Nicholas Jiemas ✏️

Scribbly tweets of things small and big.

[Nicholas Jiemas ✏️ @Nichocacola]

As 2022 is closing off, it’s a good time to reflect on our lives and hopefully emerge a wiser person.

22 reflective questions (and visuals) I asked and will keep asking myself: 🧵

[saira @sairaspooks]

honestly give me a friendship like this i’m so sick of no one being invested in me and my interests

[VP @VibesPatrol]

Examples of Materialist Nihilism:

> scrolling until the night is gone and calling it rest
> buying another thing to feel a pulse for ten minutes
> treating the body as a delivery system for pleasure and then wondering why it feels empty
> watching other people’s lives for hours instead of building one
> measuring a day by calories, steps, likes, and portfolio ticks
> talking about “self-care” while avoiding any demand that would actually change you
> collecting experiences like stamps and never becoming anyone
> treating work as only money and weekends as only recovery
> using porn, food, drink, or games as a lid on the thing you will not look at
> calling every higher claim cringe so you never have to live up to one
> filling the house with stuff and the mind with noise so silence cannot speak
> dating as inventory management
> politics as team sport instead of a question of the just city
> fitness as aesthetics with no inner order behind it
> travel as content
> education as credentials instead of formation
> death treated as an awkward medical event, not a fact that should reorder how you live
> spirituality as candles, playlists, and a slightly nicer personality
> refusing the cave’s exit because the shadows are entertaining and the light would cost you the life you already have

that is materialist nihilism in practice.
not a theory.
a sedation.

Plato called it the life of appetite.

the man on fire is the total opposite.

[IzzyBn Art @IzzybnArt]

#discoelysium animation 🕺

[i like food @messedupfoods]

straight from the source

[soli @solisolsoli]

My Dear Cat, 1977, by Masahisa Fukase

[Alex Veremeyenko @alex_verem]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[🍂 @Lovandfear]

Some people is mee 🥰

[Kevin Tanaka @ItsKevinTanaka]

Otto Kernberg explains narcissistic personality disorder as a defense mechanism:

Kernberg is a 96-year-old Austrian-born American psychoanalyst, professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine, and the most-cited psychoanalyst in the world. His work helped shape how narcissistic personality disorder is defined in the DSM.

He describes narcissistic personality disorder as one of the severe personality disorders—but one that operates differently from the others.

Beneath the surface, these individuals have a borderline personality organization: a fragmented self-concept, unstable views of others, and an internal struggle between idealized and persecutory experiences.

But rather than live in that chaos, they construct what Kernberg calls a "pathological grandiose self."

"It is constituted by a combination of ideal aspects of the self, ideal aspects of others that have been incorporated as if one possessed them, and ideal aspirations of the self as if one had achieved them."

In other words, the person absorbs the qualities they admire in others and treats their own aspirations as already achieved—building an internal world of grandiosity and self-sufficiency.

The cost? Everyone else gets devalued.

"Others are devalued; 'we don't need them, we are fine, I'm just great by myself, I don't need anybody else.'"

Kernberg explains that the outside world then gets divided into three categories: depreciated, worthless people; those who are great and must be admired so their qualities can be absorbed; and potential enemies who must be fought off.

This structure creates an illusion of stability. On the surface, the person appears integrated and secure—far more composed than others with severe personality disorders. But underneath the self-satisfaction and grandiosity lies "an incapacity to love others, and an internal sense of grandiosity and emptiness at the same time."

There is no genuine mutuality in their relationships. They need admiration constantly but cannot reciprocate.

In therapy, this dynamic plays out directly with the therapist. Kernberg describes a long-term power struggle:

"They have to show their superiority to the therapist and keep themselves superior to the therapist because the only alternative is then if they would need the therapist, it means that the therapist is superior to them and they would feel immediately inferiorized and humiliated."

The therapeutic work involves gradually clarifying and resolving this superiority-inferiority battle, which then reveals what was always underneath: "the underlying borderline structure against which the narcissistic structure was a defense"—the severe splits between idealized and persecutory relationships that the grandiose self was built to hide.

The narcissistic personality, in Kernberg's framework, is not the core problem. It is the solution the psyche constructed to avoid an even more painful one.

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

Regret is a cruel storyteller. It rewrites the past with the wisdom of the present, convinces you that you should have known better when you had no way of knowing at all.

[ᐱ ᑎ ᑐ ᒋ ᕮ ᒍ @Andr3jH]

the liberal subject scrolling through his feed at two in the morning sincerely believes that he feels compassion for Punch-kun, the young monkey excluded from the primate social order in his enclosure. but in reality the monkey's objecthood is constituted solely through its misery. the bullying is the product and the monkey, as such, is of no interest to anyone. the audience doesn't want the monkey to be happy. it wants the monkey to be prospectively happy. it wants the eternal promise of happiness. and this is where it gets truly obscene. the monkey fails to secure a happy ending. it is not able to perform its victimhood with sufficient telegenic charm. Daniel LaRusso doesn't meet Sensei Miyagi and so on and so forth. his misery as the sole constructor of his moral objecthood and the absence of the transcendence of said misery exist in a superposition and at precisely THIS moment a penguin appears. also with a plushie. the monkey show isn't renewed for another season. the monkey disappears like Nikolai Yezhov from the photo with Stalin. pure ideology.

[Nicholas Jiemas ✏️ @Nichocacola]

@ScholarshipfPhd Hi 😬

[Naval @naval]

The fundamental human disease is separation, and its symptom is loneliness.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

This relationship advice from a divorce lawyer

[📹 James J. Sexton, Esq / nycdivorcelaw]

[Christopher @molochofficial]

All truly great Christmas media recognizes the inherent melancholy of the holiday season

[Ashley Mountainstone @BottleBell]

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If you watch this video enough times you will feel your nervous system regulate or begin to. Stay with it. Feel the beauty that is my favorite hormone (and it’s not even close) - oxytocin. This is one to keep in bookmarks if you have trouble coming out of crisis. Your body is a primal system that needs these signals.

[Nsikan @CkanJohnson]

I know this feeling. Not the loss of it exactly, but the moment you notice it’s gone.

For me, it happened at the gym. This girl asked if I was done with the machine, and I just nodded and walked away. Didn’t even say the words. Just nodded. And I caught my reflection in the mirror across and barely recognised the person staring back.

There used to be a version of me that would’ve said something, anything. Made her smile, asked how her workout was going, and existed in that moment like it mattered. But I was already thinking about my next set, my macros, and the work I had waiting at home.

I grabbed my water bottle and thought, 'When did I become someone who just nods?'

What I think happened is we started carrying the future differently. Not in the dreamy way we carried it when we were younger, when everything felt possible and distant. But in the accountant’s way. We began calculating the cost of things that used to be free.

Talking to strangers used to feel like play. Now it feels like time. And time is the thing we’re supposed to be strategic about. We’re supposed to be building something. Moving toward something. So we perform this math in real time: Does this conversation serve my goals? What is the ROI of charm?

And the terrible thing is, we’re not wrong. We do have things to build. The weight of that is real. It changes your posture, literally and metaphorically. You start moving through the world like someone with somewhere to be.

But here’s what I’ve been learning: the self-awareness that makes you focused also makes you self-conscious. You become the kind of person who watches themselves in conversations, who edits while speaking. You catch yourself staring instead of seeing. Calculating instead of connecting.

My uncle told me once, when I asked why he seemed quieter than he used to be, “I got tired of performing.” At the time, I thought he was just old. Now I wonder if he meant something else. Maybe what looks like losing your spark is actually just being more selective with your light. If maybe you don’t lose the ability to make people laugh, you just stop seeing it as your responsibility.

I don’t know what happened to you. But I know what happened to me. I became someone with a plan. And plans have a way of making the present feel like a waiting room. You stop improvising. You start thinking of spontaneity as something you can’t afford.

The only thing I’ve figured out is that the goals we’re so busy serving might actually need the part of us we’ve put away. The ease. The play. The version of ourselves that didn’t count the minutes. Because the person you’re becoming isn’t supposed to be smaller than the person you were.

Sometimes now I make myself stop. At the gym, in the elevator. I make myself inefficient with my attention. I ask the unnecessary question. I laugh at the small thing. Not because I’m trying to get my rizz back or whatever we’re calling it. But because I’m trying to remember that I’m not just a project under construction. I’m also a person here, now, in this moment that doesn’t need to be optimised.

I still see that girl at the gym sometimes. We nod at each other now, and that’s fine. But I think about that moment. How she asked a simple question, and I couldn’t even find words. Perhaps I’ve been confusing warmth with performance and presence with productivity.

Personally, you didn’t lose anything. You just got heavier. And now you’re learning how to move with the weight.

[Vivid Void @vividvoid]

There is, and it's closely related to a genera, which is the opposite of trauma. It's an event so intense it ruptures your sense of self and makes your old identity impossible to sustain. But instead of the difference between old and new you becoming a whirlpool of pain and rumination, the rupture becomes a wellspring through which your soul pours into the world.

Examples include: Near-death experiences, finding the great love of your life, helping deliver a baby, meeting a hero and finding that he admires something in you that he doesn't have. Being forgiven by someone you once harmed and still carry immeasurable guilt for. Creating a work of art so beautiful you can't believe it came through you. Finding you are still loved after a nervous breakdown. Meditating until reality dissolves into indescribably beautiful vibration. Leaving a lover better than you found them. Loving someone unconditionally for long enough that you see them completely transform.

Because we are so resilient, and because the spirit naturally moves toward coherence and growth when it is in a safe and healthy environment, there are many more ways to rupture the self in generative ways than there are to traumatize it. It's one of the most beautiful things about being human.

[𝗥𝗢𝗖𝗞𝗬 @TheWarKitchen]

Thinking about conversation corners

[Nicholas Jiemas ✏️ @Nichocacola]

@ScholarshipfPhd Hi hi hi!