Here you will find a structured explanation of the I Grow Younger Framework.
Human potential
Human potential is unlimited. You can have Success and achieve everything that has Meaning. Of course, your current situation limits your choices considerably. But in the long term, there are no tables that can’t be turned around. Situations that increase our knowledge of ourselves and the world will happen to everybody.
Your character is in your head and nowhere else. You just need to rewire your human brain a bit. Your brain’s best ability is that it can learn and change. Once you believe it’s fixed, it actually is. Don’t ever listen to someone who tells you what you can’t do. They are always wrong. Be smart, think, share and get feedback, research and trust your Intuition. Options in life are so much more than your mind can comprehend and you can follow an almost infinite number of life paths. Believe everything is possible, still evaluate the odds and always remember the much better idea may be the next thought you have, if only you keep options open.
Anyone who tells you “you will make it” does not understand the odds side of things and is not helping your cause. “I can make it” are the right words to use. If everyone comes to believe in the unlimited human potential inside them and lives with this hopeful feeling, what a world we would live in!
And the right time for a good Change is always now! So let’s start …
Game of Self and Game of Life
Life is much easier to understand and live if we have two approaches to two fundamentally different concepts – the Game of Self (everything inside you, consciousness) and the Game of Life (everything outside you, reality). Mixing up the self and reality parts together is often paralyzing and can be the main reason people get stuck in life. The golden rule says not to mix facts and feelings. Feelings are exclusively Game of Self and facts are exclusively Game of Life.
To move forward in the Game of Life, we need Structure and to work skillfully with Science, people, concepts and Resources. The main resources in life are: Freedom, people, health, assets (eg. Money). The Game of Self needs Chaos and is a mess of images, feelings, and thoughts moving forward in Time. Scientists call it consciousness, we – the picture – your ever changing, inaccurate perception of reality mixed up with your thoughts and feelings. You can point the picture to: the Game of Self (Self-love, understanding, Learning, creating, meditating), the Game of Life (meeting people, moving, working, eating) or some risky combinations of the above that we will explore later.
Start the Change with the Game of Life and once you’ve made Progress, you’ll have more resources. Dedicate your efforts in to serving others. This will make you feel better, improving your Game of Self. We call this process Personal growth or the I Grow Younger process.
Hunter mode and Sheep mode
The Hunter – Sheep model defines two ways you can feel, think and act in – modes that set current life Direction. When we act like a Hunter, we’re being driven by Love, its physical manifestation (Energy), and its intellectual manifestations (curiosity and creativity). When we act like a Sheep, we’re being held back by Fears and Inertia.
When people in Hunter mode encounter a problem, they have a quick, small-scale and active solution, based on love and creativity or they dismiss the problem as not worth solving and forget about it. Sheep reactions tend to complicate things. Hunters do it; then they do the next; and then the next. Sheep think about it; then they think more about it; and then some more. Even before failure is confirmed, the Hunter has already moved on. They get extra Motivation and become even more of a Hunter. They don’t overanalyze. This is contrary to Sheep, who take failure as personal defeat. Self-esteem drops and extensive useless analysis is done.
Success and Added Value
As for success, the Hunter takes it naturally. They don’t celebrate, just move on to the next piece of the big picture. They make sure every Success has Added value. Sheep strategies rarely truly succeed. People in Sheep mode often misunderstand Achievement for success.
Motivation, Resistance and Change
Every action you take creates and influences the next. A Hunter move leads to more Hunter moves, and Sheep moves lead to more Sheep moves. Our chances of Change are the relation between our motivation and our resistance towards a certain action. When the Hunter in you wins, you open up and there is space for something even more important – Flows.
Flows and Boxes
Hunter mode vs. Sheep mode is a biological spectrum in your body related to hormones. But there is one other important spectrum, one in our mind related directly to the brain hemispheres and strengthening specific neurological pathways – Flow vs. Box thinking.
Our genes, our past and the environment makes who we are, but we can only change our environment. A conscious improvement can only have one Direction – Outward direction and one place where it happens – the Game of Life. You cannot improve your Game of Self by force. So we need a Structure that help us open up. Humans interact internally and externally only with two types of structures: Flows and Boxes. Flows and Boxes are categorically different, do not complement but rather destroy each other. Boxes have boundaries. Flows expand in every direction. Boxes cannot bring true long-term Happiness. Flows can. Boxes close us in. Flows open us up.
The first creatures had few goals in life – survive, eat and reproduce. Finding food required a process-oriented brain (Box). Not being eaten required a fluid, intuitive brain and general awareness (Flow). So focus and general intuitive awareness have to coexist. This is how the brain hemispheres – Left brain (manipulating the world) and Right brain (understanding the world) evolved. Now we want more than survival – happiness. But we forgot happiness is a Flow. Left brains and Boxes took all the credit for the progress. The relatively safe and comfortable life of the modern human needs Flows and Meaning more than Boxes and logic.
To restore the Flows we need to start with a leap of Faith. This process is popularly known as “letting go”. Only Flows improve things and true letting go is not exchanging one Box for another. It’s embracing Flows and ditching all possible Boxes. Every time you feel the urge to put something in a Box, resist. The Boxes make you weak and unhappy. You need Flows, even if they bring Chaos to your life. Flows are: Love, Energy, Creativity, Curiosity, unobstructed time, nature, Spirituality. Boxes are: all internal and external categories and labels, Goals, plans, time slots, houses, rules, dogma, Numbers.
Forest model
We need an environment stimulating Flows. Imagine you get lost in a forest, a Box, so you can plan on going into it. But then, you have to find your way back, which is a Flow. The Forest model is the only magical one that can strategically create a Flow out of a Box.
There are two types of forests – popular and unpopular. Popular forests are books, music, dancing. The popular forests are easy to find and try, but a better solution are the Unpopular forests – all Flow experiences that combine getting out of your comfort zone with committing not to go back in it until every road back is a Flow. Danger perception, physical movement and sounding crazy are all advantages. Unpopular forests are: Get lost, Straight line hiking, Snowy slope sliding, Get off just in time, Sleep on bean bags, Walk fast in transport, Move fast in a crowd, Write open letters, E-mail, don’t chat, Make chaotic gifts, Become a mentor, Internal uncertainty, No expectations, Procrastination, Empty time slots, Spend more, Value your time, Price high. The solution is to destroy the Boxes as a foundation of your life and embrace Flows. And the unpopular forests are your superpower tools for this.
Productivity, Creativity and Implementation
People with more Flows than Boxes have always productivity. Every work process has creativity and implementation phases. So we can define productivity as creativity plus implementation. Implementation is a Left brain Structure. It’s the only time we need to create mental Boxes. Creativity is a Right brain Chaos. It can be stimulated by Flows – giving it space and time to form and thrive. Boxes and Flows are like fire and ice and destroy each other in the short term. Implementation and creativity are in a constant fight within you.
We stimulate Flows and creativity if we remove enough Boxes and brain fragmenting distractions like Phone notifications and Social media scrolling. All structures are Boxes and will suppress your creativity. The only exception are Empty time slots – Boxes with no other Boxes inside create the space for Flows.
The current world makes great ideas more important than great execution. But their generation is completely unpredictable. Creativity is a slow, chaotic and immeasurable Flow.
Diversity of Experience
You need Diversity of Experience – live dynamically, talk to smart and creative people, connect, engage, share. Diversity of Experience is how many different things you have done and is crucial for your job and entrepreneurship. If you try something and it doesn’t work, you still get the Diversity of Experience. It is connected to Flow, Hunter mode and Chaos.
Core Flows and Secondary Flows
The Core Flows are Self-Love (destroys the Barriers within, you see yourself and your life experience as one whole), Unconditional love (destroys the barriers between you and other people), Meaning (destroys all other barriers in the world, seeing it as a whole), Responsibility (destroys all barriers between our values and taking action on them) and Growth / Scaling (destroys all barriers that slow us down on our mission). The core Flows generate Secondary Flows such as Curiosity, Playfulness, Joy, Love for nature and creativity.
Intrinsic motivation and Extrinsic motivation
Intrinsic motivation is the sum of the core Flows. If you don’t know why you do something and it’s some joyful Flow experience, then it comes from Intrinsic motivation. The brain has two neural pathways – one for Extrinsic motivation and one for Intrinsic motivation. Dopamine is central to both. Extrinsic motivation is anything about avoiding pain (Sheep mode, Fear) and seeking pleasure (Hunter mode, reward).
Stillness
There is one critical Flow – the value of empty intellectual space, Stillness. It’s just the absence of thinking. Mental peace. Like sadness can be a healthy processing state on an emotional level, stillness is a healthy processing state on an intellectual level. In both states the brain turns off its tireless conscious prediction engine functionality, resulting in Boxes fading away and space for Flows being formed. Stillness can happen at any moment you are not stimulated.
Balance and the extreme ends
Slowing your brain speed to near zero is great – you win in Flows and Intuition; Working at insane Speed is also great as it helps your body get into Hunter mode and doing beats thinking; The mid-ground of getting some work done at half speed is a bad choice. You’ve heard enough times that balance is good. But there are many cases where the extreme ends (one or both) are the best place to be.
A typical example is to eat half of a huge pizza and have two options for the other half – throw it away or leave it for a homeless person. You decide to throw it away. How much should you care about what you just did? Too little and you let it go. Too much and you order three pizzas and bring them to a local homeless shelter. For most people, it will be a near-best use of their time and money in the Game of Life to do something so good for others and society. In the Game of Self you feel great and you made a Hunter move, that may well lead to other beautiful acts in the future.
You care too little – you’re good. You care too much – you’re the best! For the medium amount of care given – you spend a slightly guilty evening at home and no homeless person gets to eat any pizza. Also, you made a Sheep move which may lead to other such decisions in the futurea. Some stuff you cannot change and you shouldn’t care. Some you can and you should care for the Change to happen. It’s sometimes a Hunter move to not care if the issue isn’t critical. But to care and not do anything is the classic Sheep move, the worst of the worst. By implying that somehow the best amount of everything is always in the middle and you should look for balance is not just irresponsible, it’s harmful to individuals and society.
Intuition and Logic
We’ve said that productivity is creativity and execution. And for both we need Intuition. The brain has two separate decision-making mechanisms: Logic, based mostly in the Left brain hemisphere, very good at depth and Intuition, based mostly in the Right brain hemisphere, very good at width. Logic only handles Boxes, Intuition – also Flows. Logic is about the exact, Intuition is about the fluid. Logic is a local tool. Intuition is a global tool. Logic is evolutionary new. Intuition is evolutionary old, an almost perfect decision-making tool. Logic can be accumulated and systematized by the whole of humanity. Intuition is a private, individual tool. With logic you have to understand and explain to get a correct answer. Intuition is a shortcut – you just have an answer.
The brain is a biological neural network, not so different from AI, but with massive advantages: more connections, parallelism and energy efficiency. Intuition needs data points and Time to develop and the pattern recognition capabilities of your brain will take care of the rest. Flows help create the space for Intuition to form. So does Speed. The more you have lived through (Diversity of Experience), the more helpful data points there will be for patterns to emerge.
Intuition about quantities, Intuition about structures and Vibe Intuition
There are two basic types of Intuition: Intuition about structures and Intuition about quantities. Vibe Intuition is kind of combination of these two.
I Grow Younger is all about building an intuitive framework about you and your life. If you don’t understand yourself (Game of Self), you cannot understand society and the world (Game of Life) – they are made of people like you. Human beings are interconnected. Everything influences everything else. You are a complex vibe system. Self-understanding simply means having Vibe Intuition – the best tool for self-improvement. Vibe Intuition is all about how structures and quantities evolve over time in closely interconnected systems like a human being. Vibe Intuition simply tells you what is the critical for you at this very moment – Flows; Self-love; Unconditional love; Hunter moves; Long-term Freedom; Chaos; Meaning.
Intuition about Structures deals with relations between objects, causes and effects, how everything evolves over time. Intuition about Quantities tells us how much is there of everything quantifiable – space, time, value, money, people’s tolerance, your tolerance, all limits, all critical masses needed to trigger change. These two require a very different wiring of the brain. It’s a big challenge to develop them both.
The quantities that are worth feeling are Thresholds and Flows – Numbers, Money, Freedom, Time. You cannot measure a Flow, but you can compare it to the same Flow in the past. These are important data points for your Intuition. That’s why we define the following types of Intuition about quantities – Handling numbers, Intuition about large numbers, Time understanding and Feeling thresholds.
Feeling thresholds
Life is a mess of structures and quantities, united by a universal principle: Quantity Change leads to Change in Structure (Quality Change) when a certain Threshold is passed. Knowing where the threshold is, is a quantity question which makes Intuition about quantities extremely important in life. Feeling the thresholds of humans is also extremely valuable.
Handling Numbers
Numbers govern the modern world like no other and are of critical importance. But numbers are also quite new for humanity so we never had the time and possibilities to develop an Intuition about numbers and abstraction. Life is full of situations when numbers are all around but the real challenge is not to count or do mathematical operations with them. It’s important to understand the abstraction, to understand what they represent and what the context is.
Numbers don’t bring sustainable long term Happiness. Numbers can bring long term unhappiness. Numbers cause emotions of at least the same strength as similar non-number events. A big danger about numbers is that they are easy to compare. Avoid number related emotions, don’t give them space, don’t give them time, don’t give them reasons. Friends, love, freedom, creativity are all so much more important than numbers! If the number represents another number(s), then it’s Game of Life stuff and you can dive in as your emotions are not in danger. If the number represents a non-number value like your performance evaluation or directly your Self-worth, then it is Game of Self stuff and emotions and happiness are in danger. This is the moment to avoid, ignore, not care. An inflection point between the two is pricing. Never be afraid to price high.
There is one case where numbers should be used a lot – probabilities. Practice and your brain will develop a probability Intuition that is extremely useful. A key characteristic of people with financial success and entrepreneurs is that they love being specific and hate ambiguous numbers.
Time understanding and Intuition
It’s your responsibility to understand time. It’s a purely intuitive skill that is not taught anywhere. It’s about feeling the Flow of time. Only among entrepreneurs and freelancers I have ever found people with developed time Intuition. Time understanding helps you feel how your life develops in time. Life will feel like a continuum. You will feel when something is too fast, too slow or too repetitive. It’s like a whole new level of consciousness that keeps you time-healthy and time-effective. Based on this feeling you can work and grow fast while being patient about the things in life you cannot really force.
Intuition is built from experience. You need data points. You can play two simple mental games – think what the time is and then check the real time and think how much time has passed since a memorable event. Time understanding will offer you effectivity, Self-love and creative adaptability, will make you better at work and happier in life.
Time question and Vibe question
It’s of paramount importance to ask others “the Time question”: “What do you do all day?” until you have the Intuition developed. Give me a minute by minute breakdown of your typical day. Ask the time question everywhere. Use it to ask people about their work, students about their study and parents about their parenting. It’s the most educational question you can ask someone along with “the Vibe question”: “How do you feel?”. These are the two questions that bring life detail and nuance. While “How do you feel?” is the central Game of Self question, “What you do in your day?” is the central Game of Life question.
Ultimate skills
Intuition about quantities and Intuition about structures can be also called Intellectual Ultimate skills. Ultimate skills are the most crucial skills that we need to master the Game of Self and the Game of Life. There are also three Emotional Ultimate skills: Acceptance, Mindfulness and Direction. Acceptance is to handle the past better. You will be able to change most of the future if you accept all of the past and the present you cannot change. Mindfulness is to handle the incoming Flows better. It is the art of not reacting, labeling or even thinking. It is about understanding yourself and the world. It’s a Flow state. It’s basically being fine with your internal and external Chaos and being healthy. Direction is to make your actions better. Every action of yours can be in an Outward direction, driven by Love and Energy, a Hunter move.
The Universal forces – Chaos and Structure
Paradoxically you need Chaos to learn to feel structures and also to develop the Ultimate skills. Chaos and Structure are universal forces. They are the two competing forces in your life. Their dance creates the future. Chaos changes or deconstructs Structures. The Chaos of life will trash your every unnatural and rigid order. Instead, we have to embrace the structure that occurs naturally. This structure is not something we create – it already exists within us, forming the foundation of our Intuition.
You need Chaos to have creativity, invent new things and for your personal development. It fights Boxes and Inertia on a personal level and enables Flows. It is also the way to the Ultimate skills. Chaos will help you encounter many random structures in a given time and this is all your brain needs. Structure can only preserve, Chaos is the force of creation.
Structure is useful to find patterns – it is mostly created, processed and experienced by your left brain. Structure is everywhere and needed in the Game of Life. On the personal level and in the Game of Self it creates Boxes. People evolved without much structure and cannot understand structure without proper Education. Not understanding structure is a major failure of modern society. Structure is very valuable for mankind. We owe much of the progress in our modern world to its preserving qualities.
Your personal life structure definitely has its place in the form of good habits. Humans need some supporting framework of consistency in their lives. However we need Chaos to grow. Chaos allows better structures to emerge naturally. Love, creativity and other chaotic aspects of life can exist in beautiful harmony with such structures.
Chaos and Entrepreneurship
The current economy rewards new ideas and dynamic action. It rewards Chaos as long as it doesn’t clash with the rule of law. Entrepreneurship needs Chaos and it’s currently the best path to money and Freedom. On the other hand Chaos is simply good for mental health as it guarantees that you go out of your comfort zone. But we’re often mentally unprepared for healthy dynamics and don’t understand the fundamental power of Chaos. And thus we make the mistake to have a job and not to be an Entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurship and Job
We structure life in “job” and “other parts”. Dividing one whole into two parts and then trying to balance them makes no sense.
Everyone should work as much or as little, as early or as late, and as remote, as they want, depending on their output and the nature of the work. You should be able to take a break whenever you want. Your energy comes from your motivation. Your knowledge and Diversity of Experience are always with you. The most important skills are self-knowledge and people-knowledge, which are not tied to the workplace.
The key question is: do you want to be structurally dependent for security, or do you want freedom? A day job is like a dictatorship. Working for yourself is like a democracy – chaotic, but full of freedom, learning and growth. Progress comes with Change, not stability. No job can give you the same Diversity of Experience as Entrepreneurship. Most people in day jobs never make the leap to better job or Entrepreneurship and freedom. People are held back by inertia, resist Change, have low Self-worth and overestimate potential trouble. That is good news for you, because billions of sound ideas for new products and services exist where demand is higher than supply. Being an employee lowers short-term risk, but the biggest long-term risk is doing the same thing forever. Not taking risks is itself a risk.
Work, Business and Money – the Trap-words
The words work, business and money, as well as few other that we will discuss later on represent more than a word is biologically capable of representing. Having an object with very few association links in the brain would not give a deep understanding of it. But even worse is to have an object associated with everything. The “existential risk prevention” system of the brain does not allow too many associations, because it would trigger so many connections to be lighted simultaneously that we risk a system overload. So the brain artificially suppresses activity in these word-centers. Your thought process dies, is restarted and the brain autopilot finishes the thought with whatever shallow content it can. These generic words are harmful to our thought process in an invisible way. They disrupt it, leaving behind no evidence of their failure.
When humans first evolved life was simpler so one word represented one concept. Eventually we got concepts that didn’t fit into one word. Life got more complex, dynamic and interconnected and those complicated concepts got more and more interrelated. We slapped a single word on all of those. Due to their importance they became cornerstone words in our language, categories of their own: work, career, business, money. But a cornerstone can only be one if it brings clarity and simplicity, if it is understood at a level deep enough. And since mental block happens every time we encounter the “trap word“, we cannot develop an Intuition about it.
The Fog
Then we copy the understanding of these all important concepts from people around us and popular culture. However, other people have the exact same problem – they are just as confused and the same words make them block too. We call this confusion “the Fog“ and it is invisible to those in it.
There are four types of influence that either make the fog denser or help you see through: good people who see via the fog and want to clarify and explain; evil people who see via the fog and want to take advantage of your delusions; systems that emerged to take advantage of the fog; chance makes sure to expose you to these “eureka” moments that suddenly bring clarity.
Building blocks of I Grow Younger
There is only one fundamental way forward. We just need much better cornerstone words, like those already introduced – Game of Self, Game of Life, Hunter, Sheep, Flow, Box, Chaos, Structure. Then we’ll be able to deconstruct all Trap-words using our new fundamental structure and actually understand the concepts behind them. Wrong and confusing relations will vanish and new ones will be born. Ones we can intuitively feel! This is what defines I Grow Younger. We use science – a combination of psychology and evolutionary biology – as well as the vast personal experience of our founder to reframe parts of language itself. We use basic concepts (building blocks or cornerstone words) like you – Chaos, Structure, Hunter, Sheep – you all know intuitively what those mean. And they have just one clear meaning. When having to talk about a Trap-word, we have an entire article deconstructing the mess. So let’s start with one of the most common Traps – education.
Education and School
Nothing really important about life is taught in school. Instead we learn much more facts than we need. And forget them. Children learn to think only in narrow fields, they don’t learn to make the connections needed to invent. No one teaches us how to deal with feelings, emotions and our internal world.
Number one priority for any educational system should be fostering a supportive atmosphere where children care for each other until they grow up and enter free-of-oversight life with an open heart, honest thoughts and an emotionally intelligent mind. Feelings can not be excluded from school. Love / empathy and Freedom are the building blocks for the good in life. The aspiration for Truth, which is the basis for science and education, cannot even be understood if you lack Love or understanding of why Freedom is important.
The entire structure of school should foster empathy and Freedom. Freedom means only rules the students agree with. There is no other way if you want decent engagement later.
School subjects
The world changes and so should what we learn in school: your language; english; mathematics; logic; anatomy; psychology; economics and Entrepreneurship; productivity and optimal use of your computer and the web; a diverse world; physical education plus spending as much time as possible in nature; optional sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, geography); optional humanities and arts (history and culture, literature, music, dance, theater, mixed arts); optional extra sports.
School and Motivation
Schools make one wrong assumption about students: they are all already motivated to learn. While in fact creating the conditions for this motivation is their main job. Schools then make another wrong assumption: it needs to be systematic in order to be effective. In fact systematic things tend to be boring, the motivation is gone. The teacher has to focus on the students and be effective. When we accept mediocre educational systems, we accep it for the whole world, for life.
We just need to throw away our current educational system. Not reform it. Destroy school as it is and rebuild it from the ground up. In the new system, the student and their happiness and motivation will be the priority. The student should be in charge and be mentally and emotionally supported. What is true for schools is more or less true also for universities.
University
University is old both as a concept and as an individual institution. The world today changes much faster than it can follow. Health has components that the university might jeopardize, you’re likely to experience stress or not getting enough sleep. The university costs money and time to attend. In the top universities of the world you can meet great people, but in most universities – probably not.
Remember that even for the best of the best universities it’s still a trade-off! In 4 years, with the time and money saved, you can build a financial asset worth 6-figures that brings you steady monthly income.
Self-education
In Self-education you can follow the best possible principles: create your environment to have motivation, seek fundamental goals like Freedom, triy to simplify concepts to the basics, learn from mentors in one-on-one conversations, try everything in practice, go fast, try to earn while I learn. As a self-learner you can learn anything you want, using any approach you like from any expert. You’ll be in charge of your speed and direction.
If you want to be a doctor and save lives, questions about Freedom, money and return on investment are irrelevant. The same goes for therapists, we need a lot more of them too. We all need doctors and engineers of all kinds.
IT experts, office administrators, advertising, sales, marketing, writers can and better be self-taught. Not the same for doctors, construction engineers and airline pilots – the cost of some errors is too high. If we close some universities, government funding can increase for the rest.
Here is what should be removed (all fields equally or better learned in practice): IT stuff, economics except for accounting, marketing, advertising and sales, writing and journalism, foreign languages and culture, sports.
Here is what should be downscaled: some humanities.
Here is what should be kept: highly specialized occupations like pilots, sailors, police academies, first responders, math and exact sciences, statistics, sociology, engineering, law, arts.
Here is what should be increased and better funded: medicine, psychology.
Formal education as a loss of time
Responsibility is extremely important for us and our participation in society. If you study till 25+, you take responsibility at a later age. You are likely to have less youth enthusiasm and idealism, less energy and family and kids may be on the horizon. Which means that the window within which you can fight for social Change and a better world with all of your time and energy is already closing. You can still do it, and should if possible. But there is no reason to wait that long. People suffer needlessly every day from issues we can collectively solve. In formal education we often loose not only time and motivation, but also money.
Money
If you have a job, you are an employee and the free market does not directly apply to you. A job is an exchange of: time, energy, knowledge from your side and money, appreciation, education from your employer. Your financial happiness depends on how well the company is doing, how fairly it distributes profits, and whether other companies compete for your skills. You can never expect to be paid more than what you bring the company, minus expenses, taxes, shareholder profits, and a risk buffer.
Seeing money only through the lens of your day job is a bad habit. Understanding economics gives you a huge advantage. Money is the virtual fuel of the modern world, powering most processes in the Game of Life. It has no backing beyond our collective agreement and trust that it holds value. Money is a tool. It is most effective when used rationally rather than emotionally. Money can’t buy happiness or love, but it is connected to Freedom that gives space for everything beautiful in life to exist. It is a concept of quantity, and we often haven’t yet developed an Intuition about quantities. Math and Game of Life knowledge are not enough – you must also understand your Game of Self and your own relationship with money.
Earn as many big chunks of easy and fun money as possible. Aim to have enough money so you don’t have to care about expenses like rent and food. Invest in yourself, your life and your work. You can start a business and find your way to fun and Meaning while you already earn money and have found Freedom. We can fight rising inequality together by attracting wealth and then sharing it.
Starting a business
Trying new stuff, follow two steps with minimal effort and investment until something works: create or find wasted a product or service with more demand than supply, and then find a way to sell it. According to supply and demand rules, the best business ideas are not mainstream. The market may be unfair to most businesses, but that works to your advantage. Choose industries where success exists and share back.
Choosing an idea is not as complicated as it seems – it justs needs to be Easy-to-try and hard-to-understand. Think of it as testing with minimal resources, while gaining Diversity of Experience as added value – learning by doing. The way to find a profitable niche is to experiment with many small, easy-to-try and hard-to-understand activities. A niche is profitable because it is hard for others to understand, while you are already in it, earning money and having the time to improve and finally understand it. A strong strategy is to build on a foundation that not everyone understands. Test every variation of the easy-to-try and hard-to-understand niche you’ve found.
The economy changes and constantly opens and shuts doors. When you find a good niche, don’t hesitate. When you’re profitable but options for growth (Scaling) are no longer visible, search for another niche to add to your activities. It will likely be on the same foundation, so half your work is already done.
Success and failure in business
The two main goals of business are happiness (doing what you love) and success (making money). Key success factors in business are: building assets that grow over time; avoiding projects that need constant effort or investments; no single point of failure; no long-term dependancies on a co-founder, equipment or resources.
The main reason businesses fail is the wrong kind of dependencies. Short-term dependencies are fine. You must learn to lean on employees, trust them, and delegate. Long-term dependencies are risky and usually involve a co-founder. People still choose co-founders because they share the idea, want to share the responsibility and the joy, need someone to discuss with, or need financial support. The first three are Game of Self issues. Money is a Game of Life factor. If you feel you are the senior partner – more Diversity of Experience, more resources – consider Hiring the junior one. If you feel you are the junior partner, ask yourself whether you would have any control.
A business fails if you over-focus on happiness while neglecting to earn money. Industry choice is the strongest predictor of success. The number two reason why a business fails is trying to create something that doesn’t exist. If it’s not financially sustainable, it’s a hobby.
The number three reason why a business fails is creating more liabilities than assets. Best case are asssets that create money over time with no extra cost – Passive income. Start with almost-zero-but-passive income. Worst case are liabilities that drain money over time with no extra benefit. Time is the most valuable asset. Annoying customers are drains of time. Choosing your customers is a huge advantage in business.
The number four reason why a business fails is having no idea, yet desperately wanting to have one. It often leads to a franchise – a hybrid of having a day job and a business, taking only the very worst from both – high liabilities, no Diversity of Experience and no Freedom.
Long-term Freedom
From the very important things in life, Freedom is the most invisible one. Often driven by inertia, you are not reminded that you have near infinite different paths of future choices. And some lead to Freedom you can only dream about. We define Freedom as how many meaningfully different paths you can take. Many different paths = high Freedom. Few different paths = low Freedom. The constraints on Freedom are in the Game of Self (our own abilities, fears and barriers) and in the Game of Life (our health, family and relationships, moral responsibilities and money). Freedom is everywhere which makes it all-important as Love and happiness.
A central concept of I Grow Younger is Long-term Freedom. Freedom is measurable – it’s the amount of different things you can do. It is a quantity that can be randomly enlarged and is the measurement tool for Personal development and success in I Grow Younger. You just compare your Freedom now to your Freedom in the past and your potential Freedom in the future. Only people with a certain level of Freedom can participate in making the world better at scale – the more people with a higher Freedom, the better. The rest are just fighting for their own survival. We define Self-growth as improving Long-term Freedom. By inventing and discovering new stuff, we can increase our Long-term Freedom for us and others.
Freedom does not mean a lack of commitment to the rich, beautiful things in life. Starting a family and having kids may seem like a huge limitation on Freedom and in reality it is. But life with kids gives you Freedom too, because you can experience a new universe of emotions that people without kids will probably never be able to. You lose a lot and gain a lot.
Increasing your Long-term freedom means more chances to build wisdom. More self-knowledge about what brings you happiness. More given to your loved ones and humanity in general. Your potential is and will always be limitless. But the journey of fulfilling more of it sooner goes via increasing your Long-term Freedom at every possible step. Most things can be done in millions of ways. If you limit yourself to what your broad group does, you will not end up in special places, have interesting ideas or earn more money. When you fight for your Long-term Freedom, you are on the right path. When you fight for the Long-term Freedom of others, you’re a hero by definition. If we want the highest Long-term Freedom possible, we need to live at a faster pace so we develop deeper Intuition about choices and options, consider every option possible consciously and maximize the Long-term Freedom on each choice.
Freedom and the Second mountain
We look at the Long-term Freedom scale starting from zero with you being hypothetically dead. With low Long-term Freedom you have very poor health, are in modern slavery or life imprisonment. Next on the Freedom ladder, you are mostly healthy, but live in extreme poverty. As we go higher, you earn more, can take better care of yourself and your family and allocate more of your time to search for happiness instead of fighting for survival.
As we get to a middle class person, the amount of Long-term Freedom has significantly increased. As you become wealthy, resources are no longer a problem. You need to be grateful and wise, give to charity and live happily. But this is actually just the beginning of the Long-term Freedom spectrum. You did what you could for your Freedom. But there are billions of people and animals in the world who have less. I take it as a responsibility to fight for their Freedom too. Helping others brings joy and meaning to life and is great for mental health. It’s the start of a second life period called the Second mountain when a much higher Long-term Freedom can be achieved. Second mountain is about extreme Scaling and bringing Long-term Freedom also to other human beings.
We can define complete Freedom as the ability to significantly improve the Long-term Freedom of every human or animal. Complete freedom means no more preventable death and suffering on Earth, no wars or violence. We all want it to happen, so it’s not a morality (quality) problem, it’s a lack of Freedom (quantity) problem. Both you and the world need you to scale the Long-term Freedom as far as you can go.
Business and Scaling Freedom
Building a business is the most common way to scale your Freedom. This way you make money, which can be converted into many Freedom-improving activities for you and others: hiring people whom to delegate to, trading, reinvesting, supporting good causes, hiring people who can bring positive change to the world. It starts and ends with Hiring. Nothing is as valuable as the efforts of smart, motivated people.
Before you have anything, you can start with the Love strategy (going for quality) in business (Game of Self) – hiring a person you genuinely care for. You just mixed work and Love, doubled the motivation, created long- and short-term urgencies. The Spam strategy (going for quantity) in business (Game of Life) is the second thing you can do. Spam is simply a direct path to information, attention and money. If you’re brief and direct, people will appreciate you valuing their time. If you’re cute and funny, they will value you trying to brighten up their day. Many will gladly point you to better directions. Your journey to high Freedom has begun. And every journey starts with a leap of faith.
Human forces
The human forces are Love and Fear. Fear is the counterpart of Love. It is a Box and is a typical Game of Self problem.
Compass of forces
The compass of forces contains the human forces Love and Fear and the universal forces Chaos and Structure. It’s a simple and accurate representation of the complex moves along these spectrums a human will do in order to deal with themselves and the environment.
The horizontal axis of the universal forces and the vertical axis of the human forces form four quadrants. The combination of Fear and Chaos forms the fourth quadrant – a worse place to be, where instincts and delusions rule over you. On the other side Fear and Structure form the third quadrant – a mediocre place to be, where rules goals and inertia have the say. Love and Structure form the second quadrant – a good place to be. There we have the Truth (seeking), science and structures that last. And finally, Love and Chaos form the first quadrant – a great place to be. There we are full of motivation and creativity works, and our Intuition works.
If we have Love, we are great. Together with the power of the universal force Structure we can do science, seek the Truth, create good and lasting things for all in the Game of Life. And with the power of the universal force Chaos we create the best possible Game of Self conditions for ourselves.
But people often don’t have Love, only Fear. Many of us live in the fourth quadrant. We often manage to escape from it to the third one and then try to go up to the second quadrant, but that is impossible. You can’t go up without destroying the existing structured fear. There is no way up from Fear and Structure to Love and Structure. So people come back again to Fear and Chaos. We oscillate very often between the fourth and the third quadrant. What we need is a leap of Faith. We need to give up rigid order and imposed structures and embrace Chaos and Love. Then we can make the leap from the worst place to be, the fourth quadrant, to the best place to be – the first quadrant. And that’s the only way up!
Once we’ve seen how crucial Love is, let’s explore it in more detail.
Love
Love is a complicated multi-meaning Trap-word. Love is a chaotic, outgoing and selfless giving force, so it is very hard to manage consciously.
Romantic Love and Relationship
Romantic Love should not be regarded as something between two people because it’s asymmetrical by nature. A much more realistic picture is of you loving each other independently. The strength, depth and exact mix of feelings are never the same.
Types of Love
There are four types of Love: Self-love, Love as a concept, Love in biology and Unconditional love.
Self-love
The sooner you develop Self-love, the better everything is. True Love comes with understanding, forgiveness and no Expectations. It just lets things be. It’s natural and flourishes on its own when you don’t have much Fear, Shame and Guilt. Self-love is a rarely pure, deeply internal concept that does not have anything at all to do with the Game of Life. No external validation is needed. No achievements. No comparisons. No actions. No expectations. No thoughts even. Just the feeling you are worthy of life. It’s the center of your Game of Self. Because there isn’t a single another thing not connected to it.
Love as a concept
Love as a concept unites us. A force for good which makes us superhuman. When all our inertia and barriers are gone and we achieve anything possible in the Game of Life with ease and harmony. Chaos + Love result in a beautiful mess of inspiration, motivation, creativity and Sharing. A very Hunter move inducing mix. Structure + Love result in building the best structures that last. All of science and technology is a result of mixing love with Structure. A preserving force.
Love in biology
Love in biology acts as a binding force. Love in biology for our kids is the strongest one, as they depend on us for their survival. Then there is love in biology in the form of attraction for our partner so the kids can arrive and love in biology for our family so we can raise kids. And Love in biology for our closest people (our tribe).
Unconditional love
Unconditional love is when you want the loved person to be happy, when you objectively make sacrifices for the loved person, when actions coming from your loved one do not cause harm, when it feels right to give Freedom and there are no expectations. There is no stronger force in life than Unconditional love. Enjoy its power and take advantage of the shattered barriers to grow both in the Game of Self and the Game of Life … and grow younger.
The principle of two
Feeling Unconditional love is one passion. If you don’t have another, you risk leaning into obsession. “The principle of two” states that at any point you need at least two very passionate activities in your Game of Life.
Love – myths and practical advice
There are the many myths about Love in our culture. It’s not Love that can make you miserable, it’s expectations. It can lead to sadness if your loved one is unhappy. Sadness is a part of healthy healing processes and it does not equal suffering which comes from failed expectations. Making you attractive increases distraction factors and you decrease your odds of ending up with someone who values you.
In Love we do not have complete control over anything. If the Love is one-sided it’s even more important to have a kind, understanding person on the other side. Most of those grow into beautiful friendships. Lots of Love, lots of inspiration, lots of conversation and surely preferable to an unhealthy relationship.
You cannot choose who you fall in Love with. But you can leave yourself with more good options and fewer bad ones. There are so many ways to see if a heart is full of the kindness you want. You don’t need to date someone to find this out. You just need to be around. Because in dating the only challenge (to look cool and attractive) can be easily faked, while it’s not usual for people to fake their whole everyday life. You should never hold back on loving someone if they give kindness vibes.
If the Love is one-sided, there is no reason not to let your loved one know. Summon up your courage and do it in person. Showing your vulnerability is brave and genuine and the right thing to do. The hardest thing in life (Change) suddenly becomes natural and easy – Love in its forms is crucial for Change.
How Change happens
Change happens in several ways: when life forces you to change, when you decide to follow a new life direction, when you fall in Love and when you become mentally addicted.
Sometimes an internal Change shakes up our own motivations and we end up in Hunter mode. We gradually overcome fears and barriers and follow a course of curiosity and Self-love. This reduces damage caused by spending time in Sheep mode and frees us from the harmful influence of inertia.
The addictions that create the possibility for positive Change, contrary to harmful addictions (drugs, alcohol, food, etc), are mental drugs. This creates the space for healthy thoughts if your environment and the people around you are fertile for those.
Evolution, Inertia and Change
The primary biological motivations for Change are fear or Love in different forms. Evolution leads to inertia. Its only goal is to pass your genes on, making stability mandatory. Evolution applies some very simple principles: do things the way your predecessors did – they survived and procreated, so stuck to what works; change nothing, except when a threat or reward is visible – changes in behavior are already tried and if they didn’t become the norm, they were a failure.
Living beings don’t really have a way to fully experience what lays ahead in time. Evolution’s plan to protect our future could only be executed in the present moment. So from every moment to the next, one evolutionary rule of behavior applies. If it more or less works, don’t change it. This is inertia, the most constant Force in your life.
The fight for Change
In order to fight inertia we need inspiration and motivation to overcome resistance and start making a Change. Many people look first to routines and planning as a way out of feeling stuck in life. But in I Grow Younger, we think the natural enemies of inertia are Love and Chaos – the opposite of fear and structure! Love is an internal, Game of Self, force. It starts with loving yourself in a healthy way.
Change and Self-love
We can do the following when we feel stuck in life: practice Self-love, feel that your future-you deserves better, let go of old beliefs, take chances and share the benefits. Self-love is key because it makes you feel you deserve the best for yourself.
The feeling you’re deserving of Change has the power to completely defeat the feeling of being stuck in life. What keeps people feeling stuck in life, is the question of merit – whether they’re good enough and worthy enough of a reward. If something is good for you and moral by itself, why would you think or feel you don’t deserve it? There is no merit scale. The world is mostly random. Some people work hard and get nothing, others get good stuff because of their genes, place of birth or pure luck. Fairness is a human concept the universe simply does not support. Take the chance if moral, share the benefits if any. This is all you need to follow. If you want the world to be more fair, just share most or all of the good stuff.
How to achieve Self-love
Love cannot be manufactured. But it will grow if you give it space and time and remove the barriers – shame, guilt and the fear of being immoral. The key to self-love is to completely detach it from what you think you deserve. Your relationship with yourself is the most important in your life. It’s like looking at a mirror – two times the same You. Reverse-cheating can help you to develop Self-love – just break the central rule of your surrounding system and let the benefit go to another entity.
Reverse-cheating
Reverse-cheating is a powerful force in life and changes the narrative from performance reward to genuine care. Reverse-cheating is exactly the same thing that happens every time you change something in your life. You fail the habit and make a trade-off between a known pattern from the past and an uncertain future. You and future you are locked in this constant dance of expectations, reality and improvement attempts.
In a relationship if everyone is willing to give in Love without receiving anything in return a virtuous cycle begins. You have to give what is not yet earned. There are constant occasions to make the goodwill first step, to reverse-cheat. But in a relationship between You and You if one of your You-s is down, the other You is also down – it’s a dangerous symmetry.
Vulnerability
There are two separate skills we need – emotions and thoughts. And our Self-worth and happiness depend on it. Guilt, shame and anxiety emotions are extremely unhelpful on a personal level. They have evolved to keep our tribe together and have no purpose other than that. Whenever you spot them, drop them by any means. Vulnerability is a good counter emotion to those. Without vulnerability there is no Love. Destructive thoughts come when we’re down and can grow to terrifying proportions. Be mindful and a compassionate observer. Don’t let such thoughts become yours. If it doesn’t work, distract yourself – this is fighting the symptom, rather than the disease but it’s better than nothing.
Self-love and Breaking symmetry
If you believe as a core value that everything good should be earned, you’re not giving yourself any Love and compassion because you don’t feel you have earned the right to it. This is a fundamental problem for many people. There is only one way forward for those people. Make Reverse-cheating a part of your life and get used to those unfairly looking asymmetries. This way you’ll break the patterns of fairness and symmetry that prevent you to be loving to yourself. This radical kindness by default is a practical path that costs you next to nothing. Once you emotionally accept the concept of giving forms of unearned Love, you will be able to give the same to yourself and to have Self-love. And once you love yourself, you will be able to love also other people.
Morality and Happiness
There is a structural difference between the morality of a single decision and life with its thousands of consecutive decisions. With a single decision the choices are limited and the relative cost of errors is high. So it’s important for each individual decision to try to do no harm. The number of total possible choices along the big timeline is close to infinity. In such a complex system it’s impossible to be perfect.
From the point of view of utilitarianism we have to maximize happiness for everyone. Making people happy makes us happy too, a win-win. Maximizing happiness is all about quality multiplied by scale. And here comes the real conflict. Scaling is impossible without small pockets of harm done, without feelings getting hurt. In some cases you have to actively destroy a structure to maximize happiness.
Morality and Freedom
The more Freedom in life you have, the more of your choices will be about what to create and how to help. Freedom is priceless. It gives us time, space, energy and creativity. There is no morality without Freedom, because you lose your choices. Freedom + Resources is what you need to change the world. Freedom + resources + morality + luck and you will certainly change it for the better. You can just base everything on Freedom valuations. Did your actions improve someone’s Freedom? You helped long term, in fact you changed a life.
Overly moral people
The main obstacle of Freedom in the Game of Self is the artificial concept of purity (being always moral). There is one huge group that needlessly suffers from one of the world’s most hidden and pervasive fears with zero advocacy because they value morality above Freedom and believe their only Freedom is within the framework of moral purity. This group is made of all overly moral people that always do the right thing. It’s a paradox, but it’s true. The Hunter-Sheep dynamic is so powerful in the long term, that the Fear of being immoral can seamlessly get integrated into your life. Like all fears it leads to doubts, slow Speed, small scale and Inertia that slows every ambitious project, involving other people, to a grind. Moral people are born with the empathy and honesty to lead nations, only to end up as bystanders most of the time.
If we define ourselves as being above all a decent, moral, honest person, what is the biggest fear? To lose this beautiful, pure story, to lose moral purity. The more strictly moral we are, the more the danger that this fear will start controlling all decisions in our life, leading to lack of resources and in the end, even immorality. All of this is a completely internal process. It can not only be invisible to your friends and family but also invisible from you.
The end result is stagnation, inertia and Sheep mode. The more you let any fear control you, it just grows. There are no good fears. You may leave some people unhappy with your choices but you are also responsible for yourself and everything you can give and create for this world. Don’t sacrifice all that potential for the imaginable concept of purity. Nothing and no one is perfect. Immoral people, they just take advantage of all this. They form a majority in many positions of leadership. Just because the beautiful people of this world are busy staying small for the sake of purity.
The largest unused resource for world Change are the quiet, well-meaning, moral people afraid of their own power and the Change it might bring in their lives. The passivity of such a large group makes it easier for evil forces in the Game od Life to manipulate the Truth.
Truth and Bullshit
The biggest danger for Truth comes from Bullshit. Bullshit is a Partial Truth combined with Usefulness and packed in a beautiful Story. Bullshit is easy to create and thrives everywhere. Team Truth is small and has one goal: to fight the Bullshit. Team Truth cannot monitor all the Bullshit. There is no prevention, only partial damage control. You either love the ideal of Truth and fight for it or the evolutionary forces will lead you into some Bullshit group. This hinders your potential in the Game of Life, where objectivity and understanding are the keys to success.
Bullshit is the main tool of control over the masses because of our biological susceptibility to it. The strongest evolutionary advantage was not to know the actual Truth. It was to have one Perceived Truth with your tribe. Biology makes usefulness always dominate objectivity. We have to constantly resist Bullshit. Your true allies are Flows and the intelligence-defining power of prediction. We need Love for Truth and Intellectual trust.
Love for Truth
The Love for Truth is distinctly human. People with a high level of Meaning see the world as one whole and have no barriers between themselves, their potential futures, and the world’s future. In such people Truth connects to prosperity for everyone via science and technology, and reduces the harm from the Bullshit. People with high level of Meaning feel the value of Truth for everyone and fighting for the Truth becomes their form of Love to the world.
Intellectual trust
There are two different types of Trust. Emotional trust is about people’s intentions and is carried by Love. Intellectual trust is about people’s competence and is carried by Structure. Emotional trust is built into us at a very deep subconscious level. Intellectual trust is a very adult feeling that requires a fully developed brain and is boosted by Education and Diversity of Experience.
Trust is at the crossroads of all human experience. Love and Fear are the Human forces, Chaos and Structure – the Universal forces. The two types of trust are fundamental human expressions of life’s core Forces. When we evolved, emotional trust (connection) was everything. Intellectual trust was nowhere. Emotional trust will always be critical for our survival and wellbeing as it keeps us out of malicious people’s way. Intellectual trust is essential to find the objective Truth. If you don’t differentiate between Intellectual trust and emotional trust, you simply apply only the emotional trust, that always dominates.
The fight for Truth
The fight for Truth needs many pre-requirements to even be able to start – Flows, Love for Truth, Intellectual trust, good education, Diversity of Experience, not to be indoctrinated in a Bullshit group. But you need them all nevertheless, because you have only one battle in life – the battle for Truth. Everything is connected to everything.
Finding the Truth has two approaches – direct (logical) and indirect (intuitive). The second one brings you closer to the Truth rather than exactly at it, but is the only available in messy situations with a lot of Bullshit floating around. The direct approach is great for simpler questions with a definitive true answer.
If you bring one person closer to the Truth, you change a life. Facts won’t help without you showing Love, Acceptance, understanding, Vulnerability and care. Love as a core Flow is the foundation of everything else in the Game of Self and the Game of Life.
Intuition, Love and Truth
Intuition is the key bridge between Love + Chaos on one side and Love + Structure on the other side. It needs the Freedom of Chaos to work. But also the foundational Truth of structure. If the structure is missing, we have misinformation, conspiracy theory, fake news. The majority of people don’t have the Truth-finding tools, which, unlike Love and empathy, are not built into us. They have to develop Intellectual trust and not depend on the more primal emotional trust. We should all be led by empathy when dealing with each other and led by facts when dealing with the world. Caring for the information we expose other people to is a form of Love. Love as a concept is a force multiplier for your actions. And structure is pointing this power in the right direction, determined by Truth.
Closely connected to Bullshit is one of the most dangerous Traps – Religion.
Religion, Faith and Spirituality
Spirituality is a Game of Self stuff – it helps us to feel happiness. Faith is spirituality with a direction – it helps us to make Progress and have Success. Religion is when our faith goals involve other people and the the Game of Life. It is an explosive mix between the Game of Self and the Game of Life and a major source of tension and conflict.
Religion as a story
Religion is faith turned into a Story trying to spread and outcompete other stories. It evolves like a living organism and has one long term goal: survival. Religions have to be catchy and make us feel good, universally loved and treated fairly.
Types of Religions and Ideology
Religions can be: with no (all-important) gods, with a single all-important God, with multiple important Gods, centered on Morality, centered on supremacy, centered on equality, centered on a cult of personality. The dark sides of religions vary from threatening your Self-love to threatening your life. There is no difference between a religion and an ideology.
Spirituality
Spirituality is great as long as we don’t impose our thoughts on other people who may not need what we need. Spirituality has close ties with morality, a human-made concept that is largely a force for good in society. Atheists can be spiritual.
Faith
Faith is a power multiplier of a person’s abilities. Give it to a peaceful human with good principles and you get the behavior of Jesus. People are generally more good than bad today. In times of scarcity and disinformation this was not the case. Faith is historically controversial in its results. Today faith can play a role in helping those we left behind in developing countries. It can help realize and combat inequality with some much needed charity.
Faith and Bullshit
Faith is a good tool to overcome inertia and make a Change. But faith is for personal use. It should not be exported to crowds or you don’t know if you’re multiplying the good or the bad anymore. Bullshit powered by faith is very dangerous.
Religion as streamlined faith
Religion is a story-based structure with the goal of streamlining faith. It needs cultural, political and financial resources. It collects money to ensure its survival and it gives some back for good causes, resulting in mixed economic results. It can be a valuable support structure. It can also make people narrow-minded. All this brings mixed social results.
Religion as outsourcing
Religion is outsourcing. We all have very important questions about life. Many of them science is incapable of answering. Humans are not built to handle uncertainty for anything important well. We want to know as not knowing was a bad trait in the evolution process and for our survival. Religion has thousands of years of proven experience of making humans feel better when they are miserable. It’s a stabilizing structure we can always outsource to. The demand for such structures is higher than the supply. Family and the few therapists are not enough. Religion directly brings Meaning, human connection and spiritual experiences that release oxytocin. Religious groups are usually empathetic and supportive.
If you’re down, but have hope, faith can help you multiply the hope and get back on your feet. But if you have no hope, then religion may be the last tool to create some. Happy people don’t need religion and rarely turn to it.
If you have recovered your mental health, you no longer need the support structure of religion. Otherwise you lose a lot of your Freedom. And if we care about one thing in I Grow Younger, it’s your Long-term Freedom. From one moment on your religious group will bring you decreasing benefits and/or increasing frustrations. As you evolve and change, it will still be stuck and will become your mental prison.
There is a central problem with outsourcing. You delegate a task to a third party company. They have every incentive to make you dependent. They never want you to be able to solve the task yourself. Ever. Religion is the same. In developed countries we’ll be just fine long term without religion. But we need to make sure people have access to diverse sources of spirituality, faith and hope. Regarding your values there can be no outsourcing.
Next to outsourcing there are few more Risks.
Risks (Red flags)
Risks or Red flags are Probabland, Mindless underworld, Escapist underworld, Delusional underworld, Passivity, Overkill, Passive aggression, Mental self-harm, Celebrating small wins, Bullshit, Time management, Self-pressure, Brain fragmenting distractions.
The Game of Self is a mess of images, feelings, and thoughts moving forward in time. Scientists call it consciousness, we – the picture – your ever changing, inaccurate perception of reality mixed up with your thoughts and feelings. There are a few directions you can point the picture to: Game of Self – Self-love, understanding, learning, creating, meditating; Game of Life – meeting people, moving, working, eating; Underworld – when primal urges take over – chocolate, gambling, social media; Probabland – when primal fears take over. Our perceptions of other people’s thoughts and feelings.
Probabland
The picture strongly prioritizes the current moment. Any analysis of yourself is like drawing a picture of a picture. Expectations are like drawing a picture of something you’ve never seen. Thinking about what others would think is painting a picture of a picture of a picture. We call the space hidden behind reality probabland. Humans terribly fear a loss of connection with other people because in the not-so-distant evolutionary past, life was tough and you were dependent on a tribe to survive. To care about what others think is built into our genes and we need to deal with it. Probabland is an unproductive place to be in, as it combines the worst of both worlds. This huge problem is largely hidden because we spend time in probabland almost exclusively when we’re alone. Activities involving attention and decision making (sports, games, conversation, etc) are the best way to get yourself out of probabland.
Celebrating small wins
Celebrating small wins is a way to abandon your Flows and Hunter mode just when you got the momentum. You don’t have many battles in life, you have one and it’s an infinite game, it’s never won or lost so there’s nothing to celebrate. Feeling good and joyful and having fun are great Flows. A targeted celebration is turning the joy into a Box and destroying the best part of it. You can celebrate the whole miracle of life 24/7 if you want – that’s healthy.
Self-pressure
A productive state of Flow can only happen while you’re in Hunter mode. And for this to happen, you have to minimize self-pressure. This means the least possible to-do lists, reminders, apps, phone, and distractions in general. Time management apps will not help you reach Flow; they are more of a pick-yourself-up-when-you’re-totally-down last resort solution. Management in general does not increase productivity, the opposite, autonomy, does – including from yourself.
Brain fragmenting distractions
These are Phone notifications, Chatting, Social media and Scrolling. All of them lead to more Boxes and are normally used exactly when we have the chance to experience a Flow, so they do not only destroy existing, but also possible Flows. They may also lead to Sheep mode.
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