Cortisol will ruin you

If you let it get away from you, chronic stress will lead to chronic disease and chronic disease will lead to early death

What are the best ways to lower cortisol?

1) Don't follow extreme diets

Cutting out all carbohydrates or fasting for 36 hours is going to wreak havoc on your stress hormones.

Although you may experience short term weight loss, it's going to hurt you in the long-term.

A balanced macronutrient ratio is best to aim for.

2) Get out in nature

Idc if you live in Alaska or Guatemala, connecting with nature daily will do more for your health than any biohack ever will

Reconnect to your ancestral roots and make it a habit.

Grounding/earthing, forest bathing, hikes, ocean swims, etc

3) SLEEP

You CANNOT neglect your sleep. I don't care how tough or alpha you think you are. It will eventually catch up with you.

@holisticnicola just released a great guide on sleep. Go check that out now as I read it and agree with everything inside.

MAKE THIS A PRIORITY

4) Improve your testosterone

Anything that improves your testosterone levels will decrease cortisol.

Here's a start:
-lower body fat
-eliminate PUFAs
-resistance training
-no alcohol
-sleep 8+ hours
-nutrient dense diet
-do cool shit

The story is the thing itself. Greater than the sum of its parts. When a story works, theme arises interstitially like harmony, and you are convinced because of the story’s spiritual truth and internal logic.

“Theme” isn’t something you can break out and isolate, it’s a layer of meaning that depends on the whole. An attempted theme that fails to convince because of errors elsewhere is like a legal defense that fails on the facts.

“Oh my defense was great, I should have won—if only I had the right facts. Shut up about the facts of the case!”

My friend, you lost.

What these people see dimly is that some minor inconsistencies or logic errors can be forgiven. But not if they 1) affect the ‘argument’ of the story’s internal logic, and/or 2) build to a critical mass that the story no longer seems ‘bound’ to our own lives.

By bound to our lives, I mean along the specific lines the author chose to reflect reality. I’m not sure it would be possible to write a completely disembodied and unidentifiable story—although Samuel Beckett tried.

A thread on sarcasm—

I posted the other day that we should be careful with sarcasm and was surprised by how many people thought I was against banter, wittiness, comic relief, ribbing your friends, dark humor, etc.

That is not the case! My problem with sarcasm is that it's not actually funny.

I get the impression that these critics would call Stelios (Dienekes) "sarcastic."

But this joke is not at all sarcastic.

Terms need to be defined. This entry from the Cambridge Dictionary captures sarcasm the most clearly:

Sarcasm is perfectly suited to those junior high exchanges in which someone asks an obvious question and the clever person throws the obviousness back in the face of the person who asked:

"Are you going to Johnny’s party?"
"Nooo, I’m going to be a total loser and stay home."

Working is holy. Building is the root of all that’s Good. Creating something is your duty. It’s the modern paradigm of ‘work’ that ruins the enthusiasm of Man. Having to be somewhere from X-Y. Ugly building. & Spirit knows the work doesn’t matter.

THAT kind of work is torture

but there’s true laziness in society today.
People don’t want to move any muscles, don’t want to focus for longer than 2 minutes, don’t want to sweat and chip away to piece things together

Regardless if you ‘clock in’ you should have ordained desire to work/build/make something

Give up safe 9-5 for risky 9-9 and life gets more busy but way better. We know why this is

Farmers are, by default, closer to God than accountants

Alright let's do this

1 retweet = 1 harsh Psychology truth from a retired psychotherapist

Most men avoid therapy because most therapy approaches are not designed to help the male brain deal with pain or find solutions. That makes men believe therapy is worthless. And men skip things that feel worthless.

Most people use therapy the way humans are meant to connect with our 5 safety net systems, which we retained even up to 100 years ago:

Immediate family
Extended family (kin)
Family friend network (kith)
Local community
Religious community

All 5 are now broken.

Chronic pain is often correlated with low oxytocin.

Oxytocin is a hormone that (among other things) is released in large quantities inside our good relationships as we interact, feel loved, and embrace others.

Ongoing bad relationships afflict most chronic pain sufferers. 👀

Many people who take multiple psych meds to manage their symptoms would be better off fixing their relationships to help improve their brain chemistry.

Most mental health systems will never tell people this, because the system is mostly built to address symptoms.

I'm not kidding when I say the blue pill is preferable to the black pill.

Both aren't going to do anything when the time comes for it, but the blue pilled have a lot more fun and make a lot more great memories in the present.

Either convince yourself we can win or

convince yourself to go back to normie world.

Honestly. It will be better for you.

The blue pilled are going out, finding spouses, having kids, working but not too hard.

That is of course not going to last, but when it comes down to it, that's a better life than not living it because you're convinced the end is near and defeat is inevitable.

Those that can avoid the blackpill will be few but they'll be the ones to carry the blue pilled through the times.

The black pilled will just kill themselves.

You will stare down death one day. You will close your eyes, and leave your body, dissipating into the blackness. You will breathe your last breath, and be no more — at least, here.

What awaits you? I don’t know. Humble as I can say, despite all my knowledge in the occult…

I truly don’t know.

And yet, this is what makes it so beautiful.

What bravery, what gall, what courage you must muster, my fellow brother. To stare this undefeated, omnipotent, unavoidable conclusion right in the eye. To unwaver yourself before it’s grip.

What better poem could ever be written? What better song? What better act of faith to the Lord of all, that you should stand there in awe, in fear, and yet, see it through

I think about this too much, but it cannot be any other way. God hath stilled the finiteness of life within

The unspeakable drive, this illogical urge — to be.

Ancestors were right. Great men were right. Life is a stage, and what you do here echoes long after into infinities halls. Mortal men dream of being gods, when in fact, they already are. Only a degree of separation lies between

A belief, in themselves.

Dance your dance. Move to the rhythm you feel within. Chase beauty like a star racing across the sky, and when your time comes, face it head on, and God will carry you home.

That I can promise.

I spoke to some youths today.

I was shadowing at a farm incubator. An animal ethics class from the college had come to do a tour, and it became clear about 10 minutes in that they didn’t want to talk about composting, no-till, or cover crops.

They wanted to talk about death.

To be clear, this is not a productive farm.

It’s a market garden/commons. It’s a place where city folks learn how to build raised beds.

So when a freshman philosophy student raised her hand and asked how much pigs suffer when they’re killed, no one could answer but me.

“Most of the time they do, but not always.”

I was nervous. It was the first time I’d been in a position to share what I’d learned, in person, to a willing and attentive group.

They wanted to know every detail of husbandry, dispatch and butchery, so I shared.

They were keenly interested in the exact moment of death-

How does it look?

How does it sound?

What was it like, the first time I saw it happen?

And, truthfully, I was scared at first, but it really is no big deal.

At the urging of the professor, the conversation quickly turned metaphysical.

“What would you say,” he asked, “to the idea that it is wrong for animals to die for us, even if they live a happy life and die a painless death?”

Immigration is inherently a biological question, whether you like it or not.

Nations are basically large extended families. We know this because you can find out your ethnic background with a DNA test.

Not many people talk about the expected outcome of mass migration.

We're given a lot of platitudes about diversity and inclusion, but what does this really mean in concrete terms?

Should host nations, like the Swedes or French, expect to live in perpetual segregation from imported newcomers?

Or is the expectation that one day they will fully intermix with the newcomers, and differences will disappear?

This raises more questions. If the intention is for differences to eventually disappear, what was the point of diversity, which we are told to value so highly?

At that point, there will be no more diversity. Diversity can only be maintained through segregation.

And if the endpoint is thorough intermixing, that naturally will result in visibly altered nations.

Especially when the native stock portion of a country may scarcely be 30% by century's end, as in the UK.

In other contexts, such outcomes might be labeled genocide.

Obsession with youth, vigor and vitality are not signs of an innate sympathy for truth and beauty. It is a sign of arrested development and lack of imagination. When we are young we prefer sweet. As we age we prefer bitterness. There is no end to a child’s desire for sugar.

One of the reasons young people struggle so much with mental health nowadays is because there is a crisis of authority in society - no one actually tells them how to live well, with any suggestion of a normative or “right” way of doing things being deemed problematic

Instead they have nothing to guide them except deceptive inner monologues and colourful infographics made by San Francisco designers with no life experience telling them “you do you”, “it’s okay to be lazy”, “it’s okay to be selfish” on their instagram feeds

And so people end up making mistakes and suffering consequences that could have been prevented had they been given actual advice acquired over centuries of culture and tradition (Scruton’s “answers that have been discovered to enduring questions”)

But tradition alone is not enough - it needs to be embodied. We need teachers, counsellors, priests, etc. who are personally invested in our self-betterment and can tell us when we are doing things wrong from a place of love

Insisting that people will be happy if they just do whatever they feel like is not loving. It’s also a sentiment that has so obviously been exploited by capitalism since the 60s: a society that promotes unrestrained self-actualisation is the ideal consumer society

I'm always annoyed by the way moneyed conservatism and its bow tie wearing nerd sensibilities choose how to dole out patronage for the arts or entertainment.

They think it's not worthwhile because most of the time the output from their occasional investments in it suck-

But at the end of the day it always expresses itself, if it does so at all, in the form of religion focused storylines that seem to bear a cringe Hallmark/Lifetime flavor to them.

I'm not trying to countersignal Christians here, but when your religiosity takes all the oxygen from the room and there is none left for the story, don't be surprised when you've invested in a flop.

Fiction is inherently very right wing, but leisure class boomers don't invest.

Science Fiction and Fantasy generally has a long skew rightward, but the way Conservative culture works at the top of the ladder in America, I.E. who has the money, is just kind of corny and weird.

Not enough of these old dudes investing in that kind of thing.

Not all stories have to be heavily religious in order to prove their point, though religious stories have their place as well. Let Them Look West is an innately religious story and it's

I've been lifting weights for 8 years.

If I was starting over again, here's 7 things I'd do differently to gain as much muscle in half the time.

1. Track reps & weights.

For the first couple of years, I never tracked what I was lifting.

At the start you can just walk into the gym and put another 5-10 lbs on the bar every time.

You "learn" that you're stronger every time you set foot in the gym.

Eventually this stops.

You keep trying to lift more, but you find you can no longer make progress.

What you need now is to make smaller jumps.

You need to use fractional plates to make loads like 117.5 & add reps week to week.

You must track this or you'll forget what you need to do.

2. Do less volume.

The gym doesn't make you stronger, it creates a stimulus to get stronger.

Key difference.

You're breaking your muscles down in the gym with each hard set.

There's a point where more muscle damage doesn't help you & you'll struggle to be stronger next time.

Most people will see great results with 10 hard sets per muscle group per week, and exceeding this doesn't help.

More advanced and genetically gifted individuals may do better on more, but this is not most people.

In fact, many people will progress fine on less than this.