i had friends in college who would complain about money problems and i didn't know what they meant and was too embarrassed to ask. when they said they couldn't afford X i didn't know if they meant "that's not in my budget" or "i don't have the dollars in my bank account"
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i recognize that i'm speaking from a position of extreme privilege here but this wasn't all upside. my parents took care of me materially at the expense of taking care of me emotionally. it took me until this trip to even kinda experience the money they spent as an act of care
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acidQC said - the rest of these have been paraphrases but this one is a direct quote:
"your parents created a world for you where the most real thing was how they felt about you. they successfully used money to make everything else less real by protecting you from it"
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and like i kinda get why they did that but it led to me being incredibly sheltered in a bunch of ways. they never even made me do chores. i was very spoiled and in retrospect it wasn't good for me
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anyway i could keep going a lot of stuff came up but i feel like i successfully resolved a big confusion that was preventing me from making progress on my life and that feels nice. i feel like i am a little bit more confronting the "actual stakes" wrt money
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the stakes are that the less money i make the harder it'll be for my parents to retire. my dad literally told me that. he said he was holding off on retiring because he was worried about me
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a few days later i wrote:
"this was never like... this was never a one-player game, it was always a multi-player game and i spawned already in a guild containing my parents who had already been playing for 30 years"
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the other stakes are about dignity. acidQC said "you need dignity much more than you need money" and that sort of blew me away a little. like... shit
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like when i explain my current life circumstances to myself in a matter-of-fact way it does not look good. i literally have no job, no gf, no friends (in the sense of people i interact with irl regularly), no community, no mission, no purpose, no team, no religion...
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i have 8k followers on twitter tho 😅 hi everyone
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anyway in conclusion i asked acidQC what i should do with my life and he said "literally just keep writing" and "you're literally allowed to just keep writing you literally don't have to have a plan for how the rest of your life goes that's any more detailed than that"
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oh, also, the *medium* dose of acid was incredibly important. some of the most meaningful experiences of my life happened on 100+ ug of acid and/but those experiences were really walled off from my sober life and interpolating between them with an intermediate dose was amazing
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lol
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I just found out Henry David Thoreau’s mother brought him a sandwich every day and washed his clothes for him while he was writing Walden.
That changes things a bit doesn’t it.
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fascinating
I appreciate you sharing this
it makes some things make more sense though I couldn't tell you what exactly
I will say that I'm fairly confident you can solve for mission, purpose etc
the challenge is u have to design from first principles rather than adapt script
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sounds hard i don't wanna 😩 u might be right tho
but also there might be a script i might be okay with
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i don't know who needs to hear this (me, it's me) but you don't have to start a new religion or bring back shamanism or whatever to do the thing you want to do in the world, we literally already have an established social position for that and it's called "artist"
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My parents use money as a form of emotional blackmail and control, and I feel parts of this thread very really.
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I will ask you the question someone asked me after my own “life rant” that changed my life - are you ready to stop being a victim?
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oh so you went from doing nothing and coasting off your parents money and feeling bad about it, to now doing nothing and coasting off your parents money and not feeling bad about it?
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So you learned LITERALLY nothing except that because you’re parents love you you can continue to drain them dry until they die, or you overdose and they can retire. Magnificent.
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