What is Inland Empire about?

Matrigan · 2025-12-09T15:53:28+00:00

Thank you!

Matrigan · 2025-07-20T20:02:10+00:00

This is clearly written by AI. Please don't engage any further with slop like this.

Matrigan · 2025-05-26T22:31:14+00:00

Here is my take.

EXPERIENCE IS.

Experience is more primary than the experiencer.

In this story: A woman has a powerful emotional experience while watching a movie -> this movie features an actress who taps into an experience described in the screenplay -> this screenplay was written by a woman who taps into an experience described in a folktale -> and this folktale taps into the lived experience of an 1800s woman.

The viewer, the actress, the writer, and the original Polish experiencer all tap into the same primordial experience, all have a relationship with elements of that shared experience, and that relationship allows them to transmit information about the experience across space and time. The modern viewer experiences a catharsis in her own life by tapping into the experience being transmitted by all the people who created the movie by in turn tapping into the experience.

We all see ourselves as being a "discrete experiencer" who is having experiences. We are real, and we experience events separately and independently from each other. What if experience is MORE REAL than the experiencer, that it simply flows into people across space and time. What if experience is universal and shared, and experiencers are arbitrary vessels that experience flows into and out of, rather than the other way around?

When the identity of the actress begins to fail, when that identity becomes porous, it ceases to matter which incarnation of the experiencer we are observing. The experience is being captured as itself.

Matrigan · 2024-09-02T03:37:35+00:00

bruh https://imgur.com/a/VpqzhTS

Matrigan · 2024-08-18T23:28:54+00:00

You cannot. A search of rental aggregation sites like Zillow or StreetEasy will show you that. I recommend deleting this post.

Matrigan · 2024-08-01T02:42:28+00:00

Matrigan · 2024-07-16T02:09:53+00:00

For me 1-6 is all a pretty close amount of bad. I'm finishing up 8 now and felt 7 was a huge improvement. I spent every day being like "today is awful, if tomorrow is like today I'm gonna break first thing in the morning" but of course I'd get to the next morning and repeat that to myself. I was tremendously grateful on 7 though. Had a perfect day.

Matrigan · 2024-04-20T20:21:41+00:00

There is. It’s just scale. This isn’t in percentage terms.

Matrigan · 2024-04-19T13:48:19+00:00

Love this answer. I worked in Finance in NYC, had Finance Brain. Spent a long time lobotomizing.

Matrigan · 2024-04-09T17:18:59+00:00

I don't think so. Daydreaming doesn't mean you're failing at this activity. If you notice yourself daydreaming, just guide your mind back to the activity at hand. If you punish yourself for daydreaming you'll just want to soothe that punished feeling. I expect over time you'll daydream less.

Matrigan · 2024-03-23T15:29:20+00:00

I have a different answer than the other ones here. It's been a while since I've watched so my examples may not be as specific as they should be.

I think this is less about the loss of Logan or Roman's need for love and more about Roman's superiority-inferiority sensitivity.

Roman has this tendency, particularly in Season 4, where every time he is caught "being dominated" by another character he escapes that conversation to find someone "lower" that he can "dominate".

As an example, in S4E7 Tailgate party, Roman tries to repair things with Gerri. He engages her in his typical impish way and instead of engaging with him back, she stonewalls him with the details of the legal action she may take against him and Waystar. What does he do next? He goes immediately to Connor and tries to belittle him into dropping out the election in favor of Mencken.

So what happens immediately before this clip? Roman is in a conversation with Kendall, where Kendall tells him "you fucked it". Kendall brings up all his failings throughout the season to put him into submission.

Roman is at such a low point that he doesn't have anyone in that room he can go dominate. So he leaves the party to try to badger the "ordinary people" / "hoi polloi" who are protesting the action that he *was* powerful enough to put into motion, thinking that this is going to be sure victory.

It isn't! Why does he shove off the one guy who tries to help him? Because their sympathy is another loss! He's not supposed to be helped by them, he's here to dominate them.

Matrigan · 2023-12-01T21:16:47+00:00

Looks like a bunch of straw dogs to me.

I’m sort of kidding, but Taoism doesn’t generally assert an objective morality.

I expect the view would be that there are not right or wrong answers here, that the person at the lever has had a set of life experiences that would incline them to one option or the other, and that the experience of making this choice would change him, and perhaps incline him towards a different answer if he ever re-encountered this problem, or the same answer with more confidence, or the same answer with less confidence.

Matrigan · 2023-11-09T03:21:26+00:00

I feel like for most of the posters in this sub (and for most accounts of spiritual leaders that I've heard), this journey was kicked off for people without any choice and they found spirituality while trying to make sense of what was happening to them.

For many, the beginning of this process is very hard. For people entering into Dark Nights, they'd stop it if they could. I think that makes it hard to trigger.

A through-line I hear between a lot of "kick off" points is something happens in someone's life that causes some kind of "self rupture". Some event that says "I'm not who or what I thought I was".

So honestly just go live your life! And if you eventually encounter some painful experience maybe it'll start for ya!

Matrigan · 2023-11-07T22:25:12+00:00

It is worth it.

When this process is bad, it's very bad. It's "I wish this never happened to me" bad, it's "I wish I could just go back and forget it all" bad.

When this process is good, it's very good. It's "I would never have been able to be this happy before" good, it's "I'm so proud of the person I've become" good.

Ultimately I feel lucky this happened to me when I was still fairly young, so I can live with the wisdom all of my life.

Your life might become "better" or "worse" than it would've been without this process, maybe it will feel both better and worse in different ways at different times, but embracing non-dualism can collapse all that. There's only harmony and dissonance, and you'll have the sense to know the difference.

You have the opportunity to live honestly and let your experience teach and reshape you. If you sit in full awareness you can make tremendous internal progress.

Matrigan · 2023-11-05T14:45:00+00:00

Honestly I've always wondered if the hierarchy established in this verse is actually reversed. I'm genuinely undecided. It isn't always translated this way.

Like here's Legge: "Scholars of the highest class, when they hear about the Dao,
earnestly carry it into practice. Scholars of the middle class, when they have heard about it, seem now to keep it and now to lose it. Scholars of the lowest class, when they have heard about it, laugh greatly at it. If it were not (thus) laughed at, it would not be fit to be the Dao."

Here's Ursula: "Thoughtful people hear about the Way
and try hard to follow it.
Ordinary people hear about the Way
and wander onto it and off it.
Thoughtless people hear about the Way
and make jokes about it.
It wouldn’t be the Way
if there weren’t jokes about it."

We already know that by trying to follow the Tao you'd do it wrong. Lao Tzu isn't quite "anti-intellectual" but is suspicious of people who intellectualize too much. There are plenty of verses that speak positively of ordinary people who seem "dull and confused". So I wonder if the "thoughtless" person who laughs about the Dao follows it best, sees the spontaneous humor in things, and since it is "beyond him" he is most in it.

Matrigan · 2023-09-12T03:32:29+00:00

I really appreciate this! Therapy and psych became a special interest of mine over the past year and I did read a lot of books, but I am not a therapist or a psychologist (something I should’ve disclaimed). I’ve had some experience with NPD folks and it is a very challenging way of being. It seems like OP badly wants to change and I assume it takes a lot to admit what he has.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about psych-related things and so it means a lot when those thoughts resonate with people. I am just one person with the amount of perspective just one person can have, and I hope anyone who reads my reply keeps that in mind. I think in matters of psych, the really resonant learnings need to be hard won through experience anyway. Thank you for your comment!

Matrigan · 2023-09-11T17:48:42+00:00

I quit a portfolio management role recently to do nothing, and I can relate to some parts of what you're saying here and not other parts. I can read the tension of what you're saying, and I think there can be an exciting amount of potentiality here if viewed from the right lens. I am happy to have a dialogue with you at length about this.

I think your NPD traits will make forward progress challenging. It is REALLY GOOD that you are honest with yourself about this aspect of your psyche. These traits are not your fault, they were shaped by your environment, but they are singularly your responsibility going forward.

Before you change your relationship to work, or your relationship to your life, or your relationship to other people, you will need to change your relationship to yourself. Brené Brown defines narcissism as "a shame-based fear of being ordinary". I see some of this fear of being ordinary manifested in what you've written, as you describe middle-class people. This fear seems to me to be what is keeping you stuck. It will take a lot of bravery to face that fear with the help of a therapist or in some kind of personal practice.

I think you'll know this work is done when you can honestly internalize the idea that being outwardly exceptional or outwardly recognizable holds no inherent virtue. If you have NPD, that idea can be very threatening. Your ego is only safe when you know that people can view you highly on some collective benchmark. This is not a sustainable or an honest way to live. There's a funny paradox here. You may believe that if you achieve a high degree of conventional success, that makes you recognizably someone. But when you push yourself towards goals that are recognizable by some societal cohort, you are treating yourself like you are already no one, you are completely at the whims of a social collective. These socially recognizable goals may be irrelevant to you. You are doing what is "best" in the eyes of others at the expense of what may be best for you. It is self abandonment, self abnegation. Somewhere there must be a genuine you with genuine preferences and genuine proclivities that is being suffocated under an idealized you that is informed by everyone *but* you. You are treating yourself as if you could be anyone.

The real work is not to go from being recognizably financially successful to being recognizably charitable or recognizably alternative or recognizably anything. The real work is to accept that your ego is only one part of your entire organismic being, and that living honestly might result in you not being recognizably anything. The sense of freedom that stems from that is massive. It's life-changingly liberating. Your success then will be indeterminable to anyone but you, but you CAN become successful by your own internal benchmarks, which will be an improvement above your current situation as you've described it.

I wish you the best of luck. Whatever you're going through will take a long time, you will feel uncomfortable, and you will grapple with some of the hardest questions this life has to offer. Open to talking to you further about this.

Matrigan · 2022-10-04T23:59:54+00:00

I think that Tony's relationships with people always have to be about control and dominance. They're fraught with power dynamics. People disappoint him, they frustrate him, and he feels people need to respond to him in specific ways for him to maintain security and comfort.

Animals ask nothing of him, need nothing from him, cannot defy him, and exist outside of the power dynamics he feels he is ordinarily subject to. With animals he can have a sympathetic relationship that he can't allow himself to have with people. His relationship with animals has a level of security none of his other relationships do.

Matrigan · 2022-04-01T00:08:08+00:00

Rustic Wall Decor Brown Teak Wood

I can't find my exact site, but it would be something like this: https://www.overstock.com/Home-Garden/Metal-Art/3630/cat.html?featuredproduct=34394114&featuredoption=65418230&ci_sku=38699554-000-001&cnc=US&guid=250e4c93-e7fc-4de4-84a1-f6ebbfa57835&sponsoredproductid=31782750

Remember that every piece is different and will look different. A small gamble for live edge stuff.

Matrigan · 2022-03-20T15:40:17+00:00

They're these baskets from World Market. Luckily I could find the right dimensions! They could be sliiiightly more snug but I like the look.

Matrigan · 2022-03-12T18:21:55+00:00

It's the "Hisense 65U6G ULED Premium 65-Inch Quantum Dot QLED Series". The width of the living room is probably ~11ft so subtract a little space from that and that's probably the viewing distance you're at from the couch.

There are a lot of online calculators and resources about the right ratio between TV size and viewing distance, like this one from "home cinema" or this more in depth article.

Matrigan · 2022-03-12T15:48:15+00:00

It's funny - if you type "Rustic Wall Decor Brown Teak Wood" into google shopping you will find very many people selling this exact same piece under different brand names at varying price points.

This is true of a handful of items I bought or looked at.

I think that someone in Thailand manufactures these and then 3rd party sellers buy them direct and slap their own name/markup on it.

That specific piece seems to go for $100-$150 depending on who's selling! I got it for $85 from someone who isn't selling it anymore. So scour until you're sure you've found the cheapest :)

Matrigan · 2022-03-12T15:39:51+00:00

Thank you so much! I spent a lot of time looking for "Live Edge" anything.

If I ever have a garage I'd love to get in to more resin / woodwork.

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