If you look at s&p 500 stocks weight for instance, at number 483 is Rollins inc, weight 0.019938%. Do you know this company? But everyone here if you have invested in s&p 500 has invested in this stocks. The way s&p 500 works is it picks stocks based on market cap. Now this company has a very low chance of getting kicked out even if it is a dud as people keep investing in it via ETF's
Here lies the opportunity. If you go through every company in s&p 500 you are going to find overvalued and undervalued stocks. One strategy is to pair trade. Take a long/short position. But it is very tough to time as every keeps investing every month. Other strategy is wait for a crash and instead of again investing in these ETF's for small returns pick stocks that got battered for no reason. This has inspired me to actually work a bit, actually looks at balance sheets and pick stocks.
Side note, i only own one etf and it is PTF. It has very little stocks and i think focused funds are a better bet.
You think too highly of yourself. Why do you think whatever you create is something special. It's most likely Shit. There is freedom in knowing you are one in 7 billion.
Real creation happens when you give freedom to your mind to do whatever it wants to. There is no time constraint, no feeling that i need to get this done. It's spontaneous. You are following someone else's script here. You are equating activity with accomplishment
While I appreciate the stoicism, this isn't just about delusions of grandeur.
Examples:
* I'm too old to learn how to surf
* My relationship with my child is too far gone to improve
* It's pointless for me to save for retirement at my age
* The environment is fucked no matter what I do
These are all time anxiety type dilemmas that real people get hung up on that have nothing to do with impressing the world or building the next big thing.
I think all these examples are of thinking too much. Why not just this very moment do something you feel like. Then the next and then the next. Go learn surfing, call your child and if you are too lazy then just accept you don't care about that stuff as much and do what you care about. You care about netflix then watch netflix. Don't do what you think society or other people think is cool.
If we are completely present in the now and doing what feel rights. There is no room for all these negative thoughts.
Dispensing advice like this to someone with anxiety issues is exactly the same as telling someone with depression that they should get out of bed, meet people, be happy for what they have, or smile more.
It is the kind of swapping of cause and effect that many neurotypical people fall into when conversing with those who are suffering. All of the behaviors and habits you describe are largely the result of healthy mental states, not the cause (there can be feedback loops that make the distinction fuzzy, but those feedback loops are very fragile and require constant maintenance).
I'm sure its well intentioned, but it's just not going to be very useful advice.
To the issues raised in the article? Unfortunately I don't have one to present to others. Everyone is different and my only advice is to find a professional that can talk through specifics and provide the right approach.
If you're asking more personally, I identify with a lot of the same struggles as outlined in the article and here in the comments, but I stop short of feeling the excessive anxiety. Instead I'm just paralyzed by inaction and have low energy for pursuing any ambition.
I'm currently in the process of ruling out all other possible health factors first (ADHD, hormonal imbalances, sleep deficiencies, metabolic issues), but if those end up being exhausted I'll probably explore Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
Training myself to have healthier mappings between emotions <-> thoughts <-> behaviors seems to me like the best approach. And then maybe I'll be capable of applying the sort of "just do what you feel like" advice you provided above.
> Instead I'm just paralyzed by inaction and have low energy for pursuing any ambition.
I guess that's... normal? Most people don't have ambitions, they're just content with getting through life in a relatively painless way. The ambitious people are the exception, not the rule.
These are still all goal-based examples. You may be too old to ever be a good surfer, but probably not too old to enjoy farting about with a surfboard in some small waves. You may not ever be able to repair the emotional damage yourself and your child have done to each other, but you can probably enjoy going to a movie together.
Etcetera. AFAICS what this article is getting at is simply "do more of what you enjoy"
People often find themselves entering cycles which they're not really happy about, though. They may become especially unhappy long after the fact when they reflect back on how they spent so much of their time. For example, someone may intend to work on a startup, but instead they spend a whole year basically smoking weed and watching Netflix every day, or whatever, with no startup and almost no work to show for it by year's end. They may feel quite bad and ashamed about how they spent their time during the past year.
Not to say there aren't people who do truly want to do that and find that a good use of their time (like if they work a stressful job and only want to relax and zone out during their free time). But a lot of people find themselves endlessly procrastinating or doing things which brings them very little joy and yet which they can't seem to break away from. Same goes for drug addiction, and any other addiction, really.
It’s like saying: I’m out on a hike, and I think I see a mountain lion. But most human-cat encounters are with housecats, so I can safely assume this is probably a housecat.
No. You need to look at specifics and find a classifier regime which is appropriate for the information available to you.
Absent all other information, the logical thing is not to say “I’m probably not doing anything worthwhile” the logical thing is to say “I don’t know how worthwhile this is”.
Please enlighten me. I want to be educated. According to me our mind is very fluid. We can teach it to behave a certain way. I do not believe that someone is awkward socially or cannot get caught in mania etc just because they are the way they are. All of this is learned behavior according to me. Why is it that most of these people are in the US? It seems to me because the environment makes people act this way. I do not think that this is because of genetics. If we mediate then we can look at the mind as an observer and change most if not all of our behavior. When someone gets a diagnosis for say ADHD. Then they exhibit those symptoms even more because they reinforce that behavior.
put these people in a situation that the only way to survive is to socialize, i am pretty sure they will be very charming because we are capable of doing a lot if our survival is at stake.
Here i am not talking about people with mental illness. Those i understand. Please help me understand this
An overly simplistic 101 of autism is: It is one who struggles with or does not pay attention to another's body language. Most notably, autistic people rarely pay attention to another's eyes and facial expressions.
This one aspect then ripples out into most autistic symptoms, but not all autistic symptoms. For example, one might be wired in an unusual way where they're overloaded all the time and can't pay attention to small body language cues because of it, showing even if they go out of their way to pay attention to body language their autism is still there. Some are unfortunately even worse than that.
When kids avoid eye contact and social interaction their brain develops in a certain way. Different parts of the brain are more liquid than others. Most high functioning autistic people can be taught, even later in life, how and when to pay attention to another's face. This, with some exercise and learning some social skills, will make them seem normal to everyone else. However, some parts do not get rewired. They will still be different in certain ways, like noticing patterns often in detailed ways beyond the average person. However, these semi-permanent side effects can vary from person to person.
All in all, you're not wrong, but are a bit overly simplistic. The brain does physically change to our environment, but not everyone is willing to learn and grow in certain ways, and even then some aspects of the brain change very slowly over years, or so slow it might as well be static.
And as someone who has mastered many different kinds of meditation and qualifies as arhat (You did say, "Please enlighten me." :P) if you're looking to gain full self programming of the brain, including ending dukkha, it's very much worth pursuing mastering the subject, if not for fun, because it benefits yourself and the rest of the world. ^_^
What you're claiming is that every mind, absent of mental illness, can behave exactly the same way given the same set of conditions. To start with, I'd like to see any proof that you have saying this is true. As far as I know, we don't know the brain well enough to say that is true, but also as far as I know we know enough about the brain to say that is likely not true. If you know otherwise, feel free to link some sources.
The second thing I see wrong here is that you say "I'm not talking about mental illness" but you're talking about ADHD which is a mental illness [1] as is austism [2].
Brains are fluid, yes. Up to a certain point. At a certain age, brain plasticity slows down and changing behaviors becomes harder. This is why kids can learn so fast, but adults have a harder time. Other behaviors are subject to environment yes, but are still difficult to change. If I talked to a stranger and was then mugged by that stranger, I am going to be less likely to talk to strangers in the future. There is a whole field of science dedicated to overcoming these kinds of learned behaviors, and it is very difficult and time consuming. It is very difficult to unlearn behaviors we have already learned.
But ultimately, "if our survival is at stake" isn't the situation most people find themselves in. If I am socially awkward, I'm not likely to die because of it. I might be uncomfortable, but survival is not at stake. 100 years ago we would tie the dominant hand of left-handed people behind their back and force them to write with their right hand. Did it work? Sure. Was it necessary for survival? Not a bit. Did it cause more problems than it solved? You bet it did.
I am just proposing a different point of view and i am not claiming what i am saying is right. I am here to learn and what you say makes sense. Your point about adults learn slow is it because that't what the popular opinion is and that is the reason they tell themselves, "oh, i am a grown up so i am going to learn slowly"?
According to science and medicine, our mind is a combination of plastic learned behavior and innate physiologically determined capabilities, strengths, and preferences.
how has science determined that? consciousness is subjective so they are depending on what people have said to them. The mind of scientist and the person they are observing are at play here.
There's a lot that can be done purely mechanistically, if you're super concerned about consciousness interfering with accuracy.
For example, in the extreme, fMRIs show different activation patterns for people with different developmental disabilities. It's extremely clear and not at all subjective.
I agree that this headline (data from a single year presented as a new trend) is useless at best or maybe even misleading (I haven't upvoted it), but from your comment, it sounds a bit like you are not convinced we are causing the climate to be changed. Not sure if that is the message you mean to convey.
I am not an idiot. Of course we are causing climate to change for the worse.
I don't trust everyone out there though. Most scientist and media people have a self serving attitude. They just want clicks
Sorry, I didn't mean to say you were. It just sounded like a denialist might have written it (or might not, depending on the real intention), so I figured it might be helpful for you to know that, at least to me, it can be read both ways.
I know the mistake was very costly and we are talking about lives here. But, come on.. is there a chance people are over analyzing. We can try hard and do everything right and still something can go wrong.
They are humans and the airplanes from Boeing have been very very very reliable. It's not like every max 8 dropped from the air. A lot of them, most of them flew alright. I know the people who lost their lives paid a big price but, in hindsight everyone has an opinion.
There was an article about ladders, tools and debris being left inside various parts like the tail. I’m sure management put the workers under extreme deadline pressure, but this kind of negligence isn’t simply a small human mistake. It shows there’s a systematic flaw in their quality assurance capability.
> We can try hard and do everything right and still something can go wrong.
Except they didn't do that. They did many things wrong, and it sounds like what they tried hard to do was cut costs, rush to production, and get a favorable regulatory/certification outcome via the cheapest route possible.
