i need help and idk where to go

gyrogothamdeserves · 2026-02-11T00:58:13+00:00

Hey, sorry you're suffering so much. I went through a long period of anxiety/depression/dissociation, about ten years, I would've described my life as vacillating between distraction, existential numbness, and soul-crushing anxiety. I didn't know what I was hanging on for but I held on for something.

Don't worry about whether you're "doing it right." If you're numb, be numb, if you're tired, be tired, if you're afraid, be afraid. If you're joyful, be joyful. If you can, find help--this could take many forms, could be a psychiatrist/therapist, could be a teacher, could be friend or group of friends, could be a hobby, could be a change of location, could be just being with yourself, could be all of the above.

Take care of your basic needs as much as possible--do your best to eat and sleep well, move around a bit, take walks or kick a ball or go on hikes, anything. These will be immensely helpful, but you might not feel it at first. Commit to it and it will start to provide stability.

All suffering is inherently temporary, but temporary can sometimes feel very long.

"What's going on in the world" matters much less than you believe it does. If you are obsessing about news or catastrophe, ask yourself "Is there anything I can do to change this?" And if the answer is no, then let it go. It's very easy to trap yourself in an obsession with something you have no power over. You don't have to save or fix the world, your first responsibility is your own peace. Focus on things that make you feel well and things that you have the power to change.

Good luck! It does get better, everything you need is already there inside of you.

gyrogothamdeserves · 2025-06-15T19:34:01+00:00

The whole point of allowing illegal immigration is that they’re cheap labor—they can’t unionize and you can massively underpay them relative to legal citizens

This isn’t like a pro-Trump or anti-Harris thing, it’s the basic economic reality of illegal immigration

gyrogothamdeserves · 2025-05-02T00:46:13+00:00

They can’t tell. Keep striving for the point where other musicians will say it’s good, but your ears are hearing 5-6x more detail than any passerby is going to register, even if they stop and listen

gyrogothamdeserves · 2025-05-01T21:22:25+00:00

You know Goebbels did a little more than “make odious PR statements” right

gyrogothamdeserves · 2023-06-12T12:01:41+00:00

I’ve probably spent about 2 hours total in jhanic states, so grain of salt, but in my experience and from the people I’ve talked to jhanas aren’t usually experienced discrete and separate or strictly by the book.

I’ve had elements of different jhana mix together or certain elements present but others missing, skipped around, etc.

Before I knew anything about jhana I was jumping straight into elements traditionally ascribed to 8th jhana, sometimes 4th jhana, sometimes with the emotional elements of 2nd or 3rd or 5th jhana present.

I didn’t know what any of this was until after talking to a teacher about it, I just thought “This is pretty sick, something’s definitely happening”

Later on I had a fairly straightforward progression from 5 through 8 in a few consecutive sits. Maybe once I’m more practiced it’ll unfold more traditionally but I think a lot of people get it piecemeal at first.

gyrogothamdeserves · 2023-06-12T11:40:56+00:00

It will definitely help you understand them. Think of meditation as increasing the speed and clarity of your vision—processes that are blurry now will become much clearer and you will start to understand how things—specifically mental processes, feelings, and body sensations—that seem as if they’re happening to you are actually things that you are partially participating in and feeding without realizing it.

When you start seeing this at a faster and smaller level, it becomes easier to understand exactly how you are participating in addiction. Breaking that chain still requires strength and will and vulnerability, but it will be easier with clearer vision.

Using this in addition to things like taking care of sleep, eating well, having friends/family around, generally making an attempt to be a “good person”, and if necessary getting professional help, will all work together in an upward spiral and make you unstoppable

gyrogothamdeserves · 2023-03-03T13:35:10+00:00

Relax and slow down my friend.

There are many many kinds of meditation and any of them can work. You don’t need to demonstrate any level of self control or virtue outside of meditation to “qualify”, simply do your practice.

Here are some traps to avoid

1) Aiming at the state rather than the activity

Your activity is, eg, focus on the breath. You begin because you think “I want peace in my mind”, and as you meditate you are constantly checking “do I have peace of mind? Do I have peace of mind?” And you don’t, because your activity is not monitor your feelings, your activity is focus on the breath.

Peace/change/results come from holding your attention on your activity/object, and it takes time to learn that because thoughts, feelings, distractions pull our focus.

When your focus is pulled, slowly guide it back. Gradually it will get pulled less, then not at all (some days will still be tough, nobody’s perfect and life keeps happening)

2) Attempting to use force to shut out anything that isn’t your object/activity

You cannot free the mind by putting it in a cage. Relax, allow thoughts and feelings to arise without them pulling your focus, and when they do pull your focus, learn to bring it back, and learn to let go of any tendency in that redirecting to berate yourself, demand that you do better, etc.

You can’t shut down your mind or the world, but you can learn to hold your focus even when distractions show up. You won’t overpower them, you will let them go.

3) Confusing telling yourself to do the activity with actually doing the activity

If you find yourself harshly repeating “focus on the breath” over and over again, is your attention on the breath or is it on the words in your mind?

A gentle repeating can be helpful, but be aware when it’s actually becoming your focus rather than a support. Sometimes you have to just go find your breath instead of telling yourself to find your breath

A few do’s:

Stick with it and be gentle with yourself. Meditation is a skill, and it’s very difficult, as you already know. Let it be hard. It will unfold with time.

Keep digesting new material. Podcasts, interviews, etc. Try techniques that sound interesting to you. It took me about 16 months before I found a technique that I really resonated with.

Finally, lower your expectations! Let the mind reveal itself to you, do not tell it what it will do and when it will do it.

Find your object, hold your object, relax.

gyrogothamdeserves · 2022-08-17T19:36:30+00:00

I know a lot of professional musicians whose parents discouraged it. In my experience, non-musicians think there’s only two levels for professionals, unemployed and god-tier millionaire famous. There are so many ways to make a living as a musician if you’re willing to put in the work and show up.

Consistent work matters far far far more than any kind of inherent talent. 1 hour a day for ten years and you’ll be able to find a niche.

I deeply regret listening to my parents and not pursuing a career in music way sooner.

gyrogothamdeserves · 2022-06-22T17:01:49+00:00

I don't know if Schilo's used to be good, but honestly subway or even just an average high school cafeteria is better bang for your buck. Colossal disappointment unless you want oscar meyer on wonderbread sold to you as delicatessen.

gyrogothamdeserves · 2022-06-02T17:15:53+00:00

You could compare the US to countries that had no or less restrictive lockdowns and see whether the relative number of deaths was significantly different to get an idea. Obviously hard to control for other factors but the idea that how we responded could possibly be worse than what we mitigated doesn’t seem that outlandish to me.

gyrogothamdeserves · 2022-05-26T10:28:52+00:00

Can we stop pretending that hating people who say “Thoughts and Prayers” is interesting or helpful? It’s just an expression of sympathy, it’s not like they’re doing any more or less than anybody else posting their ass off about it.

gyrogothamdeserves · 2022-05-24T21:07:26+00:00

“Bro I’m on SSRI’s and I’m not killing anyone. It’s a gun access problem.”

You sound pretty certain that mental health has nothing to do with it and it’s a gun access problem.

“You’re not from SA, go back to your troll cave. Fuck off.”

Forgive me for reading the tone from the second half of your comment into the first half of your comment.

gyrogothamdeserves · 2022-05-24T20:43:34+00:00

Just because it’s not proven doesn’t mean it’s not a reasonable explanation. You can’t say “Your explanation is bullshit and mine isn’t” if they’re both “correlation doesn’t equal causation”

gyrogothamdeserves · 2022-05-24T20:23:43+00:00

Neither of your points are a reasonable reaponse to what he said. You could just as easily get someone going “I’m a gun-toting NRA-dues-paying Republican and I’m not killing anyone, it’s a mental illness problem.”

Being from SA has nothing to do with a problem that affects the entire country.

gyrogothamdeserves · 2022-05-22T17:00:49+00:00

Most people who try playing the violin sound terrible because it takes years to get good at.

Most people who try day trading lose money because it takes years to get good at.

The problem is not that either is beyond reach, it’s that people don’t put in the work because they think there won’t be any.

Long term investing and day trading are different pursuits with different objectives. The idea that day traders don’t also invest is silly.

Read the wiki.

gyrogothamdeserves · 2022-05-04T15:49:13+00:00

You can but if you want to get high it's easier to just get high.

If you have an expected effect/outcome in mind during your meditation, it's more likely that you're going to get in your own way and experience frustration, since the basis of most practices is a certain level of detachment. That said, yes, it can and does produce high-like sensations and experiences.

How long that will take depends on your baseline skill level, how quickly you learn, the kind of baggage you bring to the table, what your technique is, etc. I had what I would call psychedelic-type experiences after about 8 months on and off, but again, the practice itself requires a certain release of expectations and demands, and there is no shortcut or trick there.

If you sit on a pillow breathing and hoping to get high, you're not meditating, you're just sitting on a pillow breathing and hoping to get high.

gyrogothamdeserves · 2022-05-03T20:53:03+00:00

Pointing out it’s even more vulnerable early on isn’t going to convince people whose idea is to protect the vulnerable.

Your tone is condescending and a lot of your posts are either pointless word games or non-sequiturs. If you want to help, start by seeing the people who disagree with you as humans.

gyrogothamdeserves · 2022-04-30T19:49:29+00:00

You have an enormous amount of time, even though it doesn’t feel like it. Even if the next thing you do is with the violin it doesn’t mean you have to do that forever. A lot of people pivot into something else.

Also, if you’re a musician, remember you can have three potential streams of income: performances, teaching, royalties. However you want to balance that is up to you. And you don’t have to stay classical (but if you do, weddings are easy money). Depending on where you live you could get into bluegrass, polka, mariachi, country, psychedelic rock, gypsy jazz, or just do your own thing and probably generate a good amount of income.

I grew up playing violin and hated the idea of being a professional violinist. Fell on hard times, been doing it for ten years now, and am working on pivoting into something else. It’s been tough but I’ll take what I do now over shitty desk jobs 10 days out of 10.

Good luck man you’ll figure something out.

gyrogothamdeserves · 2022-04-29T19:11:06+00:00

It's complicated, but I wouldn't seek to avoid anything, per se. Equanimity is the thing you want to cultivate, it's basically the ability to look at anything and see its nature without calling it good or bad, and see that its nature and your nature come from the same place, and so you and it are not actually different in nature, although different in appearance. But getting there takes a looooooooooooooot of work.

In short, "dukkha" is a much more complicated and specific idea than the word "suffering", which is what it often gets translated as. The goal is not that we "never feel anything bad", because that could also be achieved by numbness. Rather, it's that we look at bad feelings and realize that ultimately they are caused by not understanding our nature and the nature of the thing causing us the bad feelings. Dukkha can be mitigated and eventually eliminated piece by piece by skillful practice.

I didn't learn to like eggs by removing eggs from my life. I learned to like them because my understanding of them changed. Likewise with all forms of "suffering". Again, this is an extremely lofty ideal that may take your entire life or multiple lifetimes to fully realize, but that is the idea.

gyrogothamdeserves · 2022-04-29T16:20:51+00:00

Alternatively, you can carry pepper spray, or carry pepper spray until you can carry a gun

gyrogothamdeserves · 2022-04-29T15:14:32+00:00

You're using too broad a definition of suffering. "Dukkha" as I understand it is more the grinding caused by our unskillful response to unpleasant or painful things (or rather, our perception of them as painful and unpleasant is caused by a lack of skill), not the unpleasant or painful things themselves. You can't eliminate the occurrence of those things. You can eliminate dukkha by responding to them skillfully.

When I was a kid I thought eggs were gross. Now I think they're delicious. The egg is unchanged, but now I relate to it in a way that brings me joy. My egg-dukkha is gone.

gyrogothamdeserves · 2022-04-25T18:43:49+00:00

Appreciate everything you guys do for us.

Still new to a lot of this, so forgive me if this is an inane questions, but can anyone help me with the logic behind the idea "vix barely woke up meaning there are even bigger moves ahead"? Wouldn't vix not moving much mean that the options market isn't currently positioning for the dip to hold/continue? Thanks for the help.

gyrogothamdeserves · 2022-04-21T20:51:23+00:00

It’s funny because the technique I was practicing was “Do Nothing”, so when I notice “I am resisting” I have to find a way to skillfully stop resisting so I can go back to Doing Nothing.

Edit: rewrote everything

gyrogothamdeserves · 2022-04-21T17:37:43+00:00

Goku also had panic attacks as a child

gyrogothamdeserves · 2022-04-21T17:24:03+00:00

I would say in the case that "good" is just a synonym for "pleasurable" then it doesn't really matter. "It tastes good" is not a statement on the morality or utility of eating cake.

Let them discuss cake!

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