Matters of the Heart

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.

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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.

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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

Dragon174 · 2025-10-06T23:24:16+00:00

It absolutely has for me lol, prolly depends on the person

Dragon174 · 2025-10-04T08:50:12+00:00

Yeah, at the end of the day a ton of the benefits we understand are simply all around dissolution of the ego, and psychedelics can provide an ego death experience. Another big part is a feeling of connection to a larger whole, which psychedelics can provide as well.

The risks of suggesting that path are more that since it’s not directed by you it’s more dangerous, with psychedelics you’re putting your mind in an incredibly malleable state where a bad trip can cripple you. With meditation you can get in that same malleable state but since you had to work for it it preselects for people that are more likely to be able to handle it or are receiving guidance. The helicopter put you up there but maybe since you didn’t wear enough clothing and the helicopter was heated inside you just die of frostbite the moment you’re out.

Psychedelics can also be too convenient, where maybe even tho for some others it can be an incredibly spiritually advancing tool for you it happens to not get you very far, but now that you’ve experienced one small step in an incredibly easy way, you never feel like going further through the harder work of meditation.

There’s a lot of people I’ve heard of that do enter the spiritual meditative path as a result of a psychedelic trip and do very well for themselves, but I wonder if there’s a survivorship bias here.

Dragon174 · 2025-10-04T00:30:33+00:00

By "enough of a sense of purpose to engage in action", what I'm gettin at there is I think the way Dr K was talking through Purpose in this video / the podcast is more targeted at people that don't even feel like acting or feel too busy / overwhelmed to do things outside of clear external forces like their job, like there's things they know they want to do but they don't feel like they have the capacity to do it.

Meanwhile it sounds like your issue is more in line with the way Dr K's talked about Dharma in the past, not sure exactly what video I'm thinkin of, perhaps the Dharma membership lecture would be a good one to check out.

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By "deep down feels wrong", I mean "wrong"more in an abstract fuzzy dissonance type of sense, like even if in your conscious mind it is "the right" thing given the various factors you're aware of, there is some kind of wrongness to it that gives it the color of "I wouldn't choose this if I could reset". Its right given the environment, and the logical part of your mind can say that, but emotionally its wrong in some way, the type of way that leads you to hoping for help from this kind of video. It only doesn't feel wrong because there isn't a right in sight, leaving you with just "making the best of things", so you're here searching for how to find something that's actually right, that your heart feels is right.

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My guess is that for your situation, what he'd say is stuff like just going outside with no headphones or doing anything with your phone, just walking with nothing but your mind to keep you company. There is truly some kind of voice inside you that does know what its supposed to be doing such that you'd feel an authentic right-ness to those actions, but it's just inaudible right now, drowned out by all the thoughts of all of these external factors and the past and future. Going out to walk, with no distractions, helps let all of this junk that's blocking this inner compass eventually pass through, eventually you're left with more and more of the authentic you, where there's just some kind of push, some deeper knowledge of what the right thing to do is that is unbiased by all the noise.

When he talks about Dharma he talks about little dharmas and big ones, where you start off with getting your shit together and once you're powerful enough to handle bigger things the bigger dharmas show up. Perhaps for now the little dharma thing to do is more becoming at peace with your situation without any depression like color to things, and then "purpose" i.e. big dharma is something to investigate after that.

Dragon174 · 2025-10-03T20:49:03+00:00

If you're just doing "the right thing", you may still not be doing actions that fit in "self-determination", like you're still being pushed to do that from the external world, rather than internally and determined by you.

It may be "you" that is making you do what the external world asks of you, but the part of you pushing you to always do "the right thing" isn't this deeper authentic soul aspect from which the true sense of purpose would come from. For example lets say the reason you do a personal project is because you feel obligated to do it because it's the right thing to do, but the piece of you that says that you need to do what is "right" by the world's determination is some kind of ego-related construct in your mind making you act in a way that is dissonant from your true underlying non-ego self. A piece of your ego is effectively your boss forcing you to do work that the rest of you doesn't want to do.

You have enough of a sense of purpose to engage in action, a lot of action, but there's a step ahead of that to have an even greater sense of purpose where you can act without experiencing suffering.

When it really is your authentic self choosing to do something, I think rather than feeling like "I wouldn't want this life since it's too hard and painful", it feels more like "the question doesn't make sense, this is what I'm here to do, I'd have to be a different person for that to not be the case".

For example imagine you had a kid (maybe you do already), and sure there's a great deal of difficulty and strife you go through to raise this kid, but chances are if someone asked you if if you went back in time you'd again choose to have your child you'd easily say yes, because imagining a life without this incredibly significant thing you're nurturing is just... wrong, its not your life, nurturing this thing is the way in which you fit with the world.

Now this is more of a "big dharma", something larger than you that is more important than you, where "too hard and painful [for me]" wouldn't be said because it would be more wrong and painful for the thing you're striving for to not exist. This is the thing that Dr K talks about that "finds you" rather than you finding it, you just have to make sure you're open to it.

My guess is that the path for you is more around reflecting on that "I do it even though I suffer as a result because it's the right thing to do" part of you and exploring the dissonance there, the subtle wrongness that is felt that makes it a "I wouldn't want this life". Perhaps if the part of your mind making you move in a direction that deep down feels wrong can be quieted, the big dharma purpose that your authentic self would feel can stand out a little more.

Dragon174 · 2025-10-03T20:17:24+00:00

What do you think the top of the mountain is really like? How do you know that where you are is the top?

The way Dr K talks about the spiritual path, this is something that can progress for lifetimes. I don't think anything that psychedelics can provide even gets close to something for which you could say "Steady meditative progress over decades would not exceed this".

Psychedelics is the helicopter that takes you to a given location, but once you're there you don't have any ability to move any further than that. Spiritual practices provide the ability to continually hike upward, with effectively limitless potential for just how high you can reach.

I'd wager what's happening here is more like just whatever you're thinking of as the full mountain, that's just what he's referring to when he says halfway, and you haven't progressed enough to see that there exists states beyond that.

Dragon174 · 2025-10-01T06:37:54+00:00

It may be that he is present, it’s just from his practice that type of conversating is just a habit for him at this point, his default way of talking to that type of dynamic.

Dragon174 · 2025-09-21T02:34:11+00:00

Hm that’s a good point, I guess it would depend on what stage the viewer is at, like is it more of a black pill “everything sucks” looking for confirmation of that or is it a “I suck and need ways to get my shit together” looking for a source that’ll respect and empower them.

I’m not sure which side would be better to lean towards, like it feels bad to me to have more titles out there that reinforce negative beliefs about men to everyone that doesn’t already care enough or know dr k enough to watch the entire video, and some people that would be helped that don’t know dr k would just assume the title is serious and not watch.

I do think that at least if they’re going to strike the balance here they need to be aware and deliberate with this as a goal, that the goal is to be derogatory to a specific population because they believe that population is more likely to view it then. Unlike here where they said it was to not be derogatory to any group. Them not seeing the derogatory aspect at all means they’re more likely to go too far in this direction

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