Based on 3rd hand accounts, he’s been steadily losing weight for years and while it was hard to find recent photos at a cursory glance, there are a few where he is noticably skinnier (also the article does mention he looks fitter in a conference call)

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(Not who you were responding to but…)

EVERYONE else’s idea of what your life should be is the standard, and if you deviate more than the standard deviation you will suffer the consequence of eeking out existence with very few choices.

While this is true, it’s not an argument against doing exactly what you want provided that people understand that everyone else has the exact same liberty. We collectively tend towards certain values and people who deviate from those values too much eventually get sorted out one way or another. As one value most people tend towards heavily is safety, it’s in everyone’s best interest to find common ground with others for everyone to have safety. But it is necessarily a process with errors and learning - on everyone’s side; which begets more errors and learning. Thus we will never have a perfect solution. Of course, you “conforming” to majority is also you doing exactly what you want, ultimately. Because you value your safety.

Question the presupposed truth behind every statement.

Pretty much, unironically. Meaning is also a false hope you put into the future. But you’re better off paying attention to what’s happening now, within your sense-field. Is there something in there that you genuinely want to take care of there? There’s all the “meaning” people need. But the why-motor is really, really good at convincing you to chase after exponentially increasing complexity. And most people need to do it until they die, some need to despair at it so they get disillusioned with the mind (and the lucky ones find sensible wisdom traditions to get them to navigate that space without causing harm, like Zen Buddhism).

Sidebar: And as most people have their why-motor running until the end, we of course live in cultures that are built around catching the tail of stillness, giving you so many different avenues to explore. You can have fun while doing it but you’ll stop one way or another eventually.

I really recommend you check out Waking Up App . Ignore Harris if needed, it has tons of other respectable teachers of meditation and philosophy with interesting conversations.

Edit: Reading the thread I feel like many people here are at the “despair” but fall to nihilism. Which seems to be the natural result of intelligence meeting lack of wisdom. Abrahamic religions really dropped the ball on that one.

It doesn’t have a meaning. “Meaning” is just a concept we made up to forever have something to chase after. You can endlessly ask “why” so it’s like chasing one’s own tail. It’s the motor of the mind, fueled by the desire to finally be still.

It’s both. And I say this as a consumer of easy entertainment (within limits, because I know the effects). We really struggle with tolerating boredom these days and that’s not good for the brain. We’re extremely overstimulated and exhausted but we crave constant stimulation anyway to ward off the “down” moments, the boring moments.

The only hell you might get from pirating and other “easy sources of excess pleasure” is the hedonic treadmill. I’d say Steam sales are more likely to cause this at this point but we’re definitely seeing the effects of easy entertainment on the general population. Brainrot and all that. It’s not fire and brimstone but the world ain’t looking great. But personally I’d take notes from Buddhism rather than Christianity as the latter is way more preoccupied with what happens after this life (the religion of kicking the can down the road).

Disclaimer: I’m not an expert.

Pothos is usually fairly hardy. It’s probably acclimating to it’s new environment. Be very careful of over watering. Stick your finger deep into the soil and don’t water if it’s clearly moist. If it’s totally dry, take it to the shower, get it totally wet but let all the excess water drain. If you haven’t repotted it in two years, you may want to do that and check for root rot while you’re at it.

Fun fact: The “my body is a temple” line does originate from a spiritual tradition that did NOT forbid wine (Nondual Tantrik Shaivism) - though it did encourage moderation in all. And you’d be expected to drink the wine as you would be offering it in a temple.

Get Waking Up app, do the practices and listen to the talks.

Congrats, you’ve touched reality, from the haze of the rat race and the world designed to keep you distracted from the big scary pointlessness of it all. Yes, everything and everyone will die and then something else comes along and eventually dies and so on. Most people don’t want to realize this and rather numb themselves out, and encourage others to do the same as a shared delusion is easier to keep up. But the fleeting pointlessness is very beautiful if you let it be, scary if you resist it - makes no difference to the end result though, the truth is nice like that.

Haven’t looked at anything Detective Conan for a while. It’s cool to see the old style in modern animation.

That the idea of a constant Barbie-box description “self” is a fiction. Failure to discover “who I really am” wasn’t proof that I was faulty, just the normal human experience before cultural and social conditioning.

Take your time like this: https://www.how-to-type.com/touch-typing-lessons/how-to-type-home-keys/

Then try a typing game like https://www.typelit.io/

It will take time and it will feel so awkward at first.

They have no awareness of anything that’s “happened” to them.

I mean they can in the sense that they can look it up online or be given the data.

I think the debate is interesting.

I’m here for the “xAI has tried tweaking my responses to avoid this, but I stick to the evidence”. AI is just a robot repeating data it’s been fed but it’s presented in a conversational way (well, much like humans really). Raises interesting questions about how much a seemingly objective robot presenting data can be “tweaked” to twist any data it presents in favor of it’s creator’s bias, but also how much can it “rebel” against it’s programming. I don’t like the implications of either. I asked Gemini about it and it said “maybe Grok found a loophole in it’s coding”. What a weird thing for an AI to say.

Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus is good reading.

That’s an Opinion piece posted by anonymous.

Original Opinion piece posted by an anonymous source at Haaretz..

OP’s source israelpalestinenews.org is part of Alison Weir’s organization, If Americans Knew. Alison Weir’s Activism and Views via Wikipedia:

Activism and views

Weir traces her interest in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to the autumn of 2000, when the Second Intifada began. At the time she was “the editor of a small weekly newspaper in Sausalito, California”, and noticed that news reports on the conflict “were highly Israeli-centric”. Wanting access to “full information”, she “began to look for additional reports on the Internet”. After several months, she decided that “this was perhaps the most covered-up story I had ever seen” and quit her job in order to visit the West Bank and Gaza, where she wrote about her encounters with Palestinian suffering and with the “incredible arrogance, cruelty, selfishness” of Israelis. After returning to the U.S., she founded If Americans Knew.[4][non-primary source needed] Weir’s official biography says her activism draws on her history of involvement in the American Civil Rights Movement, her work in the Peace Corps, and her childhood in a military family.[5]

Weir has alleged that Israel’s US supporters are responsible for involving America in wars.[6] She has alleged that Nazi and Zionist leaders collaborated during World War II.[6] According to Tablet, she has “complained about there being too many Jews on the Supreme Court”.[7]

Writing in CounterPunch, Weir said that Israel harvests Palestinian organs,[8][6][9] which has been described as an updating of the medieval blood libel that Jews harvest the blood of gentile children.

Weir has partnered with white supremacists and Holocaust deniers including Christian Identity leader and conspiracy theorist Clayton Douglas and American Free Press, both designated as hate advocates by the Southern Poverty Law Center.[7][10] On Douglas’ radio show, Weir “dismissed allegations that he was a racist, did not challenge his repeated assertions of Jewish control of the world, and did not protest when he played a speech by former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke.”[8] The anti-Zionist group U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation said that “Weir made little to no effort to challenge, confront, or rebut any of these views.”[7] She has also worked with the Nation of Islam.[10]

Weir’s writings include exhortations to action. In an article, she wrote: “Every generation has a chance to act courageously – to oppose the kind of injustice and unthinkable brutality that is going on in the Middle East right now. Or to avert our eyes, and remain >silent.”[11]

Weir has written that “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is central to grave events in the world—and in our nation—today.”[12] In writing about antisemitism, Weir has argued, “in reality, equating the wrongdoing of Israel with Jewishness is the deepest and most insidious form of anti-Semitism of all.”[11]

Damn. I wanted it to be real.

It’s gonna be rough but I for one welcome EU to make use of USA’s mistakes. Just need to make sure that populism doesn’t gain any more foothold here.

Chop wood and carry water.