Oddbean

There's so many important topics in this discussion. I trust Whitney Webb and her investigative journalism. This kind of information about the people who control our data, who control politics, who have ties with every social media platform, the banking system, and all aspects of the media... it really makes me despair to learn these things, because as a normal person with no influence, I don't know what I can do to make any difference in my future. They also talk about how Bitcoin is not free of this influence, which makes perfect sense. The people in power will not relinquish that power without fighting to hold it to the utmost of their ability. They'll do whatever they can to ensure Bitcoin works in their favor like everything else. I highly recommend taking a few hours to listen to this discussion. As with all things, remain questioning and skeptical, don't fall for anyone's narrative without doing your own research. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMYdu-vTuPI

So even the people attempting to share some truth and information to help people stay aware are just simply "fear porn" to you, huh? Just reduced down to a fucking goofy slang term, huh? I know you didn't watch the video and immediately discounted this just from what I wrote, so I'd be very interested for you to share some media that is above your "fear porn" threshold. My instinct tells me that you keenly feel the despair I described. You just try to act more apathetic and nonchalant about it as a way of rationalizing the situation. It's understandable.

I didn't discount it because of what you wrote. I discounted it because I regularly watched both Whitney and TFTC before. Along with the corbett report, George Gammon and a plethora of other sources and I used to share your feeling of helplessness and dread against it all. I'm not telling you to stop sharing nor what you should or shouldn't watch (afterall if you hadn't posted, I wouldn't have responded 🙃). I have recognised for myself that keeping up with it all is inversely correlated with personal happiness and simply does not enrich my life. As it is all part of an overarching incentive game it will just play out. Yes the american empire is in decline, no it won't be pretty, yes some will suffer for it but overall we will be ok. If you think that's apathy I'd like you to imagine that people went through the exact same commotions when the british empire "fell". Whilst the current news wants you to believe that the situation over there is dire since brexit, I can assure you that there are very few people over there who would trade their current life for one in mid 19th century britain. So with my newfound time and freedom from not worrying so much I currently spend most of it on learning about anthropology and biology since that intrests me all of the sudden. Your recently shared video on electroceuticals fit right in so thanks again for that! Not paying attention to news has therefore become a conscious strategy for me and in addition to making my life happier and less stressful also allowed me to see much larger pictures by thinking things through on my own. I do still get a general picture from twitter but I blocked all accounts that bombard me with "BREAKING" statements and try to reduce my time spent over there. If you want to find signal I recommend watching as many interviews Jeff Booth gave as you can. I've rewatched a lot of them and many of the snippets of wisdom didn't click for me the first few times and those interviews along with his book helped raise my level of consciousness much more than anything else I had consumed before. He also has a great list of books on his website that is well worth anyones time to at least pick and chose from (I wish I had kept such a list but alas I don't recall which books influenced me the most but I started one now!). Other than that it really pays to understand incentive systems, game theory and spiral dynamics as they apply to everything. Here are some blog posts well worth reading: https://www.jeffbooth.ca/post/finding-signal-in-a-noisy-world https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2017/02/07/what-is-spiral-dynamics-and-why-have-i-become-so-interested-in-it/

I set aside a few hours over the weekend and read these articles in full. Most of the one from Jeff Booth was familiar to me, because I actually discovered Nostr from watching an interview with him where he was speaking about many similar topics. The Spiral Dynamics one was interesting and made sense as a mental framework for viewing different kinds of awareness. You're very lucky to have been able to achieve a state of mind where you're completely unphased by the state of things. I identify with many concepts from the Yellow category, but not to a degree to be able to just be laid back about everything.

Lucky is the correct term. While I have done a lot of work to get to this state I know it's only possible because of all the influence that other people had on me and just being born & raised under the right set of circumstances. I now want to help others achieve the same (first time I'm not just lurking and consuming content on social media) and am still struggling to put all these ideas out in a coherent form. But I recognize that raising collective consciousness will rid us of a lot of what we currently perceive as evil (just like we collectively recognize that quartering criminals is not the right form of justice anymore - in fact it never was). In hindsight I now also recognize where people tried to help push me to improve but I completly missed those at the time as I wasn't ready so it's a very individual journey but bitcoin plays a vital part in helping many advance from the lower levels.