🧵 View Thread
🧵 Thread (112 tweets)
Eigen's asking about negative oneshots. I wanna know about positive oneshots. Something that happened to you or that you did or saw or read that shifted your life trajectory upward, all at once? So, what oneshotted you?
@nosilverv One time I saw the sky and I saw the floaters in my eyeball and I was like "hey, that's me!" and I realized it was all me. I am everything. And I laughed myself silly as if I had just been let in on some grand cosmic joke.
@nosilverv for like my ~20th birthday my friends all pooled their $ to buy me a hefty Starbucks gift card in support of my writing (since I was broke but liked writing there) reaching 100,000 followers, selling $100,000 worth of ebooks, both of those things feel like fruits of that seed
@nosilverv A medium dose of acid: https://t.co/mve5eBoVYT
@bryancsk as a result of doing a medium dose of acid (110 micrograms) i got a good job, paid off my student loans, reconciled with my parents, and then got a really good job. there were many other things i did to unfuck everything; and maybe i could have done it natty but it sure helped.
@nosilverv Probably (though it doesn't take the full Shapley Value, it was at the tip of the transition) reading the Sequences. I fully realized I was an atheist then (was active church goer+organizer) and my life would be comparatively so much worse if I'd continued believing in the Bible.
@nosilverv I went to see a Regina Spektor concert when she was just starting to break through. I didn’t know her music at all really but the line (from On the Radio) “take the things you like, and try to love the things you took” has become a guiding principle for a life well lived
@nosilverv I told Eigen — on a positive note, I came across the below quote by Wendell Berry at just the right time in grad school Moved home shortly thereafter and settled down, very thankful https://t.co/6vBsug1y60
@nosilverv Two things: - being made to spend all afternoon meditating at a Zen Buddhist temple while studying abroad in Japan in high school and breaking out of my anxiety like I hadn't before - doing acid in college and accepting I couldn't keep running away from some of my problems
When I was in boot camp I was having a rough go of it and an RDC took me aside and said: "It doesn't matter who you were the day before you walked in here. You get an amazing opportunity right now. After today you get to be whoever you choose to be from now on." Absolutely changed my life.
@nosilverv i had been sort of beaten down and broadly rejected (undiagnosed autistic) and was stuck being unsuccessful, and in 2016, Trump made me realize that people could hate me and think i didn't deserve anything and i could simply achieve the stuff i wanted to just because.
@nosilverv I was evenly split between being cynical and optimistic and watching gurren lagann at just the right time shifted me permanently over to the "you can just do things" camp Now i run a business, own a house, married and have 3 children at 26, all traceable in part back to that
@nosilverv Major positive one-shot was reading this phrase in a book “What’s more likely: That your happiness requires that everyone and everything else changes? Or just you?” Odd thing is I seem to have hallucinated it. I re-read the book & it contains nothing even remotely like that.
@nosilverv https://t.co/m848kbCMgo
Another person just told me that they had their RSI cured by Sarno's techniques: https://t.co/RGGfCxVHy7. While it sounds like preposterous woo, it has worked in 4/4 cases of people I personally know trying it. (One account: https://t.co/8ie9NkJfWF.)
@nosilverv The ending of G Gundam, which I watched when I was very young, and this quote from the later parts of War and Peace, which I read in college, both of which temper the barb of sorrow lodged in my heart. https://t.co/X6DieWUQln
@nosilverv I was doing the Kevin Trudeau manifestation exercises for the first time Went away for the weekend and did the exercises the whole time “My house is clean and clutter-free” is what I was manifesting Came home and I had been robbed All clutter was GONE
@nosilverv Realizing that exponential growth in invested wealth enables financial independence. The idea hit over the course of about a year, so it wasn't all at once but has been one of the key guiding principles of my adult life.
@nosilverv The green box by Marcel Duchamp completely changed my life because I realized that artistic ambition and spiritual ambition are the same thing expressed in different languages and the only ceiling on both is your will to go deeper and dream bigger https://t.co/bvXpEPAquH
@nosilverv I found the idea of FIRE (financial independence - retire early) when I was in my early 20s and a reddit post led me to the Mr. Money Mustache blog. It clicked right away and it also solved my problem of not knowing what to do with all of the money that was starting to pile up.
@nosilverv Was he asking about negative? Because my answer was positive 😆 https://t.co/ZZoemQMqBb
This fucking turbo charged danger zone Ukrainian kabob from 9 years ago. Super red pill relationship hater Food poison KO at bus stop Faceplant into concrete off 4ft ledge. Wake up factory reset trying to find a wife. Married two years later. Have 3 kids now. https://t.co/4UxYHpnwa8
@nosilverv Very minor effect on my life but I saw a reel of a guy "seasoning" his chicken thigh by wiping it along the sink (gross obv) but I realized it probably went bad and he made something really funny out of the situation which is antifragile af
@nosilverv understanding what kapil gupta says in this podcast https://t.co/Hlt8eVWBGJ
Seeing my son on ultrasound for the first time, when I thought I was miscarrying at 12 weeks. Seeing him alive changed everything about the way I viewed the world, brought me back to Christ, and gave me the resolve to stand for what's right, among all the other personal sacrifices I've made for him and others that could only have happened because of that experience.
@nosilverv was 14, principal teacher accomplished painter&art collector showing my drawings to my parents [derogatory] "see I could even make her an artist if she was nicer": instant understanding of Being Perceived Socially but also confidence to pursue abrupt career changes later as adult
@nosilverv This is a little lame but as a teenager, the last line of Abbey Road(sans her majesty). “And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make.” I didn’t see it just as 60s hippy bs, but the love in duty we give and sacrifice for each other. The ties that bind.
@nosilverv "the enemy of the good is the perfect" My research advisor for an internship told me this and it changed so much. I was his last student and I still miss him. I hope to carry foreward Ken Jacobson in my heart, mind, and students for years to come.
@nosilverv Sold a pair of sneakers I made to a rando I met online when I was in high school. He didn’t react strangely that I was so young, said the shoes were sick and paid me immediately realized you could sell stuff if people wanted it regardless of your level of credentials
@nosilverv moving to SF, meeting my roommate and having her tell me about her dad’s suicide. first person I can think of who I’ve never met but feel like I have / would have really liked to. completely changed how I internalized loss and luck
@nosilverv I read this book as an engineering student and started doing barbell training for the first time. Went on to gain 20 lbs of muscle in ~6 months https://t.co/q66LeFfo4S
@nosilverv This: https://t.co/aKE8cLYxt6
A quote from Alan Watts (along with some acid) literally rewired my brain the first time I read it in "The B♾K" "We do not 'come into' this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean 'waves', the universe 'peoples'. " I haven't felt that "I am seperate" ever since. One-shotted me into the warm feeling of being home. We didn't 'come into' universe, we are the universe!
@nosilverv Searched for local yoga on google after a breakup, heard a powerful mantra on a slideshow. didn’t know what a mantra was but felt something opening up. Got one-shotted into post-rat immediately (was a auAdhd nerd, turned into a post-rat auAdhd nerd)
@nosilverv when I was 7 my babysitter told me colors weren’t real, they happened because a material absorbed and reflected different wavelengths of light. blew my mind. never saw the world the same way. made me want to discover other things that were wrong with my perception of the world.
@nosilverv https://t.co/uKw57hQrfv making a list of dream partner traits during a mutual depressive episode with my depressed friend in my 20s
when I was 25 I sat on the bedroom floor of my friend who was in the deepest throes of horrific boyfriend-induced depression. She was a famous, rich, successful, beautiful, young artist who lived by herself right in front of the beach, but was deeply isolated and lost. I’d just been on acid for the first time with a boy who told me I was empty inside. One night we decided to write on paper the qualities of our future big loves, super specific traits. We’d read them aloud to each other, close our eyes and flood our bodies with their essence. She then started making art of butterflies; they became her obsession and symbol. She did this for years and they would be huge sculptural installations that would tour all the hippie festivals for people to dance in front of. Four years later she me borrow a big glow in the dark one for a party I threw, and that night walked in the man that would possess every single quality I asked for when I was just a girl who had driven to the beach to console my sad friend
@nosilverv Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. @ESYudkowsky made my life and trajectory categorically better than it ever had been before. https://t.co/fekYYGv5ma
@nosilverv There are many possible answers to this and one is the music video of S.A.R.S. - Lutka. It's nothing special (if anyone else watches it, they'd be like ...okay?) and I don't even like this band, but it's a major reason why I'm where I am.
@nosilverv Others have already mentioned it, but The Sequences / HPMOR (I don’t quite remember in which order) had very positive lasting consequences in my emotional resilience, orientation to do things and probably had a fair share of credit for my last few jobs
@nosilverv You could argue any time you get chills from an insight is a one shot at some level. For example: Aesthetic chills mitigate maladaptive cognition in depression - PMC https://t.co/I3M1PJXmKD
@nosilverv some dude on twitter asked if i wanted a grant to kickstart a couple months of creating somatic-imaginal training material full-time, aaaand that got things rolling on what i've been doing ever since. and that dude's name was @_brentbaum
@nosilverv I'm not sure he's really insisting on negative, that's just his (current) (map) point of view. "Positive" and "Negative " are both illusory labels, here, anyway. My answer doesn't really change at that point in time , but I could go further. Always further.