I wouldn't say I am particularly sensitive to most forms of noise, especially if they are the kind that come from nature, which I find pleasant (unless they are really loud). But my ability to think and have a conversation are essentially gone when there are a lot of people talking around me, such as in a bar or any crowded area. And I have no idea how anyone could enjoy a concert, because the volume of the music is so high that it literally shakes my body, such that my ears cannot even decipher what is being played.
Apparently that sensitivity to noise is one common trait of being autistic. Does that mean I have the auts? I don't know, I can't say I care that much about that label to begin with, because I don't hold a whole lot of value in being "normal". I hold the firm belief that what people call "normalcy" is nowadays an acceptable form of insanity. Perhaps in the past, regular people were more sane, because they were doing stuff in the real physical world, and their worldview was informed by a world driven by local interactions which they could keep track of. But now that everyone is plugged to their phone all of the time, the relationship to reality has been severely eroded. If people are not straight up insane, then at the very least they tend to be dead inside, which might be worse honestly.
The fear of being photographed is probably grounded in something deep that we suppress. I don't think it's a coincidence that children and primal people (indigenous tribes for example) do not like being photographed. There is something jarring about having to stand still, potentially smile for the "camera" (or an audience in your head), because it puts you outside of the flow of simply being in the moment. Even worse when a photo is taken of you without you knowing, it feels like the intimacy of your life is being taken away from you, in order to be broadcasted to a bunch of people you don't know, or at least in order to freeze time in place, which feels somewhat sacrilegious.
Trying to put all of this into "rational" terms is basically impossible I think, which is why I have yet to see the fear of being photographed put into a frame that makes it seem anything other than weird folk beliefs (or intense self-consciousness, which is definitely part of it, but obscures the primal fear of being photographed), but I think it springs from something much deeper than most modern beliefs, a felt sense that the miracle of the present situation is being dishonored and that something important is being taken away from human interactions.
I feel very lucky about the fact that I was born in the side of the good Guys, the West, particularly in Europe which is so much better than the USA and their awful president. They might be dumb but they're still the good guys overall because they're our ally when we need them, as opposed to the bad guys, such as Russia, China, or North Korea.
It's also really fortunate that all my ideas are correct and I was born intelligent, such that I only believe correct ideas. Why are they correct? It's because I believe in them, and I only believe in correct ideas.
And the best thing is that what I pointed out will always be true. I will be part of the good guys, marching onwards to progress and crushing the bad guys, solving all problems of our world as we go along with our correct ideas, and me being intelligent and writing to other intelligent people, life is Great. Thank God, or rather ... Science? that things are good and will be good forever.
I notice that places which explicitly advertise themselves as a place to smoke hookah are rare, instead they use the label "hookah bar" or as a "hookah tea room". I guess it's not acceptable for a place to simply be about smoking or anything which feels too depraved by itself, they need to add in the bar/tea part. Likewise, the places where you can have sex with a lovely Thai lady are "massage" salons. I wonder what's next? Cake and cocaine? Animal petting and heroine? Volunteering and meth?
It's interesting to compare how older people—I am in my mid 20s, and I am talking here of people in their 40s or 50s—relate to bullshit information. Having grown up with the internet, my expectation is that essentially anything I see and read about is bullshit, or at least self-serving and self-biased, so I mostly tend to retreat from news outlet and the outrage of social media. (I don't think it's a common stance, since younger people spend so much of their time scrolling social media)
Older people on the other hand seem to get really, really upset whenever they see some bullshit info around, almost as if it was an attack personally directed at them, like "they are trying to trick me into believing this but I'm smarter than this! I need to show everyone how dumb this is!" Thus they get nerdsniped into sharing the bullshit to the people around them, to show how stupid it is, but in doing so, they are giving it even more power and ability to spread itself.
The consequences for the information ecology are obviously disastrous: if bullshit is so easy to make, and spreads so well because of those who get so upset by it that they cannot help but share it, and because spending time on seeing through the bullshit is significantly higher than what it takes to produce it, it means that bullshit tends to dominate more and more of what we read about.
Which is why I prefer not to interact with the news and people who are heavily invested in it. They are being controlled by various sides of a narrative war, or even worse, by people who just enjoy spreading nonsense around. Better to use your own finite energy on living fully than to argue on the internet.
I can understand why people get upset about it, because it is outrageous the kind of ideas which go around and garner a lot of attention, but getting angry at it is not going to solve the problem.
I kind of flinch when I see someone who starts a sentence with "I talked with my therapist about ..." as if having one is the most normal thing in existence. I don't want to shame people from talking to a therapist, it sounds to me a lot better than doing nothing whatsoever about your problems, but still, there is something very odd to me about the dependence on a professional to the choices you make in life. I mean, relying on a doctor is one thing—and in many ways it is also tyrannous that we do not have access to local communities which can help us heal—but they don't help you make decisions at the end of the day, whereas a therapist does, and they are ultimately a professional working for the system!
I still cannot wrap my mind around how so many people can see the egregious problems in our society, and yet feel that they can trust their therapist. What kind of backwards double standard is that? Everything in our world is driven by profits and soulless work, but if you give an automaton a mouth, a pair of glasses and a chair you can sit on to talk about your problems, then suddenly that part of the system is fine?
"Self Development" was seen as a disease in Tibet. In ancient texts, they called it "getting stuck in the mirror."
If someone kept asking "Why am I like this? What's wrong with me?", they were pulled away from practice. Because attention turned inward without an outlet becomes greed. You're no longer searching for a path—you're collecting broken pieces of yourself.
In the West, they call it mindfulness. But Tibetans believed: the more you explain, the less you change. The more precisely you describe where it hurts, the easier it is not to act. Because now you have a reason.
From this tweet
"Introspection" can be a major trap because it's a way for the ego to feel safe and believe that it is changing itself. One of the dangers of writing for yourself is that you feel like you are becoming more honest with yourself, and gaining "clarity", but really all you are doing is navel-gazing without doing the difficult things, which ironically includes doing nothing and resting, which can be particularly challenging in a world that rewards perpetual busy-ness.
Sometimes I think it's the case. I have a lengthy philosophy I wish to expand on, most of which comes from Darren Allen's work so as a result I do not consider it original in any stretch of the imagination, and it combines topics such as: (not an exhaustive list) 1) self-deception, individual and collective 2) the ineffable ground of Reality and how the self misses it 3) the perpetual motion machine of distraction 4) the narrative war 5) how self tries to approach its problems and constantly fails 6) the God and myths of our world (biggest one by far, but I can't share too much in a quick exerpt) and 7) how society relies on an expanding pool of energy and labor, and how those are becoming more and more scarce in relationship to our growth, which leads to societal collapse, something which happened to all past civilizations.
But it feels like collapse is happening so quickly that it's almost pointless to write about it? That by the time I would be done, which would take me at least 3 years starting from when I post this, people would be looking around and be overwhelmed with the evidence, such that I would be talking about water to people whose house just got flooded, metaphorically and literally. But I still feel the need to write it out fully because first of all, what else would I be doing? it's burning in my chest and my mind, and secondly, saying the obvious when it's horrifying can be one of the most important things to do, because there is no limit to how much denial the self can engage in.
There is no (worldly) solution, society will definitely collapse, and what we need are not futile plans or desperate appeals to "hope", but instead to face it, all of it, and only then can the alienated self and the alienating world it brings about can step away and give rise to something better.
When people believe that the system will somehow become more humane, sustainable and kind, I get the same impression I have listening to a woman telling me that her abusive alcoholic boyfriend will one day become loving and sweet if she believes enough in him, because love can change everyone. The difference is that individuals can genuinely change, though often only after a lot of suffering and consciously metabolizing it, whereas the technological system, due to its size and depth of influence, (it reaches down even to our minds) has a massive amount of momentum, rigidity and escalating demand, which means it is actually far more constrained than an individual in how it can operate and grow.
The system needs more and more energy, it needs to coordinate hundreds of millions of people, it needs to funnel our time and work to build itself further, and it needs to prevent people from acting against it. These are heavy constraints, which is why historically the need to take care of human needs has always been very low on its list of priorities. Growth is more important than love or consciousness from the point of view of the system, which is why the latter are useless at best, and hindrances most of the time.
I don't see the value in being optimistic that such a behemoth could change. The way I see it, the foundations are broken, and the higher we build our tower, the worse the effects are, resulting in societal collapse, not as instant as the world would imply, but quick enough to be quite traumatic and leading to a lot of social disruption, potentially a lot of death.
I also think it's a lot more practical to prepare ourselves for the collapse which is already happening and can only get worse from now on. Instead of praying for an easy life, we could prepare ourselves to meet difficulties, and pray for the ability to live graciously and be grateful for what we still have now.
Farmers have been treated like utter dirt (pun intended), and anecdotally, there have been farmer revolts happening in my country laterly, such that I wonder how they will be treated in the decades to come during societal collapse. Will people turn to them like heroes, or will the state try to force them to feed the population (starting with the more privileged people of course), creating even more tension and internal conflict?
It's hard to say how desperate governments act in times of real difficulty, but one thing is sure, we won't make it past the coming hard times without the farmers, because obviously food has to come from somewhere, as much as our import-driven world makes us forget it. 1
The 'great replacement' conspiracy theory has more validity to it when you google things like "white woman and her family", or "white woman and her husband", and you see how many images depict interracial couples or families (sometimes the man and the woman are both white, but they have a black kid for some reason???) even though the prevalence of such couples is significantly lower in the West than what is depicted. 2
Maybe you could argue that the right-wing themselves flooded the internet with those images to have false evidence for their crazy theory, and honestly it is possible with the current technologies considering how easy it is to generate a massive amount of pictures, but the theory cannot be dismissed as easily when you look around at the distribution of people in schools.
I think that the great replacement is not caused by some "agenda" by the elites, I think it's a combination of factors in 2 dimension: 1) economical, which is to say that immigrants provide cheap labor, increase the demand for real estate which allows it to increase in prices as the years go by 3, and maintain the demand for the other things in our economy. And 2) basic demographics, the way in which Muslims and black people tend to far more children than Westerners, and tend to be more proud of their culture than them too, because of all the historical shame related to colonialism and racism in the West.
But no matter what explanation you attribute to the phenomenon, in practice the consequence is the same: more and more immigrants, white people feeling like minorities in their own country, a degradation of social trust and cohesion, and more and more internal conflicts.
People like to blame this on politics, but ultimately immigration results from the technological system, which displaces people so as to replace expensive labor with cheaper labor, has no need for cultural cohesion and stability, because they get in the way of technological progress and market efficiency, and always needs to uproot financial stability in order to force people to constantly work for the system.
If you feel the need to call me a bigoted white racist, then just so you know, I am the child of immigrant parents, and would prefer if Europeans respected their own culture and their own country, and only allowed immigrants who cared about the country they migrated to, and wished to integrate themselves into it rather than try to build parallel societies and complain about the very same country they happen to live in. 4
I think Da has said before that he sees the 'system' as 'emergent' from the functions of many egos unconsciously acting in egoic ways. In other words, the Global Cabal may be doing this or that, but ultimately it is the system as an unconscious, group effort that does the nasty.
He has also acknowledge that 'people do meet in rooms' and that there are bad actors around the shop, but these aren't necessarily the problem. The lockdowns, for instance, weren't necessarily the coordinated plot of a minority (though there were organisations that did push them), but the natural impulse of many different egoic systems and the domesticated minds that comprise them.
In other words, if you chopped off one head, the hydra would just grow two back.
From a comment on Darren Allen's comment section in October 2025 5
This is my view of conspiracies as well, as I pointed out in a piece about the limitations of conspiratorial thinking. There is truth to conspiracy theories, but ultimately the system is an aggregate of egoic intentions, ways of living, and perception. We find not just opportunism, as in the case of Covid, and very likely coordination amongst the most powerful people, but ultimately the system is much more than any of those, and those who cannot admit to the reality of systemic problems are too busy pointing the finger at others to look at the way that their self is part of this mess too.
The main source is unconsciousness, not malevolence, even if there is genuine evil, even if the "baddies" do get together to screw us over. But the root of our problems can be better seen by thinking of the structural demands that ego has to maintain its castle of illusions, which prompts it to pursue those, which is why technological progress dominates everything, which is why death and pain are removed from our lives at all costs, which is why we no longer interact directly with Reality but have to do so through the screen, of our computers or the screens of the institutions that mediate our lives, and so on.
Ego cannot bear to be in Reality, which is why it gets together with other egos to build a prison from which they can shield themselves from Reality, even if it implies the subjugation of our souls to some insane God, even if it requires the destruction of nature, and even if the whole thing is doomed to collapse in the coming decades. Nothing is scarier than Reality to the ego.
1 Some people are so out of touch with the basic ecological realities of food supply that they are genuinely confused as to why countrysides exist. They think that they exist because rural people are those backwards close-mind people who don't want to interact with strangers, and there is some truth to that, but it's obvious that all of social complexity can only be maintained with a foundation of farming activities, which require plenty of open space to grow crops and raise animals. And no, vertical farms won't make this redundant, because more complex technology increases the need for energy input, which will be getting more and more scarce as our society declines, due to the declining energy returns of fossil fuels.
2 Search "black woman and her family" and you don't find as many examples of the opposite though. Go figure.
3 I don't have any figures to back this up, but I suspect that most of the "economy" in the West is in a form similar to real estate: assets that are said to "increase" in value as the years go by, to hide the fact that the real economy is more and more vacuous.
4 The number of Muslims and black people I have encountered at school (and some at work) who fawned over American "culture" but didn't care at all about European culture, even though they themselves were living in Europe, was quite astounding.
5 Which is now deleted. Basically, Darren Allen invites his readers to ask him questions once in a while, and deletes those threads, I guess because the answer isn't very valuable once it has been given.
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2026-02-20