aiislove
8mo ago
What do you guys do when you feel stuck in a rut? It feels like all I think about is food, sex and money and it's really irritating. I'm constantly preoccupied with what I'm going to eat for my next meal, how I'm next going to get laid and how I'm going to make more money. I don't like spending time on activities that are nonproductive so I try to avoid video games. I spend a few hours every day on my computer but it's kind of a half work half mindless visual processing thing. I make money passively so I don't have to really work more than an hour or two a week but I usually end up spending a few hours more developing ideas and doing work that's not really necessary. I have a lot of free time but I spend a lot of it organizing stuff in my house and cooking. I am dating a bit but I don't really like any of the guys I'm talking to for anything long term so it feels like a dead end there. I also don't really generally like people and would rather spend time alone, I feel like these convos always go to "go to church" or "join a community" but it just sounds irritating to me.
When I used to feel this way I would just take walks outside or drive around or do chores around the house but I have done all of those to death. I have walked every path within an hour of my house, driven everywhere in my state and done many chores. I traveled for over a year and it was great but now that I'm stuck at home again the inanity of daily life is driving me crazy.
aiislove
8mo ago
I wasn't familiar with the Four Sights before your comment but I just read the wikipedia entry and it does seem like a good parallel to the Barbie movie. Barbie's shock at the things she sees and experiences make her look ridiculous, even if she is changed by the experience of seeing them. We're not meant to empathize with her character's initial state, only once she sees the suffering of others does she become more human.
I'm not sure where a discussion of realism fits into a film that features both tiny girls replaying the 2001 monolith scene and multiple extended musical numbers.
Well, metaphors point to reality. Realism is the main theme of the movie as it's contrasted with the artificial Barbie dream world. The mom and daughter pair are the most apparent representation of reality in the film as they have to deal with the realities of humanity while Barbie gets to ignore them all in her perfect dream world. Extended musical numbers can be used to express great truths about reality even in their artifice. Effective art can mirror and illuminate reality rather than abstract or distract from it.
aiislove
8mo ago
I guess I made the mistake of conflating wokism with luxury beliefs in my comment. It would probably be more accurate to interpret Barbie as someone with luxury beliefs and the Latino daughter in the "real world" of the movie as woke. Barbie's luxury beliefs echo and reinforce wokeness in a way, she believes the daughter will agree with whatever she has to say but the girl rejects and attacks her as a fascist and Barbie is hurt by the reality of interacting with the real world beliefs of this girl.
I see where your argument is coming from but I don't think the point of the harassment Barbie faces is to punch down at the "incessant sexual harassment of the lower classes" like the woke/luxury believers would argue about, it's depicted to make Barbie and Ken look ridiculous and out of touch with norms of reality, like that the construction workers aren't all women or the president isn't a black lady or whatever, and that she can't parade around in a miniskirt as a sexy blonde because people will catcall you and cops (or anyone else) might make lewd remarks toward you. I don't see that as a ridiculously woke statement, they're not saying we should all have the freedom to run around with our tits out without consequence, the point is that if you disregard the norms and customs of people around you they will feel empowered to disregard the norms and customs toward you as well. The mom and daughter characters weren't victims of sexual harassment, only Barbie was.
aiislove
8mo ago
The point of Barbie being "sexually harassed" five minutes after arriving in the real world is to illustrate that her luxury beliefs and wokeism is delusional. The Barbie dream world represents everyone who lives in a woke simulacra of the real world where the horrors of reality are shielded from their view. The point of the harassment isn't to portray the dangers of sexual assault, it is to illustrate the dangers of living in a fantasy world when other people are exposed to real horrors every day. Barbie brought the sexual harassment onto herself by dressing in a sexualized way and not anticipating the realities of interacting with people who aren't in on the luxury beliefs that Barbie got to hold previously.
aiislove
9mo ago
The first topic reminds me of a ridiculous story from sixth grade. Someone told me this kid in my class had a gay cousin, and since I was gay I asked this kid if his cousin was gay. He got mad at me for implying that his cousin was gay, and then complained to my science teacher, who I was sure was a lesbian because she was a soccer coach and I saw her buying wine with women at the grocery store multiple times. My lesbian science teacher scolded me for asking this kid if his cousin was gay, even though I was just asking because I was gay and wanted a gay friend. (Granted I probably didn't ask with a very polite tone.) Either way, the kid I asked was more homophobic than I was, since he was offended that I'd imply his cousin was gay, whereas was just asking for a gay friend, and it ended with me getting scolded by a lesbian teacher for homophobia instead of the kid who was actually homophobic.... anyway I'm just relating this to try to illustrate how the "homophobic public offense" law is terrible and will lead only to ridiculous outcomes. Am I allowed to be homophobic as a homosexual? If not then I can only see this law being worse for me as a homosexual who interacts with homosexuals all the time and happens to do things that can probably be framed as homophobic if they need to be, compared with someone who knows no homosexuals and runs little risk of doing homophobic things unless a lesbian cop shows up at their door...
I like the song you are asking about. As a rich man north of Richmond I empathize with him and people like him more than most of the people in my class FWIW. Rich people lording their power over the poor is really bad and every time I see it I cringe. I thought about writing out a response to this piece in the NY Times but don't have much to add. The rich are increasingly divorced from the realities of the poor. All everyone with a college degree has been doing since 2008 is throwing poor white people under the bus, pointing at Trump voters as racist hicks while trying to differentiate themselves in increasingly extravagant ways. I think (hope) this has basically run its course, even the Barbie movie seems to be illustrating the horrors of "going high" while everyone else is struggling in the gutters.
aiislove
9mo ago
I think everyone knows about innate differences in intelligence. Growing up everyone knew advanced classes in school are mostly white and Asian and very few blacks. The school I went to in the suburbs had few blacks and none of them were in advanced classes while all the Asian kids were. I can guarantee you I'm not the only person who noticed this, even in elementary school I think everyone knew that Asians are smarter and blacks are less smart. If you think no one has this figured out I don't know what to tell you.
aiislove
9mo ago
The mainstream right [...] don't believe in group differences
I have read this take so many times on this forum and every time I read it I feel like I'm living in the twilight zone. Where did you grow up?? I grew up in the midwest in a non major city and group differences were so obvious and apparent and openly talked about my entire life that I don't understand how you think half the country doesn't believe in them. The mainstream right absolutely believes that group differences exist, I would estimate that the most mainstream portion of them believe that the differences shouldn't matter and we should try to broadly accept the differences if not correct for them, and the bulk of the rest believe that the differences shouldn't matter, but do, and that trying to do anything to correct it is a fool's errand at best and a recipe for harrison bergeron style dystopia at worst. I don't think this is an extreme online position at all, I can imagine anyone in my grandfather's generation saying it implicitly to friends and family and anyone in my father's generation understanding it but perhaps not saying it.
aiislove
9mo ago
Fat people don’t particularly like looking at or being with other fat people either.
Surely you've heard of gay bears? We love each other. Yes we'd probably all rather be 250 pounds of muscle than fat but we'd still rather be 250 pounds of fat than 90 pounds of twink...
aiislove
9mo ago
Thanks for sharing your experiences, I can relate to a lot of it. Speaking as an overweight but formerly obese person, I don't think that people in general really hate fat people that much. They hate the idea of themselves being fat, and may resent fat people for getting away with being fat when they wouldn't be able to live with themselves for being fat, but I think that generally people are as accepting of fat people as they are of dwarves or the mentally challenged or some exotic ethnic minority or whatever. Fat people probably hate ourselves more than the average person hates us.
aiislove
9mo ago
Have you tried the Reese’s pumpkins or eggs? They sell the pumpkins at Halloween and the pumpkins at Easter. They are like crack to me. They are ten times better than regular Reese’s cups and I already love those.
I think the maximum weight you can gain in a day is fixed [2 lb]
Is that true? A quick google tells me a pound is 3500 calories, so you’d have to eat 7,000 calories above your resting calorie intake to gain 2 pounds, which is a lot of food and probably an unpleasant feeling but not impossible. I used to eat 5,000 calories a day without thinking about it back when I was binge eating regularly and I’m not the tallest guy, im sure people could hit over 9,000 (lol) if they tried, though I don’t know if your body would start overriding the CICO thing at that point (maybe what you were implying?)
Sort of a grim answer to your question but I guess eating whatever I wanted whenever I wanted was a childhood dream that I used to do, but I became very fat and my life revolves around food and I felt very pathetic. I am able to maintain a healthy weight now (though I still struggle with temptation every day)
Actually a lot of the dreams I had as a kid I do try to play out but with sanity and moderation- like I wanted to live in Japan so I recently stayed there for 3 months, I wanted to live in a castle so I stayed in one for a few weeks, things like that, which are fun and a nice way to honor your “inner child” in psych lingo
I’ve had acne since my teens as well, the one thing that cleared it up completely was a round of antibiotics. My skin looked amazing for a few weeks but staying on antibiotics long term is a bad idea. Do you have body acne by any chance? You only mention your nose but I’ve had back, chest and face acne in conjunction with extremely dry/dandruff scalp/beard and eyebrows even, which I realized was all related to a fungal acne issue. I bought a bottle of nizoral (ketoconazole) shampoo and it works really well on the acne and dandruff, every few weeks or months it will come back and I just use some nizoral and it goes away again. Maybe give that a try. I have also noticed huge differences in my acne based on my diet, sometimes I go weeks without eating any bread (only eating rice and potatoes/sweet potatoes for carbs) and my skin will be doing great then I’ll have some bread and suddenly the acne is back. Sugar seems to make it worse as well.
Edit: Consistency is also really important. I used to have much worse skin when I would shower randomly at different times of the day and switch up the products I used on my face all the time. Now I wash my face twice a day at the same times of day and with the exact same products (cleanser, not face wash, because face washes are drying and I have dry skin which also contributes to acne) followed by a moisturizer. Every time I have to use a different product my face will break out again, so try to be as consistent as possible.
aiislove
9mo ago
Boston actually has a higher percentage of black residents than NYC now.
Having been to both and having spent a lot of time in the latter I find this so so so hard to believe. I believe you could find statistics backing this up but then I wonder about the accuracy of the statistics. Also I understand what you're saying about working/middle class neighborhoods in like Queens and much of Brooklyn being nice to live in but parts of Brooklyn are pretty horrible and the Bronx and most of the area above Central Park really are pretty bad in my opinion
aiislove
9mo ago
You're right, I was conflating the comment you replied to with this comment she made below.
aiislove
9mo ago
I don't really see a better proxy for judging a sense of duty to others than blood/nobility. Anecdotally, the people in my family who have inherited their wealth generationally have significantly more sense of responsibility to the community and those around them than the ones on the other side of my family who believe they've earned their wealth and refuse to take care of their homes and barely invest their resources to help themselves, let alone the people in their families or the broader community. I suspect this stems from the sense of fear that those born into no money feel toward money, whereas the family members who always had money were much less fearful about it and happier to spread the wealth around. Frankly I want to be ruled by people who are secure in their wealth and are willing to spend it to improve their lives and the lives of those around them rather than by people who want to hoard their resources out of learned apprehension and fear. Family history of wealth tracks the former better than any other metric I can imagine.
aiislove
9mo ago
do Mayflower descendants deserve more wealth and power just because their ancestors from 400 years ago fled England?
This isn't what 2rafa is proposing in her post at all, she is proposing that the Mayflower descendants deserve more wealth and power because they have more sense of duty and respect for the people around them and the institutions that their ancestors built than the descendants of people who flew over 30 years ago do.
aiislove
9mo ago
I was trying to point at the spiritual toll of ignoring race in my comment. I think it's more empathetic and kind to simply look at people and the groups they belong to and make broad observations about them and accept that they have differences that make them unique in the same way that white people have differences that make us unique. Trying to ignore that does a disservice to your own judgment as well as the shape of reality and the path of nature.
You dodged @Ben___Garrison's psychoanalysis downthread but really I think it's a valid point to examine the underlying motivated reasoning for your position rather than to pedantically try to dissect whether some group's traits are due to like, racial group genetics or their specific parents. Personally I do find it irritating to dissect race in a competitive way, as most men are prone to doing- seeing men who are more fit in ways that I am not is grating but accepting it is part of being a mature and respectful person. Race blindness appeals to me in theory because it absolves me of having to see the lack within myself and those around me, but it's at the expense of coming to terms with my own inadequacies and the traits of others. We focus so much in this thread on the hypothetical violent black males which can make us feel superior in terms of peacefulness but so few of us want to focus on the traits of black males that we can feel jealous of- sexual virility, domination, and so on.
aiislove
9mo ago
You ignore race at the expense of living in and experiencing reality. I would love to have the luxury of ignoring race all the time, but I don't have that luxury. It doesn't really stop at race either, any time you distract yourself from any kind of material reality you are doing yourself and those around you a disservice. You can tell yourself that men and women are exactly the same and redefine the definitions all you want a la Judith Butler but it's as incoherent at the end of the day as telling yourself that Vietnamese men and men from Ghana are the same thing. I've been all around the world and it's simply not true. Black men are more prone to violence and aggression and are more sexually threatening and intimidating than East Asian men, for example. It's so simple that people don't want to look at it. Just go to the fair and look at the chickens. There will be small meek chickens and big aggressive ones. Look at dogs. There simply are differences. Advocating for race blindness on the backdrop of BLM riots is absurd, this just feels out of step with reality at this point.
Racial blindness is a great ideal to work toward, especially in times of peace and little social unrest, but right now it's just so ridiculously out of step with the times that it seems kind of incoherent. It doesn't seem in effect very far removed from the liberal anti-racist position which is also glaringly out of touch.
aiislove
10mo ago
Nah man, I know what I like too, but I'd rather go without them than make the people around me jealous that I have something they covet. It actually makes me feel horrible to flaunt status around other people. It's just sick and would be ridiculous for me to brag about what I have when it makes other people upset. I'd rather use my resources to empower people around me than make them jealous. I have ruined friendships from envy before and I would much rather have the friendship back than be able to feel superior to them because of what I have or what I've been able to experience.
aiislove
10mo ago
That's a crazy statistic to read. The fact that Alaska would be first by that particular measurement is also strange.
aiislove
10mo ago
You're in the honeymoon phase. Enjoy it now because in a few months or years you'll start to realize the money doesn't buy you happiness, class or status and you'll feel pretty desperate that you spent money on uhhh, the gemological institute rather than on improving the happiness of the people around you. And if you don't reach that point it's not great either
aiislove
10mo ago
your average modern day HBD-informed racist's idea that White people are superior on account of their cognitive capacity and affinity for civilized behavior; that they basically deserve higher status for some contingent merits.
I don't think this is what HBD racists are saying. And if they are saying this, it is because they are trying to distract themselves from the underlying issue, which is that smaller weaker people are afraid on a physical material level of bigger stronger people who are more prone to aggression and violence. Whites and Asians don't "deserve" higher status on contingent merits because they're smarter, whites and Asians "deserve" higher status in society because when you get in the woods the strongest man wins. It's better to try to live in a world where we can have nicer things than simply a brute force competition, all the time, because then you don't have society, you just have the horror of nature which is the very thing society is trying to protect us from to begin with.
Thanks for the analysis, I think you're correct.
The piece of media that really illustrated everything you're describing, for me, was the Ghibli film The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. I could write an entire essay on it as well but it really strikes at the same situation you're pointing at. Kaguya-hime's father becomes obsessed with material and societal wealth, pulls his daughter and wife away from nature and raises a girl who is so empty that by the time she ascends to heaven she has nothing to live for. This is basically the same as Susan's pursuit of material/societal wealth that drags her away from the world of Narnia (which, while a fantasy world, actually represents the world of truth/nature/God in the same way that Kaguya-hime's birth village represented truth/nature/God.)
Kaguya-hime is completely heartbreaking, by the way, and the older I get the more upsetting it is. It kind of shook me out of the path of material status chasing, it was so profound.
aiislove
10mo ago
I realized years ago that I can't stand commercial porn because it's impossible to imagine myself feeling empowered with the actors you see in commercial porn. I know from experience that if I'm around a bunch of super hot people, it doesn't make me feel super hot, it makes me feel super ugly. I seek out homemade porn that lets me envision myself empowered if I was in the room: porn featuring homeless men, for example, because I feel superior to them.
All porn is cuckhold porn.
Well, all sex acts are downstream of power. Cuckolding is an explicit illustration of power. I have engaged in anonymous sex with other men since I was 18, once I realized how power and domination work between men this became clear. The more dominant male performs the top role and the more submissive male performs the bottom role. (This is not just in anal sex but in oral sex and aggression dynamics and so on.)
I like to view straight cuck porn often, because I find the eroticization between the two males very exciting. I usually ignore the women when I view it. Seeing two straight men go through the same process that two gay men go through when they have sex is gratifying. Cuck porn is basically gay porn with a woman inserted, but the domination and power dynamic between two men is still the same, even when there is no sex act performed directly between the two men.
Yep, I can confirm your assessment in the first two paragraphs. I'm very bored of worldly pleasures and want to seek greater fulfillment. What do you mean by diligent meditation? Do you sit in a room with no distractions and just think? That's what I imagine meditation is. Do you reflect on deeper questions? I'm curious to know more about it and why it helped you out to be more satisfied with life because it doesn't sound super exciting but I'm open to exploring it as well.
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