It's important to be able to recognise behavioural patterns that suggest a narcissistic personality. Once you've established that, you need accept they won't change, because personality doesn't change, it's a stable pattern. Some people can spot these patterns due to long life experiences and know cutting out is the only option that leads to growth.
> you need accept they won't change, because personality doesn't change
I don’t think that is true. I know from myself and many of my friends or family that personalities can change, at times quite dramatically. Sometimes for “good” other times not so much.
The generally accepted view in psychology is that personality does not change over time. That is partly how it is defined. It's the part of us that doesn't change in adulthood.
Yes, people can change their behaviour. But those changes are not occurring at the personality level.
I haven't misunderstood anything. We are talking about narcissistic personality styles. They don't change. Yes, healthier adults have some flexibility, and can grow with experience. Narcissistic personalities are rigid. They can't self reflect. Whether you call it relative stability or stasis doesn't matter in the context of thia discussion. A narcissistic person is not going to have a watershed moment in response to a life crisis and all of a sudden decide to take accountability for their bad behaviour. They will continue to falsely identify other people as the problem, because it conflicts with their false sense of self and grandiosity.
You mean people that have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) or people that exhibit narcissistic traits?
You previously wrote “personality doesn't change, it's a stable pattern” implying personalities not limited to narcissists.
If we are talking about people with severe or clinically elevated narcissism - sure it’s much harder to change since it’s basically a mental illness; but there are also many cases where people suffering from NPD improved their condition.
Which means they can change.
It might not be worth to you personally to be the facilitator of that change and that is fair, no one said that.
But saying that peoples personalities cant change as a blanket statement is just objectively wrong
Yes, I made a blanket statement that is inaccurate regarding personalities in general. So your point is correct.
But I don't really care if healthy personalities change much. I get along with them fine. I was thinking of the NPD (undiagnosed but obvious over 35 years of observation) person and the BPD person (formally diagnosed) I've known.
I really don't believe NPD people improve their condition. The changes always revert to the normal.
I just don't want people to believe in a false hope that these people actually change. And no, no one can facilitate that change except a therapist specialising in those conditions. And the improvements are marginal, if they occur at all (most of them just blame others, reject a diagnosis and find new narcissistic supply). Most therapists would suggest disengaging with them. If you beat your head against that wall, you will lose your sense of self and waste years.
That's quite funny, but the new recruits at my work place are super smart and full of piss and vinegar. Much more motivated than some of the older workers. The problem is that they will work lots of unpaid overtime, and they have no idea about work boundaries and being exploited by employers.
The excess energy dissipates when you realise the commensurate rewards don't materialise, after a few years. But if you also have family wealth, it doesn't matter so much.
Depends on how well they translate that effort into promotions or company switches into better positions.
I averaged around 18mo to either a promotion or a move in my 20s, mostly off the back of working harder (to get the promotions/comp increases) and working smarter (to work out when they aren't coming and jumping somewhere else).
If this makes sense for someone has a lot more to do with their ambition/desire and ability to work the system than anything else. It also helps a ton if you are also legitimately very good at what you do. Then it's pretty easy because you are just demanding you are paid commensurate with impact.
Simply doing overtime and having hustle doesn't cut it though, you actually need to be able to leverage it into career progress or it's just wasted life.
Depending on the education/age of new recruits, you might not have seen much of the, younger, lower scored cohort, because the sharp performance drop only really started after 2018 (so the oldest affected people are around 22).
I bought a fair phone 2 when I lived in Germany in 2016. Got a software update when I moved back to Australia. Bricked it. The kernel debug interface has no standard header, and required a fine pitch soldering iron header. I rented a German post box to send it to, as you need a European address for support. I tried to send it twice, and it was refused by German customs. I gave up and now I just buy cheap second hand Motorolas and unlock the bootloader, put lineageos on them. I think giving new life to discarded devices is more ethical anyway.
The labor party doesn't know what it stands for anymore. The HAFF was supposed to make housing more affordable, but the housing minister said explicitly that she doesn't want house prices to decrease, rather increase at a rate slower than wage growth. But they have no plan for how to grow wages. So they are speaking out of both sides of their mouth, and the electorate will hear what they want to hear. Labor will make housing affordable for my kids in the future. Labor will protect my investment. The whole thing is a farce.
"Almost universally, any time closer to today is better for most people in most ways than a previous time"
Wind that back 20 years. Yeah we got cheaper computing. Luxury items got cheaper, necessities got more expensive. I can make do with a 2010 think pad, but my rent is cooked and I'll never own a house. I'd rather be born in the 70s than the 90s.
20 years ago the average house cost 7-8.5 times the average income (cf 5X today). 2006 was the worst time to buy a house in America, ever. It was an exceptionally bad time because prices collapsed in 2008 and anybody buying in 2006 would have been seriously underwater.
You know what else you had in 2006? Loans, without jumping through hoops. "Being underwater" is the kind of thing people say when they look at their home as a thing they intend to make money reselling later. If you want to own the place you live, then you want easily-acquired loans and available inventory. It doesn't matter what someone else thinks it's worth, as long as you can pay your note.
You seem to have rose glasses for the actual situation. Many of those people with easily acquired loans have lost everything since the terms of the loans were as easily changed in 2009 and they could no longer afford the payments
Those loans are the only reason many elder millenials managed to own property at all. Not all of the loans given in that era were ARMs or otherwise amenable to modification; many were regular old fixed-rate mortgages.
I grew up in regional Australia. All of my friends from there moved to the city because they wanted careers. Myself included. My friend who stayed there still works in farming and lives just above the poverty line, and can't compete for a rental so he lives in a shack in a paddock. House prices there also became ridiculous after the pandemic.
Indeed. This is policy. House prices rising generates a lot of money for the government for a lot of reasons so they try to stimulate it, so they can spend more "with less taxing". The biggest factor here is the central bank lending to banks lending you mortgages (so the high house prices effectively become a tax. You will pay either through loan repayment or rental), the second factor is "seignorage" on the total value the central bank loans out (the government can spend effectively 4% of total money lent out loan for free, more if they also cause inflation)
Governments do this in all sorts of ways, including the big one: making this the only real risk-free but effective way to save up and have a bigger pension at retirement (so any change to this system will take a LOT of money out of the pockets of old people, who often can't replace it anymore)
But if you made mortgages either have real risk for banks or stopped funding them through central bank loans ... house prices will crash down. And having inflation is simply a choice. We could choose otherwise.
The problem with changing this is that it will require a permanent reduction in government spending or a permanent (big) raise in tax. Both are non-starters.
What this does over time is it makes labor that has low productivity, such as farming, less and less realistic if you want a decent life. It is a ratchet that forces the population to make more and more money over time ... or face destitution. It's been an extremely powerful way for countries to get rich.
I think the benefits will be short lived. The long term outcome is a new class division (asset inheritors versus pure wage earners with no inheritance). This is a terrible outcome for society. I'm not convinced high house prices generated a lot of wealth for governments. Government debt is higher than previous decades, and government asset ownership is lower. I think this has been a bad strategy.
Every country, with only a few exceptions, has been doing this since WW2, US and Europe longer. So the benefits have been going strong for 75 years and counting now. 200 to 1000 years and counting in various parts of Europe.
> The long term outcome is a new class division (asset inheritors versus pure wage earners with no inheritance)
Indeed. Unfortunately that means about the opposite of what you think it does. Even you agree that there's a new class. Before this system started inheritance was absolutely the only way to wealth.
If this system goes wrong the outcome will be that inheritance is the only way to wealth.
Right now that isn't the case (well, it is in Europe, but in the US most of the uber-wealthy come from ... well half of them were refugees as kids. There is generational wealth in America but nothing like there is in most of the world. Even in Europe there's like 10% who only found wealth after WW2. And 90% who had wealth before WW2 and managed to keep it with the Nazis in power and, frankly, there's only one way that happened (and most of the European commission members come from that 90%, as do most country governments, so good luck changing that). Still, you want to argue that this is better than what came before? That's easy)
I was referring to the relatively newer situation where house prices have outrun wages, which is more of a 21st century phenomenon in Australia. The capital gains tax discount introduced in the early 2000s largely contributed to this, and housing became a government supported avenue for lazy and secure investment. It has resulted in a wealth transfer from the young to the old, or to the offspring of investment property owning families. When you couple that with the worst renter protection laws in the western world, and very high rent growth, it has become a destroyer of social mobility that once existed in this country.
I think Lilly may have been sort of primed for intense psychedelic experiences. He had angelic visions as a child, and had a very religious upbringing. He was also a very imaginative person, so perhaps that influenced his trips a lot.
I think it is not just "intense" it is whether you realize you had more or less the same experience that everybody else has when they take hallucinogens because it is written in our nervous systems or whether you believe you are "special" and receiving a unique message.
People in traditional cultures believed pretty much the same things before the empire [1] sent soldiers and scribes to your ancestor's village. Seen that way the old religion is "written into our nervous systems" and having the experience of a revelation is absolutely routine and ordinary and doesn't make you special. But if you grew up in a rich family and the skids were always greased for you it is easy to come to that conclusion.
I've known a few people, so far always male, who developed delusions of grandeur (e.g. they are the anti-christ [2]) around the time they took hallucinogens and it often is the beginning of a series of relationship problems, involuntary commitments, criminal charges and other misadventures.
[1] ... like those people who send in the Death Star and blow up your planet if you resist
[2] in the bible "anti-christ" is like "anti-racism", like anything that is against Christ is anti-christ, so if I tell some Christian that they should skip out on church and, i dunno, play video games or smoke weed or dance around my maypole, I am an anti-christ, not the anti-christ.
"Some Christian" is likely uncool. Some [people who are labelled] antichrists are cool. That's more about what happens when you extrapolate into the future.
Nepobabies (maybe Lilly) are mostly uncool. Being able to hold your acid is cool. Mostly. That's about timing, too, but there's also a purely social component.
Thinking you're special when you are not is uncool. Signalling that you think you're not special when everyone around you think you are is ...also uncool.
Why would the mods disagree?
There is no "empire of cool" because empire is uncool
Cool is neither social nor antisocial. Cool might be a [re]productive mix of both. (Maybe some would prefer "barely sustainable" here, that reintroduces "timing" as an essential ingredient)
Regarding your first paragraph, I don't think the psychedelic experience is predetermined by the substance. There are common traits we all experience on a substance of course, but everyone has a different nervous system. Maybe Lilly even had a touch of schizotypal personality disorder, I don't know. Based on what I've read from Robert Anton Wilson it seems like Lilly was always a strange person, and difficult to understand. I see a bit of narcissistic grandiosity in him. In all his interviews and writing he never really acknowledges his research failures, for example. I think these personality traits could have contributed to his far out experiences and strange belief system. I think he really liked being seen as out there.
I do this with friends and family. I'm not sure whether my solution is considered high friction. I gave them a router with openwrt installed, and a wireguard tunnel I set up, with a route to my jellyfin server. So they can point their jellyfin app on their TV to my server.
There are social forces that are shifting the collective mindset to be more sympathetic to anti immigration sentiments. We see it in Australia recently, but the political analysis of this phenomenon is still lagging from my perspective (I am not endorsing these sentiments).
To be clear, did or did not the party leader say he would like to deport people born in Sweden to legal immigrant parents because they are not "naturally Swedish"?
The mainstream media plays into this for sure. But I think there is a lot more to it. I think most of us on this platform have cosmopolitan leanings. We're educated and have some job mobility. I've worked overseas because I got an engineering education and did well in it. But wage stagnation, job insecurity, housing costs, low rental vacancy all play into this dynamic. There are a lot of people who don't like seeing their country change in its demographics. That is partly racism, but its also fear of change. I don't like it but I can understand it. When material conditions devolve, there will be a lot of people who blame the "other", even if its misidentifying the cause. I think Australia is lagging behind the right wing populist movement of the UK and US but we are on the same trajectory, and the major party policitians still don't understand how to address it. And most left wing people won't attempt to understand it because they at stuck using rationality and ethics as their rhetoric, and don't understand that emotion and grievance are going to trump that in politics.
If you have any disagreements I'm keen to hear them. These are just my own observations so I want inputs from others outside my own echo chamber. If you CBF that's fine too though.
It's a complex issue, but in short, I think that some of the concerns about immigration are often legitimate.
Progressive people, being more keen on altruism, tend to think that the good reasons immigrants have to migrate should overshadow the problems that immigration can cause.
And sometimes there's maybe also a view that a strongly multi-ethnic society is something to aspire for, because of the increased understanding of different people and hopefully a reduction of racism that it can lead to.
Progressives tend to think that everyone should be as tolerant as them, and that can lead to only looking into the problems, and finding solutions, up to a degree.
I saw that in the shift from arguing for integration to arguing for tolerance and a multi-cultural society, for example, where inadeguate integration efforts faiiled.
---
On the other hand, right wing/conservative parties often enact policies that compound the immigration problems, rather than improving them.
In part that's due to a preference for securitarian policies, rather than looking for the root causes.
And in part that's because immigration problems most often lead to increased votes for them, so it's in their interest to not actually solve them.
All this, in the end, can create a space for parties standing for drastic solutions such as mass deportations; however immoral, dangerous for everyone and hard to realize they may be.
---
The way forward, in my opinion, should be for progressive parties to stop dismissing the problems that immigration can lead to, and to do their utmost to improve them all, rather than pretending for everyone to be as tolerant as them.
The actual middle/long term solution would probably be ensuring that the new potential immigrants are willing to integrate to a sufficient degree, and most of all to look into what pushes them to migrate in the first place, and work for improving the causes of that.
The latter can seem utopic, but it's better than the alternatives, in my opinion.
I use a VPN because I still seed 10s of thousands of torrents and have a static IP address. I don't want the swarm to see that. Most of them are from private sites I trust, but some from private sites that have a huge membership I'm not sure about. I have a lot of movies and music that isn't available anywhere else and archiving that is important to me. Kept my music collection from what.cd and a lot of that you can't even buy on discogs.
