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Exit the Cave

turtlespace.blog

101–110 of 114 posts

Re: Exit the Cave

#101

> A writer needs readers. An entrepreneur needs customers. An athlete needs competition. A lover needs someone free to reject him. Any worthy pursuit needs a mat. Nah. I judge myself by how I progressed from yesterday, not by whether what I am or what I built is useful to others. Is keeping a diary pointless if you're not planning to make it a memoir? Is staying healthy pointless if you aren't using that health to co…

What activities are you engaging in where you can make progress with no interaction with other people?

Studying, programming, meditating, reading, writing, thinking, lucid dreaming...

Re: Exit the Cave

#102

> A writer needs readers. An entrepreneur needs customers. An athlete needs competition. A lover needs someone free to reject him. Any worthy pursuit needs a mat. Nah. I judge myself by how I progressed from yesterday, not by whether what I am or what I built is useful to others. Is keeping a diary pointless if you're not planning to make it a memoir? Is staying healthy pointless if you aren't using that health to co…

I'm a grindset man. I never advertise my grind details.

A couple years back I came up with a morning routine, designed to compensate for the fact that I am extremely lazy and have a barely functioning prefrontal cortex.

Not long afterwards, roughly the same recipe was being heralded as some hardcore millionaire stoicism business, which amused me to no end.

Re: Exit the Cave

#105
post #100
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! The author makes one large assumption about why people do what they do. If I'm doing something for the fun of it, I don't think I need anyone else to see my results in order for me to get exactly what I wanted out of it.

I told my mum about all sorts of projects I'm working on. She stared at me with pity then said, "but who knows about it?"

You do mom!

Re: Exit the Cave

#107
post #14

> let reality teach me what it required This resonates with me. I think it takes balls to leave the comfort zone and test our assumptions against the real world, to get actual feedback, good or bad. I think now it’s easier than ever to just stay in our caves surrounded by nothing else but our customised feeds that reinforce our beliefs and the sycophantic AI agents that yes-and all our ideas.

it needs so much

Re: Exit the Cave

#108
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, one thing I do that might be directly relevant to this analogy is to lift weights. My goal when I started was to get stronger. I measure that by whether I can lift more weight today than I did yesterday. The barbell doesn't lie. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't. Sometimes I even regress a bit. But over time, I have gotten stronger. Some people at my gym urge me to "compete" but I can't see a reason to do this.…

Even for this, I still need outside perspective, especially when I (currently) fail at it badly. Do I fail to increase my barbell by 1 kg because I haven't tried enough, or because it's what only 0.001% people managed to do and I'm likely not one of them? I guess this may make me solve one or two unsolved math problem that I don't know is unsolved, but I don't want to count on it.

I've gone from amateur punter to moderately competent athlete (think d3 college team, though my sport has no such metric), and my thought is this: The only way to get better if you've plateaued is to change something. The external reasons you fail matter only because they tell you what to change internally. I've done things that surely not more than 100 people have done, and I'm not, by any metric, in the top .000001% or whatever. I just decided to do them and fought hard, it really was that simple.

This also relates to my interp of the article. There's grinding/training and then there's "having that dog in ya". He's trying to remind people to do the latter.

Re: Exit the Cave

#109
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What activities are you engaging in where you can make progress with no interaction with other people?

Learning a language not spoken around you is very solitary experience. Also, jogging and swimming, drawing, playing musical instrument.

Learning a language in this way is some sad boi stuff

Re: Exit the Cave

#110

'Putting yourself out there' is really only a necessity if the validation you seek through your pursuits is external in nature. Those who seek internal validation need not exit the cave, for it is not a coward's cage; it is merely another space to pursue one's own enlightenment and holds no power over its occupant.

Call me crazy but I don't think wanting to successfully achieve real things in the external world is bad
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