The Buddhist no attachments thing makes a ton of sense, of course it increases happiness, and it’s easy to explain. Imagine playing two different games. In the first game you start out with 100 points and the goal is to get to the end with as many points as you can left. You go around dodging things that will take your points from you. In the second game you start out at 0 and every time you achieve something you get a point, and once you have that point you can never lose it. You just go around collecting experience points. When you have lots of attachments you are always worried about losing things. That’s game #1. When you don’t attach yourself to things, it’s like starting out with 0 points and every experience that you have is a point that can’t be taken away. That’s like game #2. Which game sounds more stressful to play?

How do I activate my primal wallet? 🤔

You ever hear a song that just feels like your internal experience? Which song was it?

What’s an L402 token? It’s an HMAC-signed macaroon + a Lightning invoice preimage = proof of paid to access a service. No passwords. No accounts. Just sats. And here is a pretty graphic that breaks it down! 👇

Attacking someone’s self concept is, on an existential level, attempted murder. And people tend to react accordingly.

Nothing wrong with appreciating a great meat suit as long as you know that there is a real person in there!

Okay I have to go fix my zaps, but it's going to be annoying. I don't really have a LN mobile wallet, I'm always in front of my computer so I just always use my LND node. What wallets are easy to connect to Primal for zaps?

What's the difference between "oppression Olympics" and triage?

I don’t understand why there are so many men that are angry at women. The angry women I get. I’m not justifying it or defending it, but I understand how it happens. The vast majority of the women I know have been violently assaulted, groped, harassed, graped, etc. and while diving into collectivism is never the answer, I can understand how those experiences would result in a general anger at men. And yes there are subcultures where it is very popular to talk shit about men in general and that should cause some anger. But I would think being physically assaulted would appropriately cause a much higher level of anger, ya? But that's not what I'm seeing. So what happened to these dudes? Why are they so angry?

When you're from Chicago you develop a habit of attempting to cram as much as possible into a summer, which probably isn’t a great idea, but by that measure, I'm doing pretty well this year! So far I got to day drink on a boat on a Midwestern lake for the 4th whilst wearing an American flag cowboy hat #murica 🇺🇸🎇, went to a Renaissance faire, took my kids hiking through the mountains in Banff national park ⛰️🇨🇦, caught some sun at Oak St beach ☀️🌆, and drank and dined with all kinds of friends and family 🫶

I once heard someone say “god is the blanket that we throw over the mystery of the universe” and that really stuck. Yes, we don’t, we can’t, understand the universe, but we need some way to process it, some way to deal with the uncontrollable nature of it, and so we call it ‘god’. I read a book on happiness once that told a story about a young couple who had lost a child. They were religious and took great comfort in the idea that this was “all a part of god’s plan”. I have very mixed feelings about that. We can examine the seeming cruelty of ‘god’ in that situation, but we can also appreciate that they found a way to come to grips with the lack of safety in the world, and the uncontrollable nature of our universe. ‘God’, or religion, really does give a lot of peace of mind to a lot of people in crisis. The concept is a hack for learning to "let go." But there are down sides. No one wants to be a passenger in car when the driver says “Jesus take the wheel!” And this is just such a constant wrestling match in my head. How do you be a responsible person, how do you keep planning for the future while knowing, while holding the knowledge that you live in a universe without safety? A universe that you can’t control, where tragedy is always possible. How the fuck do you do that?!?! I do have some idea. I know that planning is entirely necessary in this life, and so you gotta keep doing it. And also, you have to hold the reality that there is some percentage, some amount of the situation that is, from our perspective, totally random and uncontrollable. I am now capable of intellectually acknowledging that, and I’ve been learning to decouple tragedy with shame or guilt, or even failure, in my thought processes. But I haven’t found a way to emotionally hold this reality. Ideas?