The reason why you’re not seeing any new or further growth as a content creator is that you’re exclusively or only talking to your raving fans or your audience who are already extremely devoted to you. If you want to witness real growth beyond what you’ve already reached, you are supposed to start talking to the whole world in order to attract people who wouldn’t accept your mediocre content or work. You cannot bring along new people to your audience unless you do something that impresses those people enough to consider frequently paying you any kind of attention. What your current audience digs anyway because they love anything from you wouldn’t work on anyone other than your current loyal audience. Expand yourself. Grow up. Talk to people who don’t already know you and see how that works for you. A lot of creators fall into this trap and start complaining and whining that the algorithm or the system is biased against them or is no longer in favor of the type of content they produce. Loyal fans will swallow anything you give them, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t taking it easy, you are going hard enough, or you didn’t become really too lazy to keep being not boring enough to attract people who only want stuff that is really interesting or that is worth spending their precious time on.

If you want the whole world to listen to you, you gotta start talking to the whole world, not just your extremely devoted fan base that digs or accepts anything boring you throw at them.

It’s not about what you’ll enjoy doing. When you ask yourself what do I want to do with my life. What’s my life purpose. Don’t give answers that revolve around what you will enjoy doing. This is a scam spread by people who have no idea what they’re talking about, but just want to look inspiring and grab the attention of their audience one way or the other. This is not to be confused with follow your passion. Because your passion is not necessarily something you enjoy or love doing. Understand this: Life is about doing what you figured out that it would be better if you did it, not just what if you did, you’ll feel good along the way because you love the journey. Focus on the outcome, even if the way to getting it sucks. This isn’t about enjoying the journey. This is about the destination that you can reach. Nothing breeds apathy and indifference more than believing that you should pick something that you enjoy doing and settle for it because this is what life’s all about. No it’s not. Life is about doing great things that you discover that they are worth pursuing and working hard for, even if the journey to get to them is pure torture. Now start experiencing that spiritual feeling that you’ll get when you realize that you are allowed to fix your life and make it better, for nothing restricts you from that more than a firm belief that you should enjoy yourself while trying to do something of value in this world.

I make no claims that what I say works. Nor do I make the claim that if something works, it will do so universally. What I try to do is provide you with information or pieces of advice. You being exposed to such content does not necessarily mean your life will change in any positive way. I just generate opinions about stuff and deliver them to you. I do not claim any of what I say to be factual, even if 100% of it turned out to be so someday. You pick what you like, try it for yourself, and if it works for you, then by all means, what are you waiting for? Implement it in your life. But it will be your responsibility now. You did this to yourself. I am not responsible for the consequences. “I take no responsibility at all.” – Donald Trump
I am not trying to convince you that I’m right. I do not present evidence. I do not do scientific studies. I do not want hard evidence that what I say is right. I don’t want it to be right. I just want to expose you to such stuff. You decide on your own if that stuff you’ve been exposed to is terrific or pure useless garbage. I do not convince others that anything is right. I present stuff that either I discovered or others came up with to you because I believe it might provide you with a certain effect that I’m hoping you’re qualified to experience when exposed to such stuff. I’m not trying to manipulate you, suck money out of you, bullshit you, trick you, or spam you with pointless toxic positivity. I’m just trying to help you. Please be an adult and stop saying shit like this doesn’t work. I told you so and so will change your life but nothing happened. This is not my fault. I’m not promising you anything. Not even the chance to be entertained by going through my content. I could be boring as fuck. I’m not perfect. Not even remotely. I’m not typical. And I’m not going to give up just because I’m not the polished college professor you expect me to be. I just decided to help you instead of giving up on life. I’m not talking to you from an ivory tower. I’m stuck in the same sewage system that you are right now, only that I decided to do something about it. I’m not the guy who made it and is standing from a high ground telling you how to live your life, how I made it, or how to succeed in your life just as I did, because it isn’t that I made it and now I turned back and decided to help you by giving you the formula of success after I’ve learnt it through experience or practice. A ton of what I firmly believe to be true is theoretical and based on pure thought experiments. This is my own philosophy of success. Not the formula of how I succeeded. I may be struggling way more than you could ever struggle in your life. I may have failed more than you could possibly ever fail in your entire lifetime even if you were immortal. I am not better than you in any way. I am below average in everything. Success requires both IQ and hard work. I am trying to bypass the IQ part through hard ass work. I outwork everybody, not because I’m better than anybody, but because this is the only way I could avoid falling behind almost all average people in the developed world. I’m not smarter than you. I just decided to figure out stuff that could help some people overcome the obstacles holding them back from reaching their full potential. I may have mistaken in what I thought to be true, helpful, or beneficial, but this is my futile pathetic attempt to help other people in whatever I can help them with in their lives. The question is, why haven’t you tried to provide them with your own philosophy that’s presumably better than mine? Why haven’t you tried to enlighten us with your own version of self-help and personal development material? You just say I suck, without presenting me with something better I can learn from you and modify my work around it. That’s why I am not embarrassed, and I’m not ashamed of my mistakes. Because at least I’m trying. You just took the quick and easy path of being a consumer who just criticizes any attempt to help others without making anything better yourself. If you did however, then good for you. I’m not gonna stop just because you are better than me. I’m going to keep trying and failing, because I will not sit down and do nothing just because you’re better than me, or you think the overwhelming majority of humanity is better or smarter than me.

Even if UBI is 5 thousand dollars a month for example, still the minimum wage being a living wage on its own without being added to any other source of income would make your job significantly add to your income enough to motivate you to do it not out of survival necessity.

If UBI covers the basic costs of living there would be no reason to exert the same effort you were forced to in the past out of survival necessity only to just earn an extra 600 bucks to your monthly income. This would mean that you are stuck with UBI as your maximum, and you’ll always be too poor to do what you really want aside from just buying the minimum stuff that UBI gives you the chance to afford.

It won’t be worth it to work for a job with the current low minimum wage, with or without UBI. What I’m trying to show you here is that it would be even more depressing to accept any of these same jobs with the same minimum wage you earn from them that is still below a decent acceptable living wage. It’s not a matter of being in shortage of money here. It’s a matter of not being able to expand your income or earn any more money except by working all the time just to earn a few extra pennies that comprise only about fifth of your current income or expenses instead of 100 percent of your current income or expenses. It’s about why bother working all this just to earn an extra 700 bucks over what I already get from UBI when I can just chill and get 90 percent of my income without exerting any effort and while owning my own time and retaining my sense of free will. I’ll get by with less. We don’t want that to happen. We want people to get something out of any job they apply for right now other than their mere survival expenses, because when these expenses get covered through UBI, they would still find a strong motivating reason to get a job. Not everyone who gets a job wants it because it’s fulfilling for them. The overwhelming majority of people are employees because it is the only way they can make money. If we do not give them enough money through whatever job they happened to have or be stuck with, they would find no reason to keep doing this job. In general, people don’t like to work at all, even if they love that kind of work and would happily do it for free. Normal people just want to chill. We shouldn’t deny them that luxury. We would only make it so that it becomes something like if you want to just chill 24/7, you can. But if you’re ambitious, there’s a way to become rich enough to enjoy what you want to do in life that’s expensive or doesn’t come for free, and that is through getting a job. We cannot expect everyone to be able to start their own business, even if they were so sincere about their desire to become rich. We have to provide them with alternate pathways to becoming rich enough to enjoy themselves, and live their lives to the fullest all they want, the way they want to, and these pathways should include the option of reaching so through getting a job. If jobs don’t give us anything that makes it doesn’t sound so appealing to happily live at the mediocre level a UBI can guarantee us, then a lot of people wouldn’t want to work any job they don’t extremely love and believe in, and it is rare for the majority of people to find a job that they really love, believe in, and would happily enjoy doing even for free, which means that most people would not accept jobs that the economy needs or depends on, at least in terms of production and maintenance of the supply chain. If we make such essential and even non-essential jobs worth their while, or worth the effort the employees put into them, by making these jobs pay them well or highly enough, then they won’t hesitate to take them, because getting a job with such a high salary would provide them with a pathway to lead a better life in terms of financial prosperity. That would make it so that UBI does not become a reason for people to lie on the beach and smoke weed all day long.

The problem is with being out of options in case you wanted to raise your financial standard of living. Any job that you’d get to increase your income would make no difference with or without UBI, if the minimum wage is not a living wage on its own without adding UBI to it.

You can’t become a multi millionaire through any kind of job in the current system, except if you’re a CEO…etc. I’m not trying to say that a high UBI is bad or would deter people from the desire to want to make more money. I am saying that both UBI and raising the minimum wage to a living wage should be implemented.

If no job available to you meets the minimum amount of money that would make a difference in your life, and you got the survival expenses covered by UBI, then why get a job in this case? How many people have a passion they are willing to do even for free?

But if the minimum wage isolated is a living wage, it would still be rewarding and worth it enough for the average working class employee to bother getting a job to increase their income under UBI.

And we want to encourage the average employee to keep working and being productive without being abused to keep the supply chain abundant.

Yes, we can always organize worker strikes and demand a bigger salary for all the employees in a given company, but what happens when they tell us all to leave? That is the problem here. They don’t care about us. We’re disposable to them. Unless the government forces them to pay more, we will always be in the weaker negotiating position. We simply don’t have any leverage to negotiate with.

Anyone who is looking for a job is desperate to get one. Either you really want the job or you’d just go have fun. If you want the job then you’re desperate. If you’re not desperate then why bother doing the same things every day that you don’t believe in or care about, perhaps even hate, if you’re not desperate?

Since you are not in the strong negotiating position here then you’d have to accept the low salary job whether you like it or not because there’s no way for you to add something to your UBI income except that. So they will still be in control of your decision making process, and free will would still be an illusion in your case.

In this case, if you have no choice but to get a job to increase your income above the level of what UBI provides you with on a regular basis, it would be great if this extra stream of income coming from your job adds a substantial amount of money to your monthly income.

Hence making the minimum wage being a living wage not entirely a useless or redundant proposal, if you’re pro the working class doing well financially.

Still if you’re serious about doing what you love, you gotta provide the adult part of your brain that seeks comfort and stability with a reason to shut up and stop calling you irresponsible for pursuing what you love.

And this will happen easier if you earn enough money from doing what you love instead of sacrificing financial well-being for doing what you love or believe in.

We shouldn’t rely on the kindness of any random non governmental entity to be the only possible option for you to lead a decent life.

The minimum salary under the current system won’t remain being motivating enough for desperate people to accept any job anyway because they have no choice. In the past they did it because there was no alternative route to making money available to them.

But with UBI being that high, they’d rather remain that poor (with what UBI provides them being their maximum income) but free and getting by with UBI alone instead of doing a job they hate that makes no contribution to their income that is big enough to alleviate their financial struggles.

If you can afford food under UBI but not a Spotify subscription for example, you will have aspirations that would make you want to work to be able to afford to reach or pay for them someday.

If no job makes that possible, you’d be stuck – like capped – at the UBI level of financial security without being able to raise your financial status or level above that which the decent UBI would grant you.

You will get the 2k+ UBI but it would be impossible for you to earn like 500 extra bucks except by working 40+ hours a week. Why would anyone do that?

So they’d rather suck it up and remain poor, instead of getting a job, because the amount of effort they exert all month long just accounts for like one fifth of their monthly income, not 100 percent of their monthly income, which means it wouldn’t be motivating enough for them to go through all the struggle of a daily job they don’t necessarily love, or simply not worth the effort, and thus they’d be stuck for good at the poverty level that the UBI government checks guarantee they won’t fall under.

This is my message to people who get discouraged to the extent of attempting to entirely quit and give up, even when they are successful, and their fans are totally behind them through thick and thin, because of the effect of negative commentary and criticism they get whenever they produce any content.
Just get started. Do you know how much we are supposed to not listen to any negative feedback? The kind of nonconstructive criticism that does nothing but discourage us? I had an entire chapter in the Genius Human book 1 that was dedicated to the impossibility of reaching any kind of success if you are smart enough without not giving a damn about what anybody else thinks. You’ve got to communicate with yourself. Extract the words and ideas from yourself, without passing them through other people’s approval first, and put them out in the world, without expecting that people wouldn’t judge you or give you negative feedback or negative commentary because of them. Do not be afraid of the backlash. There are conflicts that occur in our minds on an unconscious level, and some of these conflicts involve tendencies to play it safe, to pander, to not cause trouble to ourselves, to not expose ourselves to danger, to stay comfortable, to not dare, to not try risky stuff. Just because it is coming from our unconscious mind and it feels good or right doesn’t mean that it is the right choice. You’ve got to sit down and reason with yourself, and understand the principles upon which you should adhere to or follow through thick and thin. There is always a strong reason not to do new stuff. There is always a very convincing reason for staying in the comfort zone. Do not fight this battle. Just figure out that you are supposed to do certain stuff and go do them without asking for reasons why you should be doing them every time you attempt to do them. The thinking mode is different from the executive mode. That is why we advocate for planning before acting, executing, or putting any piece of advice into practice. If you stop to think about what is the best thing that you should aim for, address, or do at the moment, you’re triggering the thinking mode. If you enter the thinking mode, it will be very difficult for you to get back into action or execution mode, that is, the doing mode. It is like when you are rudely awakened during sleep by some noise and it becomes so hard to fall back to sleep although you are still tired and you feel sleepy. Do not expect to be motivated by reasons from the start. Any amount of reasons that you motivate yourself with could be easily countered by another set of reasons as to why you shouldn’t exert any kind of effort in that direction or why you should not do this thing at all in the first place. Discover what you’re supposed to do while you’re in a state of planning and thinking, write it down, then do them any time when you can without reasoning, or without questioning whether or not these are the things that you should be doing at the moment, or whether or not this is the best use of your current time possible. When working it has to be like you’re running without stopping or pausing for a second, not even to figure out what you should work on next, because once you’ve started there should be no stopping you then, or else your mind would become reluctant to give you this unstoppable energy or activation energy that is enough to complete anything you aspire to finish today, and also because you do not want to receive reward without finishing the task first, or else the reward will be associated with exerting effort pointlessly until fatigued, or without necessarily making significant progress, instead of being received or (the sense of reward being) released into your brain because of finishing something great. You want to train yourself to keep working on what you’ve predetermined to be worth working on until this thing or the task at hand is finished and is completed beyond perfection. You want to become results oriented instead of fatigue oriented. You want to become a person concerned with being productive, with reaching amazing outcomes, getting tasks done, and accomplishing great results every day, not with exerting effort until you’re exhausted, and not with working on whatever task or goal they randomly or arbitrarily pick or on anything they dread or hate until fatigued, then they jump to have fun now because they have no choice, because being tired justifies taking the rest of the day off. Just do it, because you’ve already reached the conclusion in the past that you should be doing this thing now, even if you cannot recall any of the convincing arguments that you were motivated to do this thing because of in the past at the time of execution. Don’t try to reason with yourself at the time of execution. You will always fail, or will always come up with a better idea until you run out of energy having generated countless ideas while having executed none of them. Not to mention summarizing why your life sucks and why it is hopeless and pointless to try to fix anything or make anything better. Don’t talk with yourself. Work like a slave, bot, or soldier from the start that has no free will or authority to say no to doing what they were ordered to do today. Then when you’re done, you can start thinking all you want, and you can start fighting with yourself and telling yourself how much of a joke of a human being you really are. But do this in the down time. While watching a movie or something. Not at the time when you would be unwise to waste any of your energy on thinking instead of doing. Don’t give up because of an inner struggle or an inner conflict. And don’t give up because of the backlash you get from society. Regardless of how amazing your work is, there will always be trash people who would make fun of you and your work. Don’t worry about it, they are always out there. And they make a living out of making fun of great people and amazing stuff. Do not let that discourage you, in the slightest. At least you got a platform that you can express through it what you think about what pisses you off. It sucks so hard to want to say extraordinary stuff without being able to make your words reach anyone, like when your channel is too small. It’s like giving a great speech to an empty room. Please do not underestimate the importance of being able to speak your mind to a huge audience like the one you’ve got already.

Why do you feel pathetic all the time when you’re starting out as a new YouTuber or when you’re at the early stages of building your personal brand?

When you look at your age and realize that almost all people by your age have accomplished something that got them at a comfortable place or stage of their careers where they are not under scrutiny or when their competence isn’t still questioned, or whether or not they got what it takes is yet to be determined, you feel you’re lesser than what you’re supposed to be. It’s okay if you’re still starting out if you’re still 22 years old or something. But over thirty. That puts a ton of pressure upon you, to the extent that it makes you consider something like quitting or start contemplating why you don’t have what it takes to succeed in building and retaining a huge following. Patience is key, but is patience really recommended in your case? Or should you try to bypass this conventional wisdom of being patient by going a little faster as in you‘re in emergency mode right now? Could you rely on your inner fire that keeps you going long enough or should you be not sure whether this kind of fire is going to last long enough until you get there? You’re old. Not elderly in a sense that you should give up, retire, and chill. But too old to take too long to have it figured out. You can’t take a decade until you accomplish what others took a decade to accomplish when they started in their early twenties. At least this is how your mind treats this whole situation of yours right now. I’m not saying that this is the logical course of action that you should take at the moment. All I’m trying to tell you here is that this is why you feel you’re pathetic, like you’re lying to yourself. Why you feel afraid almost to the point of panic to put yourself out there and stuff. Notice that in your thirties your inhibition is not like it was back in your twenties. These new inhibitory capabilities need to prove their existence to you by exercising themselves on anything uncertain you delve into. When you were still like 22, this was considered to be fun because of the thrill of the chase and uncertainty. In your thirties and beyond this feels like you’re shutting down the entire faculties of reason and thinking logically within you in order to do what you love, and hence the excessive guilt that you have no explanation for right now. These new logical bosses up there are not gonna settle for some pep talk you give them on not giving up and perseverance until you get there. These guys need to confront or come across hard evidence of you not fooling with them around, not just having fun and enjoying the moment or the journey to their own detriment, in order for them to grant you permission to move forward. This means that the entirety of what would work on kids in their early twenties won’t necessarily work in your case, if you’re thirty plus years old. You have to approach this from a sense of superiority. Like you’re not gonna take the normal long path with all the slow learning curve that a newbie kid would take to reach the same results. You gotta go out there, and show them kids who’s boss. In my books I called that a special situation, not a bad situation, because here you’re not going to follow the normal rules that get you going in your normal days. This is special as in the way you approach stuff will be exceptional. The laws that you’ll follow (not talking about laws imposed by the government here at all). How you will talk to yourself. How you will motivate yourself. Even if I really have no solution for you here, at least I want you to know that your sense of inferiority or you feeling pathetic right now is not because of your incompetence. It’s because of your age. Don’t let that deter you from the life that you truly want. I’m not saying that it is too late for someone like you. I’m just telling you that your mind might be telling you it’s too late because you’re too old for not having a stable predictable life right now. All I want you to do here is to not listen to your mind right now. Which is something that contradicts with what I almost always advise you to do. I always tell you to listen to what your deep places are trying to make you aware of. Listening to your mind and following it might work always in your favor in case of normal situations, but not always in case of special situations.

The more this country strayed away from liberalism and the American constitution – not Christianity – the more authoritarian and regressive it has become.

The real reasons behind the rise of suffering that we’re going through as a nation right now are the absence of solutions that would lift the majority of people out of poverty, and the appearance of philosophies that just exploit those unmet societal issues in order to fulfill their agendas that aim primarily at bringing an end to Western civilization, prosperity, development, advancement, and values.

Notice that the only reason that religious fundamentalists try to not restrict our freedoms is because they cannot maintain a significant base of worshipers without appearing slightly moderate in their worldviews.

No non-secular Christian figure could be believed or trusted to be the last man standing as a guardian of our true freedom and human rights.

They just try to swallow secular ideas in order to not be deemed as too obsolete to be bothered with after it became clear what society looks like if religion is given free reign on every aspect of our lives.

No man has a moral authority over another. Except the invisible Man in the sky. This is the best case scenario of how free you can be under religious control.

No true freedom could be expected to be exercised by anyone as long as they are forced to follow God’s orders, whether they agree to what God says or not. They may claim that it’s equally oppressive to follow the rules and laws of the government instead of one’s own free will. What they don’t realize is that the rules and laws of the government are subject to change to match what is best for us all as a society, whereas God’s rules and laws are not that malleable. God’s rules and laws are expected to be timeless, and as a result should not be questioned, trapping us in God’s presumed superior wisdom for all time, because after all, who do we think we are to challenge god’s authority, orders, rules, laws, or commandments. That’s why it doesn’t make sense when you find that conservatives want a smaller government, to maximize freedom. They don’t actually want a smaller government over one’s own freewill or life. They want the secular or human made government to be smaller, in order for it to not be big enough to compete with the actual big government that they all happily subscribe to, that is of God. And it is not easy upon further inspection to realize that God’s government is in fact not small at all in any way. It is as large as any possible government could get. It is just not secular. In other words, it’s okay for them to submit to a humongous government, as long as it is good, according to their worldview. And what government could be better than the divine infallible government of God. These people don’t aspire for a small government. They just want their colossal divine government of God to not be undermined or opposed by a non-divinely inspired Government, the one that we call secular.

Isn’t substituting the secular government by God’s government as the source of how we should act and think also restrictive to our freedom and independence from being controlled by a higher force for our own good whether we like it or not? And if it’s okay in case of God because God knows best, then will it be okay if the government turned out to be just as infallible (at least as far as the masses believe or have faith in the government) as God? That is, is it okay to sacrifice our free will in case the government were – hypothetically speaking – all-knowing? It’s easy to just dismiss any incredible new law or policy propelled by the left wing by them (the right wing or conservatives) calling it just an expansion of government, but we conservatives want a smaller government, so this should be enough as the grounds upon which we oppose this new incredible left wing law or policy that is aimed at making our lives or the lives of working people substantially better. And if that isn’t enough to do the trick we should just add the word socialism to it and then it will feel so horrible to our fellow conservative voters. They don’t want a smaller government. They just resort to this trick to dismiss or oppose any new law or policy, except when this new law or policy is not contradicting with their conservative political stances on issues.

Is it okay to give up our freedom if God was the ultimate government that is ordering us around? Like in, submit to a celestial dictatorship just because God is better than the rest of us?

Do you actually think that submitting to the authority of God means we are still responsible accountable grown-ups who are self-imposing our own morality upon ourselves freely without any external pressure? Without that making us do anything not because we’re responsible for our actions and in control of our lives freely determining what’s good for ourselves, but because we have no choice? This is what leads to maximizing degeneracy that stems from not caring about what’s good for us, but just having fun while dodging the wrath of authority like teenage kids.

Yes, I never said Christianity is the worst religion out there. And I certainly don’t think that all major religions are equally bad or evil.

But to think that individualism originated from religion, is defended by religion, or is an inevitable result of becoming a Christian, is to attribute something that came from liberalism to the doctrines created by men and women of the first century. The kind of sacrifice that is found in and cherished by religion stems from the proposition that you as an individual don’t matter, as long as the collective – which is humanity in this case – is saved. God doesn’t abolish collectivism in favor of individualism and working on oneself.

He teaches that it is moral to sacrifice even one’s own child, to save the world. Kinda like Thanos did in the avengers Endgame, by sacrificing half of the living beings in order to provide the remaining half with a bigger chance of survival and prosperity. But it goes unnoticed when God did it, because the sacrificed entity is just his own son, which still counts as one. And that is just one out of countless examples where religion deems it okay to sacrifice people for the good of other people.

The concept of self-sacrifice contradicts with individualism.

If the Bible emphasizes that it’s good to sacrifice your own happiness and well-being for the good of the collective, then that is anti-individualism, and that is not liberal.

You believe in greater purpose that we should struggle to fulfill or reach even if it makes us not so happy along the way? That’s okay. But that is still not individualism. The point is we do not learn individualism from religion, and that religion never teaches individualism.

Still, isn’t sacrifice for the sake of the collective contradictory with individualism?

Struggling for your own good as in cases of delayed gratification isn’t the kind of sacrifice that contradicts with individualism. It is in the absence of even that kind of delayed gratification that we start questioning whether or not this sacrifice you made was for your own good at all, now, later, or ever. That’s just training and practice. Sacrifice is when there’s nothing in it for you. Here you became better through this struggle, and thus though unpleasant, still doesn’t count as a form of absolute sacrifice. Right?

In sacrifice there is expected to be a lose win situation. The earlier examples of pushing through that makes you better through struggle and perseverance despite the absence of receiving what you want at present for long described above is a win win situation, from a certain indirect point of view, and thus doesn’t count as absolute sacrifice of yourself for the good of other people or society at large.

The bottom line is the kind of absolute sacrifice celebrated by religion including Christianity cannot lead to something good for you, at least not necessarily in the first (current) life. Which means it contradicts with individualistic stand points or perspectives of how we should approach maximizing our freedom, prosperity, development, advancement, well-being, and happiness in this world.

Also working on yourself to become better and fix your life and problems without outside help is self-reliance, which cannot always be helpful in every case and situation that all people without exception can go through.

Part of me mixing politics with self-help is because it’s not always your fault. According to conservatives and centrists, if things aren’t working so well for you then it’s your fault. You’re of insufficient moral character.

Whenever we propose the government should figure something out to help those who are failing despite trying it is readily dismissed carelessly by the right wing as socialism. As if not succeeding under any current bad system is your fault only.

Going through short-term pain in order to reach long-term pleasure is not what I’m against here at all. This is a kind of sacrifice that I have no problem with, and I do it all the time, despite being an atheist.

Yes, struggle is good, but how is struggling for the greater good of the collective at the expense of your own happiness, well-being, and good still individualistic or not contradictory with individualism?

When we speak about sacrificing your happiness, well-being, and what’s good for you, for the sake of what’s good for the collective, that is some kind of sacrifice that contradicts with the concept of individualism that conservatives sometimes advocate for and claim that religion calls for it despite religion being a source of material that calls for the abolishment of individualism just as the far left anti-liberal ideologies do, perhaps for different reasons or purposes.

I am happy that conservatives sometimes advocate for and are pro individualism and personal liberty. How liberalism, or individualism is inevitably extracted, concluded, or understood from Christianity remains a mystery to me.

It’s fascinating that liberalism is being defended by right wing conservatives, who think that they’re doing so because of what Jesus taught them, not because their continued traditionalism is contingent upon defending the constitution that gives them the right to hold their illiberal religious beliefs without being subjected to rational criticism.

I really find it weird when someone says freedom, liberalism, or individualism is one of the cornerstones of Judaeo-Christian values.

To think that if we deploy more reason in our lives, we’ll end up worse than if we don’t, just because our newfound wisdom wasn’t approved by the creator of the universe is assuming that the reasons for the current issues we’re suffering from at the moment is due to too much thinking for ourselves–that is what I’m against.

I’m against the Bible being the exclusive source of wisdom and solutions to our problems that beyond which we shouldn’t even try to explore.

Yes the Bible may contain some great stuff, but we’re not better off submitting our minds and lives to God’s infinite wisdom to the extent of demonizing anything that has no equal or basis in scripture, or abandoning following our own reason in favor of following God’s trusted advice or infallible reason and wisdom.

Isn’t individualism reached by realizing your value and importance, and that everyone matters?

I dream of a world where you are entitled to afford food and lodging, even if you are nonessential or outright useless.

If something is good in the bible I’ll welcome it with open arms. I’m still not going to attribute it to God, because I know it was made up by men and women of the first century. I’m just not with you when it comes to it being the word of the creator of the universe, not because I think another religion is better, but because I realized over time that we’re so alone out here, and it’s pretty damn scary.

Accepting God wouldn’t increase my comfort, and it won’t help in my case because I realized there’s nothing out there. I’m not wishing he doesn’t exist so that I can run around all day without punishment. I don’t believe in him because I know he can’t exist.

You are utilizing your reason once to determine that following God is the reasonable choice.

I’m just asking you to not deem giving up your reason for all time the most rational choice, just because you believed at some point that it is wiser to follow the lord of all rationality without needing to resort to your own reasoning powers any further from that point of time onward.

It’s like telling someone don’t idolize Jordan Peterson and give your mind a vacation just because he’s too wise to be competed with. How can you make sure that what God says makes sense without thinking about it?

And if you can determine that it makes sense on your own, then why don’t you exercise that critical thought elsewhere as well, to figure out stuff that falls outside the realm of what could be determined to be good, bad, true, or false based upon God’s words alone?

The same muscle that makes you sure following God is the answer can determine whether or not God is not the answer. If you don’t trust that ability then how can you be sure that God is worth listening to.

And if you trust this ability, then why lay it down to rest in the name of letting God take care of you in his own way because he knows best, when utilizing this ability may significantly improve your life once you start relying upon it more?

It’s okay that you found God after all this searching and questioning. Still the idea of something coming from nothing might be difficult to comprehend. But isn’t that an indication that the assumption of God coming out of nowhere is equally improbable or hard to believe?

If the universe and everything in it can’t come to existence without having been created, because they are too complex to not have been a product of intelligent design, then why God is exempt from such rules?

How could something presumably as complex and all-powerful as God come to existence without having been created or intelligently designed by another all-powerful and all-knowing entity? Why is God a lucky special case?

I’m totally not against the concept of working on yourself.

I preach the constant and never ending betterment of oneself as a goal in and of itself, something that you should do for its own sake, even if it didn’t increase your chances of succeeding at anything in the short-term or long-term.