kind of a continuation of a previous post i made in here awhile back.
I feel like Nio waking from the Matrix, Dorothy falling down the rabbithole, like that dude from the great gatsby having finally made it big realizing he’ll never be apart of this world he see’s, like…you get the idea.
one big problem here is just this…i was pretty much raised by tv/movies/the internet, and i’v spent such an …unhealthily… amount of time alone through my developing years and beyond (an american otaku i guess) that…as I make all these references to movies and shit i relate to…i start to doubt even myself, i’v done some psychedelics in the past so i know how fragile the human psyche can be.
on top of that, if anyone here is familiar with Alan Watts…I feel now exactly has he describes people who are “awakened” (i know he’s an entertainer first…just saying his lectures describe how i feel lately exactly)
I can’t help but feel like…there are a lot of basic things I should know, a lot of things people seem to take as so basic they don’t need explaining, while others seem to completely avoid these same things like the very idea of looking at objective measurable truth threatens their very existence. but again…i doubt my own eyes and ears so what judge am i of objective measurable truth
imagine if you will an innocent little boy from the midwest, who had no father figure of note and whose mother was too busy working non-stop to feed/cloth/house him, that she never really got into the weeds of raising him. and imagine if this boy somehow made it to his late 20’s before…well, before losing his innocence as they say. but he’s so unsure of his own self that he doesn’t know where his problems end (because there obviously is something wrong with him/his brain) and which are just…a natural reaction to a fucked up society. hell…what if there isnt anything wrong with my head and this is this just…me coming out of a decades long addiction/escapism spiral or something?
so here’s the question…
what things should this boy have been taught? what basic facts of life is everyone else working on they’re not?
(please don’t worry for my health or anything…I uh…i’m pretty sure I’m going to check into some kind of wellness/rehab facility soon)
Some miscellaneous truths that have served me well as a guy doing reasonably okay in life:
- Reading books is good for your brain
- Exercise is good for your body – the gym is a game that anyone can win over time
- Friendships come from shared interest, activities and experiences over time. Go do stuff in real life.
- Don’t carry credit card debt. Save money if you can. Get a handle on basic finances
- Pick something to do, try your best, and pivot to something new if you decide that’s not for you. You often learn what you do want by discovering things that you don’t want.
- Pushing yourself out of your comfort zone leads to personal growth.
- Most things seem hard at first, everything gets easier with reps.
Hope that helps!
- Don’t carry credit card debt. Save money if you can. Get a handle on basic finances
Credit cards are this weird thing. If you need them, you shouldn’t use them (if you can help it). If you make plenty of money and don’t need them, they are a very useful financial tool. I have paid interest on one of my credit cards once in the past 3 years, and it was only to have extra available funds for buying a house. But I have accrued well over 100k airline miles and several hundred (far more than the interest I paid) in cash back. I use credit cards exclusively for everything but my mortgage, and have them set to automatically pay the statement balance prior to the due date. If you aren’t extremely confident you can do that, you should avoid credit cards.
I definitely ran afoul of credit cards in my youth, so the banks have gotten their pound of flesh from me.
I was going to lead with “Don’t assume that other people have it right and you don’t” combined with “Most people are sleepwalking through life, so be careful about asking random strangers for advice”; however, I like this list and hope more people will upvote it.
Exploring, traveling, spending time in new environments, meeting and hanging out with new people, will all offer chances for learning and growth beyond your previous experiences.
I think the elephant in the room is probably best summed up as follows:
No one will ever tell you THE truth. They’ll only ever tell you THEIR truth.
That’s not to say that people won’t ever TRY to do the former (though you have to be careful to separate those who do from those who pretend to), but rather, that it is fundamentally impossible to do so. The real truth is far too complicated to ever be put into words, so the best anyone can hope to do is point you towards it.
There are YouTube channels (for everything, literally) you can find that can help, like “ask dad” channels. A lot of it is going to be your level of logic, how to fix things, where to start accessing the problem or issue, things like that.
We never stop learning though. If you see someone use something the way you were unaware of, you can ask or maybe the lightbulb goes on in your mind and you can just move on with new knowledge without feeling embarrassed or weird about it.
I’m from the 80s, I know a little about a lot of things, but I fall into YouTube and research rabbit holes on subjects like how Venice was made, how to check quality of leather boots, how to patch drywall. Things I wasn’t taught, but as they enter my life I learn about them, because clearly I didn’t know the answers before.
+1 on Ask Dad videos - this is a good channel: https://youtube.com/@dadhowdoi
Also +1 on everything else you said, especially the never stop learning point.
OP, it’s totally ok not to know things - you can seek them out in advance, or you can discover them along the way, as and when necessary.
You’ll be ok, pretty much everyone muddles through life one way or another. Best of luck 👍
Your twenties is when your brain really starts to finally take shape as an adult. You’ll find yourself questioning things and occasionally having these overwhelming feelings of revelation.
It can be a rush, but try not to get carried away. It’s important to be humble and grateful every day, be kind every day. Stay grounded. You’re gonna make it.
So, are you wanting practical basics, esoterics, or both?
Practical:
- What that other person said about debt is and isn’t good advice. Without debt you can’t build credit and without credit you can’t get big things like houses, mortgages, etc. More and more of society seems to rely on credit scores to judge a person’s worth, too. Which is concerning, but this is the world we live in, not the world we wish it was, so… On the other hand, with debt it’s easy to get into a ‘pay later’ or ‘rob Peter to pay Paul’ mentality and get yourself into a bad position. So, better advice would be: never take on large debts unless you absolutely have to. Get a credit card, buy one or two things with it a month, and pay it off every month. That way you can build credit safely.
(Obviously ignore this advice if you’re rich.)
-
Learn basics. I was taught cooking, cleaning, how to properly do laundry, basic electrical wiring, basic home repairs (attach things to studs, how to patch drywall, etc), and sewing. All of this has come in handy once I got my own place. Learning simple car stuff like changing oil, changing tires, and perhaps redoing spark plugs and belts can help you too, especially if you want to save money on car maintenance.
-
On a related note to that, cars, houses, and boats are all basically giant pits you toss money into. (That’s why people often take on debt to get new cars; a lot of the expensive maintenance is covered under warranty.)
-
Be careful with student debt. An education is important, but you can be stuck with that debt for a very long time, and owing that much in an uncertain economy like we have can be dangerous. So plan your education well.
-
With the understanding that there are some things people call ‘hobbies’ that are just them being gross (ogling little anime girls because they’re ’really 700 years old so it’s fine!’ comes to mind), in general enjoy your hobbies and don’t be ashamed of them. If, say, you like doing drag, and one of your friends says nasty things about it, that person is not your friend and you don’t need to feel ashamed of your hobby to make them feel better. If it makes you happy and doesn’t harm anyone, then just have fun. But, in counterpoint to that, don’t fall into your hobby so hard that you start gatekeeping and being an ass about it, or ruining your health about it. Remember, other people are in the hobby to have fun too, so who cares if so-and-so’s drag wig is a little basic or messy?
-
I hope you know this already, but it’s astonishing how many people don’t: bathe every day. And wear at least moderately clean clothes. No-one likes stinky people and it’s easy to become inured to your own smell.
Esoteric:
-
Like that other person said, read. Terry Pratchett, Mark Twain, Richard Feynman… plenty of people have put amazingly good thoughts down on paper. I especially like Pratchett’s definition of sin.
-
Learn history, and not just the basic ‘approved’ things taught in schools. For example, our school ‘neglected’ to teach about the Tulsa Race Massacre, or the brutal Union fights in West Virginia. I’ve found, for good summaries of more ancient history, Overly Sarcastic Productions does a pretty good job. It’s impossible to know where you are going until you know where we have been. And of course that old adage ‘those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it’ is very true. See: the US right now.
-
Learn what a cult looks like and avoid them like the plague. Doesn’t matter how lonely you are, how much ‘esoteric knowledge’ they offer, they will destroy your life and probably your family’s lives as well.
I just wanted to say how well put and structured your comment is :).
Agree that having a credit card and using it is a good thing to build credit, which is important – thank you for clarifying. I intended only to suggest that carrying a balance month to month is very expensive, as you articulated.
I work as an educator for educators, its our responsibility to teach them everything they need to know. We commonly fail when associates dont ask questions when they dont know. Its nigh impossible to teach everything in general.
What im trying to say is, hardly anyone can simply teach you everything you should know. Where does one start teaching? Look both ways before you cross the street? Dont trust the internet? There is so much knowledge to be learned and its hard to gauge what someone else may or may not know and what specificly they need to learn. It also depends on personal context what information is relevant to you. Street smarts for NY is different than LA, from suburbs to rural.
The most important thing is to ask specific questions when you are unsure. Your on the right track, best of luck. and for most things in society there is hardly one empiricaly “correct” answer.
Its tough but dor everything that you encounter that you are not sure about, what it means or so, ask, research. Its tough and skow goinf but thats how you learn. It takes a lifetime to learn and a lifetime to overcome bad learning.
- Consider perspectives that are DRASTICALLY different, in roots, from what you were culturally-formed in.
You mentioned Alan Watts, please read this book, which he called his “I TOLD you so!” reference, written by a woman who was exploring the far-East back when women didn’t have legal-personhood…
There is a truth in that book, in one of the footnotes, which David-Neel gave only half of:
There are 2 kinds of people in the world:
- moderate-path realizers, &
- steep/savage-path realizers.
IF you are a moderate-path realizer, THEN do NOT take the savage-path-realizer’s “medicines”: they are deadly poison ( her term ) for you.
IF you are a savage/vertical-path realizer, THEN do NOT take the moderate-path-realizer’s “medicines”: they are deadly-poison for you.
Cultures work differently, & the lives born-into different cultures get formed into those cultures, so that lives born into “macho” cultures cannot value female-validity as equally-valid, because the culture prohibits that…
( there is a 6-year-shorter male-lifespan in fragile-masculinity cultures, btw: it may make for some cultural “male-supremacy”, but it abuses women AND it kills men: a lose-lose condition )
I may have mentioned these to you, before, but again, they are SO fundamental, for understanding our world, that once you see the world through understanding’s eyes, you cannot go back to the “blind” condition you were living-in, before…
Lanier’s book “Foreign to Familiar” explains WHY president Carter spent literally-days talking family with the Arab Middle-East leaders he was meeting, before getting down to brass tacks…
Hofstede’s “Exploring Cultures” explains how all cultures fit-together through his cultural-dimensions theory…
& gives examples of the different-kinds-of-reactions that people formed in other cultures do,
and once one sees those examples, then one can better-understand other people, from other cultures, throughout the rest of our world.
( IOW, you’ll have significantly-less miscommunication with these 2 books IN you, than not.
You decide if altering your life that-way is worth something to you, & if it is, then invest, please. )
IF you’re from North America, THEN please read Paul Fussell’s book on the North American Class System, & see how the reactions/prejudices he identifies seep-through, & shape, EVERYthing in this continent…
& then also read Woodard’s “American Nations”, to understand-better what’s really going-on!!
The US has been highjacked by the confederates: what the corporates call a “reverse takeover”.
The clearer you underestand what’s going on, in the world, the more likely you are to survive it, right?
Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, is on the 2 thinking-systems in our brains ( see the book “Top Brain / Bottom Brain” for evidence that Kahneman & Tversky’s “System 1”, the imprint->reaction system, is actually lower-forebrain,
& their “System 2”, the considered-reasoning system, is actually upper-forebrain. The recent discovery that programming is upper-forebrain, instead of Broca’s & Wernicke’s areas, the language centers, doubly-backs this )
& when you understand Kahneman’s book THEN you will understand that the imprint-reaction-system, which is what all ideologies/prejudices/assumption-river-“religions”, etc, ARE, is highjacking the world, throwing-from-the-world both objectivity & correct-reasoning, THEN you will see that it doesn’t matter which ideology wins:
IF ideological-REACTING wins, THEN … the world’s lost.
Objectivity & correct-reasoning MUST win, or humankind’s incapable of surviving ClimatePunctuation, this century.
Finish waking up, iow!!
“The Elements of Journalism” is an important book, for understanding the process of your doing journalism, of your making-peace with the different balances between quick-understanding vs rigorously-correct-understanding…
& why for-profit journalism isn’t trustworthy, because it’s propaganda, not journalism: it’s gaslighting, fundamentally…
The book “Corps Business: the 30 MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES of the US Marines” is sooo good a parenting book, that a hippie-woman & mother whom I loaned my copy to, years ago, told me she “wished I’d read that years ago”.
Read it & do your life a favor!
Henry Cloud’s book “9 Things You Simply Must Do” is important, too.
GET THE CORE UNDERSTANDINGS INTO YOU, & then YOU own your life more, understand?
The more-competent your core-understandings are, in more dimensions, the greater your life’s freedom, in choosing its/your own path.
The whole “education” ( with the falsifying-quotes ) in the West is actually patterned on the lower caste Hindu “education”, engineered to prevent autonomous-capability…
John Taylor Gatto, who destroyed his teaching-career in his acceptance-speech for the New York State Teacher-of-the-Year Award, discovered this, in his later research…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto#Main_thesis
IF children in school KNOW they’re loved, KNOW they’re valid, KNOW they’ve rights, … THEN how could the institution possibly manipulate them, to make the institution look good??
However, WHEN the institution has broken validity, self-certainty, etc, from the children in its power, THEN it can use PROVISIONALLY-bestowed ‘validity’ to make the children into the puppets it needs … ( I’m only being slightly more bitter-in-phrasing than Gatto himself was, btw, … this concept HE caused me to be understanding… )
US education was engineered to PREVENT any more Lincolns or Franklins, to make the population into the corporate-acceptable “consumable human-resources” that such operations wanted…
It was the coal industry who paid-for the establishment of education, in the US, according to Gatto.
That only makes-sense when you understand that it didn’t want any more interference/disruption, it wanted workers who obeyed, & “education” taught obeying…
( I’m self-educated: don’t even have North American grade-11, which is equivalent to European grade-10. Decades of force-mitigating literal-brain-decimation, 7+ years of homelessness, etc, didn’t stop me: understanding-stuff’s MY addiction.
Wisdom can be an addiction. Self-evolution can be an addiction. Addiction’s just a technology: it’s neutral, itself.
What it is that one happens to be addicted-to, that makes it either bad or good. : )
Anyways, I think it was your previous post that I replied-to, before…
If so, then I’m now adding this:
I’m not going to be giving you such recommendations if I see a 3rd post of yours: either you invest in learning, undoing the encultured-blindnesses, XOR you’re on your own, now.
Mollycoddling disempowers lives.
If you want to be given everything, instead of earning it, then I ought fuck-off, outright.
If you want to know what to dig into, the others in these posts are identifying stuff, & so am I.
Pick something & DO it, honestly…
Elephants dissipate, when one is living honestly enough, from one’s room, right?
Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen,
_ /\ _
this was what i needed, more or less confirms what i already suspected. got a lot of stuff to add to reading list i guess
I’ve found Allan watts says alotta words that have little real meaning.
If you’re like me, forget the mind and focus on your body and physical health and needs. It’s important too.
It’s a bit dead nowadays but there’s !reprieve@lemmy.zip
imagine if this boy somehow made it to his late 20’s before…well, before losing his innocence as they say.
Are you asking us for help losing your virginity?
not physical innocence
I wouldn’t know what you need to know. But based on what you mentioned here, it doesn’t sound like you’re going through a spiritual awakening. It’s very much an embodied, not an intellectual experience. Here’s an excerpt from Alan Watts’ autobiography describing it:
It was in the autumn of 1932—windy, with fallen leaves skittering along roads and fields—and I was trying desperately to work out this problem: What is THE EXPERIENCE which these Oriental masters are talking about? The different ideas of it which I had in mind seemed to be approaching me like little dogs wanting to be petted, and suddenly I shouted at all of them to go away. I annihilated and bawled out every theory and concept of what should be my properly spiritual state of mind, or of what should be meant by ME. And instantly my weight vanished. I owned nothing. All hang-ups disappeared. I walked on air.
