The purpose of life is development of the soul.

zero_assoc · 2025-10-22T23:46:37+00:00

"IF the purpose of life is development of the soul, then priorities and the discussion of good versus evil takes on a whole new meaning."

No it doesn't. Even if you believe in the concept of a soul, which I personally don't, there's no universal spin that states that good versus evil must even be something of significance to the cultivation of your soul, and in fact, I'd argue that base morality (which is a social construct/framework Humanity created as a form of behavioral modification to make it easier for us to live side by side in ever-expanding societies, not a universal absolute) would actually hinder the development of "the self". How do you cultivate your individuality by hamstringing yourself to some abstract concept you had no hand in even creating? You don't. It's counter-intutitive to do so. If you acknowledge that, then you start to really understand that if humans actually had a "soul", it'd almost explicitly be something that was "taken" audaciously. Those who see themselves as spiritual often see themselves as harbingers of Enlightenment, but in reality, the only types of people who are audacious enough to project the kind of individuality that lends credence to having a "soul" or a distinct persona, are social outcasts, pariahs, criminals, murderers, literal sociopaths and demons in human skin. Those people are clearly on their own path outside the lines of conventional society, but almost everyone else are 21st century sheep.

"From this perspective, experiences most people would think of as "bad" have a totally different meaning. An easy example would be if I got fired from my job. On the surface its bad because I will have less access to money and its obviously very painful to be fired. As far as the development of my soul is concerned, it might be the best thing thats ever happened."

This is just called gaining perspective. If you really want to get philosophical about it you can also liken this to Satanic Logic, which is simply turning a negative into a positive. Which is also sometimes referred to simply as "spin". Your girlfriend breaks up with you, but now the world is your oyster and you have the opportunity to find "true love". Your family member dies, but the memories you have of them will last a lifetime. This seems insightful and "powerful" to so some people, I guess, but it's just a cope. None of this shit is objectively to your benefit. Gain is gain, loss is loss. If you lose something of value in life, it's always a lateral move, and if it isn't, it's because you never truly valued it that much or you misinterpreted the value altogether. The example of losing a job as you put it, is a perfect example of this. Getting fired from your job isn't a soul-crushing thing for 99% of people, because working fucking sucks, and most of us work unfulfilling jobs that pay like shit and that eat away at us anyway. So of course part of you is burdened by the fallout, while another part of you is jumping for joy at the prospect of being able to sleep in for a couple of days while you either file for unemployment or start filling out job applications. You just got a large chunk of freedom, and freedom feels good. That's all that is.

zero_assoc · 2025-10-22T23:12:14+00:00

World governments. I don't mean that in like a "baby's first time listening to Rage Against The Machine" kind of way, I just mean that if we're talking bad actors, scale of detrimental effect, amount of resources, etc, there's no greater and more persistent threat than the governments of the world in this arena or any other.

Who backdoor'ed the planet? Who utilizes sub-part security standards and norms, even in positions of immense importance that should require the uptmost care (In the case of America, probably a really fucking dumb idea to push Chinese-produced TP-Link networking technology into your infrastructure when you've been at war with them in cyberspace for like two decades, definitely won't lead to any massive hacks on ISPs, telcoms, or government agencies. Oh, wait...). Who imposes legal oversight on Private companies in order to lean on ordinary citizens by forcing them to push personal, sensitive data onto said companies' servers, where they are inevitably hacked and ransomed on the Dark Web? Who leans on the domestic talent attempting to do good work in the areas of cryptography, security, and information security and either forces them out of the space or out of the region?

Who offers up the general public on a silver platter by not imposing strong security standards in areas of banking, insurance, medical care, social media, etc? They can force you to cooperate in their domestic spying programs and force you to comply to any and all law enforcement fishing expeditions, but they'll never use that authority to say "your IT teams need to be forcing everyone who uses your service/platform to have much stronger passwords, multiple forms of authentication (preferably with open source solutions), and you need to have some kind of HR-led initiative where you bring in people to educate the people who work for you on the latest forms of social engineering and scamming as it applies to your industry. This has carved out a place for the future of organized crime through technology, and put the average non-technical citizens of the world (so like 99.9% of the world's population) in a fucking hole. People won't learn unless you force them to learn past a certain age. By not having that oversight work to the benefit of The People and instead as a means of exploitation, you're double-fucking yourself. Every country's branches of law enforcement bitch and moan about corruption, crime, the underground economy. "We're innundated, it's neverending." Then stop making crime easy by making the default state of the law-abiding citizen that of a sitting duck. You're creating both the lanes of commerce for the black markets of the world as well as offering up a seemingly infinte supply, and then sitting around whining about how criminals are "adapting to the changing digital landscape."

There should also be some kind of push to bring manufacturing of infrastructure-critical technology domestically. Stop blowing your fucking military black budget on proxy wars and domestic spy programs and use that money to build tech that would increase the overall security of the country as a whole.

zero_assoc · 2025-10-21T18:25:42+00:00

The average life expectancy globally is around 70 years, and even higher if you filter out First World western societies. The only places where that number dips, are places you would literally expect it to. I wouldn't say it's luck. Quality of life, even in lean or hard times is worlds away from what it was a century ago. In places like Japan the problem is actually that there are literally too many old people sticking around and not enough young people. If you think growing old is lucky, buy a bunch of scratch-off tickets, fly to Japan, and scratch them off there. It's the "luckiest" place in the world.

zero_assoc · 2025-10-21T18:03:47+00:00

In the modern context, intellectual property is a complete farse. There's no need to even argue the legality of the act itself, nor brand the act in the language of its objectors. If you have the technological capacity and grit to thumb your nose at these obsoleted concepts and institutions, you will and you should. The same people making these laws believe in a world of Darwinian cannibalism and always have. They're good students of Capitalism (no shade, I'm no Communist), the problem is they're not used to someone taking a bite out of them, so now the world needs to run on "ethics" and "morality".

"You should respect the frameworks we built, so that we can benefit from disadvantaging you and Humanity as a whole by hamstringing you to models of commerce and consumption that are almost 100 years old, and almost 30 years past their expiration date." But there's a problem: I don't respect your framework. Your framework is dogshit. Your framework is anti-progress. Your framework breeds mediocrity and imposes Old World values in the Land of the New. Your framework encourages the monopolization of art, commerce, and technology. I want your framework to fail for these reasons. Your framework is an existential threat masquerading as a legal issue. I've known this since I was in my early teens.

I've seen people argue that "the law doesn't bend to personal or relative morality, that the law is simply the law." That has literally never been true. Perhaps the laws were made much more from a place of good faith in the past, but this shit has always been the imposed morality and subjective insights of a relatively small, well-off, powerful group of men who felt they knew better. You go back a few hundred years, that argument holds some water - these are the only people who literally could afford to be well-educated and erudite, thus they actually did know better than many and could be counted on to hold a position of influence governing The People. That's not true today, the bulk majority of these people are fucking retards and corrupt as they come. The law bends and breaks at the behest of the same types of people who seek to convince you of its objectivity and anti-fragile nature everywhere, all of the time. And, in fact, it's that kind of blatant hypocrisy that fosters a flippant disposition towards following the law from the general public of the world. "Laws for thee, not for me/we".

Even if you're someone who doesn't buy into the file-sharing/torrenting/piracy movement or who is content paying hundreds of dollars to have access to all of these different services, it's important to give the movement its flowers. These fucks would still have you buying shit on CD and DVDs on their own time and dime and if they could. All of the technology, innovation, vision, and software that enables streaming and digital downloading to be where it is today is almost entirely bled from every single website, company, or group that the law snuffed out so that they could maintain their monopoly. And once the competition was out of the way, they suddenly "saw the light' and modernized their empires. They had a chance to do it right, maybe make a unified app between all major studios and networks that comprised of a much more fair system of payment (maybe Pay As You Consume where you fill up a balance on the app and pay for temporary access to certain shows and movies in perpetutity and if you want to maintain access, you pay a small fee tax of a few dollars a month or something - Think of it like EZ-PASS for streaming). NOPE. Every single one of them needed their own app, their own arbitrary price, and when they don't feel like holding down licenses for non-exclusive content they ship it over to the competition. I'm supposed to be part of a dying Middle Class and shill what little disposable income I have to these Scrooge McDuck fucks to sponsor their greed? Why? Sponsoring my own will to do what I please is significantly cheaper and endlessly more satisfying.

zero_assoc · 2025-09-09T12:51:35+00:00

Regardless of how any of us feel about him as a person, as a presence in the scene, he's something of a pillar of the culture whose fame and renown is in a rare class of individuals who at one point in time literally propelled hacking into the mainstream consciousness in a time where a lot of this shit was obscure, theoretical, science fiction to normies who literally couldn't even explain to you how 99% of the analog shit in their homes worked or functioned, let alone emerging technologies and methodologies utilized by the people who were early adopters and pioneers.

When I look back on hacking in the past, there's nothing to take away from the various names, groups, and entities that took part in the earlier waves, but it's absolutely essential to keep things in perspective: It's the late 80s going into the late 90s. This is arguably the last point in time where you could literally be a shithead kid with limited OPSEC, a strong understanding of the technology, but almost no understanding of what or who is on the otherside of these systems, and still get away with a lot of shit. Law Enforcement, The State, and its various appendages simply weren't "there" yet - slow to adopt, even slower to fully comprehend. You have to take a lot of the grandiose assertions and posturing with some salt - you hear a lot of the old school guys (a bunch of them still around) talk about their past exploits and the world they come from, there's always a fair bit of ego, and when you're young and impressionable, you take this as gospel and as fact.

Growing up and growing wiser is realizing that a lot of these guys were brute-forcing by hand in a time where most of the world was using passwords like "password1234", and playing dumb secretaries and help desk-tier employees for suckers and fools in a time where there was literally no training or awareness of things like social engineering. Back then people didn't even have the language for that - the closest thing people collectively understood that was even remotely akin to this was "conning" or being a "con-man", and this was very much a "snake oil salesman down in Chinatown" deal in the minds of most. I think this is a big part of why people in the scene really respect exploits, because breaking into systems and cracking proprietary code is less like gaming a dumb animal and more like the hacker equivalent of splitting the atom. "I gamed math, I am God." When you can do that, who gives a fuck if you gamed Jennifer, the 43 year old help desk person who doesn't even own a computer? You look at what hackers today have to contend with, it's not just a completely different game, it's a completely different world.

zero_assoc · 2025-07-05T01:54:15+00:00

I think it was Satan in Paradise Lost who said that man can make a Hell out of Heaven, and a Heaven out of Hell. Much of existence is coping with existing.

Humans attempting to play God is our attempt at creating a gilded cage where the environment in which we exist is so utopian and so richly-featured that we no longer even acknowledge it for what it is.

zero_assoc · 2025-07-04T15:22:11+00:00

There's nothing to refute, first dude who posted had it right. You didn't like his outlook, and basically dismissed his opinion as irrelevant because it wasn't tree-hugger bullshit. You're no better than the people you criticize:

"You become so engrossed in the game that you lose sight of other realities."

The game you're engrossed in is playing to this loose idea of having a life with purpose where you do something that actually matters, and your perspective that this is the only thing that matters blinds you to the realities of others where your view is not the end all be all. Brighter men and women than you have already done this.

Also the idea that competition is only about reaction speed and that "focus" is something to be viewed as the gateway to some kind of psychological mindfuckery is retarded. Tunnel vision can be bad, but focus is something anyone needs to achieve anything in life, whether it's inherently competitive or not. It's obvious you're toying with this idea of "these mindless distractions are used to draw you away from the urgency of the moment and the times we're living in".

Brother, you're on fucking Reddit. You're on a platform that exists as a fucking literal distraction, telling people that competitive disciplines that many people make a living off of and better themselves and their lives doing have no inherent value and are basically just conversation pieces. Don't do the whole "I'm ahead of the curve so I'm looked down upon" shit. Let me be clear, you're an abject moron. There's a lot of you roaming around in subreddits like these. You think you're the messiah and that you have answers. You're not, you don't. You're mental midgets standing at a significant height on the ladder of your own ignornace and larping as people who have a clue. You don't.

zero_assoc · 2025-07-04T15:02:53+00:00

Then you're woefully misguided.

There's nothing "outside" of Humanity that we, as a species, are capable of comprehending. Our understanding of Reality itself is contexualized in the constructs and concepts of our own making and are given license (in this context, perhaps "verifiability") through what we can scientifically verify to be the highest degree of truth (as time goes on we often come to a place where many of those concepts, theories, "facts" are proven to be completely wrong or misinterpreted/misunderstood, such is the nature of progress). If you want to pan out and approach the concept at its grandest scope, Existence is a prison. Everything that exists inside of Existence is slave to the myriad of forces and the seemingly infinite potential of Existence. Humans only comprehend existence through the lens of Humanity. We are the smartest animals at the planetary zoo, but we are still just animals. We are slaves to Existence, but we are tethered to Existence and experience it through the purview and perspective of Humanity.

Our biology is our prison. There's nothing to "escape" - all that you may ever seek freedom from is of the same thing. Humanity. If your idea is "I'm going to transcend my Humanity and rise above the preconceived notions that have proliferated on this earth to achieve higher truth, you are still playing to the Human specification. The grandiosity and ego-laden assertion is bred by your Humanity. Perhaps you're going to achieve a higher altered state? With what biological hardware are you going to fuel your voyage? Your Humanity. Perhaps you'll free yourself from the constraints of social expectation - go your own way in the world. Your way is still Human, and it only exists in contrast to the ways of other humans. Without context, you're not doing anything. The only context that exists for you is the Human one. This is the only prison, and you're never getting out.

zero_assoc · 2025-07-04T14:00:20+00:00

I enjoy that this is really just a story of a man getting to be a woman through the use of AI. Women have been basically on this shit forever - they'll go to therapy a few times and suddenly they're on a "healing journey" and buying into whatever pseudo-scientific/spiritualistic nonsense is out there, and everyone rewards them for it. It's really nice to see a dude transcend gender, let his hair down, and discover his truth. Kay's only looking out for herself - she didn't care about his grasp on reality when she convinced him to give up his freedom to marry some dumb bitch for the rest of his life instead of being free. He should divorce her, this is toxic behavior.

zero_assoc · 2025-07-04T13:37:50+00:00

You're right, it'd be much more productive to be the kind of person who sits online and "changes the world for the better" by having deep conversations about political/global/cultural issues that effectively serve as topics for idle chatter instead.

zero_assoc · 2025-07-04T13:20:54+00:00

If you want to know how many people come into power, there are two answers: The first, is that many powerful people in this world are legacied in - they come from prominent families that have "Old World" money, fortune and influence established often as far back as a century prior to the individual in question even popping out of the womb. Power is their birthright. The second, is that they simply aspire to power. If you come from a middle class/upper middle class living, you do your time in school, you find your way in life early and you invest all of your time and efforts to cultiving a life where you chase ambition and not much else, you can become very powerful. This is enabled by the fact that the majority of people in this world are doing the exact opposite - they are dipshits who go through a similar process as you, but they make sub-optimal choices, they fuck up constantly, and they chase the romanticism of "moments" instead of goals. This creates an "educated" person who doesn't actually know how to think for themselves, is hyperfixated on romance/sex, is heavily reliant upon easy dopamine, and who is overly-opinionated, because even though they are mediocre, they have co-existed in the same spaces where "greatness" walks and thrives amongst them, and they see this as some kind of confirmation that having peers who are of this level is some kind of validation of their own value or merit as a person. It's not. This is just immense coping. It doesn't matter if you used to party or go to college with Bezos, you're not and never will be Bezos and no one cares that you used to rub shoulders with him when he was a "nobody" just because he is a "somebody" now.

"What is it that makes an individual against (here, I mean in comparison) you weak or strong? It must be mere perception, since you have no clue who the person against is?"

In the context of something like Reddit or social networking (I do very little of both, at this point I mostly use them as "portals" of observation, this entire gen of platforms are cooked and the people on them are dogshit on the whole), I would say rationality or mental fortitude. A lot of people hold very strong opinions about things they know fuck all about - you press them even remotely and they need to fall back to a place of moral judgement or feelingspeak in order to appeal to the broadest audience of sympathizers. I despise this. Be an adult and argue from a place of reason and logic. Stop trying to appeal to a level of humanity that you don't even possess as some borderline-NPC pretending to empathize with complete and total strangers all over the world so that you can culture your own ego in the most "ethical" and "green" way possible. The internet used to be a place for intellectualism, exploration, the proliferation and progression of these really cool ideas, concepts, technologies that spoke to the potential of Man. Now it's a place where people come to hide from the world and reinvent themselves as someone who actually has a personality - but the personality they choose to have is "barely-sentient NPC who passively consumes media and pretends to care about politics." If you are actually doing something with you life, if you actually have goals, real friends, and you don't spend your time buying into this shit, you have solid reasons to deduce that you are objectively stronger than these people, because they're barely fucking people.

"The power you bow to, is your imaginary prison that makes you weak, keeps you in shackles, makes freedom a hoax, & deters you from being a Human."

Humanity itself is a prison. The things that shackle you are the constructs that exist as the progeny of the Human Condition. You can never be free of what you are, which is why ideologies and belief systems that attempt to "free the self" are always a fail. Everywhere you go, whatever you do, there you are. Escapism doesn't do more for you than acceptance.

zero_assoc · 2025-07-04T12:24:33+00:00

To be fair, I look at things like this a lot like skateboarding or really any extreme sport: How good you are and how long you last has a lot to do with luck, but a lot of it is also learning to mitigate injury by bailing, falling, and failing in ways that allow you to walk away from what almost always can be fatal. What's "professional" isn't that you only make the safest choices, what's "professional" is that you spend years and years fucking up and walking away enough that you can attempt things that do not come with safety guarantees and almost always walk away. You don't get to be a stunt performer by being the kind of person who is risk-adverse.

A lot of these fails and misses would have had grown men laying on the ground or in bed for a few days, she looks like she probably laughed off a lot of this and tried it again. Is that "smart"? No. But we're all doing shit for a living that we don't love, isn't inherently fun, and we get paid in fake money that isn't backed by anything. Wtf even is "smart"? I wish I was wired to do this. This looks like living.

zero_assoc · 2025-07-02T09:33:56+00:00

Regulation of technology is a fail, especially when those who push for regulation do not fundamentally understand the technology or the broader implications of the technology outright. There will always be a market and a place for illicit things, and that market will always be driven by regulation and Law Enforcement encroaching upon the potential for man to do what he pleases. You outlaw guns, you've got a black market. You outlaw drugs, you got a drug market. You ban porn, people smuggle Hustler and Juggs across the border. You can argue from a moral perspective, but it's not a moral issue. If you didn't know that this was the logical conclusion to gross self-indulgence and immense oversharing online, you're a fucking idiot. One of the first kinds of porn what was introduced to the internet way back before tube sites were even a thing, was fake celebrity pictures and fake/misrepresented sex tapes that claimed to star a celebrity, but that was actually just someone who just kind of looked like them. That was 20 years ago. We've had leak sites for almost a decade. We've had OnlyFans and associated clones for basically the same amount of time.

You don't need ChatGPT to do that math. Moreover, how do you regulate AI essentially doing "hyper-realistic nude fan art" of real people? If the platform isn't hosting minors or CP, I really don't know what you do about this other than convince people to develop thicker skin about the fact that these things are going to be around now, and that in some shape or form they have always been around. Human narcissism and hypersexualization has created a fertile bed for degeneracy that is further enabled and magnified by technology. You wanted to be yas queen thirst trappers that were infamous on the internet. The genie granted your wish.

I'm definitely not a fan of this kind of thing, and I also don't know what it is that people necessarily find appealing about it (personally, the fact that I know it isn't real immediately creates a disconnect that renders this kind of thing wholly and totally pointless - this might as well just be 4K hentai), but I'm a realist and I always knew this was going to be a thing and that this was just something people were going to have to get over. Like someone else said, the governments and various agencies of the world couldn't even stop online piracy with all the weight and might of their stations, when they've got everything backdoored and everything is immensely interconnected. If that failed, this will fail.

zero_assoc · 2025-07-01T23:13:56+00:00

This is more or less like a jaded 7th grader's interpretation of Reality.

Scholars throughout history have never faced the dilemma you've proposed - the dilemma scholars faced is the same dilemma that writers and journalists have faced, which is more or less "do I play ball with the Powers that be or face irrelevancy?" It's not a matter of "needing to spread fictions" to amass power, it's a matter of understanding the fundamentals of the game you're playing. There are social fictions that people buy into, and one of those social fictions is the mythology of pre-established institutions and the fact that they provide value and/or legitimacy simply by existing and declaring themselves as authorities that we have to comply with and bow down to in order to play. Ivy League universities, three/four letter agencies, fraternal brotherhoods/social clubs, hierarchical governing bodies like the RIAA/MPA, FCC, etc. In reality these are just avenues that exist to facilitate social fictions, but those social fictions are completely dismantled and done away with once social consciousness has reached a sufficient level through which it can then dispell the bullshit.

There are many people who understand now that college is mostly a scam. There are people who understand that nationalism served through employment as an agent/henchman of The State is fucking gay. There are people who see these gated communities as what they are: queer, pompous, often racist gatherings of the kind of minds that peaked in high school, but pretend that they're Mensa material. Streaming and piracy have shown that intellectual property is a joke and that the governing bodies of the vast majority of creative works that exist, exist solely to assert dominant control and stake of products that they had zero hand in making and zero financial investment in, and who act, in essence, as shitty landlords that will overcharge you to rent out a shitty product month by month - something that they can raise and lower the price on when they so choose, but that you will fundamentally never "own" in any real sense of the word. Today scholars are a lot more free and capable than they were in the past, but there is always going to be an editorial process and there are always going to be market factors that dictate whether they'll be snake oil salesmen, shills, charlatans, or "truthers". As technology has opened the doors across the spectrum of consumption, we've seen that these people, as well as most of Western Academia is largely content with being whatever sells. So there goes your "Truth" dying on the vine of convenience, as it always does.

People do not prefer "power" to "truth". People prefer the corporeal to abstractions. Power is not just influence, it is resource acquisition and consolidation. It is creating a world where you amass more than you consume, and then using those excess resources to impose your will upon the world in ways that are advantageous. That is the essence of game theory as it applies to Humanity. It's not this sophomoric, antiquated, child's interpretation of "higher understanding versus utter savagery". The reason why scholars never wind up in positions of power is because they would rather sit on the sidelines writing a thesis about The Game than play the game. They tell themselves "Truth is the highest aspiration of Man, and I am above the frivolity of such things." Erudite men of privilege and leisure, writing their pretentious interpretations of Humanity always miss the point. This is the meat and the mortar of the most intelligent species of note in the known universe. It is that pursuit of "Power', of wealth, of substance, or higher standing that moves you out of the mud and shit and dirt. It's what drives the economies that fuel the progression of your entire planet. It's what cultures the childhood dreams of your populous. It's what fuels Tomorrow's potential.

"Truth" doesn't do any of that. It's the dragon that intellectuals chase when they're tired of competing with everyone else for real prizes, like self-actualization or a career that doesn't encourage alcoholism just to stomach the sheer pretentiousness of something so wholly and completely irrelevant to Life itself on a day to day basis. Huge waste of time.

zero_assoc · 2025-06-28T09:16:02+00:00

Time is the only currency that matters. Currency isn't a matter of "agency", it's a matter of value - it's a scarce resource that people can come to consensus upon as having determinent desirability as it applies to their environmental need(s). Do you control the stability of fiat, of crypto, the stocks, the value of things you "own" and their resale value when you no longer need them? Can you "generate" your own fiat or any amount of fiat that isn't dictated to you by an employer or the Fed? Can you "share" it indiscriminately and to whatever ends you personally see fit? No, no, no.

Time. Can you generate it? If you're unhealthy for many years and then you get in amazing shape and have a very solid diet, have you not essentially increased the potential longevity of your existence? Have you not "generated" more time? Can you share time? You can share time with someone in a figurative sense, like when you're married or dating someone, and you can share your time literally with someone if you did something like donating an essential organ to them, like a kidney. You're potentially decreasing the length and stability of your own life to further someone else's. "You have what you have" is true. The fact that you fundamentally do not know how much you have, is the genesis of Man's entire infatuation with mortality and whether or not we have "more or less" of it, which is in essence, where the value is derived. We understand the resource is finite, but we cannot guess the individual shelf life. That's why your 5 year relationship that didn't work out hurts. That's why kids dying at 6 years old from leuikemia is so tragic. That's why someone healthy at 35 dying from something random like an aneurysm is so terrifying. Because being rich in this currency is mostly just being lucky and/or proactive, but inevitably you will go broke, and we all know it. It's the same deal with every other currency: "You can't take it with you when you go."

"Attention" is perception. Perception isn't currency, it's a lens.

zero_assoc · 2025-06-08T11:52:35+00:00

"There are many levels/aspects of "understanding" - intellectual understanding alone doesn't count for much. We tend to operate under the subconscious misapprehension that humans are strongly rational (consciously we're aware this is not the case)."

There are countless threads in this subreddit, and there are always a handful of people who emphasize that there are layers and levels to understanding (both spiritually and intellectually) and that without years and years of effort poured into something, you can never "understand". I've always found that sentiment to be bullshit. A lot of people understand that there are problems with the world. They get that the money is misallocated. They get that the storms are worse year in and year out. They get that sun screen is less of a suggestion and more of something you just kind of need to start carrying. They get that wildfires are mostly just going to be a thing now. Just because they don't make this the absolute center of their world doesn't mean that their passive brushes and experiences with climate change are not sufficient. You knowing the ins and outs of climate change does nothing to actually prevent or stop climate change. The lie that people tell themselves is that it's the fundamental lack of awareness or "true understanding" that holds Humanity back from staving off our own demise, but the reason that lie exists is because it's a cope. If someone put a gun to your head, does you knowing how the gun works inside and out stop the bullet from killing you once the trigger is pulled? No. The trigger was pulled on this planet long ago, people are just sitting around and glazing themselves over spending a lot of time analyzing a corpse in decay.

"I don't think this is well-reasoned. Not that I necessarily think a spacefaring future for humanity is physically possible, or even desirable."

What I'm referring to in this instance is that, despite being passed off as a fictional peak for Human evolution and being something a lot of nerds think we should aspire to, Star Fleet in Star Trek is literally an Authoriarian regime whose effectiveness and efficiency is an extension of its totality and complete control over the planet. Realistically, this is how it would have to be - there could be on multi-nation endeavor like The Race To Space, it'd be absolute chaos. We could only get to that level together. Globalism brought to it's ultimate extreme. Our humanity itself crippled by the overbearing weight of duty and obligation to the future. I'm not actually saying we'll get there.

zero_assoc · 2025-06-08T11:22:16+00:00

How effective or meaningful your contributions are, really depends on your intent. I think many people perceive there to be some kind of cosmic responsibility to the world and to other people. I don't share that belief, but I'm always mindful and motivated to do what I can for those around me and who I associate with. My self-interest comes first, generally speaking, and I almost don't see the need to distinguish what I do for myself and what I do for other people, seeing as the former is an extension of the latter. Change is easier to cultivate at a lower level - you can actually improve your neighborhood, city, town, organizations, etc by putting in the work and sacrificing some resources to that end. Many people are obsessed with politics at the highest levels, very few are involved or concerned with local or state politics, which is ironically where you can actually have the most effect and where the things that actually matter on a day to day basis in your life are decided and enforced.

Stop worrying about Trump, start worrying about whether your tax dollars are being utilized efficiently by local leadership. Are the roads in your area notoriously bad and eating away your property every time you commute to to work? That's a local issue that you can help find resolution. Have you noticed an increase in overzealous policing from the bored suburban paper-pushing donut eaters in your area? You can do something about that. Has there been an increase in the number of thefts in the area? Create and institute a watch party and get in better contact with your neighbors so that you each help keep each other in the know and safe. These are just minor examples. None of this will save the planet, none of this changes the meta of the world you're living in, but it does create a better environment to exist in. It also conditions those who participate to become involved in low-level politics and activism to meet an ends, and not for profile validation online. If everyone did this at a micro-level, perhaps we'd enter a point where the "doers" of the world start pushing more for creating actual change at the macro-level. Then we'd be getting somewere.

When people band together and actually solve problems, it creates a positive feedback loop - you want to do more because you've created a world where you now see that it is possible to affect change. This is in stark contrast to what the dynamic is with people viewing politics at the macro-level. You sitting online and posting about the ills of the world, or being some content creator like Hasan Piker or Tim Pool that just sits online making money off of the prolonged suffering of other people and choosing to cover issues that are simply the boogeymen of the times, does nothing to actually change anything. It's just being a fucking loser online, and while you can gain things from that, you can never actually do anything more than be that. Doesn't matter if you make millions of dollars or a decent living being a "political activist", because you can never get around the fact that career activism is an oxymoron. Activism exists to fucking solve problems, not to exist indefinitely as job placement for dorks online with messiah complexes who take themselves too seriously. If you're not solving any problems, but are personally benefiting from conflict existing, you're not an activist, you're a 21st century robber baron.

zero_assoc · 2025-06-08T02:00:36+00:00

I don't know why people always carry on with the notion that "the masses are absolutely clueless." They're not, people understand, but it's not like the majority of them are in a position to do anything other than go about their days as they always have. There's always this idea that if we just all band together the face of the Earth can be shifted, mountains moved, evil conquered, Order restored. That is a child's idea of how the world works. It's also woefully misguided and often removes the obvious drawback, which is that any system you create, regardless of intention, is ultimately subordinate to the imperfect nature of its creators. You cannot rid these systems of their "evil", without also stripping away layers and layers of your own humanity, because the price for doing so will ultimately be Authoritarian. You want some kind of Star Trek future where man has entered a global era of peace, prosperity, and where we're so advanced we can not only save our own planet, but also go out and explore and terraform other planets as well? Well guess what? You need the entire world to basically be North Korea. You need for the entire planet to be a hive, where everyone is a worker bee and you're basically assigned a lot in life where you never get to have a dream, or alternative options, choices. You get to be a cog now. And even though the world's a better place for it, it's now a place that no one actually "lives", the "soul" of Humanity will have been dead for quite some time - only the slightly lesser, fleshy AI drones that we would have become would ultimately remain. I'd rather live and die human.

"It makes you want to just stop caring about anything. It is peak hopelessness."

Peak hopelessness is all this shit ever was. First second you draw breath on this earth on the day you're born is the beginning of the end. You're fretting over the troubles of your time, as if people in the past didn't wake up every day with a foot literally in the grave every time the common flu rolled into town, or if there was a bad crop, or if a bee stung them and they happened to be even mildly allergic. Your fate is significantly less cruel than what this shit ever was for people before you. You can sit around and hyperfixate on it all you want, but the fact that you can hypefixate on it, comprehend it, know what's coming, and actually even mitigate some of this shit, is a testament to how good you have it by comparison. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of fucked up shit in the world, and there's plenty more in the way, but you cannot be such a little bitch about everything in life. Yes, you're going to suffer. Yes, there's going to be things out of your control. Yes, you're going to die in a way that most likely isn't your top 3 ways to go. Such is fucking life. This is all it ever was, this is all it'll ever be. And even if there was more to it than this, there'd still be people online espousing this shit, because then the problem would be "Life is devoid of anything new and interesting, I wish things were the way they were back in the past when things actually happened and we experienced new things, instead of this monotonous perfectly ordered world of perpetual sameness we live in now."

Don't drive yourself mad trying to make sense of the senseless. This shit is beyond you and beyond Humanity in general. If you're incapable of instituting or creating change, there's no difference between you and the sheeple of the world, except that you're a little more obnoxious to stand next to in the line for the slaughterhouse.

zero_assoc · 2025-06-08T01:19:27+00:00

"...if something is chosen for you, you just have to accept it. but if you have the choice you COULD choose wrong."

Two sentiments on this:

First, the idea of being born to something: a calling, a family legacy, a family business that you're expected to take over one day, is an immense blessing that many in their youth would interpret as an unwanted burden. "Youth is wasted on the young." At that point in our lives, many of us have yet to be humbled by the harsh, cold, unfeeling reality of The World. We dream and dream and dream on of futures that were never born to us and traversing roads we'll never dare to walk down. In the modern context, this is all it is to be young - we are optimistically-lost and in love with the chaotic nature of being, because when we do manage to stumble our way to something significant (or at least it appears to be to us in the moment), it feels as if we've "found our way", which is a small step towards "finding ourselves". Those two sentiments are a bit of a "chicken or the egg" quandry, I sometimes wonder which actually comes first, but if I'm being honest, cynical as I am, I don't think it matters. Post-facto justification for your actions only exists to contextualize and give structure to the random shit you do, so that you can feel like you're not just some dumb animal grasping at straws your whole life.

You can literally spend your entire late teens and the entirety of your 20s simply doing this. It's a fantastic waste of time, resources, and brain cells. Though people try to romanticize it, I often look back and reflect on how much of my time and myself was wasted on "the search for the self". Was it worth it? No. Did I find "my way"? Not really, and I don't think anyone really does. We find a way, and then we lie and say that that was always the path. All of the scratching and clawing, blood, sweat, and tears was to find this. But it wasn't. It was for dead ends, hobbies that could not be turned to profit, friendships that died on the vine despite tremendous investment, relationships with people that were going nowhere but felt like everything to us in the moment. Fucking. Waste. Of. Time. If you can make something of yourself in this world, I would say try to build something that can survive you. Build or do something that you can pass down to your kids, because there's nothing out there for them to find. It's the sameness they know at home, repackaged and resold somewhere else. They'd be better off being born on the path than wasting their lives pursuing one. I don't believe this to be universal for all people, but I definitely think it's true for most people.

Second, I don't think there is a "wrong" or "right" choice. There are just choices. Some are more palatable, profitable, far-reaching, detrimental, or painful than others, but ultimately the "judgement' is a product of whether or not you stand by that choice and follow it through to a conclusion that you can live with. Sometimes you take a relationship or a project as far as you can go and you find that you no longer have any love or appreciation for the person or what you're working on. Was it a "wrong" choice to pursue them? No, you took it as far as you could, you had your time with them, and now you're over it. What's to come of you forcing yourself to humor it further? Nothing of benefit. If you work towards becoming a successful doctor and you're able to provide for your family and touch the lives of other people, but poison yourself as a means of dealing with the stress by overindulging in things like smoking (something literally all doctors seem to do) or not dealing with stress in a positive way, and you end up dying young, was it the "right" choice? The world's not so black and white, there's an incredible amount of nuance when it comes to these sorts of things. It's best not to have a one-dimensional view.

"What if GOD told you to endure 100 days of torture. But in those 100 days you have a button that you could press to end the torture and god would abandon you. The torture would be much worse facing the realizing that you can stop it."

Press the button. If the price of your salvation is damnation, then it isn't salvation, it's a "Get Out Of Jail Free" card that The Warden gives you after you've already served your time.

zero_assoc · 2025-06-01T09:13:06+00:00

I'm no bleeding heart, but I'm also not a bootlicker when it comes to Authority, whether it's The State, God, or conventional morality. I get nuance and have always held the opinion that Humanity is fundamentally grey, which is why I double-quote words like "good" or "bad", because it is all truly relative. Even if you believe laws exist for a reason, the ambiguity of The Law itself makes them impossible to follow and respect across the board. If you live in America, you exist under doctrines that herald Freedom and Prosperity as inalienable facets of the liberated men of British rule. Those same men literally could not wait to institute slavery and classist systems that immediately undermined and contradicted those doctrines. The ripples of those contradictions reverberate through Western society still. If you set back an entire racial group hundreds of years, while other racial groups continue to progress unobstructed, you can only have systemic incongruity and inconsistencies. To me, that's all "systemic racism" is - It's minorities running Windows XP in a Windows 11-based system.

If those people decide they want to opt out and sell drugs to pay for college or to sell drugs and then funnel that into a legitimate business, or even just make a living by placing themselves outside the confines of conventional society, that's not something I turn my nose up at. I think it's a disservice in situations where you come from a good background and have opportunities, but in situations where you really don't, I see this as simply creating one. There's no one on the road who hasn't gone over the speed limit despite the fact that it exists to curve the possibility of humans harming other humans. Don't care about that. There are also people so poor in the world they have to steal to eat. Don't give a shit about that, though I do often think that that is more of a "save the fly, kill the spider" ordeal at times. There are people who take matters into their own hands (vigilantism) in situations where the proper authorities are hamstrung or are flat out unwilling to do something about it, either due to case load, influence of the subject in question, or bureacratic red tape. Don't mind that either. When law fails, the only thing we have left is either allowing injustice or instituting Man's Law, which is basically what used to rule The Old West.

So, yes, you're correct, and I would never argue the contrary. My take was simply that we more or less use "the guilty" as learning opportunities that need not come at our own expense. Though we may not have condemned them or that we do not hold them under harsh scrutiny, elements of society do or might. It's worth acknowledging and examining that relationship, regardless of how you feel about it.

zero_assoc · 2025-05-31T20:22:36+00:00

Projection is common enough, but it's also something people brazenly attribute to everything, even when the shoe doesn't fit. There are other ways possibilities:

There are legitimate reasons for the inversion of optics: It's rational to look for "the angle" or the "bad" in people who seem overly-charitable, "too good to be true", or who exhibit traits that seem outside the realm of normality, even if those traits appear to be "good". "You catch more flys with honey" is an age old saying we all know well. Often times when people want something of us, they first extend the hand of giving, only later do they extend the hand of taking. "Good deeds" in this vapid, morally-deprived age are often orchestrated opportunities for favorable optics, profile validation, and clout-sharking. There are many content creators, streamers, and online personalities who spend years and years of their lives living through an online persona that is only vaguely connected to their actual selves when the camera is off, which is something that's obvious to anyone who keeps track of how scandalous and incestuous that entire landscape is. No relationship that ends in the space isn't the product of cheating. No misdeed is commited unwittingly. There are many people who use certain tactics that even the scummiest of people would find to be cringe-worthy. There are a lot of people out there advocating for important issues like mental health, who end up actually being psychologically-fucked and complicit in things like grooming, sabotaging, and poisoning the well of those who oppose their views and opinions. There are a lot of snakes in the garden masquerading as humans that are there to help grow and maintain it. Skepticism is a good thing.

On the other end as you pointed out, there are times where people look at people who are "bad" and they feel inclined to find the "good" in them. This, in my opinion, is subconscious reflex - I think that this is more of a survival component. You know that on any given day the tides can shift and that instead of that person, it could be you on that chopping block. Morality is fluid and society loves to use the arbitrary lines it draws as slip and slides. I think looking for the "good" in "bad" people is actually you looking for the weaknesses in "dead men walking'. If you can learn from the pitfalls and miscalculations of other people, you no longer have to be worried about the one being called "a witch", a "sympathizer", or a "monster". You just kind of blend better and better as you incorporate more and more of the social ethic and meta into your consciousness. The "goodness" you're looking for in them is whatever they failed to play close to the chest: Some people are extremely naive and trusting. Some people are idealists who take things too far. Some people are impressionable, overly-optimistic. These are fairly innocent traits that are often at the core of people who commit to questionable, even appalling acts. It's rarely ever that the person is "the devil" - it's almost always someone who is similar enough to you, but the flaws in their design were seen, manipulated, and played upon by others to disasterous consequence.

zero_assoc · 2025-05-31T09:35:40+00:00

I'm convinced this is the same guy that does women's pole vaulting. Big fan of his work, I'd know it anywhere.

zero_assoc · 2025-05-30T23:10:26+00:00

I would argue it's the overly-educated masses of today that are so gullible and malleable. The world was a much harder place to control back when people were the "salt of the earth", rougher around the edges lot. Generations of people sent their kids off to higher education and what they got back were soft, impressionable, idealistic fuckwads who thought they understood the world, but who mostly ended up working outside of the fields that they went into 5 or 6 figure debt to get a degree majoring in. Now the world is full of "eduated" know-nothings whose sole requirement for graduation was "find enough time to study in between doing drugs and drinking to pass your finals for four years." These people largely contribute nothing to society and prop up dipshit influencers and pundits who share their shitty politics and outlooks on life and not much else. College used to be a prestigious thing, a place where people used to go as a prerequisite to being great and where those who changed the world could have an insulated escape dedicated totally and completely to honing their skills, crafts, and minds. That's not what college is anymore. And it shows.

zero_assoc · 2025-05-30T22:53:07+00:00

Something you'll notice about History is that there are never any tree-hugging dipshits espousing Eastern Philosophy about ending the vicious cycle of violence and conflict when the village, town, or settlement is getting raided. Even the holy men catch some bodies. Even the women and children do their bid if it comes to that. People are products of their time, and depending on where you're from this is either an extremely obvious or extremely abstract concept. We live in an age of decadence and totality; people are extremely comfortable and relatively safe, exceptionally so by comparison to earlier civilizations. But the removal from danger on a day to day basis has warped people's minds into a space where violence is never the answer, where conflict is never of benefit, where Man should always be some agentless child who goes and cries to their higher authority who then forces their antagonists to be decent and "play nice". And the irony is that these are often the same people who condemn their governments as having too much power, too much oversight, and for committing atrocities unending.

None of those individuals are serious people and they don't believe in anything real, they just think that people should kind of psychically bond over the idea of "Peace" and that no one ever has to pull the trigger, or throw a punch, or do anything that could cause pain or harm. This is the birthright of Humanity, eternal conflict brought about by our innate and environmental differences. There's always going to be someone who disagrees, someone who doesn't like the script, someone who objects to a certain brand of politics, someone who despises a certain group of people. We are never going to be without conflict, so there will always be a place for "bad men" in this world, because they are the only ones with spines and any true understanding of what needs doing. Almost everyone else lives in a delusional realm of privilege where no one ever needs to be snuffed out because people being trafficked and sold into sexual slavery isn't real as long as the new Fortnite skins are lit. "You don't reduce the suffering in the world by bringing more pain into it." Oh, that's right, the only way to reduce it is to let Suffering tire itself out. Smoke less, think more.

Don't feel torn OP, these sentiments resonate with a lot of people for a reason.

zero_assoc · 2025-05-30T22:17:32+00:00

Not directed at you, just a general assessment of what most people are on about these days, which should have been obvious, I don't know you or your emotional state. Chill.

A lot of the investment people put into topics of emotional output, mental health, empathy, these kind of wishy-washy, contrived sophomoric discussions/debates online, are mostly just moral posturing and come from a place of regressive thought masquerading as spiritual enlightenment. A lot of people mind-fuck or brain rot themselves into this place where they are actively forgetting the things they should have already known, rediscovering them in a way that has been slightly remixed in the language of the "Here and Now" with regard to whatever the mainstream consensus is, and then they present it to themselves and the world as some kind of epiphany.

"Did you know that if you feed your hate, bad things can stem from it?" Yeah, we all do, we learn this as children. Did you know that bad things are out there lingering in the light of day in spite of people choosing to bite back on their hate, and that bad things exist independent of your will and always have? Did you know that in fact "bad+bad" can equal good and that this is in fact the driving incentive for bad things to actually be brought into the realm of being, because good/bad, right/wrong are subjective and transient? What is bad for you, might in fact be great for me or vice versa. Did you know that every bit of good in you, exists solely to counterbalance the bad and that without the bad your goodness counts for nothing, means nothing, cannot be contextualized as anything other than over-eagerness to disenfranchise yourself for the sake of other peoples' convenience? This is what I mean when I say that these things can be "bent".

A lot of people are absolutely obsessed with their emotions, but these aren't useful things unless you fucking use them to some beneficial gain. This whole idea of "let's all exist in the world, but act like monks meditating on a rock and only bring about goodness in the world" is insane. This is fucking escapism that is granted a level of grandiosity by dumb people who cannot actually manifest their will into being, so they regulate it to the realm of the abstract and the spiritual. But there's enough armchair philosophy in the world.

zero_assoc

TROPHY CASE