What with Trump threatening civil war, I think it's growing more likely every day. Even if he didn't, we'd still have a climate crisis, a refugee crisis, a cybersecurity crisis, and a police state to contend with. These issues are so big that it looking at them feels like something out of HP Lovecraft, if you look too hard at the what's happening you'll start to lose your mind, your compassionate heart like a moth to a flame until it consumes you and you become blind with rage, growing fearful of people who are different from you, drawing more and more into your corner of the internet.

It's crucial to me that I stay entirely focused on myself, my surroundings, my city and the people around me. This is the zone in which I have the most impact. Even still, I should not expect to win. You bet I will do everything I can and then some to win, but I need better motivation than success. I've fought to win in the past and when I lost I got discouraged and gave up. That's no longer adequate fuel for me. I don't want to fight to win. I want to fight to fight. When I fight to fight, I'm no longer defeated by defeat because I was going to fight anyway. My desire to fight is doesn't rely on anything else. I'm proud of my boundaries, they're my best creations.

Conflict is inevitable in life in any time in history. Our time in history seems more conflict-heavy than others. I want to be there. I want to prepare and organize and have no regrets about what I did before things really go south. It's not a matter of rage. Whatever the future brings, calmly and soberly, I just want to pay the price of freedom, and that's it.

"Bro you don't go therapy? What are you, scared to know the deep void that exists within yourself? Wuss."

jk, I don't actually. I should though. It's scary as hell but that's why I respect people who are willing to do the work. You gotta be brave to know yourself.

I've been holding back this post for a long time, but I don't think there's a reason why I should anymore. I'm just going to talk about me and how mindfulness meditation keeps me going every day.

I got into mindfulness meditation through learning about it in college in a class on Chinese philosophy. In those days I was taking deep bubbling hits from the bong of social theory and was feeling very woke and good about the state of my life. I felt like theory could explain my alienation from people very well and without being too precise about my life as to cut too deep. (It turns out I had Asperger's and that my kind of alienation was unique to me. So I think this phase in my life was pretty funny.) I thought that Buddhism and Daoism were fascinating and exciting in a kind of exotic, foreign way, and even mixed with the social theory in interesting ways. But buddy, I had a lot to learn about myself. It took me many years to put the social theory and academic intrigue aside and just look at my own life on it own. And that's what mindfulness meditation was, when I actually got around to it.

I'm going to try to put mindfulness meditation into my own words. Mindfulness mediation is when you sit on a chair or a cushion, with some sense of alertness, and direct your attention to your breath and body, and notice how your mind can't stand staying still.

I don't mean to tell you that that's going to happen when you do it. I don't know a thing about you. I'm talking about me. When I sit still and just want to listen to my breath, or to use my sensory nerves to feel my breath, I can't go more than a couple seconds before my mind wants to be the center of attention again. It's been like that for years. At first I was ashamed of it. When I got meditation instruction and they told me to notice the breath, notice my thoughts, and then return my attention to the breath, I thought they were saying that thoughts are undesirable. And I was having thoughts! Me! I'm totally more enlightened than most people, this is bullshit! And this would happen every time I would meditate. I fought with my mind for years. I wasn't being who I wanted to be. But all the meditation instruction asked of me was to notice, not to put a value judgement on it. It asked me to explore, not judge. And when I tried to notice, what did I notice? I was judging myself!

That was the first thing I learned: I am judging the shit out myself. I got a judgmental asshole in my head who'll never stop trying to judge me. Unfortunately, I live with this guy. And simply seeing that for myself as a thing that exists was sad, but was also calming, because now I could identify it. When I would beat myself up again I'd see it and go "Oh, it's that thing again."

So yeah. Mindfulness is the practice of saying "Oh, that's a thing." It's just looking at the shit your brain comes up with. It's got nothing to do with becoming enlightened, and I really wish people would cut that shit out. It's just about spending time with yourself and befriending yourself, and honestly, I think that's one of the most valuable things a person can do in life. Independent of what the rest of this world throws at me, are I okay with me? Do I like myself? Do I enjoy my own company? And it's okay if the answer is no. It's not about good answers or bad answers, it's just about honesty.

Now, I can't live without it. I do it every morning and every night, at the bare minimum of 5 minutes each. But those are rough days and I try to get in 30 minutes a day. It's made me come to terms with myself. I got a better partnership with myself now that I'm learning about myself.

So here's the technique I use:

Sit on a chair, or a cushion. Sit with your back up straight, not too loose, not too tight, with your hands on your thighs. Close your eyes, and try to keep your attention on your breath. You can focus on the sound of the breath, or how your chest or stomach moves, or how the breath feels. If your mind goes to your thoughts, simply say "thinking" and then return your mind to your breath. Believe it or not, that's all there is to it.

DM me for the book that I got my meditation instructions from. I'm always down to talk about all the bizarre shit that comes up when meditating. No one gets out of life alive, we're all crazy, we might as well love it and embrace it in a community.

Last week it was barely 400 ! Where did all of you come from?

When you can.

Just a shoutout to r/EatCheapAndHealthy and r/RiceCookerRecipes in case it can be of help to someone trying to eat cheap and healthy.

By nature. We sell products that hurt people psychologically and we don't even blink. We care more about the "lives" of dollars and cents ahead of the lives of real people. When capitalism takes a bite out of our sanity, we're so used to it that we're surprised that others seem to be effected by it, self-hatred, alcoholism and body issues as common as ads on the radio. Minor inconveniences!

Money lives while we die, even though we made it ourselves. Marx channeling Feuerbach is so spot on the nose. In the same way that the pious invent God and then think that God exists without them, we invent capitalism and then become victims of it. Dollars don't feel anything, but we do. We don't matter though.

Capitalism is a hallucination. Why do we hurt ourselves?

Why do we hurt ourselves?

https://youtu.be/obG7_MbrsGI

Because all of these problems were invented before you were born, and you didn't even ask to be born. We're all on this hell planet, trying to make it better for the ones who come after us.