Imagine this: you think you’re worthless.
Because of that, you don’t dare to go to birthday parties, you don’t dare to go outside, you don’t dare to be yourself.
That is exactly the same as being stuck in a physical prison. It is exactly the same as a prison with iron bars.
In fact, it’s worse. Because a mental prison is something you carry with you everywhere. A physical prison is just a thing in one place. Once you’re out, you’re out.
In a certain sense, there is no real difference between the mental and the physical. Thoughts are also physical pieces of electrical activity. Just like the electricity that powers a prison door.
I think most people can still understand the above. But here’s where it becomes more difficult.
There are also other physical things that can put you in a prison. Like mobile phones. Mobile phones are objects that literally take away your freedom. You physically feel your phone in your pocket. Every few minutes you grab it to check whether you have a new message. That is a prison that starts mentally, but expresses itself physically.
“Do I have a message?”
“Did I miss something?”
“Is my phone still in my pocket?”
It’s very important to step out of that prison from time to time, because it sneaks in without you noticing it.
All those questions come with a physical, nervous action: a small prison cell.
I’m a man myself, but I can also imagine that women walking alone on the street are in a small prison too. You have to think: am I safe? Is there some idiot who might bother me? All small prisons.
What you should do when you have negative thoughts
You should think about those things. That’s how they disappear.
When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I think about is the worst pain I can find in my body. After that, I think about everything that could go wrong.
So I’ve already lost an hour before I have my first positive thought.
I never wake up feeling like unicorns and rainbows.
When I wake up at night, I worry about whatever bothers me the most. That’s completely logical: at night everyone is asleep, so I don’t have to worry about other people. That tiny thing from work is the only thing left to worry about.
That’s how it’s supposed to work. That’s exactly how a brain works.
Somehow people have developed the wrong expectations about what thinking is supposed to be. Several times a year, I go through a phase with the darkest thoughts you can imagine. I think about those things, I try to solve them, I might feel bad for a moment. And that’s how it’s supposed to go.
The result? I’m happier than most people. And I don’t have to be afraid of a single thought. That’s incredibly liberating.
Four things you should never do:
• Try to think positively. The only people who try to think positively are people stuck in a negative flow. When you’re doing well, you never think: “Let me try to think positively.” Do the opposite: allow yourself to think about the negative things.
• Breathing exercises. Breathing exercises are fun when you have nothing else to do. They are not suitable for controlling or steering complex emotions. If you’re having a panic attack, try to become even more panicked. Never try to push your panic down with even more control—you’re already doing enough of that.
• Downplaying it, pretending you don’t care. Afraid? “Oh, I don’t care about fear.” Yes you do, because you’re afraid. Be afraid—that’s braver than pretending it doesn’t affect you.
• Anything that has anything to do with Buddhism. Buddhism is flat-out dangerous. If you distance yourself too much from your thoughts and emotions, you can run into all kinds of trouble.
The advice above is one hundred percent legit and not a joke. We live in strange times where people who have no idea how any of this works are writing self-help books.
There are a lot of movements right now that act as if our brains are sabotaging us. That’s not true: our brains work fantastically. You just don’t understand how to use your brain — that’s something else.
People often suggest that our brains are naturally very negative, and that this makes us sick. This is the equivalent of believing in tarot cards (no offense to the people who are into that).
Smart people think in terms of balancing
For instance: I can harvest nature’s resources, but then I need a net profit on the other side.
I think a washing machine is a good example. You need resources to build a washing machine, it takes energy to use it, but it also buys time — time we can spend on understanding reality, for instance.
I think AI is a terrible deal. It overspends resources for a limited and very narrow output.
A lot of medical interventions are a bad deal too. It’s fantastic that you can grab your skis, break your leg, and get it fixed — but without hospitals you would never take the risks in the first place.
Economic Growth Doesn’t Exist
Economic growth basically means this: we use more resources, and we build fancier things.
But that’s not growth: we — and the universe — pay for that on the other side. A lot of things come with a big price.
Economic growth is completely imaginary.
Why AI Will Never Have a Chance Versus the Best Humans
Humans possess knowledge that has accumulated over generations and generations of families—people who made mistakes, corrected them, and passed the lessons on. You can’t compare that with an AI that only works with recent, surface-level knowledge generated on the spot.
Knowledge also means realizing when you’ve made a mistake, taking a step back, and rebalancing. Think of smartphones, or religion: sometimes we overshoot, recognize it, adjust, and move on. That’s normal. An AI doesn’t do that.
We always need some spare energy to see alternatives next to the choices we make. A computer can spend all its resources on the chess game. We, as humans, have to look out for others while we play chess—or decide that this is not the moment to play chess at all. These decisions are far more complex than they seem. We don’t live in a fantasy world with unlimited resources.
Do you want the real red pill?
The inside of a body or brain works like a radio play.
You give input, it goes through a black box, and you get output.
Try it.
Consciousness is a journey through your body
The difficult part is acknowledging the real problem. For example: I have nothing to do at work, I’m bored, I don’t know where to start. Or: I’m going too hard, I’m exercising too much.