

  To really relax, one has to let go of everything that usually consumes energy, like judging if any sounds in the environment are usual or unusual, checking if one is being looked at, making sure one does not look silly from the outside, keeping track of time, etc. And these are usually difficult to turn off because they protect against danger. By wanting a break so much that one no longer cares to defend themselves, profound relaxation becomes possible.

  But I’m more interested in perception changes. It would feel terrible if a male stranger, without permission, came over and started touching your inner thigh. But if that was a young woman, I assume it could feel nice (it doesn’t generalize to all people, but roll with the thought experiment for now). The physical touch is practically the same in both situations, but the perceived value and cleanliness of that which interacts with us, and the possible futures which may occur as a result of these, changes the experience entirely.

  When I drink coca cola, it can feel refreshing, but only as long as I don’t remind myself that it’s actually synthetic, sugar water acid. Actually, my mind likes to remind itself, because it thinks that disliking what I’m drinking makes it less harmful, as if rejecting it mentally kept it from touching my physical body as well. Not only does realizing this allow you to ‘grasp’ less things, it also allows you to waste less cognitive resources, by defending yourself against less sensory inputs.

  It feels like you are beyond time and it feels like the memory is wiped out.

  I agree, but in a frozen simulation, nothing can be felt. Even feeling a sense of calmness requires small changes to occur in the brain over time.

  I tend to philosophize

  I’m guilty of it as well. Too much thought, too little action. I think it’s “need for cognition”. I don’t differentiate much between psychological issues and existential issues, since both occur in the mind. And the mind overwrite reality. A mentally ill person who thinks they’re the main character in the universe will get the benefits of that belief even if it’s false. As I write these messages, I also try to be truthful, correct and logical, but there’s technically no need for either constraint.

  We just need to find a sequence of steps which get you from your current state to an enlightened state. An illogical path may be shorter than a logical one. I think “Who am I?” is a wrong question, since it assumes an underlying reality which is more real than the reality we’re experiencing. But you could also look within, and just see what resonates with you, and be true to that. That usually feels good. Throw away stuff which isn’t ‘you’, stuff you picked up because others did, because other people told you to, because you felt obligated, etc. But which always felt foreign in a sense. Perhaps the real you will appear once you let go of everything which isn’t you.

  Perhaps it’s an echo of youth

  It likely is, but I have more of it than I had 10 years ago. Even if you’re losing this yourself, there should be older models of yourself somewhere which have these qualities. Then you just reconnect with these aspects and reinforce their pathways. There are no real limits. I read a lot of self-help books, I might have internalized some of the positive attitudes over time. A sort of indoctrination of optimism.

  There’s also methods out there for manipulating ones own core beliefs. This manipulation is dangerous, so I recommend at least having a notepad where you write down the “version history” of your own configuration. Maybe write ten sentences which make you feel in various ways, and track how these feelings change as you change yourself.

  The brain has BIOS level access to itself. This is mainly testable through hypnosis and placebo, but technically you don’t need either. Sometimes, I can just “decide” that I’m not tired, and then feel more alert. And my brain knows how to cause changes that I wouldn’t be able to do myself, e.g. adjusting my level of empathy. You can also fight within the dream, you mentioned that you didn’t like your predictions of the future? If you take life by the horns, and improve yourself, that will make you feel much better too. If you have an issue that another person doesn’t suffer from, find out what they did and do the same. Almost all limitations are self-imposed

• StartAtTheEnd 22 Mar 2026 17:54 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Vadim Golub’s comment on: Scratch­ing the sore: how plea­sure re­lates to suffering

  I don’t know anything about the brain in a dream

  But there must still exist a physical location with bits of informaton which corresponds to your dream, and that is your physical brain. The contents of the dream is using prior knowledge (even if said knowledge isn’t true), you can’t see people in a dream unless the brain contains the pattern of information which resembles people. Human creativity can turn a shadow into a demon, but it cannot turn nothingness into a shadow (unless it already knows something from which the idea of shadow can be generated).

  What’s important is not what neurotransmitters are, or if they’re real. Maybe what I’m saying is that “being” and “thinking” seem to be the same. This is why the boltzmann brain may exist as long as particles can appear. You can’t have thinking without physical matter, and thoughts are made of physical matter. This physical matter is also self-contained (that is, equal to itself). It exists, and its existence is the whole structure and nothing but the structure. Nothing exists universally, since existence is uniqueness, and nothing which is universal exists, for “existence” means physical matter at one and only one location, and all matter is self-contained so it cannot reach outside of itself. Thus, human beings can only ever learn information about ourselves, since learning occurs in the matter which we are made out of, and since information is made out of matter.

  Here, I’m assuming that the universe follows something similar to rules of logic, and that quantum computers don’t actually allow “existence” and “multiplicity” to occur at the same time. Things get a bit more complicated if I’m wrong about this.

  Now, it could be that we’re all a single consciousness, and that the self is an illusion (a sort of compartmentalization/​tunnel vision), a false belief of being separated. Nothing I’ve said so far conflicts with that idea.

  I’m basically saying “The map is within the territory, but the map models the territory as being within the map. The brain is wrong in assuming that the territory in the map is the same as the territory outside of the map”. Most people make this error when they think. They confuse the model inside their head for the thing outside their head. I’m claiming that it’s literally impossible to break such ‘containment’, and that there’s also no need to do so.

  When you meditate, you can gain insight into yourself, but you can only get insight into “the nature of things” if this nature is contained within yourself. To the extent that you’re similar to the universe, learning about yourself can teach you about the universe. But if something outside is different, we will be forever unable to grasp it.

  Senses and thoughts “lie” in that models of things are constructed from limiting information. The models are used to predict the consequences of actions, and at times, these predictions are wrong, and then the brain modifies the model such that the new information is taken into account. Over time, the brain confuses the model with reality and with the self. When the model is attacked, it feels like the self is attacked. If one lets go of the model, it feels like one lets go of the entire world. The model isn’t wrong about the environment it was created in (at least, it’s usually a good approximation), but as a being moves to a new environment (or the environment changes), the old model will be more of a hindrance than a help. This is how the ego traps the person, right? So perhaps it’s better to experience life without any models whatsoever, so that one remains as flexible as water. Actually, I think the models are important, but that one should not grow attached to them (more on this later).

  What I don’t agree with, is the gloomy attitude that many people take towards life: “If I can’t predict the future then my knowledge isn’t real, and if I can predict the future then my agency isn’t real. I want a model which is perfect in every environment, and I want the environment to bend to my model! I want an easy life but to feel heroic, and I want to play forever but also to win. I want everyone to have freedom but also for them to be unable to hurt me, and I want to give into every impulse but also for others to respect me”.

  I’m ranting a bit, but I think most people are unable to accept that one cannot have the good without the bad. That’s silly! Such a thing is only possible in our minds, which is why I’m a psychologist and not a rationalist. And being silly is fine, as long as one enjoys being silly, but a lot of people do not.

  All processes are in interminable flux

  If life is “becoming” then “being” is every moment of time in that becoming. Life requires change, which requires time. And the universe requires a series of states, and if a loop exists, it must contain every single state, for once it enters the loop it won’t be able to break out, as the markov property prevents it from having a high enough class in the chomsky hierarchy to have the “memory” required for this. But perhaps I didn’t counter this idea of yours well enough before, so I will try again below.

  They are the continuation of interactions of the wider system

  Yes, I believe so. And the universe cannot have a beginning and an end without breaking the laws of logic, and if the laws of logic aren’t true, then we can’t conclude anything, since “true” and “false” are nothing but logical symbols.

  Actually, I will have to disagree with the quote you mentioned earlier. It would assume that exposions aren’t real (as they have beginnings and ends), which is silly. The idea that something has a start and an end also seems wrong. Everything since the big bang (at the very minimum) has been an effect, so there has been no causes since then. When we say “X resulted in Y” we’re just looking at a subset of this chain in isolation, and asserting X as a cause of Y when it’s just the previous state.

  The universe follows many conservation laws but these are just symmetries and equivelences over some dimensions rather than others. A cube is equal under rotation, but is a rotating cube something constant or something which is in flux? A vector (1,2) has no location, so it’s equal to every other vector under relocation (translation), but not under rotation. If you scale the entire universe, laws of physics included, does the universe change or remain static? I’d tell you the answers to these questions, but as I think more deeply, all I get is more difficult questions, rather than answers. Category theory might hold the answer but it might also just be abstract nonsense. And already now, one needs a spatial IQ equal to that of Emmy Noether to be able to understand my explanation intuitively. By the time we arrive at the final truth, I fear neither of us will be able to understand any of it.

  The only sure thing is being-consciousness

  Lets assume you’re right. Being unsure still freaks out the elephant, because certaincy = feeling of power = confidence = perceived realness. Faith is confidence is belief is peace of mind. Without uncertaincy, I don’t think anxiety could exist (this seems to be supported by Lazarus’ research). So why doubt? Why value truth at all?

  Perhaps this essay is about people similar to us? “There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic. They both desire to rule over life: the former, by knowing how to meet his principal needs by means of foresight, prudence, and regularity; the latter, by disregarding these needs and, as an “overjoyed hero,” counting as real only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty”

  And very well, you can end the SRIN. But I find it strange that you’re discussing philosophy and talking about life, when you’re trying to solve a psychological issue. Certain insights can shut down aspects in the brain, but rather than learning about the brain and the mechanisms for shutting down parts of it, you’re learning about life and the nature of being, is that not a lot harder? You seem to think you have no control over either reality nor yourself, but I think we at least have control over ourselves (after all, meditation works, and you’ve chosen it yourself, even if you didn’t choose that choice)

  There are the states where it’s seen through

  Everything can be seen through, at least everything which can be put into symbols or words. But if “being able to see through” assumes “false” then everything is false, and I can see through even this falsehood—therefore, “being able to see though” does not assume “false”. That’s my conclusion, anyway.

  Your rider is an uncompromising optimist!

  Doing a few years of depression, I had constant negative thoughts, and I reflected on them, only for them all to break apart (usually leaving behind positive conclusions or at least neutral ones). But after breaking everything apart, I had to build something anew, since I didn’t like the feeling of any interpretation being as valid as any other. I didn’t feel like a participant, and I didn’t have any opinions to share. Perhaps I broke the wrong part of my mind. I didn’t reach that state with classic meditation, after all—and my mind is flexible enough to break itself, seemingly lacking safe-guards which keep other people functioning.

• StartAtTheEnd 21 Mar 2026 16:22 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Vadim Golub’s comment on: Scratch­ing the sore: how plea­sure re­lates to suffering

  I think everything empirical must be real, it just could be distorted. If you have a hallucination about something, the hallucination is real, and it’s content is real just like how a movie is real (that is, the movie exists, but its content did not necessarily take place in real life). The only problem with “I think, therefore I am” is that it supposes an “I”, and that is assumes we know what thinking is. The logic is sound in that, in order for something to be able to hallucinate, something must exist.

  I don’t think we can claim that the dream came out of nowhere. It’s like a computer program claiming that the computer it runs on “came out of nowhere”. The computer existed prior to the program, and it will exist after the program finishes executing. The computer is in a higher scope, and the program cannot break outside of itself, nor can the program understand anything outside of its own grammar, for that’s the scope of its existence. A computer program is not a structure which is capable of calculating and holding information, the calculation IS the structure, the information IS the structure. There is only structure. We can only experience ourselves, and we can’t think of anything external because every thought takes place, exists internally. So just like how a thought in your mind cannot break outside of your mind, and a character in a book cannot leave the book, I think it’s arrogant of human beings when their brains decided that the structure they’re embedded inside is wrong or fake. There’s orders of inclusion, scope and chronology which are broken by such assumption.

  I’m not so sure it has a beginning and an end

  You assume thoughts have beginnings and ends, and that thoughts therefore aren’t real. But I think thoughts exist physically. A thought contains information, it takes up space, and information must be encoded in something and exist in some location (these are both one). So the only conclusion possible is that thoughts are real, but that we have no way to verify that our thoughts about things outside our thoughts are true. And I will agree with this, but I don’t think it’s a problem.

  Also, you think that consciousness may still be real, even if thoughts have beginnings and ends, so you only require the upper layer to be real. This means that the universe may still be real even if human beings have beginnings and ends. You’re only afraid that the uppermost layer is illusion, right? And I suppose you main issue is regarding the agency of the self, and now its realness.

  It’s constant with regard to the observer.

  If you take a thing which changes through time, and you model time as a physical dimension, then you have one static four-dimensional object. A DVD is also a static, unchanging object, but you can use one to play a movie, and a movie is visual and auditory information over time. My point about the orbits came from the law “An object in motion stays in motion”, it says “Something which changes over time will change over time in the exact same way forever unless its disturbed from the outside”, and the uppermust layer of the universe is a whole, so there is no external force to disturb it.

  Heraclitus is right, but it’s because the entire structure which is life must either never repeat, repeat forever in a huge loop which spans the age of the universe, or have a fractal-like structure. That’s the only possibilities which does not violate “Always changes but has no beginning nor end”. This seems in line with the poincare recurrence theorem and the conservation of energy.

  So, that was a lot of words, but it solves all these topics without breaking any fundamental laws, it just requires you to accept that local truths aren’t necessarily global truths. And this should be fine, since I’ve also shown that this doesn’t make the local truth less real.

  You seem to want a better dream

  Yes. But not because I dislike the dream. I’d keep dreaming even if it didn’t improve, for I’d still consider it better than no dream. So to me, destroying the dream would be a loss, not a gain. And, by being both the creator of the dream and the dreamer, it will be my own fault when the dream sucks, and I will have nothing external to blame or complain to.

  I’ve experienced the ideal state before, or something similar. But in that state, I didn’t even care if all my friends left me, for I wanted the best for them, and if the best for them was leaving me, I’d consider that good.

  When you’re in the state, you do experience it as preferable. But angry people also want to be angry, and depressive thoughts feel correct when you’re depressed, and drunk people rarely think they’ve had too much. You can only really judge a state from the outside, so you need to exit the state in order to judge it. I know I’m doing the opposite when I say that immersion into the moment is good, but this is because I experience life as a work of art, and there’s no wrong or flawed art, so it cannot be judged, only experienced.

  I don’t think it’s the dream which is painful, even. It’s the self-torture the brain engages with in order to keep itself alive. For instance, it predicts a large set of bad possible futures, and then feels pain for all of them at once. It doesn’t even map good futures to feel good about. It basically stabs itself in an internal simulation order to motivate itself to avoid being stabbed outside of the simulation.

  No possibility to learn from it

  I think one can learn to use most poisons as medicine, even if it takes time. Human beings, somehow, manage to fight entropy. I think even anxiety is entropy, which is why people relax with music, rocking back and forth, by cleaning, and with rituals. We’re soothed by all entropy-reducing actions. We love order as long as it doesn’t drop so low that we feel trapped and understimulated.

  But I think your way of thinking allows for too high complexity. People with downs syndrome live in the same complex world as yourself, but their thoughts are more simple, and from what I can tell, they’re usually quite happy people. Animals, too, are simple, and this lack of complexity does not threaten their survival. How could low IQ, and false knowledge, be a problem? Sharks have literally been around for longer than the north star, and they never discovered rationality.

  If one is not involved with something constructive, it turns into restlessness

  I think this only happens if one conditions oneself into such a state. If you know without a doubt that relaxation is productive because hard work requires rest, then I don’t think your brain will protect you from wasting time, by protecting you from relaxation (that is, sending you warning signals every time you try to relax)

  One cannot just sit for undefined period of time and be alright with it

  I think you only need to sit and look at a wall for around 40 minutes before the brain gives up trying to fight again you. The impulses to do something else stops as the brain realizes it cannot force you. I think meditations work the same way, they can’t be too short, as it takes a bit of time for the brain to change the mode that it’s in. But yeah, it will feel very uncomfortable for a while, and 40 minutes is just a guess, it varies between people.

  You accept that there is some nature there beyond the facade of the “I”

  Yeah, thought I wouldn’t call the “I” a facade. It’s real, it’s just not everything. Just like pain is real, even though other emotions and sensations exist, and many other brain circuits exist outside of emotions and sensations. When the elephant and rider is in alignment, it still just feels like I’m in alignment with myself. But this ‘myself’ goes deeper than my identity, persona and ego. I consider my entire body to be me. It doesn’t matter that it’s not. Two seperate people can be on the same wavelength and thus understand eachother, so I can also be on wavelength with myself, even if the components I consider one are actually disconnected. And I have introspective access to the decisions which are made by the brain, so I can usually tell when I’m lying to myself or acting on impulse.

  You cannot will what you will.

  I struggled with this in the past. Then I modeled it as “Neurochemistry is stronger than psychology. You cannot simply think your way to more dopamine”. Then I realized that the release of neurotransmitters are triggered by thoughts and experiences, things that I have access to. Close your eyes and imagine that you’re in a room and everyone likes you—your brain will increase your confidence a little, as long as you don’t accidentally focus on the fact that you don’t believe in what you see. The brain doesn’t really differentiate between the subjective and objective, and between imagined scenarios and real ones. Your reframing will affect perceived reality, and if you make that less threatening, then you will have a more relaxed elephant.

  The only question is where it will go in such case?

  Look at the destination, and that’s where you will end up. The brain is good at navigation. But if you don’t want to act before succeess is guanteed, I suggest reading this phrase every day for a while:

  “Failure I may still encounter at the thousandth step, yet success hides behind the next bend in the road. Never will I know how close it lies unless I turn the corner. Always will I take another step. If that is of no avail I will take another, and yet another. In truth, one step at a time is not too difficult. I will persist until I succeed.”

  Whenever I look, I only see intentions

  If you tell yourself “Everything is fine” your mind will object. It should also show you the counter-evidence which caused the objection. As you “argue against yourself”, you should feel the source of the counter-arguments, no? Something like “Here’s a memory where you thought was fine and it wasn’t. Here’s a bad situation which has 4% chance of occuring in the future. Here’s the cognitive dissonance between your statement and how your body feels. Here’s a weak unpleasant emotion associated with the phrase, because you disliked it last time you heard it. Here’s the memory of somebody being nice to you because you didn’t look fine, which taught you that not being fine is valuable”.

  You cannot really trick the elephant, unless it believes that you’re tricking it in a way which leads to a better future. But you see, there’s no need to lie to it. For the most part, it just wants you to acknowledge the worries, and to listen to it without dismissing anything. Then you can tell it “I hear your worries, I know it’s hard, but I sincerely belive it’s best for both of us if we do X”

  The elephant is intelligent, but the rider can see further. I think they work best as a team. Even if you don’t like my solutions, most of them should lower anxiety, and make it easier to reach enlightenment. Unlearning beliefs which block enlightenment is at least as important as learning more. If you want the conclusion of EST, it has a lot in common with Zen: “both the enlightened and the unenlightened man are totally moving in the world of stimulus-response, stimulus-response, the enlightened man seizes a single space after the stimulus to choose, say “yes” to the response. The response will occur in any case (what is, is), and the enlightened man differs from the unenlightened solely in choosing the response, in choosing what he gets… when he gets it.”

• StartAtTheEnd 21 Mar 2026 3:01 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Vadim Golub’s comment on: Scratch­ing the sore: how plea­sure re­lates to suffering

  I suppose that’s true. But aren’t questions and answers false? If I ask you how heavy a rock is, and you answer that it’s 7 kilo, isn’t our conversation happening entirely outside of the rock? Neither the question nor the answer really relates to the rock itself. So when you ask what something “really is”, neither the question or the answer is any more real than your experience of the thing, they’re both inferior. And a memory is, at best, a low quality imitation of an experience, it does the vividness of the experience no justice. The same goes for the re-telling of a story, one had to be there in order to experience the real thing.

  For the same reason, I don’t think thoughts, models, theories, explanations and descriptions can get to the bottom of things. They’re all derivatives.

  How do you know of such physicality

  Through my senses. If you’re asking how I can prove that physical reality exists, that idea is really not something which bothers me. If you mean that it might be illusion or whatever, you’re right, but it’s even less likely that beings exist which have a shared illusion of something they call physical reality, and a whole lot of coherent information which just so happens to not break said illusion. It would be as if somebody faked an autograph by simulating an entire person neuron by neuron and then having them interact with somebody asking for an autograph and then compying it over from the simulation onto the paper. Intuitively, you only have more things to explain if the simple assumption is wrong.

  Is there a reality that is distinct from the observer of such reality?

  A changing thing can be constant. A stable orbit is something which is constant but also changes over time. And gravity is constant acceleration. The soluton to an equation can also be, for instance, a line. By “unchanging”, you’re actually asking for everything to be zero-dimensional (a single dot). I think we make a lot of unreasonable demands of reality. That reason itself makes wrong assumptions about things.

  Therefore we operate through the principles of relativity

  No, relativity is correct because absoluteness cannot exist! I meant this literally. Nothing is absolute, for there is no fixed neutral reference point. You might as well try looking for the middle of the surface of a sphere. It’s easy to think that ones own culture is reality until one meets other cultures. A person with a single watch always knows what time it is, but give him two different watches and he will have a problem on his hands. The problem can only be fixed by pointing to a new unique authority, like the clock on the church. But then you discover another church, and now the problem is back! Then you look in a bigger scope for the next unique thing. Similar problem to infinite regress and Infinite ascent.

  Now, most people think that “universal truths” are “absolute truths”, but it’s really just that they made “the universe” the new authority. If you point our that, perhaps other universes exist, then they will say “well, math is objective! Laws of physics are objective”. But you can create different mathematics, they’re just axiomatic systems. And it’s possible that other universes have other laws of physics. Even if you arrived at a true upper layer, it would be finite and definite, and thus limited in a way, and thus exist as something specific and thus not universal.

  No local patterns can have universal character. Things literally only exist in one place. Existence is uniqueness. If something is multiplicity (like the future), then it does not yet exist. And as soon as it comes into existence, it’s definite, precisely because every other possiblity is excluded at that moment in time. Every single atom is different. From this we arrive at the semi-famous quote: “All generalizations, except maybe this one, are false”.

  I have a frightful dream

  I experience both positive and negation emotions. Why do you decide to define the experience by the negative emotions? It’s not wrong, but the opposite is just as valid. For the same reason that these two statements are equivalent:

  1: Every time I get up, I get knocked down again.

  2: Every time I get knocked down, I get up again.

  Both are a loop transitioning between two states forever, but one sounds negative and the other sounds positive. But it’s the one and same loop, mirrored.

  Person doesn’t exist

  I think this means “The (personality/​ego/​constructed sense of self) doesn’t exist”. Bu the generalization is true even for objects, and I meant the physical person. When I look at things, what I see is a function of my eyes. I cannot seperate what I see from eyes. What I taste depends on my taste buds, if taste buds do not exist then neither does taste. Beauty is also in the eye of the beholder. Thus, if a picture of a flower is ugly, it’s human to assume that there’s something wrong with the flower, but what if the problem is actually with the camera? When a person says “life is bad”, why do we assume that there’s something wrong with life, rather than the person who speaks such words?

  Meaning is derived from just being and being ok with it

  I don’t think mere being results in meaning. But I think that a person can endure a lack of meaning if he has a sense of beauty. In either case, I feel like enlightenment undermines itself. It cannot be a meaningful persuit if the persuit destroys its own meaning.

  Challenges can improve the system

  I just model it as two interacting forces with some incompatibility. Is two magnetic poles repulsing eachother challenge or conflict? What about the desire to be productive and the desire to relax? What about a guilty pleasure? I try to model things in such a way that I can trace a single principle from the laws of physics all the way to subjective things. This doesn’t always succeed, but it’s because the brain has different elemental operations than physics does. In real life, hot + cold is lukewarm. Your brain however, can experience the qualia of frost and burning at the same time, they don’t cancel out.

  The mind seeks for ways to come to safety constantly

  Yeah, but that’s like how an insecure person fishing for compliments. It’s an “error” stemming from a self-protective mechanism, and you can turn it off as long as you can believe it’s safe to do so. You could argue that one has to learn why, but I’m tempted to say “the answer is already within you, you can already do it, you just need to realize it”.

  You don’t exist in a vacuum

  I have access to my own nature. I can isolate myself and reflect on what I truly like. I can choose, but only because the brain is malleable.

  You operate under the assumption that you have control over life

  At least, I have control over myself. And I’m a part of life, so I have a little bit of power. And like you, I could make some good arguments that this power is an illusion. But if you look around the world, you will see individuals who singlehandedly seem to have a lot of influence on the world. It’s like those who are crazy enough to believe that they can make a difference are those who can.

  Who is the controller?

  I’m not sure it’s a “who”. It feels like some mutual understanding between the elephant and the rider, which is experienced as a mixture of agency and certainty. It’s not merely following a schematic created by memory, because if it were, one wouldn’t be able to turn their life around from one day to the next, and yet some people have managed this. The mechanism doesn’t question, it answers. It doesn’t ask “What is it?” It says “Thus it shall be”, it doesn’t follow, it leads.

  One has first to find out what is meant by the word “I”

  This feels like a limiting belief. It’s a bit like “In order to drive a car, you must first know how it works, and somebody will have to prove to you that it’s actually a car”, but any idiot can get in, turn the key and press the gas pedal, and off it goes.

  And it cannot be done

  You could say “Take a medicine, and think of yellow flowers”, and then no red monkeys would bother you. The reason that it doesn’t work, is that when you write “not X”, you’re also writing X. The reason it works in logic is because “not false” is evaluated to “true”. It changes into something which works. The brain does not seem to do this step, at least not in the same way.

  That is apart from life

  I don’t think anything which exists is apart from life. And since we exist, we’re part of life. I think your issue is that you deprive yourself of agency because you don’t trust yourself with it, and then you hide this fact from yourself.

  Can you not remember any cases where you “woke up” and allowed yourself agency? This always happens to me when people I care about are in danger. If you ask me if I can get to the graveyard one night, I will tell you no, I don’t know where it is, and it’s basically impossible to navigate in the dark, and it’s cold and I’m too tired. But if you told me that my grandma had fallen at the graveyard and was lying on the ground waiting for me, I’d be there within about 15 minutes. And there are no if’s, it’s an assertion. It feels unconditional. Can you try similar thought experiments and capture this feeling of certainty? That’s probably the elephant you can feel. You allow yourself to use your own strength because circumstances legitimize it.

  Now, these experiments might fail. You might feel like a victim instead, and wanting to call for help. That’s alright, it just means that your elephant considers it a better strategy to get the attention of other people who can help you. You might also just panic on the spot—in this case it would be because the elephant first panics, and then protects itself from the feeling of panic through a mental retreat, because it incorrectly believes that it’s the emotion, rather than the source of emotion, which is the danger.

  If it works, I’d say focus on negotiating with yourself, and on creating mental framings which legitimize your agency. Fuse what you want to do, and what you know you ought to do, into one. Watch which objections occur, those are the limiting beliefs. E.g. “I want to believe the explanation I’m reading right now, but I want more proof first, as it may be wrong”. In this case, the elephant would be afraid of holding false beliefs, because it thinks it can be hurt by them. There’s an ocean of possible limiting beliefs, including “I don’t think I deserve success”, and “successful people tend to be bad people, and I’m a good person, therefore I must not be successful”. All self-defense, which is also self-sabotage.

  I can explain more, but the solution doesn’t actually require understanding the solution. Neither is it the case that it will work if, and only if, I can prove that it will. Reality cares just as little about logical arguments as ideologues and religious fanatics do.

• StartAtTheEnd 19 Mar 2026 20:19 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Vadim Golub’s comment on: Scratch­ing the sore: how plea­sure re­lates to suffering

  You must have a reason for seeking enlightenment in the first place, some reason that suffering doesn’t work well. I think there’s good excitement (thrill) and bad excitement (anxiety). And that there’s good insanity (slight mania, vividness, charisma, stong engagement) and bad insanity (mental illness and the mind collapsing under its own generated strain). I hope to flip as many negatives into positives as possible, rather than to remove the mechanisms.

  To reflect oneself out of the system

  The meaning of the quote is that this is impossible. When a person says “Life is suffering”, what they mean is “My life is suffering”. It’s about them. Everything in life only exist in relation to other things. “Nothing exists but the whole”. How a picture looks depends as much on the thing being photographed as it depends on the camera. In this case, a camera is trying to say “the picture looks like this in itself. I, the camera, am unbiased”.

  In order to remove all the bias, you must remove the entire person, including the thinking process. You will not be able to remove “error” any faster than “virtue”.

  There are insights that you naturally come across if you suffer enough. Buddha came across them, as I did I. They’re not necessarily true, but most of them are the experience of a previous idea breaking apart, and the mind freeing itself from something which used to trouble it.

  Is it really life-affirming if it doesn’t invest into the moment? i.e. if it’s without “skin in the game”. Saying yes to everything means that one seemingly lacks preference. Well, the brain can give a positive value to everything all at once, it’s has slightly different rules from mathematical systems. And it is indeed possible to destroy the narration. But I think that is strongly tied to the meaning-making circuit of the brain? I experience meaning as “weight” and “relevance”. Weight is strongly tied to “caring” as well. Here’s some examples:

  In Dragon ball, the power levels scale exponentially every season, making the old numbers feel meaningless.
  In videogames, cheating ruins the value of resources because the value was given by scarcity. Also, leaving a game and coming back later makes it less meaningful because the relevance has decreased.
  A way to momentarily get rid of anxiety is to tell yourself “we’re just monkeys on a big rock hurling through space” or to otherwise zoom out to a bigger perspective. This is an outside-in perspective rather than an inside-out perspective, making the brain filter away the self which is suffering. The ratio of space that you occupy in the perspective is also about a billion times smaller when you reduce the earth to a rock in space. I think this is WHY the method works.

  Finally, the “rat race” makes one fixate on productivity, which makes the brain assign less values to things which do not further the goal of productivity, so the value which things are assigned depends on ones current plans, which explains why people who don’t know what to do next also feel a sense of meaninglessness.

  These examples are not exhaustive of how perception and meaning is tied together, but I find it difficult to come up with methods which lessen suffering without decreasing weight, caring and subjective relevance, and therefore meaning. And meditation seems to work by modifying perception directly. I’m open to the possibility that I’m wrong or that my model is incomplete, but the model applies to myself.

  Or you have to define what you mean by reality

  Reality is that which exists physically. These words merely “point” at reality. Reality is not “ghosts”, I think you’re fixing the wrong side of the equation. The perspective from which reality appears unreal is a ghost.

  It’s still ambiguous what I’m actually claiming, so I will be more direct: In order to live in reality, one must have no mental model of reality. When you see a car, you must see the car itself, as if you had never seen a car before. Your brain wants to pull up the concept of car that it’s already familiar with, and this is what would prevent you from experiencing the car as it is. I think one is the closest to reality when they have no preconceived notions, not even the knowledge of logic, nor of concepts.

  But it would be a compassionate thing to explain to me that demons don’t exist

  To the person experiencing demons, it would feel like that. But perhaps the person who has lost the ability to believe in anything except material reality would be jealous of such an experience. And find it cute in the same sense that it’s cute when a child believes in santa or the tooth fairy.

  And fair. I used “development” to mean “adaptation to circumstances of life”.

  Suffering leads to development when and only when one overcomes a problem. If one loses to the problem, it becomes a setback, and if the tension remains unresolved, then it’s just a passive energy sink.

  Can you learn math without studying math? I think you need math problems to overcome in order to get better at math. The problem helps you find the solution, as the two are one. If you have math homework you just keep trying to ignore, then ignoring it will tire you out (energy sink). If the math is way above your level you become discouraged (lose momentum/​energy). If you can do the math, successfully it feels good to the extent that it challenged you. If you were to design a video game and calculate the amount of experience points something would give, it would be a perfect fit to my analogy. And despite this all being subjective and mental, it seems to describe how physical growth in power works, too.

  Are you sure challenges can’t improve a system? To grow stronger through conflict is almost the definition of life. The greatest growth results from the greatest suffering. Almost everything I write here I discovered on my own, because I refused the alternative, which was dying.

  My entropy also increases when I read a new book, but then I chew on the information and integrate it into my worldview, again lowering the entropy. It’s similar to actual eating and digesting. And physical trainin and healing. If you want low mental entropy, I suggest you don’t learn anymore. Conflicting information reduce the coherence of your mind, increasing entropy until the conflicts (inconsistencies) are resolved. Even chatting with me leads to conflict (inconsistencies) which result in growth (stronger models). The feeling of mental clarity, and confidence, is likely just the minds certaincy about its own worldview. From self-esteem issues to confidence the only things which change are the certaincy of belief and the value assessment of oneself.

  It’s a rhetorical question

  If you think of things as “created” rather than “discovered”, then you won’t be bothered when you realize how arbitrary many things are. It also won’t bother you that different people have different worldviews. It also won’t bother you that some things are emergent, and that you can’t prove anything exists prior to the universe. It also allows you to create your own values and to believe in their legitimacy. About 80% of all existential issues disappear on the spot for anyone who adopts this view.

  Tantamount to finding out the reality

  I think integration is needed, not just self-tyranny. And I think one learns to know oneself, rather than reality. But the reality which is not tied to oneself is, in my opinion, irrelevant.

  The reason I wrote that, by the way, is that one can focus so much on spiritual growth that everyday life is neglected. In that way, the type of victory does not transfer over.

  The intention to avoid suffering is there

  I avoid outcomes which are against my taste. Suffering can be beautiful, just likes movies which make us cry can be excellent movies. But why is this anymore surprising than people loving video games? Some even choose hard mode or hardcore mode, intentionally making the game difficult and frustrating.

  Or who has the choice over preset conditions of one’s makeup?

  Self-modification is doable. Meditation is self-modification too. And I need to know the mathematics of experience in order to create a richer experience. Imagine a fictional book character gaining self-awareness, and instead of breaking the fourth wall and invalidating the book, he chooses to remain a character and make the book even more thrilling to read.

  Koans help one to get out of the car

  Deep sleep

  I only need to show that I sometimes exist in order to show that existence is real. I don’t really care about the reality which I’m not around to experience, and if I was only alive 17 hours a day, that wouldn’t really bother me either.

  I’m not sure what experiments will align the most with your quest for enlightenment. I can remain happy even when the ratio of suffering to pleasure is ⁸⁵⁄₁₅. I guess I can teach you one way of escaping yourself, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. The brain can filter out background noise, right? You can treat your own suffering and thoughts like such noise. This would be a bit cruel to yourself, though, since you’d be ignoring their (your) suffering.

  Most anxiety comes from not having things in order, and the best way to deal with it is to take life by the horns. Don’t ask for permission, and don’t merely hope. Cause what you want to happen, you have the ability. If you ask me “How will X go?” my first answer will be “I don’t know, I lack information”, but this is just an impulse, a lie. I know what my future will be, how my relationships will go, which of my goals will fail and succeed at this rate. I just have to look, and looking is scary, but if I open my eyes and also steer things in a good direction, then there’s no anxiety and worries about failure. I will know I won’t fail. I can even decide when to go to sleep and when to wake up (and I won’t need an alarm). I could lie and say “It’s unpredictable”, but I can feel my brain negotiating with itself, deciding before it falls asleep if it wants to wake up or sleep until it’s rested. I’ve just sometimes pretended I didn’t know. This is probably what is meant by “There is no try”.

  Let me quote “EST, playing the game the new way”, for I just remembered where I’ve seen this idea before: “You have a remarkable ability which you never acknowledged before. It is, to look at a situation and know whether you can do it. And I mean really know the answer for you. And all I’m saying is that if you can see that you can do it, go on and do it”. This requires some level of alertness above that of self-deception and autopilot, but that’s not a very high level. It also requires you and your subconscious being somewhat on the same page (you will know!).

  Regarding favorable states, they get easier as you have more control over yourself. Can you relax on command? What about hearing a spoiler and then intentionally choosing not to commit it to memory? Can you placebo yourself without a sugar pill? These things are all quite fun.

• StartAtTheEnd 18 Mar 2026 17:34 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Vadim Golub’s comment on: Scratch­ing the sore: how plea­sure re­lates to suffering

  I hear that a lot. But I think suffering is just a broader category of pain, which includes more complex feelings and discomfort stemming from thought rather than physical sensations. I still think that promoting this concept to metaphysics is wrong, suffering is not a part of life, it’s just a function of the body. Human cognition has a built in fallacy which intentionally externalizes internal issues. E.g. when you’re angry, the whole world might seem annoying. When you’re sad, the whole world seems unfair. The projection is a quirk of the mind, but it tricks even intelligent people into writing books “about life” which are really just about themselves. Like Nietzsche concluded:

  “It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.”

  However, it’s valid to model pain as sensation, and suffering as the interpretation of the sensation, and then to acknowledge that the latter can be controlled by the individual.

  Pain is there as an indicator to keep the body going and it will be there after awakening

  It’s only there as long as the brain deems it useful. The brain can learn that nobody cares if you cry, and then become unable to cry entirely. It can learn that shame is illogical, and become unable to feel shame. It can learn that backpain is normal, and make your backpain fade into the background so that you don’t notice it anymore.

  One cna experience a dimensional collapse, either in the brains signaling or in ones ability to listen to it. Some people are blind to faces, others like empathy, others lack theory of mind, others are asexual. I can’t tell if this is a result of “getting used” to something, or the brain just discarding a frequency entirely because it doesn’t have a use, but one should be careful not to accidentally trigger these changes.

  I also think that disabling the internal narrative might be bad for your subjective experience of life, since the story being written might stop feeling like a story. You need to immerse yourself into a story in order to feel the meaning of it and in order to sympathize with the characters. If a character is introduced and dies 30 seconds later there’s little emotional impact, precisely because it takes time for the viewer to get attached to the story and its characters. A common way to feel less suffering is to reduce the mechanism which causes over-investment into a story, but this method has hidden costs.

  But you were happy to reduce it, see?

  I thought it was interesting more than anything. I’m not afraid of suffering, but it’s reason. When my body is hurt, I’m afraid that it might be permanently damaged, the pain signal is secondary, and if I were to reduce the dimensionality of signal, my life would also lose depth.

  And again, the concept itself is flawed. If I love chocolate, and this determine that I choose it over vanilla, how does does that invalidate the choice as being my own?

  I don’t think objective reality is a harmful fiction, but the belief correlates negatively with intelligence, so less intelligent groups will claim to fight for “the truth” as they actually fight to spread their own personal values while combating conflicting values. Like with egoism, the desire to be right leads to hostility towards those who disagree. But in cultures, this self-defense is often necessary since it protects against subversion by other cultures looking to propagate themselves.

  One has to discover it first in oneself

  And I’m not sure I agree with this. Why do you think understanding beats ignorance? Reality doesn’t change by you understanding it, and philosophers don’t strike me as happier nor as more competent than average people. Is the foreground is the most valuable, then isn’t every experience worth more than its explanation?

  I consider things like questioning the realness of reality to be a serious mistake. And given how intelligent people do this more than dumb people, intelligence is a mistake. General intelligence conflicts with narrow intelligence, but we’re narrow beings in narrow circumstances. It does us no good to think outside of the scope in which we exist, especially not if it leads us to question the only scope in which we *can* exist.

  I don’t trust my brain that much

  Since the foreground is the only thing which is real, every experience you have is real. Your brain too is more real than any theory. If you tell me that you’re sad because a demon is after you, then the sadness will be real, even if the reason is false. And to you, the experience would be real.

  “Necessary friction for development”, you say. I don’t personally value development except as a hobby. If the world changes twice as fast, I think we’d just destroy ourselves twice as fast. But I do find it strange that you want to get rid of suffering, since it exists precisely to create a friction which results in development. And you think development will continue without suffering, so why wouldn’t a country drift even with strict policing of social norms?

  Consciousness

  I think consciousness and the moment itself is “foreground”. Things which are background would be anything processing what is experienced. Further in the background is models built from what’s processed. Further still is meta-thinking.

  Not even pain

  But in novels, characters bite their own tongues in order to sober, because pain grounds them in the moment (grounding techniques too, focus on the sensations of the body). So this seems more like a method to get away from unreality (e.g. doomscrolling).

  They are not healthy nor useful

  Why do you believe so? Except in this one way, in which I’ll agree: Because we’ve created a modern society which is somewhat incompatible with our biological selves. If you ask me, the error is not our failure to conform to society, but the ridiculus action of building a world which we’re incompatible. It happened in such a stupid way, too. We constructed it out of ideals! Ideals are ideal because they symbolize something which is not the case, we value them because we want them to be true, which is the opposite of them being true.

  I could make my happiness not depend on anything, at all. But if I was happy even as my life fell apart, wouldn’t that prevent me from taking action to fix it? The brain seems to think so, which is why it’s so hard to turn off this dependency.

  Conquering yourself and conquring reality is two different tasks.

  Zen koans

  These exist not the find the solution to a problem, but to make us realize that we can deny the problem itself. Koans aim to break the map, so that one may experience the territory. For instance, I deny that suffering is a problem, and because of that, I don’t feel the need to solve it.

  Pre-set configuration of this brain.

  This is what I meant by “Your brain is your axiomatic system”

  Conflict is dissipation

  It’s two contrasting forces. Three outcomes are possible:

  1: force A is stronger than force B and consumes it. 2: Force B is stronger than force A, forcing A to yield to B. And 3: The contrast itself is denied. Force A and force B no longer interact.

  That which does not kill you (force you to yield) makes you stronger (increases your energy), but you may choose to deny the conflict entirely (Amor Fati, turning the other cheek, radical acceptance, denying the problem, etc.)

  Depression and low self-esteem is excessive failure (yielding). Mania and grandiose delusions is excessive victory/​overcoming.

  You can hack this value, but doing so often puts you out of alignment with other people, and it may result in reckless and dangerous behaviour since your self-model may predict victory where you’d lose.

  It’s heat and no free energy

  Heat is a result of having too many ongoing battles. You should either win them or lose them. Being undecided on a lot of things is what makes you feel trapped and aimless at the same time.

  You need information if you wish to update your own model of yourself in a way which is accurate. But it’s a ‘challenge’ of power, not of truth. Politicians keep lying, for that’s what makes them win. If you’re playing the truth game and they’re playing the power game, I’m afraid that’s why you’re not doing well in life.

  It was a trick

  The entire quest for knowledge seems to end with the conclusion that the quest for knowledge was a mistake, and that only action will suffice. When you take something far enough, you end up with the opposite. The greatest act of living will kill you. Morality taken to its extreme is immoral. Rationality taken to the extreme is irrational.

  I worded myself badly, the background does exists, it’s just not physically real. It’s simulacra. The map (background) is simulacra of the territory (foreground). I’m committing an error (thinking) in order to show you that it’s an error. It’s like saying “those who don’t understand, speak. Those who understand, remain silent”. Zen Koans exist because here’s a class of errors which can only be taught through that same error.

  how do you know that you are?

  Something thinks, therefore something is. But the issue here is not the lack of proof, it’s wanting a proof in the first place. The proof exists in the map, and I’ve already argued that the map is of secondary importance. Do you not wish to be free of existential problems? If you deem reality more real than thought experiments, then thought experiments (e.g. boltzmann brains) won’t threaten your belief in reality.

  I won’t write my experiments this time as the comment is already too long for my taste. But I can tell you that if you have a belief which relies on nothing, then no attack exists which can harm said belief. You could write a proof that I didn’t exist, and I’d just laugh at the concept of a map of the territory claiming that the territory its mean to approximate is wrong. It’s like taking a picture of the sky and claiming that the sky is wrong because the picture looks different. Anyway, can you provide more information about the problem you want to solve? Right now I’m just sharing random insights, and I don’t know which may be of use to you

• StartAtTheEnd 16 Mar 2026 6:02 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: Vadim Golub’s comment on: Scratch­ing the sore: how plea­sure re­lates to suffering

  That’s what Buddhism points to as well.

  Is it? I consider even the existence of suffering to be alright.

  We’re meant to fight against it, but we’re not meant to win, that’s a misunderstanding. For instance, when you get hungry, you’re meant to eat, right? That’s the purpose of hunger. If you were to create medicine which could “cure hunger”, destroying it entirely, that would be to misunderstand the purpose of suffering. A lot of human wireheading is like this, including the way Buddhists succeeded in hacking the human perception.

  Into the nature of suffering’s emptiness

  I think I accidently did this recently. The qualia of suffering has at least two components. They’re the raw feeling of suffering, and its meaning. Ever noticed how sounds also have at least two components? There’s the raw sound, but also a location in 3D space. Your brain assigns a location to each sound.

  Anyway, I somehow separated the raw feeling of suffering from the meaning component. That reduced its intensity by about 85%. The most painful part is what the suffering signifies, e.g. a bad future.

  It is the middle way in our tendency to live in absolutes

  I’ll take your word for it, but Buddhism strikes me as taking its own teachings all the way. It does not for instance suggest only grasping enlightenment halfway.

  “Free will” never made any sense

  The way most people think about it is silly. They basically make the definition of free will “the ability to break cause and effect”, because that’s sufficient for them to feel as if actions are pre-determined. That quickly turns into the question “does randomness exist?” which is a conversation about a property of the universe, and not about agency. It quickly gets silly, and both “free will” and “no free will” are wrong. The very concept is a mistake.

  What if the truth of the default state is different from the one of transcendence?

  Transcendence is not a property of a thing. If you transcend suffering, it’s you which changes and not the suffering. Your relationship to it changes though.

  Who is the judge of what is true?

  For you, your brain is the judge. You’re the axiomatic system of your own reality. Your reality is gibberish from the outside, just like foreign languages are gibberish to you. I speak English, your computer speaks CPU instructions, your body speaks DNA. These all have alphabets and rules about their composition. Inside such systems, falsehood is contradiction and truth is tautology. Asking what’s true outside of these systems is like asking what matter exists outside of the universe. I was kind of bummed out when I figured this out, myself.

  How do you know that?

  I reversed an error. I also drew inspiration from one of the smartest people in the world, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Super intelligent people usually go all in on objectivity, but not Goethe, and I think it’s because they put the foreground first. If you go in the other direction, you end up with a kind of Infinite regress… And emptiness. “Consciousness is just electricity, electricity is just forces, forces is just information, information is just..”

  See the problem? If you take anything far enough, it eventually contradicts itself. If you keep zooming in on anything, it eventually doesn’t exist. Question something enough, and it eventually stops making sense. All these errors are solved if you learn to love the surface instead.

  The old EST training program also argues that only experience is real, so you can look into their arguments too.

  It’s exactly to be one with the flow of life

  Would this not require immersion in the moment to the point of self-forgetfulness? Buddhism strikes me as going in the complete opposite direction, becoming so aware that nothing remains besides the thing observing the self which resides in the body which experiences. Buddhism feels like it’s taking a distance from life, rather than going further into it.

  What you’re saying doesn’t feel wrong, but one way to lessen anxiety is through grounding, and another is by focusing so much on other things that you forget yourself and thus the anxiety you’re feeling.

  You’re right that the freedom I was talking about is a fiction, that’s why I warn against it. Your definition sounds a bit more like freedom from imaginary problems. The end of self-sabotage. The breaking of artificial limits, rules and borders. All these things getting in your way are likely constructed by your mind in order to protect you, or by your ego in order to protect itself.

  We prefer the state of being without sores than chronic condition of itching and scratching them, don’t we?

  I’m not sure. Do you prefer never playing video games, over repeately starting them and winning them? Never reading books over starting them and finishing them? Do you think death is better than being born and eventually dying?

  Personally, I don’t want to win. I want the game to keep going forever. I like the game, and while it’s my job as a player to try to win, winning would end the game. Without itching, there is no scratching. Without death there is no life.

  Life cannot be integrated until such questions are pondered and resolved

  The anxious brain tells the self “I just need more information, then everything can be resolved”. How do you know this is truer than when a famous person thinks they just need more fame, or a businessman thinks they just need more money? The brain collects information to reduce uncertaincy, because it copes with it poorly. No matter how noble goals we have in life, I think we remain the playthings of our instincts. Trying to go outside of oneself is like trying to bite ones own teeth.

  In my perspective freedom means openness to what is

  True openness would be Amor Fati—to wish nothing different. To consider everything perfect as it is, even imperfection. But this would mean not prefering enlightenment over ignorance, and to not prefer virtue over injustice. Or if you were to accept yourself as an axiomatic system, it would mean to accept that you’re simply a being who prefers virtue over injustice, and prefers enlightenment over ignorance.

  What you seem to prefer has a lot in common with what I’ve already found, but I found many of these things by rejecting or reversing Buddhism. Oh well, we’re quite aligned, and I’m happy to announce that these states are indeed possible.

  Thought is limited by definition and operates by division

  Yes, but you need conflict in order to have force at all. The flow state for instance is the right amount of difficulty contrasted with the right amount of skill. If you destroy either difficulty or skill, the flow state disappears. You can only feel your own strength when you’re using it. You can only be a hero when you have an enemy. If you get rid of contrasts, some states will become unreachable for you. How will you feel embarrassment after achieving perfect self-acceptance, for instance?

  The layer below thought is an animal like state of sensations and sensory impressions. It feels kind of trance-like to me. Flow is still possible here, as the contrast between a stimuli and your concentration. For instance, listening to music can be nice when the contrast between the music and your conscious processing of it are at a balance. Perhaps this occurs at 110BPM for you. Anything below 30 or above 400 beats per minute is probably unpleasant.

  The reason I can’t consistently reach or stay in these states, at least some of them, is because real life gets in the way. Other people and their problems, social norms, daily duties, and being bombarded with perspectives which are incompatible with the enlightened state. And sometimes, sleeping. Your mind repairs craziness doing sleep, and sadly this can include pleasant states like manic moods.

  I’m not sure if methods for reaching enlightened states can be communicated. If you were to teach somebody how to balance while standing on a ball, using words alone, it would be impossible, right? Even when I do get an epiphany, and write it down, I can’t always come back to it even when I read my own notes. I can tell you about some of my experiments, but I don’t know if it would be useful for you.

  By the way, I like your articles, but I’m less interested in Buddhism itself than in learning new insights that I can use to reprogram myself with

• StartAtTheEnd 14 Mar 2026 15:02 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Vadim Golub’s comment on: Scratch­ing the sore: how plea­sure re­lates to suffering

  I’m not too confident about my knowledge of Buddhism either, but I’ve independently made similar discoveries to Buddhists and I think I can explain them in more modern words.

  I think you’re telling the truth as far as you’re concerned, but I think Buddhists misinterpret themselves since they use morality as a metaphysics (to me, it’s just another dynamic). They seem more focused on reducing the bad than cultivating the good, and they probably don’t see much of a difference.

  Transcendence of suffering

  Is that not reduction? An alternative is to simply accept suffering, and to let it wash over you as any other sensation, and to pay it no more mind. But Buddhists take the concept of suffering way too seriously for me to believe that’s what they’re doing. They must think of the fight against suffering and sin as a grand and important battle in order to dedicate their life on it, but once such a battle is won, it would no longer seem grand and important. Everything becomes simple once it’s understood, knowledge results in disillusionment. In their defense, a lot of insights are worded simply: “The secret is that there is no secret” or “The moment is all there is”.

  Theorizing works if one understands the insight (as supposed to memorizing it). It has to connect on a deeper level to be felt. It’s similar to how knowing everything is fine and relaxing is different to knowing everything is fine but still being anxious. The knowledge has to be embodied.

  I think “the middle way” means a balance between extremes. Not working too much or too little, not eating too much or too little, not trying too hard or too little. I don’t think it applies to Buddhism itself. I’ve heard of many Buddhist papers about the concept of nothingness.

  There is no intrinsic nature to begin with

  This is true, the concept itself is flawed. Same goes for “truth”, “free will”, and “meaning”. The way we think of truth requires that something is inherently true, i.e. true outside of any systems. But truth is a property of systems. The way we think of meaning requires that it exists outside of ourselves, but “meaning” is a property of the human brain. The way we think about “free will” requires that it’s different from “unfree will”, but we cannot tell if free will exists because the universe would look the exact same if it didn’t (in other words, the definition is nonsense). If you encounter questions that you cannot answer, it’s likely because the question is wrong.

  But truth exists, locally. Meaning exists locally, and free will exists in that it’s experienced.

  Most people think of life as having a foreground and a background, and some think that the background is the real world and that the foreground is fake (e.g. shadows on a wall in a cave). I can confidently tell you that it’s the other way around. Only the foreground is real!

  Nietzsche understood these things, they’re explained in his “Will to power”, but he still refers to Buddhism as being nihilistic, so I’m using the word in the same way. He likely uses it to refer to a state of mind, rather than to a description of the universe.

  I agree that there’s no life without change. There’s no “being”, only a continuous “becoming”. But I can’t tell you what this implies about the intrinsic nature of things, as that would require solving the ship of theseus problem. Am I a new person every moment? It depends what definitions we use.

  To transcend it

  They use this word a lot. But you cannot transcend something in the sense of going beyond it. Have you ever tried to transcend your own humanity? If not, I will tell you the result: One does not become a super human, but rather less human. It’s a reduction, not an increase. The same problem occurs with liberation/​freedom, it’s actually just separation. It’s not the ability to engage with things as you wish, but rather a lack of engagement.

  As you go from the specific to the general, you increase emptiness. Everything which is more general than uniqueness can not and does not exist. That which has the potential to be anything has not yet become anything. Him who has compete freedom is not engaged with anything. As you increase width you decrease depth, and as you increase depth you decrease width. That higher branches of mathematics are more abstract, and therefore more empty, is because they apply more widely. As width approaches infinity, depth approaches zero. As depth approaches infinity, width approaches zero.

  Not the final solution

  Is it not? It transforms the negative into something positive, is this not superior to destroying it? Giving birth is one of the strongest pains a human being can experience naturally, but it’s an event so meaningful that the pain becomes secondary. Some women go through this, and then decide to do it again. Is that not the ultimate affirmation of life? The choice of being over non-being *despite* suffering?

  All is tampered to this end only—to get the insight

  One cannot optimize for multiple things at once. “Virtue”, “Insight” and “Life” point in three different directions. If they optimize for virtue they do not optimize for insight and vice versa. This is how optimization works, and it’s why an AI will convert all of us to paperclips if it truly optimizes for it.

  I do not agree that freedom is empty

  If one has no ambition, then they will be content with a quiet life. Enlightened people with no drives will not become bored, that is true. But the more you shield yourself from life, the less alive you will be. For the same reason that, if you never open yourself up to other people, all your relationships will be superficial. Here I’m not describing subjective experience, but a mechanism. A relation (A,B) is a connection between A and B. If A and B are truly independent then there is no connection. For a node in a graph to experience true freedom, it must be connected to no other nodes. When things are connected, the must necessarily influence eachother. As you know from quantum mechanics, you can only observe that which you interact with, and all interactions between things influence both things proportionally to their size.

  One will get lost in one’s cognitive models of it

  Getting lost in an experience is “immersion” (animals do this), but getting lost in beliefs, mental models and thinking is indeed not living in reality. But at least it’s living.

  Nietzsche too found the innocence of all existence to be a freeing thought. The idea that nobody was to blame for anything. But it’s the concept of morality which makes this liberation impossible (Nietzsche freed himself by being amoral), and Buddhists strike me as believing in morality.

  I may not get what you mean here

  It’s the most important part of my message. A person who is used to poverty will savour a plain piece of bread. A person who is used to fancy resturants will experience fast food as being trash.

  If life gives you more than you try to take from it, you will be pleasantly surprised. If life gives you less than you try to take, you will experience it as a loss even though you’re getting something. Rationalists sometimes decribe depression as trapped baysian priors. Why not trap low priors instead? We can define this constant as “taking for granted”. Lower this constant, and every event in your life will feel more pleasant. I don’t mean “don’t hope”, but hope in such a way that the outcome you hope for does not become the baseline for comparison. The goal is to keep the comparison mechanism rather than destroying it, while preventing the brain from updating the baseline and getting used to the improvements we make.

  All-permeating peace

  I’ve tried this, but only doing really good times, in which I must have had high levels of dopamine and other neurotransmitters. Ideal states should be sustainable over longer periods of time, rather than once-in-a-lifetime experiences (though these are nice)

  They stress out experiential insight into the nature of reality

  They do so using a base set of assumptions about morality, truth, illusion, virtue, being, etc. They consider these axioms, but they do not realize that axioms are created rather than discovered. All of mathematics is a set of axioms and everything which follows. We consider 2 plus 2 to be 4 “in reality”, but it’s only true within an arbitrary system in which we define numbers and the plus operator. Math is created, not discovered. It’s the same when we think about “time” and “space”, as if they were fundamental. Nothing is fundamental, it’s all our own sloppy constructs. Even this word, “is”, is a linguistic construct. Coffee isn’t actually hot, since that would imply that hot is coffee, which is nonsense. We can’t think about reality, because language influences how we do so and gets in the way. Some people realize this, others experience words as reality. But even concepts should not be experienced as reality if you want true cognitive flexibility. But most people who lose faith in the map also lose faith in the territory, which is no good. All problems are with the map, the territory is perfect.

• StartAtTheEnd 13 Mar 2026 14:55 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Vadim Golub’s comment on: Scratch­ing the sore: how plea­sure re­lates to suffering

  I do agree that it’s about clinging to them. But they do not treat positive and negative sensations equally. They remain indifferent to positive sensations, but treat negative sansations as something important enough to dedicate their entire lives to eradicate. It’s very asymmetric. Healthy people tend to judge the positives as being of higher worth, e.g. “Pain says refrain, yet joy wants eternity”.

  Superior in the sense that they are enabling insights

  It does enable such insights, but using the word “superior” here makes it appear as if the goal was understanding the nature of suffering and the human mind. But the real goal is the reduction of suffering. This is dishonest as Buddhists pretend to be above the illusions of the self. Just like the brain tells us to cling to moments of happiness, it also tells us to avoid suffering. These are both axiomatic in the brain, but while the Buddhists recognize the former axiom as an illusion, why do they not recognize the second as such? They too treat it as an axiom, trapping themselves.

  As it is impermanent and lacks substance

  That’s not true, this is the belief “That which is not forever is a waste of time”, and it’s a similar belief to “That which is only locally true is an illusion”. If you regard the former as true, then you’re a nihilist, as nothing will have value. If you regard the latter as true, then nothing is true, everything is illusion. Both conclusions are only made in mentally unhealthy minds (anxiety leading to a desire for cognitive clusure), the second stems from a lack of understanding about the limits of axiomatic systems (universal truth doesn’t exist, and cannot exist. It’s not a reasonable demand to make, but few people knew this before Gödel discovered the incompleteness theorems)

  One only clings to things when they regard them as important to survival. Simply having alternatives reduces the clinging a lot. This is why dating books recommend dating 3 women at once rather than one. Being clingy (that word is no coincidence!) with a woman will scare her away, and by having alternatives, one feels less threatened by the possibility of a single failure.

  Reducing clinging will reduce all associated negative emotions. However, when you regard something as less important, and therefore suffer by it less, you also find less meaning in its pursuit, and feel less happy when you achieve it. The reason this is terrible is that the only way to endure suffering with a smile on your face is by finding meaning in said suffering. Also, people who have lots of casual sex value these relationships less because they’re common.

  Nibbana is limited in how blissful it can be. Not only does Buddhism cultivate nihilism, depersonalization, and meta-thinking, all of which reduce the vividness of life through mental distancing, it also removes the contrast required for pleasure. Food taste better when you’re really hungry, and this is because “Lack” increases the value of the thing which is lacked. If you destroy the lack, and prevent an amount X of suffering, X is subtracted from the reward of X as well.

  Buddhists try to have their cake and eat it too. Liberation is freedom, but freedom is empty. Their entire life will “loose the oomph”. If you’re immersed in a book then you care about the characters and sympathize with them, but when you recognize that it’s “just a book” and that the characters aren’t real, you destroy not just the pain you feel through your immersion, you destoy the entire story and your own experience as well. I could flip it around and ask you “Does a video game become more enjoyable when you use cheats? Does being liberated from the need to grind for resources save you?” and the answer is quite trivial.

  What is very important, which Buddhists sort of fail at explaining, is that you can ruin your entire experience by having high expectations, and enjoy most things by having low expectations. Having low expectations means lowering the baseline used for comparison. If 80% of experiences are better than what you expected, your life will be more joy than suffering. This is the only cognitive hack I’m aware of which is not zero-sum like Buddhism is. The only mechanism where you can “cheat” your brain into eternal abundance.
  What Buddhists teach is not how to move this baseline of comparion. What they teach is reducing the amplitude of what is compared against. It’s a small difference with huge implications. They get really close, since “not clinging” approaches “live in reality rather than in your expectations”, and in that “wanting more” lowers the value of that which is.

  We cannot imagine how deep the roots of suffering are

  What you’re describing here is immersion into an unhealthy state. But if you learn how to permanently escape immersion, how will you later immerse yourself into a healthy state? The meta-perspective allow you to retreat and watch from a distance, but many who struggle with derealization/​depersonalization wish they could enjoy the moment rather than merely observe it from a distance.

  How is this for a comparison? Those who work 50 hours a week really wish for a holiday, but those on disability income, who never work, will tell you that such a life is tedius and boring, that life just passes them by.

  It is blissful beyond compare

  I found that to be the case for the first Jhana, but this is because unbroken concentration leads to feedback loops. When you get goosebumps listening to music, it’s the same kind of feedback loop. I think people with ADHD generally enjoy things less because of their fragmented concentration.

  Anyway, it’s also because I only take up meditation when I’m absolutely wrecked. If you only meditate when you’re completely overwhelmed and exhausted, and thus love meditation, it would be like if you only had ice cream on hot summer days and came to think of ice cream as the best snack in the world.

  Current experiences are being amplified

  Sounds a lot like a feedback loop. You don’t need Buddhism or enlightenment for this, just strong, continuous concentration on a stimuli. It’s a very useful insight, and it made me realize just how harmful the habit of ‘multi-tasking’ is.

  They don’t prescribe

  I’m not sure about this. They would likely describe me as “fool” for choosing the stage play and falling into the illusion that it’s real (by the way, it would be real, since it’s occuring in reality). Many Buddhists also try to push their teachings on other people, even when they’re harmful. HealthyGamerGG on Youtube showed a rare moment of self-awareness when he named a video “Your Success Was Unprocessed Trauma”. When people are “traumatized in the right way” it can push them to live extremely successful lives, and curing them from this trauma can therefore be harmful. I’ve done a lot of self-improvement, so I know the trade-offs of most cognitive framings very well, and I’ve even had to undo some of my improvements as the trade wasn’t worth it. Most of my comments on LW are about me taking something further than other users, gaining insights on the trade-offs, and warning against them. And like when Nietzsche warned against morality and conformity, and Kaczynski warned against technology, it’s not received well initially. That’s the price of being ahead.

  Buddhists use theory to deny reality as illusion (everything becomes false when you think about it enough). What I recommend they do afterwards is using reality to deny theory as illusion (the problem was the map (thinking) all along, not the territory (reality)). Nihilism is only good as a transitory state

• StartAtTheEnd 10 Mar 2026 19:11 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Myron Hedderson’s comment on: Maybe there’s a pat­tern here?

  It does seem like I’m drifting, but I don’t think I am. The problem is incentives, and incentives tend to be materialistic and degenerate. I shouldn’t call it modern culture, for I think that culture is actually disappearing. (culture, like religion, is like a defense against incentives, since it creates subjective values which defend against objective metrics of value). There is no longer any meaningful difference between most countries thanks to globalism, which is why I’m not specifying which culture. There’s no point in saying “That one where people are having less children, and where less and less people believe in religion” as that’s everywhere. I could even say something specific like “The country where the biggest bills you can have of their currency is getting smaller over time compared to inflation, in order to make currency more digital as a measure against crime, also beef is getting expensive” and that’s still basically everywhere.

  I looked it up, and while younger generations have more permissive attitudes toward relationships, it seems that both rates of cheating and socities attitude towards it are stable. Acceptability of premartial sex about doubled since 1970. But according to the data I just found, neither the average nor the mean number of sexual partners is increasing over time. Rate of virginity seems to fall from 60% at 18 years old to 2% at 25 years old(!). Virginity at 18 is increasing over time, but virginity at 25 is decreasing, so I was almost mislead by the increasing age of consent (another global pattern of change). I’m still pleasantly surprised by this data, which is the same as me admitting that I was somewhat wrong about it.

  I may be biased in that I’m getting older, which means that the people around me generally care less over time. One becomes much more superficial and practical from age 15 to 30. I’ve gone from meeting multiple people who wrote the name of their partner in their arm with a kitchen knife, to hearing people say things like “Our relationship wasn’t practical so we broke up”, so it’s no wonder that people seem less deep over time.

  >what conclusions would you draw

  I grew up around many bad people, and stopped interacting with people from my own country as a result. But the online friends I know on a personal basis are quite sexually open, even though I feel like I’m filtering away hedonists and nihilists. By the way, when I started using the internet in my pre-teen years, it was dominated by intelligent libertarians, and today it’s mostly dumb conformity and brainrot, so it’s no wonder I feel as if that’s getting worse, too.

  I’ve noticed a large increase in how much people care about politics. A large decrease in individuality and strength of character/​personality. Increased socialization (homophily). Also a huge decrease in the desire for freedom to step outside of the Overton Window, and a large increase in wanting freedom within the Overton Window. The crabs in a bucket mentality also seems increasingly common, and one is expected not to behave in ways which can be misunderstood by those who look for the worst in others. If one doesn’t signal that they don’t hold value X, they’re now assumed to hold value X.

  Do you remember how people made myths up around video games? “There’s a mew hidden behind the truck!”, etc. There’s no hidden information anymore, no exploration, and therefore no soil for culture to grow. Everyone just follows the current meta. In the same exact sense, our current society feels increasingly Plaza-like, whereas it used to feel Warren-like. This seems to have a bad influence on socialization.

• StartAtTheEnd 9 Mar 2026 13:41 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Myron Hedderson’s comment on: Maybe there’s a pat­tern here?

  Those examples are because of a change in knowledge more than a change in values. The risks of injury from playing are immediate and visible, unlike leaded gasoline and smoking which takes decades to really cause harm, so that’s a change in values.
  I think we’ve become thin-skinned cowards, and that we pretend cowardize is virtue. Worse still, the popular form of signaling is now being offended or hurt on other peoples behalf. The degree to which people feel sympathy for my life experiences does not line up with how much pain these experiences caused me. Neither does socities stance of problems mirror the degree to which said problems affect me.

  Many experiences are both good and bad, with the good outweighting the bad. But the modern world only focuses only on the negative aspects, which is disasterous (for the same reason that being perfectionist will be disasterous to ones schooling). Such philosophy is provably unworkable, it assues inaction is better than action (as less mistakes are made), and that people dying is good (less people alive means less suffering, and dead people don’t cause others pain). I dislike modern metrics.

  If you talk with people in Thailand, most will still reject the idea that seatbelts are necessary, despite knowing how we feel about them and why. Most people project their current values through all human history, judge them retroactively, and fail to differentiate value judgements from rational judgements. If your experiences in high school were distressing at the time, and not just looking back , then I consider them valid.

  The reason we feel less shame is because we removed weight from sexual relationships. This makes relationships more superficial, and sex less intimate. You can always make this trade-off. Reducing suffering is trivial, just care less. Take lithium and SSRIs and you will remove both the valleys and the peaks of life. The sum of positive and negative emotions won’t change, but to those who only count the negatives, this is experienced as improvement.

  > Nostalgia
  Applies specifically to ones own childhood. The position I’m arguing is quite a lot harder since it extends further back.

  > We’ve drifted
  Right, but the future will be made worse by technology because our values have become degenerate, and I think tech also causes our values to worse, so the two problems are hard to separate. Advances in tech will be used against us more than for us.

• StartAtTheEnd 8 Mar 2026 0:21 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Sting’s comment on: Maybe there’s a pat­tern here?

  I don’t think it’s inherently bad. It’s fine that many things in life follow a power-law distribution, but this inequality shouldn’t feed into itself. If you’ve ever played Monopoly you know that it’s so unsustainable that even the winner won’t want to continue.

  But I strongly disagree that rich people provide value. Windows is not a good operation system, and the competition they prevented would have made for a better world. Most of what made Bill Gates rich was essentially stolen as well. It wasn’t just that you picked a bad example, most rich people are not the original creators of value. If it were people like Alan Turing and Neumann who became billionares, then I’d agree with you, but it’s actually companies like King (they made a clone of an old flash game called Bejeweled and made billions). Nikola Tesla died penniless and in debt.

  You assume that more popular things are more valuable, but is that really the case? Most of what I enjoy is obscure, and most of what I dislike is common. You could counter that with “While gold is worth more than iron, it would hurt us more if all iron disappeared than if all gold did”. So if value = quality * quantity, then yes, all the most popular things are the most valuable, but should we really define value in this way?

  A poor product which is well marketed often does better than a good product which is never marketed, so reach is rewarded more than quality. And the things which made us rich are often harmful to others (which is why money is considered the root of all evil). Chances are that if you are a good hacker, or good at finding loopholes in laws and such, then you’re also good at making money. There’s a Youtuber called The Spiffing Brit who breaks video games with exploits, but he does the same to the Steam market and the same to the Youtube algorithm, and this is because it’s the one and same ability. If we assume that richer people simple added more value to the world, then we can conclude that scammers are good for society and that people like Tesla were a waste of oxygen, but that conclusion is the opposite of the truth. Ideally, merit = reward, but we’re so far away from the ideal that the two hardly correlate (in my opinion).

• StartAtTheEnd 7 Mar 2026 22:59 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Sting’s comment on: Maybe there’s a pat­tern here?

  They both are and aren’t. Modern molochian problems stem from actions which maximize income, and with the death of god, materialism is winning against traditional morality. We don’t need more money in order to be happier, but on the other hand, living paycheck to paycheck is really hard on the psyche, and it often feels like everyone is out to bleed you dry.

  I also think we have less alternatives to these traps than we used to. There’s less communities and family gatherings, less nature to walk in, less social activities around town. Many improvements require collective effort rather than individual effort. I’m immune to these traps, so I don’t think they’re solely to blame for the worsening conditions.

  You don’t think that the million laws, regulations and paperwork requirements makes it more difficult than in the past to invent new things or start a business?

  I agree about [redacted]. If you’re refering to ideas which aren’t just taboo in our current era, but in most or all eras, feel free to DM more about them. I like hearing such takes, but they’re anti-memetic so all search engines work against me.

• StartAtTheEnd 7 Mar 2026 16:19 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: Scratch­ing the sore: how plea­sure re­lates to suffering

  Buddhists do not use words in the same way as modern psychology. “Clinging objects” is the subjective feeling of mentally tracking and rejecting something in a way which results in a mental tension. We waste cognitive energy keeping up this resistance, and it feels as if letting of this resistance will cause harm. E.g. “Worrying about my friends keeps them safe. This mental strain is a shield which protect them, and if I stop caring if they’re hurt, the shield disappears”. What the Buddhists figured out is that this is not the case—letting go is free. The benefit of the tension is an illusion, we’re not in control. It merely feels as if we’re holding up the world through our cognitive strain, but it’s possible to just let go of everything and discover that it was holding itself up all along.

  Buddhists have a problem with most pleasant sensations, because they only exist as contrast. To feel relieved you must first feel worried. Food taste the best when you’re hungry, water feels the best when you’re thirsty. Pleasant sensations are fleeting, and usually paid for by their own opposite.

  Buddhism seems to prefer a flat landscape to ups and downs. It also assumes that avoiding one unit of suffering is better than gaining one unit of pleasure. I disagree with the former because contrast tends to be psychologically healthy (it’s better to exercise and then relax than it is to exercise without resting or resting without exercising). I disagree with the latter because suffering only bothers people when it lacks meaning.
  The human body only moves because it can think of a possible future state which it deems better than the current state, and because it seems to reduce this gap between what is and what isn’t. If you deem this to be an illusion, and remove the mechanism, I think your motivational system would collapse. You’d be free of suffering, thought!

  The state of enlightenment is just the destruction of many things, but I don’t know what remains in the end (whether everything is destroyed or not). The state without craving/​suffering might not be completely neutral, it may even feel slightly good all the time. But I highly doubt that the peak pleasures of enlightened people beat the peak pleasures of the unenlightnened.

  The priorities of Buddhism are unhealthy, but its teachings aren’t false. It answers “Is it better to love and lose than to never have loved?” with a no, and I think that having such an attitude towards life is a bigger issue than the fact that life can be painful.

• StartAtTheEnd 7 Mar 2026 14:09 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Sting’s comment on: Maybe there’s a pat­tern here?

  Long response—feel free to skim.

  The second and third articles seems more to the point, and Mike Solana is right. But the “intellectuals” with the graphs are overlooking many important things. I also doubt the legitimacy of a lot of this data, how exactly is food quality going up? There’s a clear trend of nutritional decline, added sugar and chemicals, and hyper-processed foods.

  I know that life has generally gotten worse since 15 years ago, but I need a stronger argument to show that this is not just a local trend but a global one. For the same reason that “This year is colder than last year, therefore there is no global warming” wouldn’t be a valid argument.

  I take issue with how so-called knowledgable people fixate on surface-level metrics and act like other aspects of life do not exist. Money is not a good metric for well-being, and while economics is relevant, psychology is much more so.
  I’m glad that Zvi at least talks about the cost of watching children like hawks, but that’s merely one important pattern. He refers to it multiple times because he rightly regards it as important, but he barely manages to see the shadow of the cluster to which it belongs, and he fails to notice that his modern values helped in creating this cluster.

  I’d have brought up the difference between manifacturing and service if the article hadn’t. The change from “Buy something and you own it and it will work for 50 years” to “Buy a mere license to something which needs repairs after 2 years” means that things may appear cheaper despite being more expensive over time. But even if that is taken into account, people become miserable when you take away control and agency from them, and these psychological aspects account for a lot of the felt decline. It’s much easier to cope with failure when it’s because of ourselves or because of life, than when it feels like other peoples tyranny is to blame.

  I have to disagree with the argument “We find the compromises of the past simply unacceptable”. The “we” refered to here are those who prefer the present over the past, and I’m arguing that things are getting worse because I find the past to be better in many aspects. The author then claims that anyone who prefers the present is “wise”, which is ridiculus. As if a societal collapse is worth a reduction in mean words. He doesn’t seem to realize it, but many of the problems he later identifies (like bureaucracy and overregulation) are replacements to traditional ways of doing things.

  Zvi is in-between the position that I disagree with and the position I agree with. He knows that some things “adds to measured GDP but makes life harder” and that “People are very good at noticing when things suck. Not as good at figuring out why”. This is the tension between the intellectuals who only see the surface, and the people living in reality who lack the education to explain why they’re miserable. Many of my objections to his post point in the same direction as his own arguments, i.e. “Survival requires jumping through costly hoops not in the statistics.” Exactly, the ivory tower is too disconnected to the averge person. The objective metrics does injustice to the subjective life. The prefrontal cortex tyrannizes the older brain circuits. If Zvi takes his ideas further, I think he will converge towards my current position.

  The customer’s benefit comes in the form of increased quality of life. The business’s benefit comes in the form of profit

  This duality is excellent. It mirrors the trade-off between “Work to get resources but lack the time to play” and “Have the time to play but lack the resources”. A fundamental trade-off between utility and qualia. But the example misses something important, for well-being requires power (agency and freedom), and being exploited by the system leads to a reduction in these rather than an increase. The traps here feels like hedonism, or the “increased quality of life” being short-term rather than long term. You felt this too, since you mentioned junk food and gambling.

  Finally, most of those who are miserable about the economy today tells me that they commute, work, eat, shower and sleep. They do not have time and energy for anything else. So this is an excellent metric! Has hours worked increased? Is free time left after necessary daily chores decreasing? If they’re not, then it must be that life has gotten worse psychologically, and that the decrease in mental energy, rather than time, makes life feel as if it’s nothing but a struggle. 4 hours of free time which would be spent socializing in the past might have turned into 4 hours of free time spend ruminating or on unfulfilling escapism.

• StartAtTheEnd 6 Mar 2026 17:43 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Myron Hedderson’s comment on: Maybe there’s a pat­tern here?

  Thanks for your response!

  Indeed. Writing just the conclusions doesn’t tend to work out, so I waste words being pre-emptive.

  It’s not that nothing has gotten better, but that the things which improve and deteriorate seem to cancel each other out. This felt effect is less strong for people who conform, and for those who don’t have strong principles which are threatened by change.

  I think “things have gotten worse since 2010” is a much easier argument to make, perhaps it’s too easy, so I will defend the idea that there’s little improvement doing all of human history. I don’t care what stats people have collected as reality takes precedence over derivativations. I yield when I have a theory about something and a source contradicts it, but I do not yield to the consensus when it conflicts with something I’ve personally experienced.

  I don’t think the memetics of ideas matter unless they are related to cognitive biases strongly enough to alter ones perception of their past, and I generally expect opinions about the past being worse to come from personal experience rather than hearsay. Of course, the effect of nostalgia is strong, so for some subjective topics, people will say that the experiences of their teens or so were “the best” quite consistently.

  The worst parts of the world may be getting better quite consistently, but I think the best parts of the world are getting worse. It wouldn’t be strange if globalism drove things closer to an average.

  I agree that technology is likely one-way (Unless Kaczynski’s plan is feasible) and that regulations are mostly one-way (making human freedom tend towards zero, by the way, which is one of my dislikes of modernity).
  I’d also argue that technology is neutral, and that while ideal uses of it are possible, bad uses drag down the overall utility of the technology. And every time you make laws to prevent bad uses, you make good uses more difficult, and increase the total overhead of the technology itself.

  I’d also argue that exploitation is becoming more common, because it’s almost synonymous with optimization. Thinking in objective metrics is also harmful to the overall experience of life (notice how buildings are getting uglier over time!). In other words, we sacrifice good taste (and everything which is hard to quantify) for efficiency. The past was more human, and therefore less Molochian, because we valued the subjective more. The two values inherently conflict

  Re: benefits erase themselves

  A lot of modern “benefits” seem to benefit the lowest common denominator, and to make things worse for power users. Perhaps this is another levelling process. It would also be a net benefit on paper (‘lowest common denominator’ is a bigger group than ‘power users’). I won’t deny your personal experiences, but I think there’s also examples of things getting slower and worse over time.

  We couldn’t afford the level of regulation

  I want to pause future regulation too (if regulation worked, we’d not always need more of it), and I think it feels “necessary” partly because of technological improvements. But it’s admittedly another process, which runs somewhat parallel to technology, and which is influenced by other factors like the fear of being sued. Also by modern morality, which only focus on the bad side of things, and therefore doesn’t notice that reducing the negative aspects of things must necessarily reduce the positive aspects as well. For a trivial example, kids are safer at home than they are playing in the woods, but the life of a zoo animal is not strictly better than that of a wild animal (and I dislike the sort of people who don’t intuitively understand this position). We only track the safety metric, and overlook the tradeoffs, so everything is getting better on paper, but we rightly feel like something is lost as a result, because it is.

  More people would die in the absence of those regulations

  Indeed, but that does not make such regulations objectively good to me. And try asking older people who did things which are now considered bad or unsafe if they regret their actions or if they’re happy that one cannot have their experiences and memories anymore. The overwhelming majority of people I’ve spoken with prefer the past (random example—many have fond memories of playing multiplayer games back when harsh insults were a core part of the experience, and find themselves repulsed by modern over-regulation)

• StartAtTheEnd 6 Mar 2026 10:06 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Sting’s comment on: Maybe there’s a pat­tern here?

  That sounds strange. The benefit is almost purely the customers, and yet wealth inequality keeps steadily getting worse? I’m working backwards from a conclusion that I’m still sure is true, and I probably do make mistakes, but I can’t tell where.

  If grocery store profit margins are small, and the prices aren’t falling much, and the farmers also complain about their economic situation, then it seems like benefits are simply disappearing. Machines keep getting more efficient, doing the work of more people in less time. We make better crops, better fertilizers, and find better ways to prevent food from getting attacked by insects and from rotting.

  Theoritically, everything should be getting better. Either the ratio between the cost of living and wages should increase, worked hours should decrease, or else the current lower-middle class should be living like the upper class of 30 years ago. Neither have happened, which is what I mean by zero-sum mechanics kicking in.

  Richer people are generally happier, but what matters here is simply the relative amount of money, not the absolute amount of money. It seems that people who don’t understand this calls it a paradox. I may not be able to explain why it’s true, but people are naive in that things turn out much more zero-sum than expected. I know the general consensus is that the economics is far from zero-sum, but even if theory can back this up, reality seems unable to.

  Here (source) is a historical analysis of subjective well-being over the past 200 years, by the way. I think the common opinion that things are getting better over time is a fallacy stemming from the belief that, since the past looks worse from our current moral values, the past must also have been experienced as worse by the people of the past. But that assumes that they had our current values, which is false. We are tempted to interpret people in a way which support our own values (e.g. neo-nazis who think that Hitler would have approved of them, and Christians who think Jesus would approve of them) and I think this leads us to mis-interpret the past.