Never back down.

And yes, they will not turn back, shrink their ego, and cower in fear just because you were indifferent to what they are saying.

They are throwing stones at you. If you keep ignoring that, they’ll escalate, and start throwing big rocks to wake you up or get your attention.

You have to show them the consequences of trying to annoy you in a language they can understand.

It’s time to fight back.

Disclaimer: No contact is the only real solution to dealing with anyone from the dark triad. Do not attempt to do anything else if this option is available for you. In case it’s impossible, there’s no way on earth I can imagine being an easy target for them would do you any good.

I understand that not wasting your time or energy on them is highly recommended, and that ignoring them is the only definitive solution. As long as it is not impossible, you should live your life as if they don’t exist in the first place. In case you have no chance of doing it, that is, you still have no way out for some reason, for example, you can’t move out due to financial difficulties at the moment, you can’t implement the grey rock method and hope for the best. It would be a recipe for total disaster. They will literally use physical violence or sexual assault against you to make it inevitable for you to fully engage with them. You don’t want that to happen. If instead you were like a lion from the start, they wouldn’t find a way to make you instantly angry just as easily as they would in case you insisted upon ignoring them until they hopefully leave.

“Motivation is garbage.” – Mel Robbins

All I’m proposing here is that there are things that produce certain effects and outcomes that you cannot reach except through doing certain things or activities. You cannot reproduce these same results except by doing these things and only these things. No amount of mindset, positive thinking, or anything can bypass that. You do a certain activity and you get a certain result or outcome. You cannot get this same result or outcome by any amount of mindset or positive thinking, even if you wanted to, no matter how hard you try. You can argue that mindset and positive thinking might help, but with or without them, the entirety of the positive results or outcomes expected from doing such things or activities will be the same anyway, no more, no less, and thus the belief that mindset or positive thinking could be dismissed as totally useless is not entirely irrational.

The proposition here is to not undermine the role of mindset and positive thinking in the quality of your life, but to put every factor in its rightful place without ascribing to it something that it does not exclusively or entirely deserve. It is about having a concern for meritocracy. Not favoring a group of factors for success that could be easily removed from the equation while still maintaining the possibility of obtaining the same results even in their total absence. This is not to say they only have a placebo effect. This is to say that they have no effect at all in the first place if it was possible to produce the same results consistently with or without their presence, which makes the proposition that all your problems arise from the lack of these irrelevant factors understandably outrageous. I don’t have to be a leftist to arrive at that conclusion. I only have to be fair and honest with myself.

No amount of mindset, positive thinking, or alignment with the law of attraction can make up for not doing certain things, activities, or behaviors, or can help you reach the effects and outcomes that you can only reach through doing those things, activities, or behaviors, and cannot reach without doing them.

For example, physical exercise. The benefits of physical exercise, including those that are upon your mood, cannot be achieved by any amount of mindset, except only as a motivating force which can help you engage in a habit of exercising, even if you don’t feel like it, ironically enough, without waiting for motivation to come first.

Even if you have all the amount of mindset or positive thinking in the world, nothing will change if you don’t exercise.

Focusing on mindset and elevating its status or importance to such extent like it’s the ultimate solution to all your problems, and as if it’s the only reason why you’re failing is a serious problem.

It is next level hypocrisy that is too infuriating to not point out.

Even if fixing your mindset could be helpful to some extent, it shouldn’t take all the credit for changing your life to the better, nor should you rely upon it to any significant extent without taking significant action towards your favored objectives simultaneously as well.

Even if you had a negative mindset, you’ll still get the entirety of the benefits of physical exercise, if you actually put in the work and do the physical exercise, even if you do it without a smile on your face.

Blaming most or all of your failures on mindset or negative thinking is a form of gaslighting to say the least.

And no one seems to bother criticizing it because it is being propelled by people who have no idea what they’re talking about, and defended with the same level of out of proportion rage as that of religion, due in no small part to the rampant spread of superstition and new age spirituality in the developed world.

You should always aim for no contact unless it’s impossible.

However, you must know that a bag of tricks will not do the job. Only understanding how they abuse you will. Knowing everything about how they manipulate and abuse you is the answer. It’s the ultimate commandment.

I always thought if I was smarter and if I had everything figured out more, no one will be able to touch me.

Having understood that abuse is and should never be considered your fault, I still don’t think I was entirely mistaken in my assumption.

I always thought: okay, now I am smart enough. I’m ready. Now what?

I’m dealing with stuff that makes you think okay what they did was profoundly stupid it’s disgusting. This is beneath me. Since that is so beneath my level of comprehension, I will not bother wasting my time with it. I will not argue or explain myself to people who are too stupid to understand basic everyday stuff.

I was right about that, but I was almost always easily defeated because of that, to the extent that the smarter I got, the more easily I lost the fight. I failed due to my higher IQ, not due to arrogance, but because the pain increases the higher your intelligence is.

I have no problem with that. I just wanted to know why my insane levels of intelligence didn’t help me. Why was I always perceived as the bad guy with grandiose issues instead of the other way around.

I did everything in my power.

I was fascinated to experiment with this, because I was already screwed up beyond repair to the point of not giving a damn anymore, so why not have some fun while being tortured in hell.

And every time I tried to learn something new while thinking I have nothing to lose, I end up failing miserably, learning nothing, the voices getting louder, the self loathing reaching new peaks, and the inability to survive becomes exacerbated dramatically.

To say it was hopeless will be an understatement. I now know why you have no idea what real suffering looks like. When your own mind and body become the enemy, that is a whole different animal.

I’m sorry, but there was never a happy ending to this story.

Anyway, along the way I had the privilege of exploring and discovering stuff that others didn’t have the opportunity to explore because they didn’t sink that deep. Or if they did, they became too broken to learn anything. Think drug addicts, being thrown in prison for decades, dying, etc.

No contact is the best and most recommended way to deal with anyone from the dark triad or tetrad. No doubt about that.

The problem lies in trying to apply this when you’re still in hell. When you’re still a victim and liable to be victimized by anyone who has the power to victimize you.

In hell, you can’t give the silent treatment. You can only receive it. Some people argue that if your response to everything they say to you is whatever, you will emerge victorious from every situation and starve the narcissist every step of the way. I don’t know where did they get such an idea from, but it sounds good on paper. Trying that in the real world would be on par with being suicidal. You will be asking for it and then wonder why all this happened to you. I followed the instructions. I want my money back. This is worse than defunding the military. This is like disbanding the military altogether and hoping for the best. There is no healing. There’s only defending yourself and protecting yourself from such attacks, from such garbage world, and from such people. Good news is, you don’t need to heal. You just need to become stronger. Peace through strength, not through outrunning the inevitable. You have to learn how to fight back, and win every single time, and that, my friend requires practice.

Focus on high yield tasks that will lead to most of the results that you’re after at the moment.

Get the tasks that will move the needle in your work, life, or business done first before anything else, including morning routines, or get them done when you feel you’re most ready (compared to other times of the day).

Always attempt to do household chores when you’re tired and need to regenerate. The best time for doing boring or easy tasks or household chores, including daily self care chores and activities is during your downtime or when you’re too fatigued to do what you want, or at times when you hate yourself and feel like doing nothing. This is where you channel or sublimate your violence, not when you’re doing heavy tasks that require immense attention, energy, and control. Not in the morning or immediately after you wake up, or when you’re ready to do complex or taxing activities.

Do the daily boring, repetitive, easy tasks, or any chores during your downtime or when you’re too tired to do anything productive.

Your positive thinking is the result of your success and happiness, not the cause of them.

Based upon such perspective or understanding, you don’t have to actively be negative.

It just means you’re swimming against the tide, or trying to buy the cart before the horse.

You have to try to be positive as much as possible, with disregard to your circumstances.

But you being unable to stay positive as much as you normally could is not always due to a bad mindset. It’s almost always because of being stuck in a bad environment.

This is way more important than you think.

A brief discussion around engagement rates, mostly concerning Instagram, but could be helpful with understanding how algorithms and the system works elsewhere as well.

The engagement rate that makes a difference is the amount of comments you get per unit time for example. I don’t think they determine the engagement rate relative to the number of followers. They don’t consider your engagement to be any less because relative to your number of followers, the number is still small. Two percent of one million followers is less than four percent of a hundred thousand. Even if the amount of engagement that the post got in case of the two percent engagement rate is much more than in that of the four percent post.

This is not what engagement rate means or how they measure how good a post is performing or getting engagement based upon.

I understand that you can call the amount of engagement you’re getting compared to the number of followers you have engagement rate. That is fact and there’s nothing wrong with that.

However, there’s no evidence that they decrease your reach or how much they push out your posts to your followers or to new people based upon that kind of engagement rate mentioned above. To think they do means that anyone who has millions of followers will be shadow banned indefinitely due to no fault of their own. They will be punishing people for having a huge following that is out of proportion to the and does not match the expected amount of authentic engagement they’re really getting per every post, which is clearly not the case, because an inverse relation between reach and number of followers is hard to not be noticed. It’s hard to miss detecting the fact that a page with a huge amount of followers has a very tiny amount of engagement compared to the average or expected amount of engagement that such a number of followers should get.
That kind of engagement rate is used just for self assessment, not that it counts as a verification metric by the system.

The engagement rate that significantly increases the reach and definitely counts is the amount of engagement that a post gets per unit time, which indicates without a shadow of a doubt that such a post is doing good in terms of the attention it’s getting. Also another engagement rate that matters is how many of the people whom the post was sent out to actually responded in any way to the post and engaged with it as determined against their normal engagement behavior with such posts.

Also bots don’t have a feed, and so the posts never get sent out to them. Instead the bots chase the post manually. Also if someone doesn’t engage enough, the system stops sending them your posts, so their lack of engagement will stop indicating that your post is bad. Also Instagram knows that the bots behavior is not your fault so they don’t punish you because of them by decreasing your reach. Tell me what you think about this.