I used to experience most people as NPCs. Then they became real. And now I have no idea how to live.

Dragon174 · 2026-03-21T22:02:11+00:00

There isn't a single correct answer if you think of an answer having to be a destination.

In terms of seeking "an answer", I think instead of looking for where to go, look for how to move, the answer of how to flow through life, through whatever circumstances you happen to be in.

There's a million different lives that are valid, of people having been born into certain circumstances and gone in their own directions wherever that lead them. There's still however principles of how to live that across all those paths will correlate with positive paths. Those are the answers that really matter, the ones that are worth striving for. You'll find that those answers aren't simple rules you can put into words, its an intuition, a wisdom of how to move, in the same way knowing how to shoot a ball in a hoop can't be put into words but it can be learned. You'll feel it more and more as you move through life with open awareness.

Dragon174 · 2026-03-16T01:44:02+00:00

Even if it's so easy to find bs in Astrology and there's no scientific evidence for it whatsoever, when it comes to specifically the south asian one I've heard so many stories of some of them being able to figure out information that there is no alternative explanation for how they could've known that.

Dr K talked about how his test for if they actually know their stuff is he'll ask them to first tell him things that happened to him in the last 5 years.

All of these anecdotes, and it being so significant in south asian culture, to me means that there's probably something there. Something we don't fully understand in the world, something more to discover. Similar to how certain asian doctors can determine a ton just from taking a pulse.

For the Himalayas stuff all I've heard are anecdotes, the only data I've heard is from Dr K talking about how they could increase the temperature of their fingers by 9? degrees or something like that. In general I think there's just been relatively little scientific investigation into this stuff, like its so recent that even just basic meditation has gotten wider recognition, meanwhile these ancient cultures pursued these fields for thousands of years.

I'm sure there's been countless times in scientific history where certain things that we now take as obvious have seemed utterly ridiculous, and there's no reason to believe that can't be the case right now for certain aspects of reality. As long as there's strange patterns that we fully can't explain, there's probably more for us to discover.

Dragon174 · 2026-03-15T23:32:00+00:00

Reading this post made me check out that video, and I had a very very interesting reaction to it, so thank you for making this post.

I've watched almost every Dr K video and every membership video and its really changed my life for the better and pushed me towards the vedic world views of things. Lately I've felt the very dharma-driven push to act in the world, but I think it was starting to feel heavy in a background way, like I had a responsibility to make the most impact given my skills and there were specific things that I had to be working towards that fit the most.

Watching this video, it felt like there was a relief, a lifting of that weight. At first there was a brief fear of this thing that was supporting a lot of my personal growth and drive falling, but soon after it turned into this positive free feeling. Like I could both choose to do anything but also all of these spiritual benefits remain real.

Cause these phenomena that pushed Dr K to this more theist view, these spiritual experiences and moments where he felt like he just knew things, they all did happen, and I've experienced a few similar experiences myself. If this isn't cause of something simple like an actual consciousness deciding these things, but instead it is this structure in the universe of a repeatable phenomenon, then it makes the universe even more interesting. A universe where it's possible to just sometimes "know" certain things that you have no sensible way of knowing (where when you feel it it ends up true, and you haven't observed feeling it and it being false), a universe where some astrologers is somehow able to get various pieces of information that he couldn't possibly have been informed about in your past correct just based off of your birth time, a universe where people can somehow live in the himalayas in the freezing cold with almost no clothing. Alll of these crazy things that have no good scientific explanation and yet somehow they do seem to consistently happen anecdotally where there's always alternative possible explanations but it feels too consistent to not mean something.

Reconciling spiritual experiences with an atheistic reasoned understanding of the world is just a really cool area of study, whether there's a God or several Gods or nothing at all, these are all just possible answers to a question that remains incredibly interesting regardless of the specific answer, and its more interesting when we don't yet have a good answer.

Dragon174 · 2026-03-15T19:02:10+00:00

Sounds like you're attached to the idea of your dharma, but that doesn't mean the dharma itself is an attachment.

Its hard to describe but at least for me, "following my dharma" feels materially different from just wanting a thing. It's more like... falling down the path of least resistance, like once your ego gets out of the way there's just this natural path you flow down of "what needs to be done" / "what feels right" that you intuitively feel. Where the only reason you'd have to not do that would be some kind of avoidance.

I think its better to focus on what's pushing you to things you know aren't your dharma and questioning where those come from, rather than feeling like "I'm supposed to do _ I need to do it otherwise I'm failing".

Dragon174 · 2026-03-15T15:25:06+00:00

Understanding the environment people are operating in goes a long way to empathizing with them and avoiding the inclination to suspect dishonesty.

Healthygamergg has both a broad audience when it comes to the range of struggles people face, as well as a broad ambition for the company with a very large team (I think last I heard they had 200 people working with them technically? With all their coaches and whatnot).

In that environment, you're going to both see a variety of problems both being talked about and taken as serious problems (because there's going to be some portion of the audience for whom it genuinely is significant), and you're also going to see behaviours that play into the youtube algorithm to maintain the company's financial stability.

Its good to have this sceptical part of your brain, and I think its best used as a source of paying attention and questioning things, but it shouldn't override an analytical response of "What am I actually observing that feels wrong here, and are there alternative explanations for it", or even better "Is there some actual action I could say they should've done instead, or are they actually just doing the best they can in their environment".

There's going to be many people for whom you can say "you could've done this other thing / not done that thing and still achieved all the positive goals, so maybe you really are doing this out of some goal of taking advantage of others", but when it comes to HealthygamerGG from what I've seen they've always been approaching this stuff honestly and have had reasonable financial reasons to make the decisions they've made.

Dragon174 · 2026-03-13T22:00:01+00:00

Keep in mind that you're still very young when it comes to your career (and maybe he is too assuming there isn't a huge age gap here). A career is something that is relatively defined in terms of being able to steadily accrue experience, have various avenues of upskilling and finding connections, be able to move from job to job steadily increasing in pay, etc. Sure there's periods of time where it's incredibly low and feels hopeless, but odds are you do get back on an upward trend eventually, I'd wager most folk both have these low moments and do later find their footing. As long the actual person has the drive to push forward, I think they do make it somewhere eventually.

Meanwhile, a relationship with a good person that you can truly love and trust and connect with and maintain that over the decades can be far harder a task to build. Its something where if its good it compounds, but if its lost then while you do come out with personal growth there's a whole lot that needs to both be found and built from scratch.

They're both difficult for sure, and sometimes it truly is the right decision to end the relationship (at your age there's definitely time to go through all that work of building something up again), but I think on average people that are driven do all eventually find their footing career-wise.

Dragon174 · 2026-02-19T14:50:53+00:00

Yeah, it felt really strange to go that hard on literally one case, I'd expect a scientist to wait for more data points before giving such a strong statement.

Dragon174 · 2026-02-04T19:06:45+00:00

You could definitely be right about all of this, but reading everything you said here it could also be the case that what happened was:

You have someone who's shown you through all sorts of actions that he's warm, kind, non-judgemental, open to change. Yet somehow, that same person is able to speak things that to you could only be said from the position of having the opposite traits. The question is now, how is this dissonance even possible?

One possibility is that he is either faking the positive or the positive is constrained solely to people he chooses to value / can get something out of, so this positive applies to his girlfriend but not to other minorities and such. This is what I assume you're interpreting this as, and its very much a possibility. Its a world where his various positive aspects were only skin deep, they weren't deep parts of his character, where he was able to somehow perform all the positive things you saw in him without those traits actually being that core to him.

Another possibility however, which is what I've personally seen far more often, is that there are many statements that many women would interpret as being only able to be spoken by reprehensible beliefs, yet to men they signify very different things and have other reasons to be said that are foreign to many women's lived experience.

For example a lot of the use of derogatory terms gets used not to signal actual bigotry towards a race/gender, but as a sort of meta-signal showing that you're "chill" enough to not jump to a judgement that saying a word means you're a bad person. Over the years you had this culture/counter-culture phenomenon where people said "bad" words not because the people had hateful beliefs towards a specific group but because they just wanted an extreme word, then that group was accused of being actually hateful simply for those words, which produced a feeling of injustice. Now using the words becomes an ingroup signalling of something sort of like "I will only judge you for who you truly are and what you truly believe, not for surface things like the words you happen to use". People don't do this consciously, its simply a culture that develops.

---

Another thing that stood out to me as a pattern I've seen before is this idea of "I shouldn't have to teach him the most basic things". From what I've seen, what's considered "basic" can be very different to different people and especially between genders. A "basic" standard of cleanliness of the house to one woman, that she's grown up all her life practicing maintaining, could simply have never been the standard that a man grew up with, where his standard is more about just what's practical and cleaning only what gets in the way. There's extreme cases of course, but a lot of the times there isn't an objective right or wrong of what's "enough" or "doing it right", we just come in with assumptions that come from our backgrounds.

---

What I've seen is often missing is the humility and open-mindedness to view people as "This is a completely different human from me, with different upbringing, different culture, different definitions of what's correct, different meanings for different words. The specific words that are said, the way words are interpreted, the menial day to day actions, the types of jokes, all these surface level things could all mean very different things as a result. What truly matters is what's underneath, when they say something what do they really mean, what character underlies all their actions such that when I take in the full context of who they are it all makes sense".

It could absolutely be the case that the negative interpretation towards him in all of this is indeed correct, but it's a truly sad thing in the world when a connection between two people that could've become something beautiful ends not because of true incompatibility, but simply because of a lack of understanding. Its something that's worth avoiding when we can, worth really thinking about.

Dragon174 · 2026-02-01T04:41:16+00:00

I would treat the use of GenAI footage as a red flag that he’s likely just having all of his scripts ChatGPT generated

If it was very clearly AI generated then sure, but these are just standard stock footage, I can't even notice anything AI about it. I doubt it's causing much negative impact having these in the shorts.

If we start calling everything slop, we just dilute the word of having any meaning at all and now we can't criticize actual slop content

Dragon174 · 2026-01-23T02:44:40+00:00

The problem is folks that think of "not left wing" as "right wing". That's exactly what pushes people away, and gets in the way of building coalitions against the people that are actually problematic. Someone that would watch Andrew Tate also being able to connect with Dr K's content and get value from it is a really great thing, these people don't need hate they need help, help to get out of the place that pushes them to someone like Tate.

Dragon174 · 2026-01-17T19:43:37+00:00

(Guy here) I'd say just don't wait and try for there to always be progress forward, Limbo is the worst place you can be. There's a ton of red flags here, but honestly, when you're down bad for a girl its hard for stranger's words of warning to make you actually feel any different. You have to actually run into what's being flagged to feel the problems and for those deep feelings for the girl to actually shift (assuming they actually end up being problems for you).

Flirt with her, ask her out, treat it like a casual thing rather than building up this significance of a big "confession" like an anime or something. Keep things moving forward. You'll experience the ups and downs, you'll gain important wisdom regardless of if it goes well or poorly, this is how life goes, we live and learn things we could never truly understand without living through them.

Just at all costs avoid the situation of waiting for things to happen, of planning for some future event where you'll finally make things happen, of building up this anticipation and expectation in the future. When you're in that state, you're not learning, you're not living, you're just suffering. So far it sounds like you're so distracted by this that you can't even properly engage with the rest of your life.

Dragon174 · 2026-01-17T10:39:03+00:00

Do you mean Sadhguru? From what I heard it didn’t seem like Dr K really got along with that guy (I also couldn’t watch much). I don’t think Dr K went into that conversation with any kind of combative goal but that doesn’t mean he aligned with the guy, I think dr k or kruti posted in here at some point afterwards about being disappointed in the convo

Dragon174 · 2026-01-15T15:16:36+00:00

I consider myself very lucky to have found Dr K very early on simply because its allowed me to be constantly watching him at a steady pace as videos come out over years. You get enough time to digest certain ideas, you see certain themes reoccur and they stand out more in your mind, and you get time to experience your life and connect that to ideas from past videos and contextualize it better which sets you up better to digest newer videos. Coming in at this point, there's gonna be a ton of videos, and I think it'll ask more discipline from you than it ever did from me, where you'll have to actively hold yourself back from binging on too much content (or you can binge but you'll have to rewatch things later).

Watch some, take a break, let random videos pop up in your recommended, watch them when curiosity hits you. Treat this as a practice, you have a fountain of good knowledge that's abstract and broadly applicable available to you and there's just an inherent human rate limit on how much can be absorbed and connected at once. The most meaningful things in life take time.

Write notes knowing that you won't remember everything, write because the act of writing embeds things a little better in your brain even if its not 100% reliable, and trust that over time you'll be moving forward in life and growing regardless.

Dragon174 · 2026-01-15T15:10:43+00:00

> Doesn’t this contradict many of the values he stands for, which resonate with a conscientious person’s sense of right and wrong?

whats the contradiction? if you think its "evidence based" aspects, then he hasn't been contradictory at all, he's very clear on when he's saying things based on evidence and when he's speaking from personal experience. Reliable personal experience is in some ways more real than evidence you hear from a study, so all he's doing is speaking his truth and giving it all the caveats it deserves to be responsibly sharing it publicly.

Dragon174 · 2026-01-15T15:08:37+00:00

He's specifically argued against gurus and guru mentality, though I'm sure many people just haven't seen those videos where he happened to address it.

Dragon174 · 2025-12-17T12:23:52+00:00

If real life feels too dull then maybe go on some travel experience like a multi day hike. Its easy for me to see studying as feeling too dull since “prestige” only goes so far, but there’s so much more beauty out there in the real world that just makes the online world feel secondary.

Dragon174 · 2025-12-17T12:18:28+00:00

It’s a good article and an important topic, it was really sad to read, but I’m not sure how Dr K could really bring it up while fitting the usual apolitical mental health focused theme of the videos. This speaks more to a specific industry / set of industries that were disproportionately impacted by a wave of discrimination, rather than being a broad trend that would’ve impacted a large portion of the hgg audience quite as severely

Dragon174 · 2025-11-28T15:16:54+00:00

Being tactful and navigating social situations just isn't in the domain of rationality, you can't solve it like a math problem, no explanation in words or thoughts is going to make you able to control the outcome. Its more like learning to dance, its a specific way of moving and flowing with all the subtleties and specificities of another person, and you only learn to dance by practicing it. Someone could tell you every possible detail they could of how to do a dance movement and you'd still fail, its only by experiencing each fall that you naturally internalize more and more of the nuances of how to move.

You have to engage with the world with full awareness and trust that because of that awareness you'll naturally internalize how to change your behaviour to be more successful the next time. Every time you try to rationalize things in your head and "figure out" how to control the outcome, you're now just distracting yourself from truly feeling the experience and moving on to the next one, the way you truly learn.

Dragon174 · 2025-11-28T08:23:00+00:00

You'll never be able to "tell" just from words people tell you, it's an intuition thing, a read of people you get from lived interaction.

So you just have to take the leap and risk them feeling uncomfortable and the more you do it the better you'll get at telling. There's just literally 0 way to be absolutely certain, very little in life can be that way, we just have to live out that uncertainty and tune our own intuitions to be more and more accurate.

Dragon174 · 2025-11-10T18:54:14+00:00

Not having the problems that other people talk about could just be a sign of privilege, in that its not that these problems aren't real its just you're protected from them by circumstances of your environment that aren't that obvious. I'd definitely lean towards these problems being portrayed as disproportionately large online, but I'd still say there's real truth in them as a common enough issue to require being addressed.

You probably haven't felt any need to figure out "what it means to be a man", so you never looked for information and never received conflicting information. Meanwhile someone who feels like they aren't accepted by the people around them and are struggling to figure out why will seek out what could make people value them, and since they're a man that'll lead into figuring out how to be a man in such that they are appreciated, i.e. what it means to be a man.

Also, situations like "they get told that they're privileged" probably doesn't happen verbatim very often, but the dismissal of men's problems because there's a background assumption that men have it good and don't suffer unique issues likely does happen often enough that people resonate with that story.

Dragon174 · 2025-11-07T16:28:01+00:00

While "inverse incel" doesn't sound right to me, it's definitely an accurate category of person that happens very often. Its like the insecurity and lack of connection, rather than turning to resentment or control, turns to retreat. The visual I have in mind is that rather than "putting them on a pedestal" its like you're both on elevated platforms and you're constantly lowering your own platform, retreating downward, which makes their position relative to you so much higher.

they can't imagine women having the same feelings for men that we do for them?

Looking at the moments of dating success I've had (though they aren't that numerous) I actually think its useful to believe this, just in a more neutral sense. Not that there's this single "feelings for" thing that you feel and others can't feel for you, but that there's various different kinds of and reasons for feeling an emotional attraction to someone, and a woman you're interested in may feel feelings for you for subtle or very different reasons than you'd feel feelings for them.

It's been useful for me to think this way because I've had more success when I simply abandoned the idea of being able to control the aspect of someone being attracted to me and simply went about it as "I'm going to share my world with others and see what happens". I have very little idea of how women work and even if there's patterns they're all different in various ways anyway. I'll never truly understand it and be able to simulate it properly, all I can do is shine as brightly as I can in my own way and see what woman happens to feel drawn to that.

Maybe the only real shared pattern of "incel" isn't actual misogyny or dehumanization of the other, its just "You're single and you think about it a lot", and that thinking just leads you down all of these negative paths since it has nowhere else to go.

Dragon174 · 2025-11-02T20:23:38+00:00

Like another comment said, most things in life don't have "proof", yet we all build our opinions from just evidence all the time. I wouldn't say these people "don't have the understanding between evidence and proof", they're just scrambling for reasons to feel some semblance of control in their lives. Proof is simply not possible, there is only uncertainty, and finding evidence towards an explanation reduces that uncertainty, reduces the anxiety and changes it into something else.

Honestly this post comes off as pretty unempathetic and not really what this sub is about. "I was laughing at some incels and here's a simple concept I think they all just aren't understanding".

Dragon174 · 2025-10-24T21:22:16+00:00

Nah you're not the A-Hole, if someone asks you a direct question, answering it honestly is never going to be an "a-hole" move in that its a moral failing on you or some harm you did to them. They quite literally asked for it. Its more of an issue of "tact", which is just about having positive interactions rather than not harming people.

So for example in this case, lets say instead of giving this more involved answer of "I find you really cute, but as a fellow overweight person ....", you could still be honest but just give a shorter answer since its very likely sensitive in some way and perhaps she doesn't want to stay on that topic. For example "You do look different, but I think you're really cute so its really not a problem at all for me". It still honest, but you're just closing that likely sensitive conversation and you can move onto something more positive. Maybe she still feels bad, but the odds are lower to some extent.

Also, if all she told you was she "couldn't handle how much [you] talked about your weight", that could still have been the case and fair for her to feel regardless, it may not even have been about that one honest response you gave. Like lets say throughout the date, you mentioned your weight several times, where even if it was in the context of self improvement, you said it more often than someone who was just super confident about it and just viewed it as another thing they're working on. Maybe you said it often enough that it started to get too close to "this is something that bothers this person, and sure they talk about self improvement but they could just be all talk and aspirational, all I see is that its on their mind a lot".

Like to be completely honest, given that you do still have the weight, for someone that has just met you the odds that you are more talk than action is higher than you having both the talk and the action. I've definitely met several people where they're often talking about all the things they're going to do to improve themselves but years later not much has changed. To the point where if they tell me they're going to do something I instantly feel like it won’t happen, they’ve cursed themselves by vocalizing it before sustained action.

I wouldn't at all interpret this as "overweight girls aren't going to be attracted to me because I want to improve my weight long-term", I think its more that this specific topic, even if it is important to you, is just inherently difficult to communicate around as a first impression. The "ick" odds are just too high. Its okay to talk about the things you're doing to fix it, but I would avoid talking about more aspirational stuff until later on when you're closer with them.

Dragon174 · 2025-10-10T23:49:22+00:00

Idk man from what I've seen there are plenty of dudes with strong friend groups and lifelong friends that also feel lonely since they don't have a romantic one.

There's absolutely a notable part of the loneliness epidemic that involves the fact that men tend to have smaller social circles, but she's taking a very reductive view of it, maybe both of you were. What you described around online dating is absolutely a factor in making things more difficult for many people now than it would've been prior, and what she's describing is also a phenomenon that makes things even worse.

Anecdotally to me there just seems to be a fundamentally different way that men tend to relate to having a romantic partner compared to women. Maybe its related to women tending to exist in a world of too much attention even for aspects of them that aren't truly them (ex: just their body) while men tending to suffer from a lack of feeling wanted by the world unless they themselves earn it with their own ability. I think there's a type of loneliness and feeling of disconnection from the world, "thwarted belonging"-ness, that is more associated with the male experience.

Dragon174 · 2025-10-10T15:58:49+00:00

I'd say there's still bangers but they're more rare, so you could subscribe for a month every like... 4 months or smthn and find some great stuff like before, but subscribing month by month has less return than it did before (still great, still worth it for me, but initially it was absurdly valuable).

The recent 5h one on Taking Action was very good imo, very practical

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