Choose what you do wisely. You get good at what you focus on in the real world, not only the world of thought. This is usually meant in regards to ideas and behaviors. This time it’s different: Scivive is talking about the real physical world and its manipulation now. Whatever you physically work with, you’re going to get better at. Violin playing, driving a car, sex, software design, cooking… If you keep working at it, you’ll get better.

Know your capabilities. When planning the juice of your life, work from yourself up, not stuff down. If you turn upside down the way people look at wealth and success, and look at it from the person up, instead of the stuff and achievements down, you notice that there’s a lot of chokepoints and factors that are quite hard to overcome, and they’re barely affected at all by the giant levels of wealth and power above them. The human-centric upwards view is a better way to look at things, for if you try to shove 10 pounds of cake in a 5-pound bag, you’re not going to have a good time carrying it home. If you try stacking billions of dollars and meetings on top of a person, you’ll find that much like the bag, that person doesn’t fare as well as if you took the individual’s capabilities into consideration before you started stuffing.

Stay sober. If you are drunk when you’re doing all the fun stuff, then you are hindering your memory of all the fun stuff, and you would have a better memory of your life if you were totally conscious and aware for the best parts of it.

Often when you speak to a drug user, they portend to have an aura of superiority because they have experienced drugs, and you have not, and therefore they feel they know things about “experience” you do not. This gets boring rather quickly, for the same reason that using status as evidence is pretty poor evidence. Your status as a drug user doesn’t lend any credence to the statement that drugs are useful and people should do them more. Evidence is evidence, bring it forth and leave the aura of superiority at home.

So what are drugs good for? Well, chemicals in the form of hormones are the very programming that your brain uses to cause feelings. If you have a certain hormone in your brain, such as serotonin, you will feel a certain way. If you have another hormone instead, you will feel something different. So if you ride a roller coaster, and it is exhilarating to you, your brain will release dopamine. But if it’s terror for you, your brain will release cortisol. So what happens if you just take a shortcut, skip the roller coaster ride entirely, and just take the pill that gets the dopamine into your bloodstream and across the blood-brain barrier? When you take drugs, you often screw up what the emotional programs have in store for you.

Some people believe we should strive to develop a healthy relationship with drugs. Don’t overdose and use the minimum effective dose. They think it’s really important that you see drugs as yet another chemical that you ingest, such as dietary chemicals like salt. You need some, but you also don’t need too much, cause its “immature.” See drugs for what they are and what they can do for you, how they can serve you, educate yourself on their effects. Your relationships on drugs shouldn’t differ from your relationship from any other potential dangerous item.

If you created a human from scratch, like a science project, you would need some way to program it to behave in certain ways and not others, while making sure that it didn’t get stuck in a loop and do the same thing over and over again, like forget to eat and then die. Nature came up with a great way to do that: emotions. They’re the programming that you were born with, the same programming that your parents were born with, and without them you wouldn’t be here, because you wouldn’t have been born. The desire to eat (but not too much), have sex (but not too much), breathe (but not too fast), do one thing (but then switch to another thing), find people like you and team up with them—they are all useful emotional imperatives that allow you to outcompete other living beings for food and space and mates. Drugs shortcut this useful programming by giving you the feelings without the effort that you were supposed to expend to earn them.

The difference between having sex and masturbating is that while both result in orgasm, one can lead to pregnancy, children, and the continuation of your lineage, and thus impart whatever habits and behaviors you have into the future; whereas the person who abstains from messy sex in favor of the much easier masturbation is more likely to be childless, and thus forever removed from the gene pool.

You’ve fulfilled one of your emotional imperatives, which is to experience different states of consciousness. But you’ve shortchanged the other part of that program, in that you’re often supposed to execute a certain behavior to earn the release of that hormone from your own brain. Perhaps you were supposed to win a race, or learn a new thing, or see a beautiful thing, or share an experience with someone else, to earn the release of that hormone. You however, took the shortcut and took a pill. You fulfilled one imperative at the cost of another.

So where do you draw the line between following the good emotional pleasure seeking programming that you were born with, and taking shortcuts to get the feelings with pills and inhalants? A great way to follow up and decide what the right ratio of drug use and non-drug use is this; what performance to most drug users get out of their lives, and at what cost? Are you an addictive person, would you be the kind of guy that is really curious about how much a drug your body could handle? Are you in an environment where the drugs that are easiest for you to get just happen to be the ones that are hardest to have a good relationship with?

If you can do it, it’s much better to get your good emotions out of the real world by fulfilling your good inborn emotional programming, instead of taking chemical shortcuts.

The shortcuts have lots of downsides outside of their opportunity costs of missing out on real experience. Take for instance, prison, societal contempt, loss of job opportunities, slippery slope of wanting to “try” some harder drugs, dependence, addiction, and having to associate with dangerous people who are willing to work with other dangerous people to get you the illegal substances which you desire. You are also taking the risk that what you bought is not what you think it is. Maybe someone slipped in some other chemicals, and what you got is more dangerous, or will you become a scientist and constantly test everything before you take it? That sounds like it might kill the buzz, and who knows where you could even get such testing equipment sent to you without getting your name on a list.

Interesting fact: There is a free drug testing service based in Spain called Energy Control, which will test the quality of your drug for free as a public health service, and they will accept packages from anywhere in the world.

If you think that state change, and being one with the world, and being at peace is so awesome, you should really check out the great work that the Tibetan monks have been doing over the last 1,000 years or so. They are really chill, and really at peace, and they can even lower their own body temperature at will solely through the power of thought.

Of course, they don’t invent anything, and they’re getting killed off by the Chinese, and they can’t enforce their own borders, and they have no medical progress. But if state change is so great, just let your culture get destroyed peacefully by the Chinese, focus on the journey outward instead of the journey inward while the people on the outside are crushing you.

While you are dicking around trying to feel different feelings, the real world is coming for your limited resources, they will eat your lunch, and it will not be pretty. Try to mess around in the virtual world of games and drugs to the minimum you need to, or know the cost.

Drugs are an interesting value proposition for the consumer because most products you buy have to filter through some values before you get the benefit, the feelings. With drugs, you get the feelings without the values.

Experiencing life through all your senses:

• Hearing

• Feeling

• Seeing

Perception is only strong as the weakest link. Just as only certain people can see certain colors,

And some TVs can show more colors,

And some broadcast formats allow those colors to be transmitted,

And some cameras allow the colors to be recorded,

And some sensors see the colors,

And some lights actually emit the right wavelengths of light to be reflected off the surface to be recorded,

And some pigments and paints can reflect that emitted light,

And your glasses, and your eye defects, and your perceptive map,

Any break in the chain and you don’t get the result,

This doesn’t just apply to the absorption and retransmission of a beautiful image, it applies to ideas as well.

In order for your audience to appreciate your idea, they need to have the vocabulary, logic, life experience, and similar beliefs and understandings regarding how the world works to be able to even understand what you are saying.

It’s always fun to see someone misunderstand what you are saying so hard, that they are entirely wrong about it, and not because they understood it in the correct way, to be incorrect about it in the correct incorrect way, but to just get it entirely wrong based on a misunderstanding.

You have to choose whether you want to correct the incorrectness they are stating, which is unrelated to your original point, or you want to skip it and just attempt to retransmit the original idea, wait for them to understand, and then have incorrect beliefs as output from the accurately transmitted and understood idea.

If you don’t encode the awesome things when they happen, you won’t be able to recall them very well. If you’re a hunter of experience who likes to try different drugs and see how they feel, you might find that you can get much of the same adventure and experience of feeling new things by changing the beliefs that you have, and changing the go-to instant reaction feelings that you assign to certain thoughts.

Whether it be working out, making love, or being an honest or good person, if you train and condition your internal responses to be the one that you want every time you see it, an NLP, it’s called a swish pattern. The swish pattern is a classic NLP technique that is most often used to help people overcome automatic habits that are hard to let go. Overeating, smoking, nail-biting, and sudden emotional reactions are a few of the many problems that can be attacked with swishing. It’s basically just trying to rewire a behavior that has been rewarded enough in a positive manner to become a habit.

When you’re exploring consciousness and feeling by using chemicals, you’re doing risky things by blocking up receptors in your brains with things that you haven’t properly qualified as pure. You don’t properly know how you’ll respond compared to other people, so you can’t really get your dosages right, and you’re not tracking your sleep patterns and whatever weird biochemical things can be going on inside your body.

Winning the lottery might not be as great as you might have previously thought.

For fun, read about anyone that’s won the lottery and the horror that comes along with it and you’ll see that one of the worst things that could ever happen to you is winning a large lottery.

Remove bias and get to experience yourself in a new and exciting way.

It’s really cool when you forget that you did a thing or you forget that you wrote a thing. For instance, if you go through your documents from 10 years ago and you pull out a piece of paper that you wrote when you were a kid and you read it, maybe you realize, “Damn! This is pretty good. I was a pretty smart kid!” It’s really neat when you get to love yourself not because you forced yourself to, you thought it was a good idea or not, or you were extremely biased because you see so much profit in loving you.

The removal of the bias and the discovery that you are worthy of your own love is really enjoyable, enlightening, prideful, and fun. In theory, if you could abstract meaning from something someone did or created as to keep the overarching theme, but change the contents so wildly that the person that created it didn’t recognize it anymore, then you can expose them to it, they can profess their like for it and then you could say, “By the way you actually wrote this. I just changed this, that and the other. How cool is that?” That could be a really enlightening, although very hard to structure, gift that you could give a person.

You should always try other people’s food first so you can get the full flavor of theirs and then the full flavor of yours.

The miracle of hitting the right temperature on your food. No extra calories and lots better flavor. 

Certain senses affect other senses in ways you wouldn’t think they would.

Heavier silverware makes food taste better.

Potato chip bags are noisy because studies show it makes you think chips are crispier.

Similar to the chanting the phrase “worst is first” from Always Sunny in Philadelphia, if you have to eat a couple things in a row, eat the worst thing first. This way you can cancel out that bad flavor with all the good ones.

Food tastes better in brighter light.

Uncommon permutations and stacking highs: You can stack a sugar high with a coffee high with a good nap with an orgasm, and whatever else you like. Uncommon permutations can lead to cool stuff.

Isn’t it funny that super-trendy restaurants always serve you strange dishes like ox face and goose balls and throat of tiger and whatever other weird food they can think of? This is because they don’t have the courage to compete on the everyday foods people could legitimately compare. If you order the tiger balls, how do you know whether they were actually done properly or not? You have no idea because you’ve never had them before.

Same fact rings true for serving pigeon face. You don’t know what a pigeon face tastes like, so you cannot judge it; but if you are served a cheeseburger, you’re going to tell whether that cheeseburger tastes better than another. People too easily and too often sacrifice excellence and those things that we recognize and are most common, because they are the most delicious. They instead take the easy way out, trying to make weird stuff that no one likes.

The silliness and greatness of porn: Imagine monkeys sitting around looking at pictures of each other’s butts on the Internet. That’s porn. That is what we are doing.

You’ll find more nude pictures and videos on the Internet than you ever could see in real life. There’s also a high chance that these people are much hotter and kinkier and greater in quantity than what you would get. Thus, the fiction can always exceed the reality in some regards. It doesn’t matter who you are, it’s a numbers game. The number of cameras rolling is bountiful. There’s also an innumerable amount of beautiful people out there, getting it on. You can’t compete on a looks, kinkiness, or quantity measurement.

You can win on the visceral and real experience meter, though.

It’s really hard for your body to know when you’re having sex and when you’re not. It has to be able to detect it. It is similar to how you’ll see people freezing to death get delirious and start taking their clothes off because they think that it’s hot, or you can put ice on someone’s back and they may think they’re actually being burnt.

This is because there’s just not that many ways to sense the real world, and your body takes short cuts. Sometimes it shares channels for the pain signal. Some people are even born with their signals mixed up in the form of synesthesia. For this reason the way that you let your body know that it’s having sex right now, and it should feel really great, is super important.

One of the ways your body knows it’s having sex or not is timing. If something happens, and then it doesn’t happen again for a long while, then it’s not repetitive enough to be sex. You could call that frequency. Good sex has a frequency to it, any woman will tell you that as soon as what you’re doing is working great, don’t change anything until her climax. The chance that your change makes it worse instead of better is high, because it was already great to start with, and the ways to make it feel less great are probably 20 times more numerous than the few if any ways to make it greater.

How does your body know that it’s just your underwear rubbing on your fun parts and not someone you’re making love with?

These are the magic moments that you will remember on your deathbed. The things that made life worth living. Your first love, the birth of your child, achieving that lifelong dream, sharing great food and sights with friends and loved ones.

As for photography, if you aren’t in the photo you’re taking, your picture is probably terrible. Other people with better cameras, ladders, drones, and more time to wait for better lighting and more unique and interesting circumstances have probably already taken, and likely will take in the future, a better photo of whatever you’re shooting. Unless there’s something actually unique, you might not want to waste your time doing what everyone else is already doing better for free.

Also, even if you take a good photo, say of your visit to see the Mona Lisa, every year a new, improved sensor comes out which does the job of digitizing that art better than you could, regardless of how much money you spent, for the march of technology continues. Just as there’s depreciating value of knowledge, there’s often depreciating value of imaging.