@thesotiris
@thesotiris
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Shaming: If you do the time, you might as well do the crime If your “morality” relies on the systematic ridicule and humiliation of people, otherwise it won’t be sustainable, then either you lack conviction in your values, or your moral framework is inferior. Any supposed “morality” whose survival relies on utilitarian violence (physical or psychological) is not true morality. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-shaming-fallacy-part-2…
@thesotiris
Laziness Does Not Exist: The psychodynamics of giving up and shedding hope Once, I tried to rescue a cat who, I was told, had been curled up motionless in a corner on the side of the road for days. The friend who had found the cat thought the poor thing was dead, but after closer inspection, the cat showed weak signs of life. We took the cat to the vet. The vet told us that the cat had probably been hit by a car, and his jaw had cracked, making it impossible for him to eat…
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Losing hope, part 3: Freedom in cynicism For as long as I can remember, people told me I was too hard on myself, as though they knew where the line for me was between being lenient and being unforgiving. But **my expectations of myself were a direct reflection of my dreams**. The harsh standards I held myself against were the magnitude and shape of the **shadow cast by my hopes**. Had I been cynical from the start — had I been hopeless and uninspired, and not dared to dream…
@thesotiris
Give Yourself Some Credit: Exposing demotivators Welcome to another self-therapy session where you get front-row seats to the Greek Tragedy of my being, and get to rejoice in schadenfreude over the show of my vulnerabilities, trauma, and insights learned from them all. **Personal story and context** One of the most life-defining experiences of my childhood was when, at 12 years old, I was honoured in front of the whole school as one of the top students (having received only…
@thesotiris
Men, Middle-Aged, and Single: Your options when it's truly too late So, you’ve wasted your youth with situationship after situationaship. You lacked direction, never realised your potential due to passivity and self-destructive behaviour. You self-rejected whenever you had an opportunity with a woman you felt inferior to. Feeling inferior to a woman made you *actually* inferior to her. You thought you had time, but life isn’t short — *youth* is short. There’s a lot of…
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Some Optimism: Humanity is actually on a good path Positivity? From me? I know, right?! For regular readers, a positive post by me probably comes as a bit of a shock. “*What do you mean by optimism, Sotiris? Are you ok? Is there someone we could call for you?*” I recently realised that things are, in fact, getting better for humanity, not worse. Hear me out. **Frame** You see, for most of my life, I’ve held the belief (and fear) that things were getting worse for people,…
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Do Not Do Bodybuilding! The most popular fitness regime is the most useless Bodybuilding is the easiest fitness approach: isolate muscle groups, aim for the pump short-term and for hypertrophy long-term, and obsess over aesthetics like an insecure teenage girl. No function, no muscle-group synergy, no intensity, no explosiveness, and very little skill required. Easy. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not here to disparage lifting weights in the gym. I’m here to say that lifting…
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Some Optimism, Part 2: The scam of democracy is actually a good thing... Hear me out You won’t find a harsher critic of democracy: this ridiculous scam, the emperor’s clothes, this audacious lie that “democracy” or “republic” or “socialism” (or whatever rebrand) is supposedly “the rule of the people”. It demonstrably isn’t. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/socialism-fascism **Criticism of democracy** If you held referenda right now on every single thing each state does, you’d…