Caffeine Thoughts

My blood is Caffeine.

[Illimitable Man (IM) @SovereignIM]

You are the villain in their story so they don’t have to be.

[Lauren @buridansridge]

Most will harp on about "locking in", but those who have truly gone full-bore in pursuit of their vision know the soul density and spiritual texture of others who have too, and what it actually takes. You can smell the stench of those who are performative. It is hardly ornamental, the ordeal is utterly dishevelling. It feels like a live flaying of the psyche, all while paper-thin strips of flesh are continually peeled from your fingers until they snap off somewhere on your body. You can't tell the difference between blood, sweat, and tears because they all taste of exhaustion. Hours bleed into days, which bleed into months, yet deadlines somehow still blare like neon signs in a cyberpunk city, or were they pop-up advertisements, who knows. Supersonic, narcotic, necrosis, fibrosis. Your definition of sleep loosens, you're not even sure if it really exists. Many will smirk, doubt you, prepare you for failure, tell you it is unsustainable, yet you pull off unfathomable "miracles" by the skin of your teeth because you have to be innovatively resourceful. You lose face, your ego is both in the pits of hell and equally stapled back in under your diaphragm because you accept no other option, because you back yourself that much, because if it makes sense to you, that is all that matters. You cough up half-swallowed exhales, unsure if it is relief or anticipation, because that is what it takes to speed-run and excel. And when you arrive, you are warmly congratulated and greeted with how "lucky" you are, which makes you laugh because if only they knew.

[Illimitable Man (IM) @SovereignIM]

To the highly intelligent man, logic even more than money is his God. He will worship it vigorously, dismissing anything that does not obey it, believing it contains the answers to all things even as he perverts and corrupts it to suit his biases.

He will cling to reason desperately. He will not relegate it until it fails him in the most catastrophic of ways, and he becomes intimately aware of its acute limitations. Then and only then will he gain an appreciation for chaos, death, paradox and spirituality. Then and only then will he realise logic does not have the answers to all things. Only then will he realise how prideful and ignorant he has been.

It is for these reasons he has love: to show him the foolishness of his ways - that his reason is not a God that governs all, but a tool of understanding that can explain many things, but not all things, that can help him master many things, but not everything.

There exists a reality beyond the limitations of his logic, and it will batter down his doors in his smug, self-protective hubris until he is humbled. He is a zealot, and he will come kicking and screaming. For a man’s rationality to fail him then is a type of initiation - it is for this reason he must come to know heartbreak.

[Illimitable Man (IM) @SovereignIM]

Your self-discovery should not be paid for with another person’s heart.

[Illimitable Man (IM) @SovereignIM]

A problem solving machine that has no problems has run into the problem of not having any problems. Therefore it creates one either real or imagined in order to give itself something to fix.

This is not about machines.

[Illimitable Man (IM) @SovereignIM]

Anyone who reframes your intensity as negativity and advocates for “normalcy” is asserting mediocrity as superiority, and should be avoided. They do not appreciate you, do not understand you, and will drag you down - if you let them. Do not let them. Cut them off immediately.

[Unfiltered @quotesdaily100]

PHILOSOPHIES THAT PERMANENTLY CHANGED HOW HUMANS THINK:

Ancient Greece
1. Stoicism — Control what you can. Release what you cannot.
2. Epicureanism — Simple pleasures outlast extravagant ones.
3. Platonism — Reality beyond what eyes can see exists.

Asia
4. Confucianism — Society built on respect, duty and relationships.
5. Taoism — Flow with life rather than forcing it.
6. Buddhism — Suffering begins and ends within the mind.

Europe
7. Existentialism — Meaning is not given. It is chosen.
8. Marxism — Economic systems shape every human relationship.
9. Humanism — Human dignity requires no divine permission.

Middle East
10. Sufism — Love is the highest form of knowing God.

Modern Era
11. Nihilism — Nothing is inherently meaningful. That itself is freedom.
12. Pragmatism — Truth is measured by what actually works in practice.

India
13. Vedanta — Consciousness is not what you have. It is what you are.

China
14. Legalism — Order without structure is just chaos given a polite name.

Africa
15. Ubuntu — A person becomes fully human only through other people.

[Illimitable Man (IM) @SovereignIM]

Knowledge is stored information.

Intellect is the capacity to grasp complexity and distil it into higher forms of simplicity through distillation rather than dilution. It is also divergent forms of cognition. Vast processing power. Vivid spiritual interiority. Rationality. Laterality. Paradox tolerance. Nuance.

Wisdom is to possess accurate pattern maps based on what you know and act in rightful accordance with it. High truth preference.

[Archetype Vision @ArchetypeVision]

Amor and Psyche by Adolfo de Carolis

[Illimitable Man (IM) @SovereignIM]

It's actually very hard to be simple when, by default, your brain generates various nuance chains trying to be as precise as possible.

So hilariously the stronger the brain, the harder it is to generate simplicity as a smooth output, because it’s not the default processing mode.

[Illimitable Man (IM) @SovereignIM]

You feel free when you don't explain because you're not holding yourself accountable to other people's inability to grasp. Maybe they just don't need to know. Maybe you're okay with them not getting it, and the implications of their not getting it. Maybe: fuck them.

[Illimitable Man (IM) @SovereignIM]

Actually an argument in favour of age gap

The only way a 14 year old guy will be able to call out a girl doing something like this is if he is the son of a narcissistic mother with a ruthlessly trained disposition or a genetic psychopath

Average guy gets cooked by age peer girl

They say it's manipulative when the man is older, and yet women run rings around age peer men and habitually manipulate them, and nobody calls them out on this.

The illusion is that age peers are mental equals, when they are not. Men are slower to develop.

She is the “creepy older man” in this scenario, exploiting a poor young innocent boy's heartfelt goodness to flex her coming of age feminine sexual power, narrativising it as a cautionary tale of male incompetence whilst purporting to be ashamed. But she is not ashamed. It is a humble brag posing as a lesson.

And men don’t need to learn about women from women anyway, their self-awareness pitiful. If you need to learn anything about women, you learn from a man who has conquered women and can repeatably reproduce that outcome aka someone competent with a true perceptive understanding, not an estrogenic self-indulgent ad hoc narrativiser.

[Bohemian girl @_Bohemian_Girl]

Kreska

[Illimitable Man (IM) @SovereignIM]

If you care about how people see you and want to be accepted rather than excluded, as a woman, you simply act soft and people will validate you. This is why even the most vile women are habitually fake, mask wearing and performative in an often very transparent way. It is a winning social strategy for them, because it is rewarded and thus reinforced. Women are thus, intrinsically, not only in physical appearance but in mental expression too: faker and less authentic than men are, because society rewards inauthenticity in women in a way it does not in men.

For men, if you try the exact same social strategy, you will be seen as pathetic and weak rather than as sweet and lovely, whilst if you are ruthless, you will be seen as cruel. Rarely will you hear someone call a man lovely reverently and truly mean it, without a single shred of disgust or pretension to accompany it. This is possible, but it requires a much deeper recognition of the man's fuller being, rather than a mere cursory social read.

If you ask people "how a man should be", they will say neither too nice so he is not seen as weak and unrespectable, nor too cruel, so he is not seen as insufferably obscene. So the word or phrase you will hear a lot is "firm" or "firm but fair" - but in reality, this is a very thin, prohibitive range of ascribed acceptable behaviour. Meaning, men are restricted by a far narrower range of expectation if they are to be seen as "legitimate" than women are.

Women can lean into an extreme where men must hit a ratio - she doesn't have to hit some special perfect golden mean to be perceived as socially legitimate. She can just perform niceness no matter how insincerely, and this will be seen as valid. But a man doing the same is pathetic, and a man who is his most unashamedly masculine self is offensive. This, then, is a rigged game for you as a man. It is not built for you to win. If you grew up in the West and ever spent time around "polite society" - you will have experienced the intolerance of such rigged sensibilities acutely.

So the true reality is this: most people cannot tell the difference between cruelty and firmness, because in their fragility without perfect hand holding they will perceive firmness as cruelty, and are thus habitually intolerant of the very male potency they claim is vital. It is likewise unreasonable to expect a man to extend the type of paternal patience and nuance of orientation to strangers in the public sphere, as he would to his loved ones in private.

To expect firmness is to ask a man to act with perfect righteous anger tempered by compassion, with absolute patience, in complete self-mastery. Even if a man can do that, and let's be honest, the vast majority cannot - is the average person worthy of the expenditure of such spiritual resources? Does the average person deserve to be properly fathered by a man merely to be seen as legitimate by them? No. Is that far too much of an ask? Absolutely.

As such, especially as a young man, you must realise this: you are not designed to be liked, nor to win. You cannot win the game of optics, and so you shouldn't try to. This is, at least within the contemporary Western context, inherently a woman's game.

As Machiavelli stated: "it is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both" - so naturally it makes sense you would play up to their fears. If they cannot respect your warmth, it is much better to be held in contempt for being seen as toxic, than be seen as weak. They will hold you in contempt either way, so you may as well choose the path that better dignifies you. As an (aspiring) leader and protector, this makes perfect sense. A man who cannot be appreciated for who he truly is but is instead flattened into uncharitable misunderstandings should invite caution, not predation.

It doesn't matter how truly decent a man you actually are, because the optics game only cares about perception, not truth, which is why it is inherently a losing game for you. This is why the only way to win is not to play - meaning: you should opt for authenticity - a willingness to be disliked and misunderstood, and being at peace with that.

Instead of asking yourself "do they like me?", you should ask yourself "was I true to myself?", and so long as you were, may the chips fall where they may, but better yet: fuck 'em.

[Illimitable Man (IM) @SovereignIM]

Having “young energy” as you get older is literally just not getting fucking demoralised and becoming a resentful endless whiner, but instead possessing hope, passion, and vigour at an age where people expect life to have already sucked the soul out of you.

It is true power.

[Illimitable Man (IM) @SovereignIM]

So the reason I said Athena is better than Artemis, is actually very simple:

Athena divinely aids Odysseus. She literally bends (guides, intervenes, rigs) his personal fate to serve him by making him unnaturally lucky in his personal affairs. She is in a sense, the kingmaker loyal ride or die in goddess form.

Artemis is basically an inferior feminist goddess who goes around hunting animals being a forever virgin. Some "independent woman" who goes hunting is not what you name a manned spaceflight to the far side of the moon when picking female goddess names just because she is Apollo's sister, when you can literally just use a better goddess. Symbolism in human endeavour is far more important than symmetry of space program names.

In Iliad 21, Athena tanks Ares’ attack, smashes him down with a stone, and boasts she is mightier than him. In that same divine battle sequence, Artemis is not shown as a peer war goddess at all: Hera tells her it is better for her to kill beasts and deer than fight stronger powers, then grabs her, beats her with her own bow, and sends Artemis running away weeping. If Artemis and Athena had a 1v1, Athena would destroy her no question because she's the literal goddess of war (tactical strategy).

Athena shows the feminine being powerful without rejecting the masculine. She is thus, in my view, a more integrated archetype of the feminine embodying true queenliness, for she shows intense intellect, expression of will and warrior potency all without rejecting or running from the masculine. Artemis is therefore, in all the most important aspects, quite literally an inferior goddess to Athena.

Basically, it's an insult to Athena that Artemis gets a fucking manned space flight, and she doesn't.

[Illimitable Man (IM) @SovereignIM]

Thanks for having me on French. It was fun!