Pinned Tweet
have as much fun with irony as you want but if you can’t drop into earnestness at a moment’s notice you’re not ensouled
2
6
36
1,359
i loathe tiny transactional “venmo me $9 for covering lunch” culture
no i’m gonna pay for you this time, you’re gonna pay for me next time, and it’s all gonna come out in the aggregate of our long and storied friendship
808
12,668
212,735
4,744,517
don't like the ghibli trend. idk man. something about a particular artist's meticulously crafted style being turned into a mass-market on-demand commodity. it doesn't sit right.
is this how it's gonna be from now on? anything good in the world being taken for parts to make slop?
348
4,690
29,039
532,302
i wish i could tell whoever made this meme how much it meant to me when i was 20-22 and felt like my life was over and i wasn’t ever going to escape my dysfunctional habits. feels silly to say but it really got through to me. i came back to it over and over again. thank you.
5
70
1,374
48,756
i'm not like, upset at anyone for posting them or w/e
i just don't think this leads good places. don't like the idea of all art being reducible to a vibe, and that vibe being backfilled with whatever else consumers want -- everything creative under the sun becoming viral slurry
16
57
715
19,610
it’s embarrassing how i don’t really know how to self-regulate or behave when i’m really genuinely single. all of the growth i’ve gone through last few years has been with a partner/codependent situationship. i am actually lost being alone and i dislike how desperate that feels
36
7
412
15,916
I think the way meditation instructions are produced causes a lot of suffering people to bounce off meditation, and I want to have a conversation about it.
Properly addressing this issue could hugely expand the range of people meditation could help
Here's a thread
1/20
15
26
279
37,533
my ex used to hate on "ambient studio ghibli vibes" music mixes on youtube. the art of ghibli films comes from the combination of every element. taking them to pieces, harvesting them for vibes -- it's abhorrent.
i think she was right about that. this is even worse.
2
7
253
11,102
Breakup at the age of 25 has the mario kart final lap time running out music playing my head
1
2
250
5,538
Took a gram of shrooms yesterday. Coming down, there was 30-45 minutes where I felt sober, but completely lightweight -- no apprehensions, no concerns, frictionlessly marveling at existence
Today, I feel sad. Congested and confused -- what's the point of it all? What do I want?
13
2
176
16,739
scrub mentality to insist your opponent owes you suboptimal responses to unsafe offense.
If you don't think people should passively crouch cancel, punish them for it rather than feeding them and ragequitting! It's a two-player game!
sirlin.net/ptw-book/introduc…
3
184
18,347
I need to quit consuming pornography. I've needed to quit for over a decade.
i was exposed too young. i didn't know i was installing a load-bearing nervous system control lever i'd still be shamefully, compulsively pulling a decade later.
something must change.
13
1
155
26,788
if you’re not creating your own spells from scratch, you don’t really have any business calling yourself a wizard — you’re just a spellcaster.
I’m not saying everyone needs to write their own tome from scratch but you should be able to muster a few original invocations.
4
7
123
5,548
why did i get the freeze and waste my whole fucking life mental illness instead of the workaholic mental illness fuck my life man fuck my life fuck my life
7
4
124
3,134
my relationship of two years ended today. i love her, but we’ve both been aware it wasn’t working great for awhile.
i’ve never dealt with a breakup like this. i don’t know how to think more than fifteen minutes ahead.
lost
13
116
4,731
day 2 post breakup. not sending a good morning text has reduced me to fucking shambles. feel like i just hit a wall going 69 mph. feel like a blubbering idiot. everything seems wrong.
16
2
119
5,260
The space of baseline human phenomenology is *absolutely massive*, and traits like hedonistic baseline are unevenly distributed. Most people have little-to-no grasp on how their phenomenology is unique, or how to account for that when processing meditation instructions
9/20
1
4
115
17,422
years and years of (usually) closing my mouth to smile in photos. barely realized i was doing it.
still have a few more weeks of invisalign but even the current progress is an unreal shift
straightening my teeth did so much for my self confidence. did not know money could buy an ego boost this big.
9
1
114
6,739
the fractal bootcamp totally changed my life. absolutely ridiculous roi — tripled my income and substantially rehabilitated my relationship to hard work
if you’re interested in breaking into the nyc tech scene, i can’t recommend it enough. happy to answer any questions in dms!
the bootcamp is filling up (16 of 20 students), but @meatballtimes and I really want 20 students to hit our growth goals.
he is begging me to tweet, so I must oblige. If you, or someone you love, wants to accelerate their tech career, book a free coaching call with me ASAP
1
5
112
7,026
any artistic vision can be taken-for-parts
ghibli movies are made as a whole -- stories, visuals, music, script, themes and direction that tie all of it together
now, that can be reduced into a vibe, and backfilled with any context. the original artistic whole is discarded
4
1
103
3,624
For example, I struggled with metta for a long time
I eventually realized my inner voice is *inherently painful*.
The way I talk to myself in my head is *driven* by painful clenching, so mantras like 'may I be loved' mostly just created strain and suffering
7/20
3
97
2,980
But ultimately, I think this issue is real:
the current approach toward meditation instructions mostly leads to successful meditators teaching other people similar to them, and a lot of suffering individuals bounce off because they can't relate.
Thanks for reading.
20/20
6
95
1,723
@nickcammarata makes two suggestions that are incredibly valuable in addressing this:
(1) if meditation doesn't 'work', try using other techniques like IFS to clear out the 'big stuff' first
(2) heavily minimize the amount of 'effort' used in meditation
10/20
3
89
2,922
Burbea suggested literally speaking to your inner critic. I sat down and wrote a dialogue with myself. I talked through till that voice was tired, even vaguely agreeing with my 'rational' self.
My head feels light.
I am unusually aware of the spaciousness around me.
2
4
92
1,916
I had to learn (am still learning) to invoke and play with these feelings in ways that accounts for the pain of the inner voice.
But nothing about traditional metta instructions explained how to solve this problem, or even brought it up as a possible pitfall
8/20
4
80
2,899
like yeah, they're not obligated to play obv
but it's scissors guy behavior -- "I ONLY pick nair into crouch cancel"
ragequitting mid-match because you can't handle a gimmick is way more embarrassing than using a gimmick on an opponent who refuses to even try to play around it
1
2
85
2,193
I'd really like to see a more guided 'choose your own adventure' approach to early meditatio
"if you're hurting with (x) part of your phenomenology, try (y)"
leading into
"based on how (y) went, try (z) or (w)"
18/20
5
2
80
3,508
more meditation instructions need to start with a massive disclaimer about how insane using words to convey meditation instructions is. it's like "interpretative dance about architecture"
words are not magic spells -- you're aiming for experiential gradient descent of some sort
5
6
78
2,844
he did not make it.
think he passed away a bit before i went to bed last night. likely too far gone by the time i found him.
i hope that having a quiet and safe place to slip away made it a bit easier on him.
rest in peace little guy.
found a unwell pigeon on the sidewalk and developed instant moral responsibility
apparently there’s a place on the UWS that’ll take him, but they close at 7. hope they’re open tomorrow. hope he’s ok for the night.
7
74
3,897
wandering around brooklyn feeling so overpoweringly grateful i cannot find the words to express it. my life has gotten so much better so quickly i can hardly believe it’s all real, i can hardly believe i’m actually here.
7
2
101
7,408
I've got this pretty solid analytic "textbook" dharma knowledge, and a fucked up tanha-ridden psyche that doesn't ever, ever, ever stop clinging. I reify meditation instructions into weapons for the inner critic. I cling to letting go. Feeling clueless.
21
72
4,824
Has ANYONE gone from chronic, crushing depression --> jhana? Has anyone done it directly? (i.e, without some period of recovering from depression before being able to practice jhana?)
8
69
6,460
Consider that most meditation instructions are written by:
- (A) lowest common denominator corporate mindfulness types (often useless except as a funnel to instructions written by category B)
- (B) accomplished meditators, with ~thousands of hours of practice
2/20
3
1
69
3,702
It's funny how a different way of a looking made everything so simple, and now that feels so inaccessible.
While I take some solace in the memory of how I felt then, I don't think the answer is "more shrooms"
But it does suck how heavy, thick, clueless everything feels again.
1
67
1,806
On the contrary, if those instructions clash with somebody's phenomenology in an deeply painful way, they won't stick around long enough to become a serious meditator and write the instructions that would've worked for them.
The unique perspective is lost!
6/20
1
1
67
2,998
It's not just that by the time somebody is (B), they've 'ironed out' a lot of the issues which might effect a beginner -- the sort of people who become (B) are often those who *didn't deal with any of these serious setbacks* in their early practice.
3/20
1
1
67
3,572
thinking of taking some shr*oms tomorrow. would appreciate advice. no psychedelic experience. been in a rut. scared, trying to love myself more, don't know how. most-all sober interventions end up as refied concepts. don't have a sitter, but have some shrooms. 0.3g a bad idea?
34
65
7,420
I want to explore more perspectives on meditation that acknowledge the nightmarishly personal pit a lot of people are stuck in, the zero-to-one step that needs to happen before an individual can really appreciate a Rob Burbea talk or guided TWIM sit.
16/20
2
65
1,791
an intimate relationship means merging psyches -- your internal model of your partner because a part of *yourself*
this is a blessing and curse. it's why relationships are such serious business -- really loving somebody means *incorporating* them in a way you can't easily undo
5
4
62
2,857
I've had *just barely* enough success with meditation to keep coming back to it, even though my baseline phenomenology is a tangled nightmare, and most instructions don't work well for me in my current state.
14/20
1
58
1,904
People stick to things they're good at, or enjoy. If you're 'good at' or at least enjoy meditation early on, you're more likely to stick to it and become a (B) person (a 'serious meditator').
If you really struggle early/instructions don't work, you're more to bounce off
4/20
1
57
3,351
(1) is important because it can take a person suffering in idiosyncratic ways closer to a 'typical' healthy baseline phenomenology, increasing the odds they'll be able to utilize meditation instructions without crashing into idiosyncratic issues they can't explain
11/20
1
1
56
2,606
(2) helps by reducing the pressure and stakes; less mental energy means less possibility of flying off in an unproductive direction, i.e, producing lots of tanha, getting overly invested in the results of meditation. Move slower, figuring out more along the way.
12/20
1
54
2,284
do or do you not think your opponent should be obligated/pressured to play a certain way so you have more fun?
i play third strike, not smash - i've never understood this attitude from smash players, it's not nearly as prevalent in the fgc
why not just adapt to this dumb shit?
2
58
2,379
I feel undeserving of jhana, even light ones. it has to take years. it's not possible that it's easy; at least not for me, no, why would it be?
14
51
7,243
So most serious meditators are the sort of people who had a 'gentle onramp' -- the serious-meditator sourced instructions they learned from worked for them, they develop as meditators, and they write more instructions based on their experience.
5/20
1
48
3,084
so excited about this apartment i just signed. feel like a kid before christmas. since the pandemic i haven’t lived anywhere longer than nine months. now i have a home of my own in new york city. i can settle in and do whatever i want with it. it’s unbelievable. i’m so blessed.
6
51
1,309
Working with a skilled teacher 1:1 would probably help a lot of people navigate these early difficulties, but the sorts of suffering people who bounce off isolated instructions are unlikely to get invested enough in meditation to seek a teacher, or recognize a skilled one
13/20
1
48
2,065
I think @meditationstuff's global wayfinding probably has merit here, but I haven't read the book closely enough to be totally confident in that; the scale of the document makes it a hard sell in its own right
17/20
1
47
1,785
do you have any idea how fucking impossible it is to do therapy for childhood trauma when your mother is/was a therapist?
7
45
1,346
Does everyone feel like their heart contains nearly infinite nuance and empathy that cannot be adequately expressed in words or is that just me
6
2
44
4,782
I've learned a ton about myself in picking at why these instructions don't work, or what's happening when they're not working -- even though I still am far from a 'serious meditator'
But I just as easily could've bounced off meditation entirely.
15/20
1
44
1,815
got my first negative performance review at work. apparently being a top 1% bladee listener for five years is a “red flag”
2
43
2,234
intellectual property law should be gutted to the point of being nearly nonexistent/unenforceable
7
39
Maybe the size of the space of possible baseline phenomenological profiles is just too large to make a document like that worthwhile.
Maybe I'm naive in assuming nobody has tried to write it before.
19/20
4
41
1,717
+1 once i realized i'm hot and caring enough that it'll work out for me in the end, i stopped worrying so much
3
43
1,258
Any wins against LLMs will further empower publishers and lead to more situations like this. You can't have it both ways, legislation is a blunt instrument at best and it's not going to thread the needle such that freely lending PDFs is ok but scraping to train AI isn't
4
2
38
5,796
n=1, i lived with four girls in uni for a year and a post-hookup debrief one of them gave to the rest was orders of magnitude more graphic and objectifying than anything i’ve ever discussed with my male friends. and that’s what they were willing to say with me in the room!
1
39
674
Twitter timeline death spiral is so obviously caused by the new financial incentive.
Of course everyone is going to triple down on farming engagement when they’re literally getting paid for it. The issue was bad enough when notifications were the only prize!
2
38
3,812
this cardboard tube my ikea carpet came wrapped around triggered the male “cool stick” instinct and i can’t bring myself to throw it away
6
41
811
the nice part of using a skeleton pfp is I can never be accused of being a poser. I have a skeleton myself, actually.
3
40
we did this when one of our dogs passed away last summer.
the other one still didn’t get it; spent days looking for him, came running from across the house when she heard somebody pick up his old collar (jingling the tags)
broke my heart. still does.
1
37
1,784
i cannot count the never of ultimatums i've given myself on this.
i don't believe in them at all anymore, but i still need to quit it. it's not good, man.
unfortunately, it's too effective -- post-nut/post-arousal clarity is the perfect nervous system "sobering mistake"
2
38
2,055
i'm a little autistic and generally very sentimental. in the long run i'll make peace with this new world some way or another -- i didn't expect an offhand tweet like this to blow up. it's just strange and a little sad for me rn
thanks for space cadet pinball, that shit rocked
1
35
3,220
astonishing how blatantly i scroll twitter as a nervous system crutch. it’s like reaching for a cigarette. compulsive, cheap relief from acute anxiety.
3
1
34
1,117
i'm not even anti-ai-art in principle -- I just think it's unfortunate that interacting with "studio ghibli aesthetics" now means like, running a picture of your dog through a filter, rather than actually engaging/commenting on these colossal, gorgeous films.
3
32
1,317
I've read 166,000 words of Animorphs: The Reckoning since yesterday.
I feel cursed. It shouldn't be this good. It's like crack. I'll never, ever be able to justify a fuckin animorphs fanfiction as the most interesting, robustly explored scifi I've read. There's no chance! How?
7
1
31
1,064
Can't participate in the Jhourney retreat due to brief hospitalization in 2019
Tough stuff. I'm bummed.
Super stringent criteria around mental health makes sense, this esp this early.
Still, it sucks to take a leap of faith to sign up, then not be able to take part.
2
32
1,921
i wonder where this ends -- every rewatch of dragon ball z involving inserting your friends in as the cast type-deal?
it'd be fun in some ways, but it also means a creator's vision is now secondary to what people want to extract and make from it. that disassembly is a little sad
4
1
31
1,255
ate 2.5ish grams of mushrooms. everything fell apart. it got really scary for a bit.
not much in the way of legible takeaways. profoundly grateful to be sober again. i don't think the answers i'm looking for are in psychedelics.
5
31
458
something clicked recently (last week or so) and I'm suddenly hyper-aware of my nervous system
all the inscrutable negative feelings I've suffered from for years; they're in my nervous system, somatic
this entails a desperate need to skillfully handle this; yoga, maybe?
7
1
30
2,810
fair, at the end of the day ig it's different attitudes toward what you can expect from an opponent
i wouldn't blame somebody for leaving after one game, but mid-set is salty and bitchmade imo
my thoughts
2
32
1,810
yup yup yup yup I have been saying this
it's way more likely to discourage rather than inspire -- why try at 100-135 if there's 140+ out there attempting similar things?
Not knowing immunizes you against this; you're only measured by your attempts, which you can control
29
4,075
whenever an attractive woman likes one of my tweets, i briefly wonder what being married to her would be like. then i feel guilty for even letting that cross my mind.
5
1
30
637
I've unsuccessfully tried to get into Jhana for almost two years and I have a very bad (obviously self-reinforcing) feeling that getting turned away from a Jhourney retreat over mental health is going to make the "I can't possibly be happy" neurosis worse
I hate being so fragile
10
29
3,150
it's an interesting little business. everything's marked up -- $10 for a 50-year-old paperback
but the selection is excellent, there's no trash on the table. so you're paying for curation -- getting to buy from a small, easily-parsable collection rather than a cluttered store
3
29
1,133
Hard hard agree -- does a lot to validate the different "sizes" of trauma too. Trauma isn't (entirely) about the scale of the pain, but how little escape there was from it.
3
23
749
one time i convinced myself a girl who friended me on facebook, then matched with me on tinder, then came over to my dorm room and watched a movie in my bed with me, was a lesbian and therefore wasn’t interested in me
3
29
456
thank you for saying this, got one of these then dumped on a weekend vacation at 11am it was fucked as hell
2
25
1,668
I didn't realize how stupid or careless the average user of this site is until i had a few tweets blow up. cannot wrap my head around it. these people cannot be real.
3
27
590
it put me in a new, emotionally safe container where:
1) everyone, instructors included, were working long hours
2) i felt confident, on external authority, that there would be payoff for the work
3) my limits were continuously pushed, but in a very attuned, growth-centric way
2
28
462