Meditation and philosophical inquiry. Spent a lot of time believing the default vaguely-Christian-materialist-dualist framework that western culture has been brainwashing people into for centuries, pretending it's "objectively true".

How to Read a Book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book

Because people severely lack media literacy. People say read Orwell... and alt-right was saying it for years too.

There's someone in this thread saying kids should be forced to read Orwell. Which I think illustrates the issue perfectly...

Surrender.

Not resignation. Surrender.

(Several years of reading philosophy, meditation, Zen Buddhism, resolving mental health issues, trauma work, therapy, psychedelic therapy, going through my personal hell, dropping self-hatered etc. but you can skip the hard stuff and just accept that all you ever amount to is the dash between your birthday and time of death. It's very liberating once you stop believing the idea that you, or anything really, is "supposed" to be special. Or indeed that there even is a "you" - that's just another way your mind is keeping busy. Vast majority of people take the long way around though.)

I believed that I had to be certain way in society or I was fundamentally flawed and bad.

I dropped that belief, acknowledge that to some point it's convenient for me to follow societal norms but trying to fit in makes me mostly miserable. I naturally don't want to do things that bother other people but I also don't really want to be around them so why should I try to be likeable to them any more than is normal to me. This way people who like me, are sure to like me as I am. If I like them enough, I'll naturally also want to be considerate of them, even if I have to occasionally behave a little different.

I somehow made it very complicated with just beating myself up for being bad/stupid/ugly/broken because I kept believing people who I don't even like.

What's mainly depressing is that so many people think that every religion is exactly like Christianity, but with a different object of worship and a slightly different flavor of supernatural belief. They don't know anything about philosophy, they haven't examined their own beliefs, they just parrot whatever pop science they've heard last and think that somehow gives answers to metaphysical questions.

Read some philosophy, people. Examine your own beliefs a bit. I've just recently seen a bunch of Lemmings who I'm sure consider themselves very rational and scientific freak out at the idea of not having free will, and by extension, there not being absolute good and evil. They can't even argue about it, they just immediately fall into ad hominem attacks and strawmanning. Bring in the fact that whatever virtue one thinks they have is just the result of genetic lottery, and suddenly the idea of some kind of an untarnished soul becomes awfully tempting. Dare to suggest that nobody is inherently evil and boy do people get mad because their favorite pasttime of judging others has been called into question. Yet these same people often consider themselves above religious folk because they actually think that their worldview is purely science based and not at all colored by what they just want to be true.

Oh, not to even mention questioning if matter is the fundamental aspect of reality (as opposed to consciousness). Many people with 0 understanding of philosophy will start arguing about this and then get mad because they can't prove that there's matter outside consciousness. They'll do the science equivalent of saying "God is real because the Bible says so, and the Bible is the word of God so it must be true". Matter is fundamental because my scientific framework that is built on the idea that matter is fundamental says so (it actually doesn't, because again, so embarrassingly many people don't even realize that science has never answered a single metaphysical question).

Unless you have spent several years with philosophy and actually scrutinized your own beliefs honestly, you are likely living in just as much fantasy as most religious people. In some cases, more so.

And because I've hit my quota for entertaining poor arguments for now: if you want to argue, unless you can provide scientific proof for the existence of free will, absolute good and evil or matter being fundamental, I may not reply.

Here's a conundrum: what if most people wanted to organize the society in a certain way? They are doing what they want. Are they not allowed to do that? People who make complaints about not being able to do what they want rarely seem keen to grant others the same privilege.

Also, the guy in the comic is doing exactly what he wants - it's just that he probably wanted a job more than he wanted to not wear pants. The issue isn't not being able to do what one wants, the issue is that people don't want any inconvenience for doing so. The more you learn to tolerate inconvenience, the more free you are to do whatever you want. But you can't have your cake and eat it too.

You can't both resist a system and then demand to be able to enjoy the fruits of the system you are resisting.

Consciousness is fundamental to reality. Science-based thinking (but not science itself) has put matter as the fundamental element but actually has never been able to prove it. To be able to prove that matter gives rise to consciousness, you'd have to step out of consciousness and point to matter. Which you cannot do. Not talking about individual consciousness where you can just point at someone's brain: that experience of pointing at someone's brain is happening inside consciousness, how else would you know about it.

Not to be confused with Solipsism, that's the thinking mind. I'm talking about Idealism, the raw state of pure experience before thought.

Yes, but "people" must include oneself as well. Else it just becomes another people-pleaser mantra.

I've been using !summit@lemmy.world for a year now. Very happy with it.

Doesn't seem to like piefed though but I don't like piefed either so, eh.

There's just way more content today but probably the percentage of good vs. bad hasn't changed much. Finding the good in the sea of bad might be harder though. Actively maintain and curate your feeds.

And keep around indie web and federation etc. Internet used to be a niche domain of the nerds. It is happening again where some find it's just the time to depart from the mainstream web. Just don't get too attached to visible engagement.

Taking antidepressants does not have to reduce your creativity. Artists express their experience with their art. Sometimes it does it so well that people observing the art (through the lens of their conditioning) get moved. More damatic emotions get noticed more. But art can capture subtler experiences too. Antidepressants won't remove your capacity to experience, it just changes the quality of the experience. Pay attention to all the qualities of your experience and you'll notice it's not just the intense ones that have vibrancy. You can convey that in art beautifully as well.

The suffering artist is a known trope but don't think it's a prophecy.

For me, psilocybin wasn't even enough. I did one round in a therapy setting with MDMA, 5gs of mushrooms. Then later another round with just 5g of mushrooms. Mostly just laying in bed, listening to specific music with the facilitator making sure I stay hydrated and all that. I cried a bit but it didn't feel like it got quite there. Mostly it was boring. I was quite frustrated because there was so much hype about psychedelic therapy but of course I was the one super special boy on whom even a high dose of mushrooms didn't accomplish much. Because of course it can't be that easy for me.

I'm sure it was minor long lasting effects though but it wasn't the dramatic shift I was secretly hoping for.

I however did get the opportunity to do 5-meo and that... did things. Just the handshake round made me feel the worst possible emotional pain. Then the second round made me scream, dry-vomit and convulse. I thought I shat and pissed myself (thankfully not, though the facilitator said it wouldn't have been the first time and it would've been fine). I felt like my whole being was put through a blender. Then somehow I still did the final round which was more of the same. I was with a competent facilitator and a few friends and weirdly, it felt good to have people witness it all without judgment. In fact I think that was one of the most important factors because it was other people that had taught me to suppress and push everything down. Having a different set of people hold space while I went through that all (and provide hugs after) was profoundly healing.

Afterwards for the first time in my life I actually felt healthily empty inside. The sense of stuck emotions was gone. It didn't magically make me happy, I seem to just have a chronic depression, but at least I didn't (and still don't) feel dragged down by unprocessed feelings. I don't have this constant sense of "something is wrong".

Good news is that there are people out there who are trying to make an ethical AIs. It's still an atom bomb (and as ethical) as you say, but at least it could be in the hands of those that actually value human well-being, not just their profit margin.

This podcast had an interesting conversation on it: https://shows.acast.com/...

And the research paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15125

Discussion about anything spiritual. Mention the word and people automatically assume that you're an extreme right-wing fundamentalist Christian ready to host a sermon about how much God hates homosexuals.

Very much this. Just going for walks is great. Meditation is great.

And people need to stop consuming political content in social media. Read/watch the news, sure. Especially LOCAL news - find opportunities to actually DO something. Do it intentionally, not passively

Letting oneself be constantly exposed to outrage and doomerism is just going to be more incapacitating than activating.

There's something deeply ironic about saying people should be forced to read Orwell...

There's a persistent idea that the ability to suppress one's feelings = sign of good mental health.

Few options that don't necessarily even require a whole lot of capital (and I'm already doing one of these):

• Work in finance (and stay educated to be good at it), donate as much as possible to well researched charities.

• Work in healthcare, volunteer your services where they'd be otherwise unavailable.

• Build a community with certain values and offer life-enhancing (basically odd jobs) services freely to people outside the community. Or just offer community, just be transparent about the rules and expectations (don't be a cult).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Dsvj5yoH9c

Yeah, I haven't looked into that one. Just read old philosophy and also a bit on analytic idealism from Bernardo Kastrup

https://philarchive.org/rec/KASAIA-3

It's gaining a bit of mainstream recognition but... A lot of cultural baggage resists it.