Anxiety is the emotion of abuse

There are two very obvious symptoms that it will tell you if someone suffered long term abuse. The first one is the inability to express anger in particularly rage, and the second one is the persistent felling of anxiety.

As we are wired to respond to threats by fighting of fleeing, if there is no resolution in the fight you retreat by running away.

And for as long you can't find any resolution by fighting, by expressing your anger in a productive way you are going to retreat and the emotion associated with that is anxiety.  

In order to stop your anxiety you have to restore your capacity of self-defense. Which is very likely that it was destroyed when you were a child.

And the process through which you destroy someones capacity to protect himself is called obedience. Which in modern society is the norm when it comes to treating children.

Whenever they are trying to negotiate with you or ask you for what they need you use some form of coercion like violence or manipulation techniques like grades etc. to induce them pain. Like this they associate pain with asking for what they need and in order to avoid the pain of asking for what they need they stop doing it.

This let's the victim of abuse in a weird state of chronic anxiety, withdrawal and isolation. Often that suppressed rage comes out in all kinds of outlets like aggressive sports, aggressive music, addictions etc. but almost never is being channeled by the victim towards the abuser, so for as long as that last there is no chance of stopping the abuse.

It is not the abuse from years ago that it is causing your anxiety, the abuse that you experience years ago only damaged your deffence system, but your anxiety it is caused by the abuse you received today. All vices happen under the shadow of denial, including letting others abuse you, victims of abuse are in denial about the fact that they are being abused, they would rather blame they're anxiety on the events of the past that are now irrelevant rather than inconvenient others today.  

Self-deffence is about inconvenience, in particular inconvenient others by stopping them to use you in an unfair way. Most of the anxiety experience today by humans comes from other humans, as we eliminated most of others predators, the only effective predator that is taking advantages of humans is the human itself.

However separation will stop the abuse from one person, but it doesn't revers the negative effects of obedience, which means that you remain with a lower deffence mechanism and you are vulnerable to be attacked by others.

Predators attack the weak members of a species, and the more abuse you experience the more dysfunctional you have become, so the harder it will be to form relationships with sane people, because they are going to run away from the dysfunction. Can't really blame them for that.

The solution is to learn to inconvenience other people whenever it is justify, you don't want to be either nice or bad, I found the best way to be is difficult, if others are treating you well there is no point in creating any unnecessary drams, if they don't it is best to inconvenience them with your words and actions.   

Technology = Stress

Technology doesn't make your life easy, it makes it more complicated, and the more complex something is the more ways for it to fail and malfunction and because you don't fully understand it, the less of a chance for you to be able to fix it by yourself or maintain it.

And whit this added complexity comes a lot of stress in to your life. Everything has a cost and a benefit, and the benefit of technology is that it allows people to do things that are impossible without it, like have a pleasantly cool room in the middle of the summer, communicate over long distance, fly etc. but all this comes at the cost of making your life more complex and at the same time more stressful.  

I am far from being against technology, I actually love it it opens so many doors and can bring so much potential in to someones life, but I am also starting to understand the Amish.

Simplifying your life by using mostly low tech technology is a major way to reduce stress in to your life.  

Modern human are almost completely removed from nature, the more technology we adopted in to our life the bigger that distance become, which made us really bad animals. Not animals in the sense of uncivilized as much as weak, sick and unhappy.

We are like animals in captivity, we get all the problems that animals at the zoo get, diseases that don't exist in nature, reduced life spans, disrupted and bizarre reproductive and socialization patterns. The only difference between animals at the zoo and modern humans is that we are not hold in by electrified fences or force, we are trapped by the convenience and pleasure that technology brings.

The Pandora's box is already opened, there is no way back, technology is indispensable it would be hard to function in most places without it. But that doesn't mean that there are no ways to manage it better.

In the case of technology more is not always better, having the latest gadgets very rarely adds anything major to your life. Like for example smartphones, the only thing that my smartphone did to me is made me stay in bed longer, added a couple of work hours to my day and made me less social. Overall the negative effects that it had on me are way bigger than the positive, so I got ride of it. Which was an oddly liberating experience.         

Consciousness is the problem and the solution

Being self aware it is not necessarily a positive thing. Whenever you refer to someone as being self conscious, it means that the person you are referring to, is far to aware of herself and his surroundings, as well as all the potential dangers and risks that could happen at any points.

And that is causing that person to self censor herself unnecessarily, or avoid certain parts of life to avoid the inherent danger that you could find there. The more aware you are of yourself, the more you are of all the potential things that could go wrong, in order to control that anxiety you might find it very tenting to diminish your life.

This is where the desire of the average person comes, to escape reality and not be very concerned of what the truth really is, because the truth is often scary.

Being conscious is like trying to talk over the echo of your own voice, it makes it almost impossible to talk coherently.

Sadly we are trapped here with this mind that it is so conscious of itself, as far as I know there is no way to destroy or effectively reduce consciousnesses without major negative side effects.

If you live your life in denial you won't live to your full potential, as far as other solution humans have been trying along the history like drugs or lobotomies they have their really obvious down sides.

There is no way back since you know things you can't unknown them. The only way that is available is forward.

If consciousnesses is like noise that is preventing you from expressing freely or functioning, and it is impossible to eliminate it. The only available option left is to learn to manage it.

This is possible using consciousness itself, because you are conscious it means that you can become aware of the fact that being so conscious is causing you some problems, which can motivate you to find a solution to this problem.

Incomplete knowledge is what is causing you anxiety, knowing enough about something is what will reduce your anxiety. This is why expanding your awareness about yourself and your environment is the solution to anxiety derived from awareness.

How to set goals without stressing yourself

I don't know how you are but sometimes when I thing about all the things that I have to do in a day I can feel my heart racing.

There is the typical advice in the self-help community that you should set small and simple goals, like that it is more likely for you to do it and less of a chance to fail.

But this doesn't work that well for me because, even if I set a small goal as an intermediate for a bigger goal, I still know where the final destination is and all the potential bad things that could happen on the way there. So it is still stressful.

Most of the advice I received and reed about goals, it to either trick yourself to do more than you would normally do, or minimize the amount of failure and trial and error you are going to go through in order to accomplish your goals.

Which I think is the wrong approach, what we tend to call failure in the modern world is really just part of the normal learning process. Whenever you are attempting to accomplish something you will defiantly encounter some failure along the way.

It is the believe that you should accomplish things easy and without failure that gives you the impression that you deviated from the right path that makes you abnormally stressed.

In the deffence of everybody that is doing this, sadly this is how the education system is set up. Because you have been around people that punished mistakes whenever you were a child, you received wrong feedback for normal consequences of the process.

If you are going to set people for success in life you have to do the opposite of that, you are going to teach them how to fail. How to take small calculated risks so they don't put themselves and anybody else in any amount of serious danger that will cause permanent damage. This is why the conventional school system is criminal, it have done almost nothing good then sabotaged generation after generation.

With the things that you want to accomplish in your life is not where you should avoid failure, it is where you should fail the most. Because that will give you the necessary experience to build the skills that you need to accomplish your goals.

I have developed a game I like to play with myself, whenever I fell unsatisfied wherever I am and stressed because of it. I start counting how many time I am going to fail each day until I accomplish my goal.

It is very likely that even if you are not at the finish line tomorrow you are getting in a very subtle way better and better every day, and acknowledging that will give you the right feedback that you are on the right track and diminish your stress.              

Life is an extreme sport

Life is a dangerous sport to play, there are threats and danger waiting for you under every corner. Nobody who is playing this sport will survive, this sport is exhausting and it is killing 100% of the people who are playing it.

Think of it like this, how miserable your life would be if you would go through the effort every day to prepare yourself to skydive from a plane. You would go through the briefing, put on the gear, get on the plane feel all the anticipatory anxiety in the plane eventually reach the drop point, and than have your emotions overwhelm you and never actually jump.

On the ride back to land you are probably going to feel bad that you didn't jump, we could probably call that depression. And next day you go through the same cycle of preparation and anxiety followed by avoidance and depression. Over and over again until the end of your life.

Most people lives is like attempting to skydive without ever jumping from the plane. They are on a vicious cycle of anxiety and depression, but they lack relaxation and excitement from their life because they are never put themselves in any danger. So there is no high to it.

Sadly these three things danger, relaxation and excitement all live in the same place on the edge at the point where you are completely uncertain if you are going to succeed or fail.

Avoiding one of them, means that you are going to also avoid the other two. Leaving you with a boring and stressful life.

The ironi is that we are trapped in this skydiving tour, the decision to get on that plane doesn't belong to you, that decision was taken by your parents years ago when they decided to have you.

So the only way for you to have any excitement and calm in your life is to actually jump. Extreme sports are enjoyable because they put you in such a high amount of danger that there is nothing you can do to prevent any of the negative consequences. If you are free falling and something goes wrong with your parachute what are you going to do in mid air!? Panic is going to accomplish nothing, you actually have much bigger chances to survive and solve the problem with the parachute if you stay calm. So it forces you to surrender to your experience, because it is the best survival strategy.

Don't get me wrong I am not saying that you should start doing any extreme sports, I am using it as a metaphor for life, as a suggestion that perhaps it is better to approach life more like an extreme sport.

It is a little more subtle than this in real life as far as I noticed people adopt two avoidance strategies. One they pretend that they aren't even in the plain they become apathetic as jumping is not going to make any difference.

The other avoidance strategy is by pretending that they are jumping, by becoming obsessed, as in a way if they master certain aspects of the sport that have no danger they are going to reach such a high level of mastery that they are in a place where it is impossible to fail.

Not to confuse this with people who are trapped in dangerous environments with people who are abusive, where avoiding that environment is probably the best thing to do.       

The art of contentment

It is hard to bring down emotions to a science, the same way it is hard to create a scientifically formula for creating masterpieces.

You can apply science to art like measure and recreate colors and sound or engineer materials to become the support for art, the same way you can measure bio-metrics that allows you to more accurately gage what is someone felling and create a substance to modify that bio-metric.

But you will never understand or measure the essence of it, this is why science can't learn people to become contented because it is an art. The same way we are probably never going to invent a robot that can write musical masterpieces.

Experience is subjective, the emotions that come from experiencing certain things are going to differ from person to person. Contentment is like an improvisation game, you are constantly put in unpredictable situations, that you have to work with and find your way back.

Contentment is the virtue between pessimism and optimism, the pessimist thinks that things are always going to go bad so nothing that you are going to do matters, which is partially true. The optimist thinks that everything happens for a reason and things are going to finally work out over the long term, even if now things don't look very good which again is a partial truth. Pessimism creates deficency and optimism creates excess, both less than favorable places that will increase the amount of sufferance you will experience.

While the person that is contented knows that things are not going to change, like there will always be some negative in the world, and that things will get better just to get worse again, but either way he manages to maintain a constant mood of bliss.

This means that at the level of experience and emotions your life won't get any better, you will always have this three types of problems:

1. something wrong with your body;

2. you will find yourself in some sort of conflict with someone;

3. you won't have enough of something you need or wan't.

This problems will always follow you around no matter where do you go or what do you accomplish. You will always have a version of thees three problems.

People who are in denial, whenever they experience any of these problems they perceive it as something wrong and unusual happening to them. From the perspective of your emotions it is impossible to be a loser or more likely everybody is a loser at the end of the day.

There are generally seven really though sticking point that is causing denial, and with denial they diminish your capacity to feel contentment:

1. abuse

2. aging

3. death

4. hate

5. anxiety

6. depression

7. goals      

This seven sticking points make it a little harder to improvise your way out of them but is not impossible. I will wright more about them in the future!

Magnesium for anxiety

Sadly recovering from certain mental disorders like anxiety, sometimes takes a long time, which means that for that period you aren't going to enjoy the best quality of life for a while.

Often with many relapses, it is important to find something to ease your pain while you are addressing the main cause.

I was never a fan of psych drugs, they have to many side effects and I heard some stories of people becoming addicted to it, so I was always interested in alternatives.

One of the best thing I used is a magnesium supplement, it didn't necessarily fix any of my problems but it made a big difference at the time I was suffering.

It is estimated that 80% of the population at the time is deficient in magnesium, the reason for that being poor diet rich in processed foods as well industrial agriculture practices, that deplete the minerals from the soil.

I was on a very healthy diet where I was eating regularly some of the foods with the biggest concentration of magnesium like: spinach, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds etc. I was never shown to be deficient on the regular blood test that you get at the doctor periodically and yet still supplementing relived some of my symptoms.

So I would give this one a try even if you think that you are getting it from the food, you never know how reliable food is today, to give you all the nutrients you need. The supplement are cheap and the upside is huge as well as risk free. The worst thing that could happen is if you take to much it is going to have a laxative effect.

Below is a list with some of the most common symptoms of deficiencies:

 Neurological:

Behavioral disturbances
Irritability and anxiety
Lethargy
Impaired memory and cognitive function
Anorexia or loss of appetite
Nausea and vomiting
Seizures

Muscular:

Weakness
Muscle spasms (tetany)
Tics
Muscle cramps
Hyperactive reflexes
Impaired muscle coordination (ataxia)
Tremors
Involuntary eye movements and vertigo
Difficulty swallowing

Metabolic:

Increased intracellular calcium
Hyperglycemia
Calcium deficiency
Potassium deficiency

Cardiovascular:

Irregular or rapid heartbeat
Coronary spasms

God is dead, now what!?

Religion had two purposes, one: it gave people a way to cope with hardship, by believing that there is an invisible man in the sky watching and controlling everything it eased the pressure of life and gave man a way to cope with negative events in their lives.

The second purpose of religion is to give most people a purpose in life, as not all of us are able to compete or leave a legacy behind us, most people purpose was to be decent humans and respect all the rules to earn their ticket to heaven.

As we progressed most of us find it less and less plausible to be-alive in the concept of a deity. Which means that most of us are in a lack of something to help them go through though times as well as a purpose in life.

If the concept of God it is not true this also means that most people were lying to themselves to begin with. It is not that we lost our purpose in life, it is more that we didn't had a purpose to begin with, this is why we had the need for magic, for replacing the reality with fiction in order to sooth our anxiety.

Almost the entire world is going through a crisis, that sadly not too many people are taking it seriously. It is like an extended period of grief and most people haven't passed the denial stage.

They know what the reality is and are aware of the most contradictions and logical inconsistencies, yet they will still label themselves as belonging to a certain religion. They are generally religious just in title they rarely or never do any of the rituals or practice any of the philosophies of their religion, because they are aware of how ineffective those are but they won't still let go of the concept of a deity.

It is basically a collective neurosis through which the wast majority of us go, we are conscious of the reality but still prefer to replace it with fiction to sooth our anxiety.

At the end of the day all what we are certain that we have is the planet we are living on and each others. Which is where all your needs should be fulfilled, including your need for a purpose or support for hard times.

What we need is an upgrade to the way society function, to peak up the slack the religion left behind, or more likely the slack that was always there that we covered with lies instead of doing anything about it. And that happened because there wasn't really any solution to that in the past, as the purpose of denial is to avoid paying attention to the negative whenever you can't escape it in order to remain partially functional.

Your purpose should be found in your direct participation and contribution to society and his systems like for example the economy, and rely on others to help and comfort you whenever you are going through hardship.      

Tragedy has the capacity to bring people together, perhaps one of the biggest tragedy is the death of God. The end is just a different perspective of the beginning, it is now that we need better fairer system and need to relay on each others the most, since aloot of us are starting to realize that no one else is going to help. 

Free Market - Universal Basic Income

At the risk to be called a socialist or communist, I am going to share something that I have been thinking a lot lately.

The free market doesn't limits itself to just products and services, it also includes charity. And the current forms of charities we have right know on the free market are rather ineffective and barley cover the demand. It is basically begin by yourself or having someone else beg for you, which is annoying and ineffective.

Most of the charity programs cover the minority of people like the homeless, people with severe disease etc. The majority of people who need charity in the western world are people who can't afford a private pension to retire, or people who are sick and can't work, single parents etc. As far as I know there is nobody competing with the government for this charitable causes.  

You see the market always gets what it wants, and what the market wants right know is free money, sadly the only people who are willing to give away free money are governments and banks. And the problem with this is that they do so by stealing from everybody, keep the majority of what they take and then they give very little to the poor.  

Generally the people who are talking about UBI have the tendency to lean towards the left, they believe in the necessity of a big government, taxes and laws.

The problem with the government implementing UBI, is that in order to pay everybody they would either need to increase taxes, print more money or barrow money. No matter which one of these strategies you are going to chose it means that you are using coercion to extort money from some people and give to others, which creates a double standard, and double standards lead to more unfairness. Creating pretty much the opposite of what the UBI is trying to accomplish. 

At the end of the day you cant make the world more fair by treating a minority of people very unfairly even if those are the rich of the world. In order to take money from the rich you have to give someone authority over everybody to steal for you. Which in reality if you look at history you end up with a corrupted mess, and an even more unfair world.

If the government is going to implement UBI is going to make certain people that are working for the government very rich. It is bad enough currently that the richest people in the world are not the most productive member of society that offer the most amount of value to society, but a bunch of bankers and bureaucrats. If all the bankers and bureaucrats of the world would disappear we are probably going to be OK if not better, on the other hand if the people who are providing direct services to you like the people who pick up your trash or your internet provider, is going to have much worse consequences to your life.  

Implementing UBI in the current governance system it is only going to increase inequality.  

However I can't help to imagine how the world it is going to look like if something like UBI could be implemented, at least in theory it looks like it is going to solve a lot of the problem humanity had since the beginnings. 

Now we have the technology to create our own money without the need of an intermediary or use something with real intrinsic value like gold.

If we are going to use block-chain technology to implement UBI, the many are going to be distributed by software eliminating the need of an actually institution to do so. And this is great because software doesn't become corrupt, beside that there will be competition, there will be multiple charity programs competing with each-other which is the way free market deals with corruption.

The money are going to go from the software to the majority of the people, who are going to save it or spent it on products or services from the minority of people who are still providing this. It is safe to speculate that the majority of people are going to spend their share, and this is going to concentrate the money in the hands of the most productive members of society, while allows everybody else to live comfortably.

At the end of the day the money are just a universal value for resources. It allows us to more effectively exchange resource, and particularly it allows others to profit from their own labor. Nobody really owns the natural resources, the only resource you own is your own labor. Which is protected through property rights. If you own a piece of land and plant some corn on it you want to be able to profit from the products of your labor at the end of the day and be able to defend it if someone is attempting to steal it.   

But you don't own the carbon matter or the sun rays that are falling on the surface of than land or the rain. Nobody really owns those, there are natural resources that are on a continuous cycle, it is nearly impossible to horde renewable resources.

All animals that are on the earth including human beings are entitle to take whatever they need from the earth in order to sustain themselves. as well they are entitle to profit from their own labor.

When your only income comes from exchanging your labor for resources created by other people labor, you have the risk of the products of your labor becoming absolute, true being out-competed by your competition or labor saving devices. Which means that you know have no way of sustaining yourself.

The value that you are creating to share equally with everybody, comes from the earth. Not from the rich or the bank, in theory nobody should be getting screwed.  

In order to cover all the costs of paying people monthly, you will need an inflationary coin, where the amount of money is going to be determinate by calculation done automatically by software, not only to cover new people who join the program but also to maintains the value you give to each individual.

In the current system, inflation is bad for two reasons. First of all it makes it impossible to save money because by constantly increasing the money, the value of money depreciates, and you can end up in the situation where you will end up buying a cup of coffee with your life time savings.

The second bad effect of inflation is that if you depreciate the money and destroy the buying power of the money you can buy less with the money you make, which creates the illusion that all the prices increase constantly. Which in fact is the money depreciating.

This problem exist in a single monetary system, where everybody is forced to use the same money that are controlled by a centralized power.

In theory if I create my own form of money and I constantly create more and more, yes we will have the same problems it will make it impossible for people to save money and they will be able to buy less and less with the money you give them.          

But if we use more than one form of money and you have a few limited coins on the market like bitcoin, the value off all the prices should remain stable in bitcoin ass well as it is a stable store of value.

If you give everybody let's say a thousand dollars a month this means that because you pay them in an inflationary currency the more you pay them the less the money you give them are actually worth. In order to mitigate this problem you have to pay everybody more each month to adjust for inflation, like this they receive still the value of a thousand dollars each month. We might use a more stable reference like gold because the US dollars are also an inflationary currency that will depreciate over time, however gold seems to be keeping his value over time.     

Like most things it is a cost benefit analysis as nothing is perfect. Whenever you are gaining something you will lose something else.

As the chaos theory prescribes small changes like this can have big or catastrophically results. Giving poor people money is not only going to change the life of the poor but everyone's.

I would imagine that if you cover the basic cost of living of everybody, people with undesirable jobs are going to quit. This is going to change the job market, changing not only the salaries you need to pay to make this job attractive for people but also the prices of the product or services you provide in order to be able to pay your workers.

For example if you own a movie theater, and the cleaning lady quits her job, in order to get a new one you will have to attract people to do that job with more money, which means that you have to charge more for a ticket.

This means that all the products and services that are produce right know through cheap labor are going to get more expensive. This is if not are going to become automatized which a lot of them are in the danger to be.

We have an unhealthy relationship with all the things that I can think about that are produce through cheap labor, it encourages us to be wasteful and destructive.

If you have people who will pick-up your trash for cheap we produce a lot of trash and pay someone few bucks to cary it somewhere where we can't see it or smell it, which is completely unsustainable. Cheap clothes produced in sweatshops, most people buy clothes wear them few times after which they get in the back of the closet never to see the day light, next year they are probably going to be out of style anyway. The same is valid with electronics, cheap food etc. if the prices go up, which a lot won't because of automation, you can still be able to survive on a minimum basic income but you can't afford to be wasteful.

Another justify concern is to what is going to happen with people psychologically and socially. Are we all going to become lazy and unproductive?

Well energy doesn't get created or destroyed it can only be transformed. In theory the same energy that it is motivating you to get up from the bed it is still going to be there, only that it is going to have different priorities. I could argue that if people have their basic needs covered they are more likely to do things that makes them happy or to help others. A lot of the desperation in the business is going to dye down, that urge to make others pay you in order for you and your family to don't die of starvation.

It is the Maslow hierarchy of needs, when you get all your basic needs cover, your priority becomes self actualization. You get motivated by autonomy, creativity purpose etc. Rather than making enough money to pay bills or buy food.  In a way is the next evolution the same agriculture eliminate the need for most people to go in to the forest and harvest berries and hunt daily, it freed them up to use their time and energy to do something else that is productive with their lives.

I wouldn't be able to promise you that this is not going to have any negative effects on some people, like amplify their self destructive tendencies and addictions. I am sure that there will be some cases like that.  

Another thing that we have to be aware of is to don't artificially increase the population of the planet artificially to more than it can support. It seems that the highest concentration of people are in poor and under developed areas where they have high rates of poverty. There is a lot of data that suggests that this is a biologically adaptation that all mammals have. Whenever they live in a though environment where they're children have a low chance of success they have an increased desire to make more children, because that gives them higher changes of at least some of the kids to survive or become successful.   

There might actually be a decrease in population over time, as many areas are lifted out of poverty and you offer people decent condition to live in.

Some example of free market initiatives that get close to the principle of UBI is YouTube. The content is being distributed and made available to everybody for free unconditionally. The people who provide the most amount of value through content are the ones that will make the most amount of money. The whole program is founded by various companies, through advertising various real life products and services. That are naturally limited by the amount of available resources.

YouTube is such a successful free market initiative that is taking a lot of the audience of the older conventional ways to distribute news and entertainment, by offering it for free to everybody unconditionally, while simultaneously offering many a way to make an income.      

However there are some problem with regulations that lead to some people to be demonetized, on content that was actually very popular, but that was mitigated relatively easy to other third parties like Patreon or even the possibility of competition stepping in and offering a new platform.

How to relax

Sadly relaxation is one of the things that is being challenged by the modern lifestyle. It is increasingly harder to relax as society progressed.

And not because we live in very unstable or risky environment, it is actually the opposite, it is the increase comfort and the fact that life is very easy for the majority of people that is compromising their capacity to relax.

We live in the best time humanity ever enjoyed, I can't tell you how many times someone approached me to ask for money on the street and have an obsess body. Even the beggars, the people that should be starving are way better than in the past, not only they are no longer starving but have an excess of food to become overweight.

So then the obvious question is: If we are doing so well, why it is so hard for people to be relaxed?

It is the inconvenience and risk that modern life is allowing most people to avoid. We never develop the capacity to overcome any adversity or risk.

Because risks can't be fully avoided, not even modern innovations like insurance or safety features in cars will create a completely safe environment, they only reduce risks. This means that we are trapped in a risky and dangerous environment, and if risk it is impossible to avoid the safest you are going to be in this world is after you overcome a threat. After the storm passed there is a period of tranquility and it is very unlikely that another storm will come imediatly.

Risk is a precursor to relaxation, danger is what causes you to be calm not only overcoming danger will signal to your body that the threat has passed and you are safe now, but also the act of overcoming danger in itself it is a relaxing activity, this is why people enjoy extreme sports.

If you are skydiving, you might feel a lot of anxiety before you have to jump from the plain, after you jump there is no reason to be stressed because it is impossible to prevent anything bad happening to you. If things are going to go bad while you are in the air there is not much you can do about it so the only option is to surrender to that experience.

It is possible to be relaxed in almost any environment, particularly in challenging environments, where you need relaxation the most and it is going to make the biggest difference in your life. If the only place you could be relaxed would be a tropical beach with palm trees swaying in the breeze than relaxation would be useless would provide no benefit to you. So the law of self preservation dictates that relaxation should be possible almost anywhere particularly in dangerous places.        

 In the past almost nobody had a choice to avoid effort and inconvenience, in the presence we made it possible to be able to survive without to much of it, yet that seems to have negative effects like compromising your capacity to relax. I think embracing danger and taking some calculated risks has to become something conscious that people have to pursue if they wish to be healthy and happy, the same way we do with our diets.  

Why reaching consensus is impossible

There is a major mistake that a lot of the intellectuals make, whenever they are trying to impact the world in a positive way.

They assume that if they are going to educate people the majority of them are going to understand the principles they are trying to explain to them, and after that a consensus is going to be reach and the world is going to change in a positive way.

That is like believing that if you are a good athlete that broke a world record, by showing everybody your technique, everybody is going to match your performance.

A lot of what is guaranteeing your success is actually talent an attribute that you were born with. No matter how hard I will train I will never run as fast as Usain Bolt.

The same way no matter how much you are trying to explain certain concepts to the majority of the people they won't understand it they actually can't. It is as impossible for them to understand that as it is impossible for most people to become the fastest runner on the planet.

They don't have the same capacity to make abstraction, recognize patterns or make association as someone who was born with a high intellect.

And because they won't understand what you are trying to teach them there will never be a consensus.

Get a small group of people together and try to decide to what restaurant you should go, three hours later you decide to eat at home and not everybody is happy. Now imagine doing the same thing with more than seven billion people.

It is practically impossible or at least to my knowledge it was never done in the past. Not only there will be a lot of people that won't understand you, but even from the people that do some of them won't agree with you. Saying that in order to change the world we need consensus is like saying that we need magic.

This is pretty much the nail in the coffin of all benevolent ideologies, not enough people will agree to reach critical mass and be implemented in the world.

Even the current system and the dysfunctional systems in the past, whenever they should have been implemented by the masses by uniting them they failed. Like for example when socialism it was just an idea that should've bring the workers together and rebel against the capitalist was unsuccessful.

Until force was used, by small armies that organized cues all over the world and forced everybody to become a communist or socialist. Even today cultural marks-ism exist because people that infiltrated themselves in the system like education, politics, healthcare etc. and changed this systems from the inside out with lies.

The sad reality is that the masses can't be changed through education, the only people that react well to education are intellectuals which are a minority in society. Think of ideas like the golden rule: don't treat others like you wouldn't like to be treated. That idea enter in the stream of human consciousness more than two thousands years ago, how many people understand it and how many people live by it.

Even God gave up on trying to educate people, I don't think that another son of God visiting the earth and another two thousand years is going to change then numbers about how many people understand the golden rule.

I don't mean to demoralize you but it is important to exposed our own denial if we are going to be effective at changing the world. In my opinion the only chance we have to influence things is by recognizing what does the market needs and provide value. Like this even if you are attacked the if you are popular and help a lot of people they will join and defend you the same way they are defending the government and the central banks today.

Leadership is mostly an instinctual thing, left over from evolution since we used to be monkeys, it doesn't respond well to reason. People follow the most competent, not philosophies, ideologies or intellectual ideas.  

Don't expect others to understand or give you permission to do what you want to, because very little of them will.

Who should you worship

There are two types of people in the world, people who are capable to compete and people who need to be lead by the other people that are able to compete.

The people that are less competent can't get all the value they need to survive by themselves so they need to get that value from someone else.

This is a symbiotic relationship between the minority of the people that are very competent and produce the majority of value in the world and the wast majority of people that at best are going to achieve mediocrity.

It is a fair exchange of value like products and services in exchange of resources higher status in society and all the benefits that comes with that.

As we are not all born equal if the world is going to be fair some people will accumulate and achieve more than others.

For example not everybody can become a great athlete, this is why we have competitive sports, people get joy from someone winning a competition in there name. As their chosen champion is competing with the rest of the world, his victory becomes the victory of the people who worship him.

This is how people who aren't born with athletic bodies or don't have the determination to train at the level of a professional athlete etc. get the happiness of competing and winning through proxy.

However there is a problem when the masses become corrupted and they start worshiping heroes for the wrong values. Competitive sport is the equivalent of porn for having good leaders. Worshiping an athlete doesn't provide a fair exchange of value between the hero and the rest of the people, because the hero is selfish, he is competing solely for his own fame and fortune not for solving any significant problems in society or to address any real issues.

The people that the most worshiped today tend to be rather selfish and not offer a fair trade. People like musicians, movie stars, athletes, politician and perhaps the worst thing to worship is a God.

We worship this people not because they offer value but because they offer relief form the pain we have that comes from living in a world deprived of purpose and love. This heroes become a tool of denial rather than a way for people to cooperate in a fair way. If you support your favorite team that wins the championship there is no real substantial benefit that you received other than the joy of supporting the winning team. Your pleasure that you derive from it is empty meaningless and without purpose.

While simultaneously serous problems in the world remains untreated, unman-aged and things tend to deteriorate further. While everybody is distracted by bread and circus. 

How do we self-sabotage

When it comes to your goals there are two really bad things that you can do that it will prevent you from accomplishing them.

You can either be lazy, if you are two passive and you don't take enough action because, your goals are obviously won't accomplish your goals.

The other bad thing people do is they become obsessive about their goals, obsession is the opposite of laziness, it s when you take to much action to the point that it is hurting your goals. There are many forms obsession can take, some of example of that might be: micromanaging, checking your results very frequently, expecting that you should have a constant climactic growth without any plateaus etc.

These two strategies of self sabotage might look very different on the outside but they are actually two different strategies that accomplished the same thing. The purpose of these is to control pain, laziness or apathy happens when people stop acting because their actions cause them almost exclusively pain in the past, so they stop taking any actions in order to stop suffering.

Obsessing about something it is another way to control your pain, instead of being to passive like when you are lazy, you are being to involved in that process you micromanage things you expend to much energy than it is necessary, It is most likely to take shortcuts or fall for scams.

The interesting part about obsession is that sometimes can get you some results, if you are a workaholic it will eventually pay off to some degree, but your progress and success is going to be very unstable and volatile, you are not going to enjoy your success because you are mostly motivated by pain to pursue it. So there is a constant dark shadow that lives inside of you following anywhere you go, and the only way to distract yourself from paying attention to it is by obsessing about your goals.

This is the stereotype of the externally successful people, but miserable on the inside. Like most vices they either lead to deficency like laziness does, or to excess like obsession does, either way no matter which one you predominantly practice they won't lead to happiness.

The virtue between laziness and obsession is relaxation, sadly we live in a culture that lost his capacity to relax, we relay on drugs like alcohol to help us "relax" almost in all situation. Sedation is not relaxation when you are drunk you are not relaxed, you are just numb. Relaxation means to accept the negative consequences that can hypothetically happen in any given situation, it requaiers presence, not absent mindness.