daimonion

God hates cowards.

The gut-brain axis research is genuinely interesting but “that won’t sell drugs” misunderstands how psychiatry actually works. Psychiatrists don’t sell drugs, they prescribe them, often reluctantly, often as one tool among several. More importantly, the framing collapses when you’re standing in front of someone in a catatonic state or a first psychotic break. In those moments, the gut can wait but treatment cannot. The critique of pharmaceutical influence on research funding is legitimate, it just doesn’t land as cleanly when the alternative to medication is watching someone disappear into psychosis while you optimize their microbiome.

Psychiatry should be more concerned with the gut than the brain. But that won't sell drugs. So there we have it.

Nobody gets it, that’s probably the starting point worth accepting. The existentialists landed on something useful here, meaning isn’t found, it’s made, and the making is the point. Jung put it clinically, he thought the psyche is oriented toward wholeness, toward becoming more fully what you already are, and that this process, what he called individuation, is as close as he could get to a purpose. Not a cosmic answer, just the work of becoming more genuinely yourself over time. Which sounds modest until you try it.

I still don’t get the concept behind life. What exactly are we here for??

The evidence-based short list: sleep is the most underrated intervention, the immune system does most of its work then. Zinc lozenges started within the first 24 hours have decent evidence for shortening duration. Saline nasal rinse works better than most people expect. Fluids, not because they “flush” anything but because staying hydrated helps everything function. Humidity at night if you can manage it. Alcohol slows recovery more than most people account for. Vitamin C after symptoms start doesn’t do much, the window for it was before. Beyond that, it’s mostly waiting. As the medical joke goes: treated, a cold lasts seven days. Untreated, a whole week.

how do you make a cold go away as fast as humanly possible

The skepticism is understandable but the evidence has moved fairly decisively in the other direction. Neuroimaging studies consistently show structural and functional differences in attention regulation circuits, particularly in prefrontal development and dopamine pathways, differences that don’t reduce to personality variation. The “personality type” framing runs into the problem that what’s being described isn’t just a style of being but a pattern of genuine impairment across multiple domains that responds specifically to dopaminergic interventions. That said, the diagnostic category is genuinely messy. Overdiagnosed in some populations, underdiagnosed in others, and the threshold between “disorder” and “extreme of normal variation” is a real philosophical problem in psychiatry generally, not just here. The honest position is probably that something real is being captured by the diagnosis, the nosology around it is imperfect, and “not a real thing” and “pathologized normal variation” are both too simple.

I’m not certain ADHD is a real thing. Maybe a personality type, but not a disorder. Could be wrong. Thoughts?

Nietzsche didn’t hate the weak. He hated those who had strength and called their retreat a virtue. Ressentiment is cowardice that has learned to moralize.

Retardmaxxing is an elegantly simple way of saying there’s no intellectual solution for an existential problem. Like in Coelho’s Alchemist, you end up where you started because you can’t truly depart from yourself - all true transformation is embodied, time yields treasures when there’s momentum, hence “the alchemist”, meaning the person who can make gold is the person who moves, does, attempts, desires, seeks, tries. “He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch” type beat

Kierkegaard called it the leap, and he meant it literally, not as inspiration poster material but as cold diagnosis: thinking about the jump and jumping are mutually exclusive acts, and at some point you have to pick one. Sartre said existence precedes essence, which sounds like a seminar until you realize it means nobody thinks their way into becoming someone, you move first and find out who you are in the aftermath. Camus got the most mileage out of it, Sisyphus happy not because the boulder problem got solved but because the moving itself was the answer, and whatever meaning accumulated did so quietly, without asking permission. The void doesn’t owe you a reason to jump into it. That’s kind of the whole point.

@praiseoflight @brigatanera33 @aristomarinetti It’s not a compliment, it’s a symptom. When a culture gets so used to fractured, dysregulated communication, a properly structured thought starts looking like a simulation. You're confusing articulation with artificiality

@_daimonion @brigatanera33 @aristomarinetti There's nothing complimentary about someone saying your writing sounds machine written

@brigatanera33 @aristomarinetti The highest compliment the modern mind can give to basic syntax is accusing it of being a machine. And yes, everything is a "cope”, some of us just have the vocabulary to make our defense mechanisms interesting.

@_daimonion @aristomarinetti AI + cope

There’s something true here, and something that tips slightly into romanticism. Love as heroic resistance is a compelling frame, but it can also become a way of aestheticizing what is mostly just the slow, unglamorous work of staying. The bravery in real love is less dramatic than going against the grain, it’s the willingness to be known fully, to remain present when presence is uncomfortable, to let someone matter enough that losing them would actually cost you something. That requires courage, yes. But it looks less like defiance and more like showing up, again, unremarkably, on an ordinary Tuesday.

real love requires going against the grain of a world designed to make everything disposable and is the bravest thing you can do

Probably Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, though “fell in love with” is the right phrase for it. Not admired, not found important, genuinely fell. Myshkin is one of the strangest experiments in literature, what happens when you put a truly good person into the world as it actually is. The answer Dostoevsky gives is not consoling. But something about that refusal to console was the first time a book felt honest to me in a way that changed what I expected from books afterward.

what was the first book you ever fell in love with?

@Lovandfear Silence, if it’s true. The ones who answer too quickly haven’t really heard it yet.

What's the best response to "I love you"?

Whatever you are working hardest not to think about is probably running everything. Repression is one of those concepts that sounds obvious until you try to catch it in yourself. The thing about actively keeping something unconscious is that it requires constant energy, which is why people who are heavily defended tend to be exhausted in ways they can’t explain.

This rule completely misses how we actually work. It assumes logic is the only valid engine for change but as Jung spent his life documenting, real transformation doesn't happen in a debate. It happens through messy experiences, relationships, and sudden crises. When someone fundamentally shifts their worldview, it’s almost never because they heard a flawless logical argument. It’s because they collided with something in their life that their old mental framework simply couldn't hold anymore. A belief without reason isn’t a belief without a cause. It just means its roots grew in soil that logic can't reach.

“Those who believe without reason cannot be convinced by reason.” ― James Randi

Worth flagging that this quote doesn’t trace to a verified Chesterton source, and Chesterton misattributions are common enough to warrant caution. The sentiment reads more like contemporary paraphrase than his actual prose style. That said, the idea itself has a long lineage, and Chesterton did write genuinely about books and inner life, just not quite like this. If you love the thought, it’s worth finding where it actually comes from.

“A man who has read a thousand books is armed for life; a man who has read none is easy prey. The man who has read a thousand books has lived a thousand lives. He has seen cities he has never visited, spoken to men who died centuries ago, and walked in worlds that no longer exist. Reading does not merely inform him; it enlarges him. It stretches the boundaries of his own experience until he becomes something more than himself.” -G. K. Chesterton

Depends on what draws you to it. If you want to understand why life feels the way it does, start with the existentialists: Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus is short, readable, and hits immediately. If you’re drawn to questions about knowledge and reality, Plato’s dialogues, particularly the Meno or the Apology, are still alive in a way most introductions aren’t. If ethics is the pull, almost anything by Aristotle on the good life holds up better than most modern self-help. The mistake most people make is starting with histories of philosophy rather than the philosophers themselves. Go to the source early, even if it’s harder. The difficulty is usually the point.

哲学興味あるんだけど何から手つけるのが最適なん??

Drieu’s appetite for contradiction was real, and in another life it might have been the sign of a genuinely capacious mind. But his contradictions never resolved into anything, they dissolved into each other, and the dissolution made him available to whatever force seemed most decisive at the time. That turned out to be Nazism. There is a version of “mixing contradictories” that is intellectually serious, holding genuine tensions in productive friction. And there is a version that is simply the absence of a stable center, which makes a person not complex but directionless, and ultimately dangerous to himself and others. Drieu’s life is a case study in the difference.

"I always liked to mix the contradictory: nation and Europe, socialism and aristocracy, freedom of thought and authority, mysticism and anti-clericalism." — Pierre Drieu La Rochelle

The image works because it maps onto something real: trauma doesn’t resolve in chronological order. The frightened child and the furious adolescent don’t disappear when the adult self forms, they go underground and surface under pressure, often pulling in opposite directions. What makes healing genuinely hard isn’t any single one of these, it’s that they each have legitimate claims. The child’s fear made sense. The teenager’s anger made sense. Dismissing either in favor of the adult’s desire for peace tends to drive them further underground rather than integrate them. The peace that actually holds is usually the kind that was negotiated with all three, not imposed over them.

my therapist told me this and it hit me: “healing is so hard because it is a constant battle between your inner child who is scared and just wants safety.... your inner teenager who is angry and just wants justice.... and your current self-who is tired and just wants peace."

Organizing a life around “I will not be them” feels like freedom, but structurally it’s still a form of orbit. The gravitational center hasn’t changed, only the direction of movement. What tends to get missed is that the vigilance itself is exhausting, because you’re not actually living toward something, you’re living away from someone. And the cruelest part is that the traits you most fear inheriting are often exactly the ones the vigilance produces. The war against the parent gets fought on terrain the parent chose.

if your parents let you down in a significant way, you are more likely to build your whole life around the unconscious desire to not be like them unfortunately, this approach doesn’t usually work and has serious costs, such as putting you at war with yourself