What do I feel?

We've been fed plenty of narratives especially our generation.

The book 9.99 by Friedrick Beigbeder explains it in a perfect way. People like Bernays have had the biggest impact on the world and I'm pretty sure 99.9% of the population on the planet don't even know who he is. I hope I'm right but I believe people are starting to get much smarter by realizing that real rational decisions will push us to the next level so they start to question authority as we should. Authority isn't something that should exist, respect is what matters. In your case, Love is the authority we're being fed as a constant, while in reality, things are much more complicated.

I think it's not even about verbalizing. I can tell someone that I love them or that I respect them but it is more important that I actually love them or respect them. We are all human beings whose lives are determined in a way. There is also the narrative that we are free, have 100% free will, that we just need to tighten the bootstraps and do it which to me has to be true to some extent. So, we are definitely the sum of our actions but our actions can be shaped by who we are and our environments. It's another complicated situation because I am currently convinced that no one truly knows how much free will we have. Just that we probably do have some.

I woke up this morning and I wanted a cuddle. I cuddled with my dog but he is crazy and doesn't want to cuddle. I cuddled with my pillow and fell back asleep. I had a dream where I was cuddling with Kanye West. That was interesting. I even told him I would rather be cuddling with his wife Kim and he said "yeah, me too."

I was lying in bed thinking how crazy it is that the sun heats the earth from so far away. How suns even exist. How anything even exists. And I get fixated on apps and dream about cuddling with Kanye West. It's all so absurd.

I was watching a JOI porn the other day and the women was like my type. I don't even have a type but she was my type and she kept talking to a guy off camera that was jerking off for her with my name. It kind of took me off guard but it kind of enhanced the fantasy. I tried to find it again and it disappeared. Peculiar.

I may be going into one of these phases where I get a bit manic and psychotic. I have already questioned if Spotify is trying to communicate with me. As long as I am agnostic about it I am ok with it. I have bigger plans for my life but right now they just seem to be to write more poetry, learn how to tattoo, and find someone to cuddle with. Well, a good fuck never hurt anyone either.


So, as a race of humans how do we overcome these narratives and just get down to what actually works?

Obviously, the people who have a bunch of money and power get a bit unnerved by change. What does a revolution look like today?

I don't necessarily want to go around murdering these guys. If you murder all the jerks you are just the new jerk.

We have to get these conversations going though. That is the only way.

Tinder feels like such a waste of time if there is a possibility of revolution. Let's get woke and I am not talking Mortenson8 conspiracy theory woke but like how we can actually make the earth a better place woke. What do we do with anguish and self-centered craving?

That is a big one. What do we do with anguish and self-centered craving? The buddhists have a lot right but I can only jive with secular buddhists. Fucking bowing down until the monk sits in his chair is silly. If I lived in Japan I might bow but fuck bowing. If I was in a performance on stage I might bow but fuck bowing.

I just want that stream of dopamine. Stream of consciousness. Stream flowing down the side of the glorious mountain. Stream. Streaming beautiful music and streaming all over the empty white spaces.

I would rather be a sun than a shooting star. Maybe a comet. Even though it can be quite painful at times I am glad I am me. You never know what one is getting into by switching consciousnesses.

You know there was a day in poker that I played for 20 hours straight listening to "Addicted" by Serge Devant on repeat for most of that only taking breaks to get coffees and to smoke hash/weed/tobacco mixtures. Nice little $25k day. I was probably that perfect level of manic where I was shitting on everyone at the table all day long. I miss rushes like that. I slept maybe 2 or 3 hours and jumped back on the tables. Decided to just run all 10/20 with killers. That is how you really learn the game. Maybe I am wrong actually. I never had PLO solver back then. 25/50 with killers was like serious education but it was costly. You spend some time mixing it up at 25/50 and go back down to 2/4 and you are seriously fucking people up. Surprisingly, I can get a good rush these days if I consume a bunch of caffeine and see how fast I can cut stuff at work. It's not the same though and I miss marijuana.

One of my dreams is to DJ a rave in a cave in Malta.

I remember when I was playing big PLO in Buenos Aires after a bad session I would just go off and run. Some nights I would run like 10-12 miles. I was not a practiced runner but it was like that feeling of losing a large number I would just run and run and run. Like I was trying to run away from the loss. It was pretty good medicine. I was listening to a lot of Tiesto podcasts at the time and his cd Kaleidoscope.

You know I think a lot of people have this dream of playing poker. And it is great if things are going well and you are winning money and can also have freedom. Weathering the downswings is actually a very difficult thing to do over time. I can only imagine how difficult poker is these days. I have been seeing some posts on being delusional with poker and I actually think people have to be a bit delusional at the start but being delusional absolutely crushes a poker PRO. I don't know though. I don't think I was that delusional when I started. It was just something I did. I started playing in home games in my apartment complex. I saw the one guy was playing online and he wasn't that good but he was playing 2/4. I saw that like Rek and Elky and people were beating that and higher so I knew it was possible. I remember seeing Tillerman wouldn't be playing in the WCG for warcraft 3 because he was playing poker. So, I just kept playing. I got obsessed and just kept playing. It was fun when I was murdering 1/2 and was college campus rich. I mean not as rich as the rich kids but I didn't have much regard for money. It was fun going to the bars and splashing around a bit. The turning point was probably when I had a $14k day at 2/4 nl. Those days were fun. The reality is that not many of my friends still play poker. I am talking about some serious killers too. There are a lot of other things the world has to offer. It's tough being jaded with poker and then getting thrown into "real" life. I want a hand tattoo. Fuck the world. Love the world. Sometimes it is difficult.

I just miss raves and I don't know if they would be much of an experience sober. That has to be part of my vision though. DJ'ing raves. I have yet to DJ an event. I have so many collections of sets I have made on Spotify but have never networked to actually get on stage and get a party charged up.

Oh well, I feel like it's about that time for me to get to the gym so I can maintain my muscle and lose a bit of fat. It is still mostly about my diet. I can't outrun my mouth. By golly I have tried but there is something about getting a lift in and going HAM with some HIIT. Flush it all away, leave the world behind, endorphin stream.

On May 07 2018 13:27 Spitfiree wrote: We've been fed plenty of narratives especially our generation. The book 9.99 by Friedrick Beigbeder explains it in a perfect way. People like Bernays have had the biggest impact on the world and I'm pretty sure 99.9% of the population on the planet don't even know who he is. I hope I'm right but I believe people are starting to get much smarter by realizing that real rational decisions will push us to the next level so they start to question authority as we should. Authority isn't something that should exist, respect is what matters. In your case, Love is the authority we're being fed as a constant, while in reality, things are much more complicated.

Doubtful, anyone who reads regularly is likely to have heard of him. The last book I recommended on this blog a few days ago even mentions him. Here's the passage:

From self-interested to socially reciprocating Adam Smith spotted that self-interest is an effective human trait for making markets work, but he knew it was far from the only one required to make society and the wider economy work well too. Yet in The Wealth of Nations his sharp focus on the role of self-interest in markets overshadowed the rest of his rich observations about morals and motivation, and that trait alone was plucked out by his successors to provide the DNA for economic man. Over the following two centuries, economic theory came to be founded upon the fundamental assumption that competitive self-interest is not only man’s natural state but also his optimal strategy for economic success. Stand back and take a look at how people actually behave, however, and that assumption starts to look flimsy. Along with being self-regarding we are also other-regarding. We help strangers with heavy luggage, hold doors open for each other, share food and drink, give money to charity and donate blood – even body parts – to people we will never meet. Toddlers just 14 months old will help others by handing them out-of-reach objects, and children as young as three will share their treats with others. Of course children and adults alike often struggle to share – we certainly have the capacity to snatch and hoard too – but the striking fact is that we share at all. Homo sapiens, it turns out, is the most cooperative species on the planet, outperforming ants, hyenas, and even the naked mole-rat when it comes to living alongside those who are beyond our next of kin. In short, along with our propensity to trade, we are also drawn to give, share, and reciprocate. That may be because cooperation enhances our own group’s chances of survival. In the simplest of terms, we send a clear message to each other: if you want to get by then learn to get along. And we have learned to get along in very particular ways. According to economists Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis, we WEIRD ones typically practise what is known as ‘strong reciprocity’: we are conditional cooperators (tending to cooperate so long as others do too) but also altruistic punishers (ready to punish defectors and free riders even if it costs us personally). And it is the combination of these two traits that leads to the success of large-scale cooperation in society.23 No wonder rating and review systems are so popular in the otherwise anonymous online marketplace. From eBay to Etsy, they turn each participant’s track record into their trading reputation, revealing who can be trusted, so allowing conditional cooperators to find each other and thrive even in the presence of free riders. Our readiness to cooperate and to punish defectors has been most famously demonstrated in the Ultimatum Game, which has been played in many societies beyond Western, educated, industrial, rich and democratic ones. Two players – a proposer and responder who are anonymous to each other – are offered a sum of money to share, typically equivalent to two days’ earnings. The proposer suggests how to divide it and, if the responder accepts that division, they each receive their respective shares; if the responder rejects the proposal, however, they both go empty-handed. And they only get to play the game once. If, as mainstream theory assumes, people were purely self-interested then responders would accept any amount offered: to turn it down would be to reject free money. But what happens in practice? Responders typically reject proposals that they think are unfair, even if it means they walk away with no money at all. We humans are ready to punish others for their selfishness, even if it costs us. The most interesting results, however, emerge from the contrasting ways that different societies play the game. Among North American university students – the archetypal WEIRD community – proposers tend to offer the other player a 45% share, and offers below 20% tend to be rejected. Meanwhile, among the Machiguenga living in the Peruvian Amazon, proposers tend to offer far less – around just 25% – and responders almost always accept their share, no matter how small it is. By contrast, among the villagers of Lamelara, Indonesia, proposers offer to give away almost 60% of the money, and rejections are rare. What explains these wide variations in cultural norms of reciprocity? In large part, the diverse societies and economies in which we live. North Americans live in a highly interdependent market-based economy that relies upon a culture of reciprocity to make it work. In contrast the hunter-gatherer Machiguenga live in small family groups and meet most of their needs within their own households, with little trade between: as a result their dependence on community reciprocity is relatively low. The Lamelara, in turn, depend upon communal whale hunting for their livelihoods, heading out to sea in large canoes carrying a dozen or more men who must then share each day’s catch: strong norms of sharing are essential to their collective success, and are reflected in their high offers in the game. Across diverse cultures, social norms of reciprocity clearly vary according to the structure of the economy, particularly the relative importance of the household, market, commons or state in provisioning for society’s needs. People’s sense of reciprocity appears to co-evolve with their economy’s structure: a fascinating finding with important implications for those aiming to re-balance the roles of the household, market, commons and state in any society. From fixed preferences to fluid values Economic theory curiously begins with the over-18s: it is rational economic man, not rational economic boy, that we first meet – but why? Because the theory hinges on being able to assume that people have pre-set tastes, formed independently of the economy. Few would attempt to deny that corporate advertising grooms children, making the most of their pester power today while seeding the tastes and desires that will draw their purchasing power tomorrow. But adults can perhaps be portrayed as sovereign consumers, with firms merely aiming to deliver the products and services that match their existing preferences. Under this set-up, any changes in people’s shopping habits must largely be due to new product information, a shift in relative prices, or a change in their incomes. This story is, of course, far from credible. Adults, like children, are by no means immune to the marketeer’s message, as Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, realised in the 1920s. ‘We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of,’ he wrote in his book Propaganda, ‘… It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.’ Bernays invented the ‘public relations’ industry and rapidly became America’s master wire-puller, convincing women (on behalf of the American Tobacco Corporation) that cigarettes were their ‘torches of freedom’, while persuading the nation (on behalf of the Beech-Nut Packing Company’s pork department) that bacon and eggs were the ‘hearty’ all-American breakfast. Drawing on his uncle’s insights into the workings of the human mind, Bernays knew that the secret to influencing preferences lay not in advertising a product’s attributes (it’s bigger, faster, shinier!) but in associating that product with deeply held values, such as freedom and power. Those deep values that Bernays masterfully tapped into have since been systematically researched, with profound results. Since the 1980s the social psychologist Shalom Schwartz and colleagues have surveyed people of all ages and backgrounds in over 80 countries, identifying ten clusters of basic personal values that are recognised across cultures: self-direction, stimulation, hedonism, achievement, power, security, conformity, tradition, benevolence and universalism. When it comes to nurturing human nature, three things stand out in their findings. First, all ten basic values are present in us all, and each one of us is motivated by their full array, but to widely differing degrees that vary between cultures and individuals. Power and hedonism, for example, may predominate for some people, while in others benevolence and tradition prevail. Second, each of the values can be ‘engaged’ in us if it is triggered: when reminded of security, for example, we are likely to take fewer risks; when power and achievement are brought to mind, we are less likely to take care of others’ needs. Third, and most interestingly, the relative strength of these different values changes in us not just over the course of a lifetime, but in fact many times in a day, as we switch between social roles and contexts, whether moving from the workplace to the social space, the kitchen table to the conference table, from the commons to the market to the home. And – just like muscles – the more often any one value is engaged, the stronger it becomes.

Schwartz further found that the ten basic values can be grouped around two key axes, as illustrated in his circumplex. The first axis juxtaposes openness to change (which concerns independence and novelty) with conservation (concerning self-restriction and resistance to change). The second axis juxtaposes self-enhancement (focused on status and personal success) with self-transcendence (having concern for the wellness of all). That divide between self-enhancement and self-transcendence is echoed in the contrast between extrinsic motivation – which moves us to act in order to achieve a further outcome, such as gaining status, money, or some other benefit – and intrinsic motivation, which moves us to do something because it is inherently engaging or satisfying. What’s more, the ten values tend to influence one another in push–pull ways across these axes. Engaging one value, such as stimulation, tends to activate its neighbours, hedonism and self-direction, while simultaneously suppressing its opposites, security, conformity and tradition. Such insights into the responsiveness and fluidity of the values that motivate our actions bring far greater nuance to humanity’s emerging portrait than did the pre-set preferences of Homo economicus, with many implications for how we can nurture human nature, as will emerge below.

I think I am very strong stimulation and universalism but there is definitely a strong push/pull with comfort/security and a desire for status/power.

It seems like to me if we got past this branding of nations and state lines and this facade of total free will there would be a lot more social reciprocity. This marketer's lie that being an American citizen makes us free and powerful. We are all living finite lives on finite earth. Impermanence permeates. Trump is not going to save us. The state is not going to save us. Buying products from corporations is not going to save us. Buying a pair of Yeezys doesn't make me a free thinker or a non-conformist or liberated or cool or anything. If anything it makes me a chump.

But, how do we break out of these mental prisons, these ideas, these traditions?

I feel like this blog has the most potential for dope conversation so I am bumping it.