You're aware of just how powerful the right conditions can be - probably have some ideas of what they could be for you.
But as you think about changing the world, your original problem comes back - the world does not care. The institutions of power painfully insensitive.
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They grate on you. The people who run them don't care, and the bureaucracy is configured to resist creativity. The rare person of this type who can stay in a big institution's career track for long always gets worn down - ends up suppressing their sensitivity.
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Now your own sense of personal potential - and your own desires for success and pleasure cause you to resent the world you still care for so much.
You have some idea of your capacities, you can't express them, you feel deeply undervalued.
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Your own bitterness starts to war with the empathy in your mind.
I've seen this basic pattern repeat itself over and over again. In a lot of NEETs, yes, but also in a lot of people who were doing pretty well in the military, in political tracks, in business.
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This feeling, fractally repeated in most institutions, that the Dao is not on the ascent. Goodness has no traction That what changes can get made will be buried by incompetence and greed.
At the social level, this turns into a permeating fog of despair, and it kills young men.
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To paraphrase a sentiment from Hafiz, "How could you not believe there is a battle, when all around you noble riders are crying out in despair?"
This is, at its heart, why I think of myself as a revolutionary. The inhumanity of the system is real, chronic, and lethal.
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This is a self-reinforcing problem. It's a problem with the psychological loops good people who could change things have fallen into. A problem that needs to be addressed interpersonally and emotionally.
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But few things are stronger interpersonal forces than our own sense of ourselves - as a nation, a civilization and a species. People don't invest how they should in the interpersonal out of a sense of despair caused by the political.
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There is no better catalyst for personal transformation than victory. You want to help people change themselves? Hand them an earth-shattering win.
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All of my understanding of history tells me that such victories are possible - victories that found nations and transform peoples.
Such a thing may be decades or more off - but it is possible, and it's worth working for.
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this is really lovely, thank you 🙏 very curious for your take on why it seems to be young men specifically. i think i know women who feel similar things but it comes out very differently on the surface somehow
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Mostly young men, maybe 80% of the people I have these conversations with.
My experience has been that women will have not fixated on the issue in the same way, even if it's a loud part of their background experience
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also my experience lol
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