i never remember to explain shit anymore i just vaguepost and expect people to catch up but i finally have good news, we've made a lot of progress with my parents' estate (they both ran their own businesses and you know those images of nightmare cable management? well imagine that with bank accounts) and i actually have money now - im taking a trip to Aotearoa NZ with my mate Jules next week (dark sky reserve! lotr filming locations! snow! FOOD!) and then in august i will be moving to nyc to pursue a 2 year masters degree in library science with a focus on rare materials archival studies!! shits happening in my life!! im not just sitting in my house doing nothing all day!! and like i said i have money!! if you're taking commissions lmk bc while im focused on my getaway for the next few weeks i wanna support my friends and their art and when i get back i wanna throw u cash to draw my ocs!!

2024 #01 Great weather here in Crete but:-

To whom it may concern:-

Great weather here in Crete but:

1. It seems that I again need to say that I am not hitting on and why, just like in each of the previous 5 years:-

(a) People (men and women) need to understand what using their radar actually does:-

When you use your radar it tells you the strength of the hormones of the person you are directing at.

I have strong hormones so when you direct your radar at me you get a much stronger response than you expected!

Aha you say she's hitting on but actually I am not. You just haven't completed the test properly! 

(b) You need finally to turn your radar off after completing the test as such because that lets out anyone like me with strong hormones who isn't hitting on. 

(c) There are millions of us around and it has been a big problem for all of us since the, now discredited, 'hitting on" legislation, was issued. No due diligence of any sort was carried out anywhere on the text of this legislation! For whatever reason the text was just accepted and it was either simply incorrect or specifically targeting the millions of people like me. 

(d) Some Governments took it on back then but they are now having to work around it in one way or another to allow for women with strong hormones.

(e)The rogue Policeman who is now in prison for misogyny was supposed to send the new version of the test (that includes turning your radar off at the end) to the EU and to England last year to replace the erroneous test given in that legislation. Perhaps he didn't, if necessary, can the new incumbent undertake this please? It will save everyone a lot of time if they use the correct version, ie the updated text!!

(f) I am leaving this in the hands of the Police now because it is getting to the point of at least misogyny and well on the way to sexual harassmen. Additionally each time one of you does the test on me (or any other woman,) you are 'hitting on' not us. The European Union (EU) has legislation covering both of these offences and Greece is in the EU.

As I have said a lot of times before I am always happy to be tested by someone who knows what they are doing. I know that I am not doing anything so it isnt a problem for me.

Perhaps the Police can lend you an electronic tester to pass around between yourselves? You clearly don't know how to do the test without one and they are easy to use.

2. (a) I know that the man from Ammos beach is one of you. When he knows that I am in that area he has to come by me to get his fix of my hormones and I often used to find him lurking behind me at Umami. I would guess that by now he is seriously 'hung up' on me because he won't turn off his radar. He might not realise what he is doing but it is this.

(b) Another way that men of a certain age use my hormones is to give themselves an erection. I am not doing anything to these men and mostly I don't even know that my hormones have been highjacked until there is feedback to the effect that I am hitting on when I am not. These men should be more honest to their family as evidenced at the Sports Bar and possibly Strada

3. Strong hormones are a genetic issue so it is not in my hands to do anything about it (The will of God or Inshallah depending on your preference). As a genetic issue it passes down through families  and I am at least the 4th generation to have strong hormones in my family.

4. Since I was in my mid twenties I have been targeted by Islamists because of something that I have no control over. Given advances like the internet Islamists have a much broader area of attack on me than for previous generations of my family although we have all had problems. As a result my grandmother didn't go out much and my mother was seriously depressed for most of her life. At least I understand the nature of the issue when they didn't.

On a cruise last year I was told that although there are other women with strong hormones that they look out for I am top of the hit list. Islamists are paying people on cruise ships to disrupt my life. I dont know why any of this should be the case but it sounds like a vendetta to me?

Just 2 final notes:

(a) to say that I was tested in Dubai last year in my hotel foyer by a short bearded man in local dress. He was deferred to by others and clearly had some standing. He used an electronic device and seemed surprised but he did accept that I was not hitting on. Dubai seems to me to be the most advanced of the Islamic states and I doubt that they are sponsoring hatred against me so presumably it is someone else?

(b) there was a very good manager at Kimzu who undertook to train his staff on these issues and I thought he made a very good job of it. Ultimately Kimzu staff were very knowledgeable. Unfortunately he wasn't engaged to work with anyone else but I think this is what is needed here, some man to man communication where one of them is up to the task of explaining the why's and the pitfalls etc. Not sure where he is now as I havent been to Kimzu since the attempted rape. 

Imagine: Now, But Never Then.

Requested by Anon. Includes: Erik Lehnsherr x Daughter!Reader Request: · Hey sorry l dont realy know how to do this but would you be able to do and imagine where the reader is erics daughter and is hated for being humen and runs away from the abuse and then they all regret what they did to her and wnd up finding her like loving her best life supper happy and that sorry if this isnt how you do it and for mistakes my English isn't that good but l realy love your acount and think your amazing

Note: I'm not sure who 'they' is so I tried not to include any other characters that I didn't make up for this imagine.

Also, I haven’t seen Dark Phoenix yet so I didn’t know this scene existed but it fits perfectly????

Note revised 25th February: Not very long.

    It wasn't quiet, the day he had found you, in fact, it was rather busy, and he used that to his own advantage. From where he sat, alone, across the road from where you had been with five other people, he was able to sip his coffee slowly, and glance at the articles in the paper in his hands, all while keeping his eyes on you. It had been almost five years since he had last seen you, and, clearly, those years spent away had been kinder to you than any second spent with him. There was a glint in your eyes that he had never seen before, a lightness in your laugh that he had never heard before, and a feeling of pain in his chest that he had never felt before. You had more colour to your skin, it was no longer sunken and dull, your hair seemed to shine as the sun shone down at the small cafe you had been at, your smile spread across your face the way a real smile should and not the way your forced ones used to be, and there was a confidence in yourself that had clearly taken a very long time to grow and develop.

    Erik could remember the moments that his own words and actions had caused a small part of you to break, soon causing those small breaks to become large and empty caverns, very vividly. It was during those times where he would disregard you at any given moment, the times when he allowed the others to treat you with the same disrespect and never put a stop to it, when—at eight years old—you stopped asking for things, you stopped going to him when you had nightmares or when you were sad, or when you stopped smiling altogether, all because he was the reason why it had all happened. No child should ever feel like a burden, or like they weren't wanted or loved, but he could remember every single moment he had made you feel those ways.

    His coffee had long gone cold, and he had been glancing at the same article for almost twenty minutes before he had realised just how long he had been there, just watching you live a life that you had built for yourself without him in it, watching you be happy for the first time, in a long time, that he had been able to recall. He hated himself for what he had put you through, his own child, just because you weren't a mutant like himself. Just because you didn't share the same genetic component that had him what he was. He never saw you as his own flesh and blood, he saw you as the enemy to his kind, even when you were just a baby. He doubted he would ever feel or experience the same guilt and disgust towards himself that he felt in that moment about anything else. He realised just how much he had let slip from his fingers at that moment, and he felt sick. Erik watched quietly, with a frown on his face, as you stood up with the rest of your friends, and left the outside seating area of the cafe.

    "Can I get you a refill or something to eat, Sir?" A barista asked in a happy tone.

    Erik looked at them before quickly looking back to where you had been, seeing you walk down the path with your friends, your arm hooked with one of the other girls as you both chatted away to one another, completely unaware of his existence. He turned his head and cleared his throat, looking back at them with a forced smile, feeling a lump in his throat as he responded in a quiet voice, "No, thank you, I think it's time for me to go back home."

    It hadn't taken long for him to find you, but it had taken him a long time to want to find you, and he truly regretted nothing more than how that was how he felt now, but never then.

The full story

(Heya all! This is litteraly the full story of Maeddrona up till the point im rping her, I just kinda took this moment to word vomit everything I made for this character, she’s been developing in my mind for about six months, So, yeah. OOC super Long post under the break!)

Maeddrona is a literal incarnation of the void, previously I mentioned it being old, but the void is old and a God actually looked around as the universe got more and more busy and full- It just kinda.. stopped. Once humans became a thing it looked at mortal life and envied humans for achieving so much with so little time, it looked at the smaller picture of happiness humans could carve for themselves amidst a bloody history. So it just kinda, gave up it’s greater power and sentience, it’s essence possessing humans every once in a while.

These humans would usually barely live passed the age of 15, their lives being ended by some odd coincidence one way or another. It seemed as if dark reality had no place for hope and optimism. There was one that lived to be older, in about the 2nd Millennium *cough*  but she was murdered but someone very close to her.

Now, Maeddrona was growing up on her planet of Fortuna a little bit before Emps has started his rise on Terra. She reaches about age 35 and is the first Void-Born to awaken to her powers.

The entire planet is wiped clean of animal life and the planet itself is shrouded in an odd bubble-ish thing of space so warped you can look at it and see the stars behind you. This is only an illusion, and a result of the explosive amount of power awakening her, but she is left alone on this planet and with the isolation of the Age of Strife, no-one’s gonna show up. (if someone did show up, it would look almost like a black hole might be there, and they’d turn right the fuck around, because whatever that is, we’re not fucking with it)

So Maeddrona, now awakened to her void powers, realizes she... can make things happen by thinking about them on the Planet. Nothing big or overly huge- but time seems to have stood still since she gained her powers, but if she focuses on a plant growing and producing fruit, that’s what that one plant will do until she stops thinking about it. So she can at least survive- just, things are... wrong here. She also begins to have dreams, memories of each past life. Not movie-style, i mean boring, day by day, feels like real time dreams until she wakes up. It it does feel like she is this person, not like she’s watching from outside. She doesn't quite understand what these dreams mean. but she begins to write them all down in a journal.

Though, with Maeddrona being void, have discovering she can utilize a pocket dimension of just empty space, and that putting anything besides herself in there will slowly desolve it. A being with power like this and also who just caused an entire planets worth of population to die would be very interesting to atleast one God i can think of...

So Tzeentch enters her head, uninvited, occasionally, and tries to find out what the fresh funky fuck is happening in THIS corner of the galaxy! Maeddrona is convinced she’s going crazy and the eldritched fuck is all for it. Eventually Maeddrona says something like “prove to me you’re a god of knowledge and not my mind going mad, give me the knowledge I need to escape this fucking planet.” So she stands there, waiting for her mind to suddenly ascend with understanding and learning.

Then a book drops to the ground next to her.

Then another.

Then it starts RAINING BOOKS and she just runs to hide in a building, Fully believing a god was in her head now.

So, now, she starts reading and begins making a ship. It takes her the better part of  50 years (when she awoke to the void her body stopped aging, but more as a “she is nothing, neither alive nor dead” kinda thing) with non-stop work and learning and failures and dedication to get SOMETHING functional. (Thankfully she has an entire worlds worth of resources all to herself) Then she starts fucking with how to FTL travel- because she doesn't have a warp drive. She couldn’t actually make one- so she fucks around with the void, and finds she can travel trough the void while going through the warp as a bit of a substitute. (Its similar to how the Tau FTL travel) So she ends up getting to another planet! But she enters in so close to the planet that she kinda crashes. not far from her crash she finds a few dying people- she (correctly) assumes this might be her fault and tries to fix it, attempting to do something with her powers to save them. She saved one. She makes the first Void-Touched. The void changes her hair, and it tells her a name that she likes far better than her own, and is so grateful to Maeddrona that she wants to follow her when she leaves. Maeddrona isnt alone anymore

(at this point I should mention I take a lot of things from Warframe- specifically names, weapons, frames and abilities. I just love it so much!! but that’s all I really take.)

So for the next long while Maeddrona flies about space, making another deal with Tzeentch to get dreams from people dying that are compatible with the void (she doesn’t question how he knows who is and who isnt, he’s a God *shrugs*) and gets about 30 people in her little family. Occasionally they run back to her Fortuna because it’s their planet now and no-one else knows its there. (Yes, i have all of these as OCs, i know all their plots and stories;;;;)

Then one dream leads her to Terra, where a small boy is dying. Foolishly, she goes. She has much better control over her powers now, masking the ship with the same warped gravity look to try and mask their presence as they go to the biggest hornet nest in the galaxy.

And she is not surprised when the warmongering ruler of the planet does interrupt her in the middle of saving a child. He questions her, and she answers honestly. But her soul just feels... wrong. off. like it’s not there, but obviously something is!

She smiles, and offers her greetings. She does not prostrate herself before him, does not whisper rumors and legends and feats of his beings.

She smiles and patiently waits for him to respond. through their conversations an interest grows. Both are old souls and both hold immeasurable power.

And both consider themselves human.

When she says she is void, he asks if she is Chaos, ready to destroy her if needed. She gags. As by now she knows the intentions of the voice in her head, He and the 3 others have stolen a few of her Void-touched. “I am no God.” would come her reply, Honest.

He would then decide, though not entirely honest, she is no threat, And that these powers she speaks of are interesting, He asks if she would mind being studied,

of course she says yes

the fool she is

Eventually a relationship does form, and while their views are fairly different on many topics (read: most if not all) they balance each other out when they are willing to listen to one another, as both are incredibly hard headed and stubborn. He lets her in on the Primarch project, wanting her insight on raising children as she has been motherly to most if not all her Void-touched.

And he even offers they should make a child from her genetics, to raise along with the Primarchs. She will be human- or Void-born as Maeddrona would call her. But she loves the idea.

Then, tensions rise a bit. the primarchs are still being developed, but Emps wishes to increase the reach of his Imperium a bit as well. there is a system he wishes to acquire- and Maeddrona offers her and her children to do so instead, they can get there faster and her children are very effective with their abilities and such. But he refuses.

This is not the first time this has happened, she thinks he is afraid of the Void, afraid that it is too similar to chaos to be fully trusted on battle. And then, Tzeentch speaks to her once more, agreeing with her, She’s right! Of course she’s right! She should just get there first and do it before he arrives anyway. Show him he’s wrong, give him undeniable proof.

So she does. And... the conversation she has with the Emperor is less than pleasant, It is long distance, but he has been aware of Tzeentch talking to her for some time, he was growing worried that she wouldn’t shoo him away and would sometimes humor his asinine conversations. But now

Now she’s starting to listen to Tzeentch.

He tells her they will have a talk when he arrives, and plans to give an ultimatum as she is so close to falling and she doesn’t even know it. While waiting for Emps to arrive Maeddrona makes a discovery that she is pregnant, this being incredibly exciting news as she believed the void made her infertile.

When Emps finally arrives and she is sent for, and he feels something is wrong. When he sees the presence of two souls, though masked and hard to make out from the void, his mind is not on pregnancy, it is on her fall. He assumes she has allowed Tzeentch to at least semi-possess her and makes a decision, he grimly faces her smiling self and names her an enemy of the Imperium.

At first she is stunned into immobility- but then he begins approaching her, and she flees. She uses the void to go back to her ship and tells all her family that the Emperor is going to kill all of them- So she uses her power and uses escape pods to put them all in Void-stasis (it’s like a Schrodinger's box really, while it’s closed, whatever’s inside of it does and does not exist at the same time until someone opens it and everything exists again. So, they arent even sleeping, just not existing.) and sends them out, one by one, because she doesn’t understand and thinks he’s here to slaughter them because of the void.

She then send out two pieces of equipment, a head accessory known as the “Halo of the void”, and her giant two handed long sword, the “Blade of void.” She then separates her soul into three pieces among herself and these things, using her emotions  as separation points.  Her confusion and shock go into the Halo, her anger and feelings of betrayal go into her sword, leaving her with her fear. Her incomparable fear. She sends these two pieces out into their own pods

And the Emperor boards her ship. It is quiet, eerie as he walks. It is not a warship. This is their home. This is where they lived, had comforts and hobbies. The walls are lined with pictures and drawings, many areas are made to be comfortable lounging areas, doors are stuck open from the commotion, leading windows into shared rooms of her children.

This was their home. And he must walk through it to get to where Maeddrona is hiding. And when he does she is a mess, curled up on the ground and sobbing uncontrollably. It’s too late for words as she approaches her, but he stops. He cares for her enough to want a near painless death for her- but curled up like this she has made it impossible, so he contemplates how to go about this,

His pause gives her hope, and she uncurls for a moment, bleary eyes looking up at him,

And she says his name. She says his name. She knows his name yes of course she knows his name. Spoken with hushed voice only to him in their moments of privacy and passion.

Now said breathlessly

As his sword is already plunged through her.

As this happens, Limbo, the first Void-touched Maeddrona ever made, enters, trying to save Maeddrona and escape together. And she screams. Rushing to her mother’s side, crying, bawling, and screaming at the Emperor.

He leaves, he does not need to kill her child- then she screams about what Maeddrona was going to tell Him.

About her pregnancy.

And he does stop in his tracks at that, the truth of the second soul’s presence now dawning on him. But he only stops for a moment before continuing back, through the halls of a ruined home, with his mistake and his mistake alone.

He then returns to Terra to find the Primarchs scattered.

And that’s where this story turns, The Emperor basically dies with the Heresy, his soul shattered. Then one small part, one tiny bit, that loved Maeddrona, that never stopped loving Maeddrona, finds her small soul in the warp. As the void is like permanent marker- you can never really get it off once it’s on something. So he finds her, attaches his soul to hers and uses what of his power he can to give her a stable body in the warp.

And that is the Maeddrona I have as my muse :)

Ask Pileup

It’s finally here! The asks that have been collecting dust in my inbox! Doing them in one post just because it would be hella spammy if I did them all individually.

Don’t see your question here? It’s probably because it’s a 100BC ask that I’ve either answered before or is already clarified in the rules.

@simvanglade:  I love your sims medieval posts! I've never put that much effort into it before but you make me want to!

Aw thank you! I assume you mean the ones I was posting in the Sims Community Facebook group? I don’t think I’ve posted a lot of Sims Medieval to my tumblr, but I’m super happy you love them so much! I’ve wanted to do a Sims Medieval story for a long time on this simblr. Remind me when I finish one of my current stories. ;)

@consultingpolymath:  I have a question about the 100 baby challenge!! When my matriarch is an elder and ready to move out, is it ok at that point to make her immortal, or is it still against the rules? Even if she's not in the house anymore, I wish she could live to see some of her grandchildren, instead of just dying of old age after a week.

So I don’t typically answer a lot of 100BC questions anymore but this is kind of an interesting question that I don’t actually think I ever thought to address??? Yeah, it’s fine. You can basically do whatever you want with moved out kids and elderly matriarchs as long as it doesn’t break any rules that would in any way affect your active household. Moved out kids and matriarchs aren’t technically part of the challenge anymore.

@darkgrungemusic:  Hiya I just saw your answer to the ask of your text color on your blog and I wanted to let you know on Mod the Sims there's a mod to change the load screen and the main menu so its like normal, and there's one that lets you pick the colors instead. Just letting you know in case you didn't. Love you and your blog! Have an amazing day!

Thank you so much! I’m so happy you love my blog! I knew about the mod but since I knew a darker load screen was coming soon, anyway, I didn’t really want to bother with another mod that I’d just end up uninstalling again in a couple weeks, anyway. I appreciate the help, though!

@hotcocomash:  [i swear this isnt a 100baby ask] I found you from the buzzfeed 100 baby videos and got hooked on your not so berry story! ive kinda been reading it backwards cause of how mobile works but im still loving it. when i have time im gonna sit down and read everything chronologically. thank you for making so much interesting and fun content!

Lol I don’t actually mind answering 100BC asks. I just don’t like repeating myself. I’m so happy you found me through Buzzfeed (which is kind of surreal, wow) and I’m even happier you like my Not So Berry Challenge so much! I hope to get back to the Sweet family soon! They’re lots of fun.

@tekimimotaku: So I've only just found you. By looking up the only challenge I knew: the 100 Baby Challenge. But I'm looking through your blog and I'm captivated by the other challenges so far. Some aren't to my taste, but I can still appreciate the thought put into them and that others will enjoy them. Had I not already made my matriarch, I'd say F it and do a different challenge of yours. I can't wait til I'm done with this one so that I can start on the others! I wish I could think things through like that!

Aw thanks so much! I hope you’re having fun with the 100BC and it’s totally fine that not all my challenges appeal to you. :) I try to create different challenges that appeal to a wide variety of players so for most people, some of my challenges won’t be all that fun for them, but there could be others that they love so much, they just want to play over and over. That’s always sort of my intention when making a new challenge; trying to engage a different group of Simmers.

@mmfinch: I know that you're completely tired of the 100 baby challenge questions. I went back and read your Midford series as an apology of sorts and thoroughly enjoyed it. Your creativity in storytelling is amazing. I read through all the Q&A but this hasn't been asked. Is show hidden objects allowed to get a birth certificate for non hospital births? The have baby option was clicked by accident and couldn't be cancelled. Show hidden objects is a cheat, but the object is decoration only.

I’m so happy you love The Midford Legacy! As for your 100BC question, there are definitely a LOT of objects in the debug menu that I would consider cheating and not allowed, but the decorative birth certificate isn’t one of those things. Go ahead and buy it if you like. :)

@bipolarrrbearrr: Hey! I know you’re not super into this page right now, but I’ve been keeping up with your not so berry story and I love it. I haven’t been able to go past peppermint because I’m on safari and can’t get the app right now. I wish you could have streamed or recorded it because that would have made the story so much better! You’re awesome 😎

I have kind of a personal loathing for the YouTube/Twitch scene for... many, many reasons, some of them valid and some of them petty, lol, so I don’t think I’ll ever take up YouTubing again. I like the written word too much and the freedom of being able to stage my shots, but I appreciate the sentiment! I hope you get to read the rest of the challenge soon!

@sim-sizzlin: I did originally follow you cause you are the 100 baby (and many other cool challenges) OP writer, but it's really cool to see an active simblr making sims medieval posts it makes me want to reinstall my old copy it was YEARS AND YEARS ago ty

Aw, thank you! Yeah my Sims Medieval content is surprisingly popular. I think I need to make one of my next storytelling projects a Sims Medieval one. Thanks so much for the feedback!

@yennibelle: Hello there, I have an inquire about your unnatural genetics for children and toddlers in the sims 4. I just re-downloaded it, due to this months patch and was wondering if you have added Island Living hairs? Or did I miss them? And if you have not, will you? Either way, I appreciate your mod/CC :)

Hi there! I’m so sorry, but I haven’t updated the hair for Island Living, yet! All my files and palettes I used for those hairs is on my old laptop and I haven’t gotten around to transferring everything I need onto my new one, yet, but thank you for reminding me that’s something I need to do. :) In the meantime, all the hair should still work fine in your game. You just won’t have funky varieties of the IL hair (yet). I’ll be sure to post when I take this on but it may not be for a while, yet.

SECOND Trimester and Surrogacy FAQs

We have made it to the end of the SECOND trimester 🎉. Today, I am 26 weeks, 3 days, so at the end of this week it will be the start of the third trimester! I am pretty excited and so are the babys IPs! We have had a pretty uneventful second trimester which is a GREAT thing! We have had 2 ultrasounds this trimester and everything with my little belly buddy looks great! He is growing just like he should and has all his little fingers and toes! I also had the oh so wonderful glucose test last month! My levels were normal with that as well! Other than that, I am feeling this little boy kick and squirm all the time! As I have said in the past, I love pregnancy and feeling these little kicks is one of my favorite parts of the process. I am still a bit tired, but other than that, as time goes on I have started to feel better and better! So since there isnt much to report on, I thought I would give you guys a little surrogacy FAQ and answer some of the questions I always get asked! So, if you are still reading these lol…Here goes!

1. Are you going to be okay?

It kinda makes me giggle when people ask me this because they dont usually come out and ask what they REALLY want to ask. Everyone words it different ways, but they are all asking the same thing. What they mean is, am i going to be emotionally okay giving this baby to the IPs.

Answer: YES! I am going to be just fine! As I have said before, I am so happy to be helping my best friend! This is also something I looked in to doing long before I even met her. It has always been on my heart to do this, which has got to be a God thing! Also, this baby is not genetically tied to me. In plain terms, he is not my baby!! I am just his babysitter for now! I will say the only thing I sometimes worry about are those hormones that we can not always control after pregnancy, but I am confident that I will be able to navigate those! I am so looking forward to seeing the happines this baby brings to my friends! I have a great support system too! I know I have said all this before in a previous post, but I get this question the most for sure!

2. Are you going to breastfeed?

Answer: I will not be breastfeeding of course, but I do plan to try and pump for a bit if possible! I am not giving myself any time limits on this, so no pressure, but I want to try and provide if I can!

3. Sooo do you get to choose who is in the delivery room?

Answer: My IPs and I have discussions on stuff like this. We were afraid covid would only allow one person, but I am happy to say that we can have two people in the room as of now! So, my husband and the babys mother will be in the room for sure! 🎉. Dont worry, sweet babys father will also be able to be at the hospital!

4. What do you do after delivery?

Answer: I will have my own room to recover and my IPs will have a room as well! We will all be comfy!

5. Has this pregnancy been like your others?

Answer: This pregnancy was pretty rough as far as morning sickness goes, so this one was a little harder. My youngest daughter is almost 8, so I am a lot older than the last go round, which i think contributed a bit to this pregnancy being a bit harder on my body.

6. Would you consider doing another surrogacy journey?

Answer: As much as i would seriously LOVE to help another family, I am not sure that my body can handle it. I would definitely give thought to it though if the opportunity presented itself.

7. What do your kids say about this?

Answer: We have some different opinions going LOL! My 14 year old boys only response to this whole process has been “this is just weird”. I mean can you blame him, its definitely not quite conventional. Now my 8 year old daughter is the complete opposite. She loves baby Mason already, but she is fully aware that this our friends baby. We are very close to the IPs, so she is around their family often. While laying in bed the other day she said “I love baby Mason, he is gonna be our friend right? I said yes ma’am he is gonna be our friend! My stepdaughter got to see baby kicking this past weekend and thought that was so cool and my stepson said the other day “you can finally tell your pregnant chasity” ����. They do all understand the concept that this baby is not their sibling and that I am carrying for someone else.

Thats all I can think of for now, but definitely ask away if you have any other questions!!! 💙

space

i just wanted to use this space as some therapy place. im not that happy but im not the kind to tell anyone anything but recently things have hit a pretty low point, i love my friends, music and smiling but im not really sure what life is saying at home.

i once went to christian camp a few years back and everyone had to write on a piece of paper a describing word for the person next to them, the one i was described as was ‘strong’ all my life i have known myself to be a’strong’ person, but i believe that is because of my circumstance and background not my natural personal way.

STRONG-  able to withstand force, pressure, or wear. I cant deny ive had my fair share of this in my life but it doesnt seem to end? 

I can appreciate their are a billions of people worse off than me but every situation in personal and i just wanted to get mine out on here because i have never been able to before, cos im a bottled up pussy.

Being the oldest sibling i have grown up with a younger brother who is two years below, since he was born life has been pretty difficult on myself and a strain on my parents dramatically. Born thought to be ‘normal’ he within a few months started to show signs of something not being quite right. At the age a baby should started crawling, moving and walking he didn’t this is when my rents went to the doctors they said nothing was wrong but after looking into it more they found that he was severely disabled and couldnt develop like a ‘normal’ little boy. My parents managed to get him into an amazing school for severely disabled children in Aylesbury (the PACE centre) which helped him to start walking and by the age of four, a lot later than other boys his age he was up and starting to walk more- a great breakthrough for Thomas ( my brother) but this meant PACE had done there job and meant he had to move on as they are a charity run school who’s aim is to help children through physiotherapy start walking, and since Thomas could walk a considerable amount more than he used to be able too, so his time at Pace had to come to an end.

This is a very complicated life so i better explain a bit of background on what IS actually wrong with Thomas. See the thing is he doesn’t have a diagnosis there’s no one else like him as far as we can tell, but somehow something went wrong at some point maybe in the pregnancy or birth but it was declared not genetic, so completely lost how to how and why it happened which is one of the worst things about it - we don’t know what is wrong. 

All we know is that for some reason he is severely disabled- finds it hard to walk and cant walk for pro-longed amounts of time although Pace improved that it has recently deteriorated again. He’s incontinent due to his brain not working properly, and this means hes still in nappies at age 16. He also cannot speak at all he is currently 16 and has never spoken a word in any language his whole life - it isn’t a problem with his voice box as he can laugh and make noises he just cant speak, this is suspected to be something to do with his brain. He also is severely visually impaired and now attends a Blind School in Wimbledon which is week boarding, called Linden Lodge - this is where Harvey Price, Katie Prices son also attendended. My parents payed thousands of pounds in legal fees to get him into this school as they had to go to court over it as the local council would not pay for him to go to a school which could attend to his needs and sent them to the local cheap option school which was dangerous and not thr right fit. The Breakespeare School in Kings Langley the local authority (hertfordshire county coucil) wanted to send him too but my parents refused and after me my mum and dad all getting banned and the head teacher calling the police on my Dad for no reason we consequently refused to take him and he was out of school for around 18 months, with this my parents were threatened with prison and fines, but eventually their stubborness payed off and with one e-mail, he was allowed to go to Linden Lodge a school that could care and provide for him untill he is 19, when the struggle begins once again. :(

Although he is now at a good school, new things have presented themselves as problems with his health, which im struggling to deal with on a personal level. 

Thomas has always been known to have the occasional epileptic fit but for a boy as poorly as Thomas maybe one a year when he was tired was not out main worry or concern, but since he has gone to the school we wanted him to be at for so long this has developed and got worse? I just dont get why you know like isnt it enough all the other shit, obvs not lol. 

Now he has been diagnosed with epilepsy, around a month ago he got an MRI scan done on his brain to see what was going on and it seems that the cerrebellum part of his brain has been shrinking, this is clearly noticeable to me and my family from his deterioration in movement and his sudden jerks and movements, which aren’t controllable. He also gets scared and confused and acts out by pulling hair and hitting people, this isnt nice to see as i know he doesnt know what is going on and is really confused and scared, but what makes it worse is he cant talk and tell us whats wrong or if hes going to go into having a fit - his epileptic fits have increased from 30 seconds to up to 2 minutes which isnt completely severe but shows that they are getting a lot worse- and seeing as my mum is friends with a lady who’s son died from his epileptic fits just over a year ago this is not happy times.

When your cerebellum shrinks your mobility decreases and makes it hard for you to get about and puts your balance off, this is noticeable as Thomas has to be taken out in a wheelchair now if he goes out and is very unsteady and can tense up and get scared if he feels he is going into a fit.  

Cerebal Atrophy (shrinking of brain) is not preventable or irreversible, which scares me but we’ll have to take every day as it comes as noone knows what the future holds. It’s just these recent events have made me wanna talk about something that i havent spoken about properly for 16 years and even this isnt half of the battle. But we’ll see, and keep smiling whilst we’re seeing :) 

How to be happy and lead a meaningful life

Shares 104

Overcoming fear is one part of living life without regret. You do that by being open to new people and new experiences, and by acting even when youre afraid. Another aspect of a rewarding life is learning to find happiness in your daily existence and building upon that happiness to construct a meaningful life. Today, in the second part of this limited series on mastering your life, I want to share what Ive learned about how to be happy. More than two thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote, All knowledge and every pursuit aims atthe highest of all good achievable by action. And what is that good? Both the general run of men and people of superior refinement say that it is happiness, and identify living well with being happy. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle said that happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence. To some extent, a good life requires good fortune. Happenstance can undermine the well-being of even the most virtuous person. But Aristotle held that ultimately happiness isnt a product of chance. You can allow misfortune to crush you, or you can choose to bear the blows of fate with nobility and greatness of soul. Although fate may play a role in your affairs, Aristotle believed that in the end, happiness depends upon yourself. Modern psychologists agree. The How of Happiness In The How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky shares the results of years of research into what makes people happy. Shes concerned with chronic happiness (as opposed to temporary happiness), with people who maintain an elevated sense of well-being over time. Based on her work, Lyubomirsky believes: About half of human happiness is biological. Each of us seems to have a happiness set point which accounts for roughly 50% of our level of contentment. Because this set point is genetic, its tough to change.Another 10% of happiness is circumstantial based on external factors. These include traits like age, race, nationality, and gender, as well as things like marital status, occupational status, job security, and income. Your financial situation is part of this 10% but only a part which means it accounts for a tiny fraction of your total happiness.The final 40% of happiness comes from intentional activity the things you choose to do. A huge chunk of contentment is based on your actions and attitude. You can increase your level of well-being through exercise, gratitude, and meaningful work. Because circumstances play such a small role in your well-being and because many of your circumstances are unchangeable it makes more sense to boost your bliss through intentional activity, by controlling the things you can control while ignoring the things you cant. You cant wait for someone or something to make you happy. Happiness isnt something that just happens; happiness is a byproduct of the the things you think and say and do. Just as you ought to become a money boss to take charge of your financial life, you ought to become a happiness boss to take charge of your emotional life. Believe it or not, you can control your emotional responses. It just takes a bit of knowledge and practice. The Psychology of Optimal Experience For fifty years, psychologist Mihly Cskszentmihlyi (pronounced me-high cheek-sent-me-high-ee) has studied human happiness and creativity. Much of his work has focused on flow, which is his term for optimal experience. Heres how he describes flow: We have all experienced times when instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, we [feel] in control of our actions, masters of our own fate. On the rare occasions that it happens, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment. Our peak experiences dont come during passive moments. Sure, we enjoy reading a book or watching Big Bang Theory or playing a videogame, but these arent the best moments of our lives. Instead, the best moments usually occur when a persons body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult or worthwhile. People are happiest when they forget their surroundings to focus on doing their best at something that challenges and interests them. In short, happiness is produced by total engagement in the pursuit of excellence. We can experience flow during activities as basic as riding a bike or as complex as building a bridge. Sometimes flow is achieved through physical activity. Athletes refer to this state as being in the zone. People achieve this state of bliss while climbing mountains, sailing boats, or swimming oceans. But even mundane activities like cleaning the kitchen or doing taxes can produce flow, if theyre done well. Peak experience also comes from mental pursuits. Many computer programmers become so engrossed in their work that time streams past like water. I experience flow while writing. Today, for instance, Ive been deeply engrossed in editing this article. As Im working, my mind is so active and so engaged that it almost feels euphoric. Im happy. I cant imagine wanting to be anywhere other than in front of my computer, writing about money. I am in a state of flow. For more on flow, spend a few moments to watch Cskszentmihlyis TED talk on how flow is the secret to happiness: [embedded content] To learn more, pick up a copy of his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. The Elements of Enjoyment

Ive found flow while hiking in the Andes. Ive experienced it while writing. Ive achieved it while making boxes in a factory, while preparing a speech, and while mowing the lawn (for real!). Though each of these activities was very different, they shared some commonalities that helped me get in the zone. This made me wonder: Can happiness be somehow be cultivated? Turns out, it can. During Mihly Cskszentmihlyis research into optimal experience, he discovered its possible for a person to gain control over the quality of their daily experience, to build enjoyment into even routine and mundane activities. His studies of diverse populations around the world have shown that our best moments contain at least one and often all of the following characteristics (some of which overlap): A challenging activity that requires skill. Flow occurs at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenge is just balanced with the persons capacity to act. To experience flow, you have to be doing something difficult but not too difficult.The merging of action and awareness. Because challenging tasks require full attention, people become so involved in what they are doing that the activity becomes spontaneous, almost automatic.Clear goals and feedback. The vast majority of peak experiences occur during goal-directed actions bounded by rules, such as playing chess, programming a computer, or climbing a mountain. (Or, in my case, mowing the lawn.)Concentration on the task at hand. To achieve optimal experience, you cant be distracted. You have to be absorbed in what youre doing. As you focus, order comes to your consciousness, which leads to contentment and joy. Fear and worry fade. You are fully present in the now. (This idea is the premise behind Eckhart Tolles massively popular The Power of Now.)A sense of control. During the flow experience, you feel in control or that you could be in control. More precisely, you arent worried that you might lose control, a state so typical of much of modern life. To achieve flow, you must believe that youre able to influence the outcome of whatever it is youre doing.The loss of consciousness. During a peak experience, you lose sense of who you are. You become one with your environment, a part of a greater whole. Youre no longer aware of yourself as an individual.The transformation of time. When youre in the zone, the passage of time is altered. In some ways, it slows minutes seem like hours. In other ways, it quickens hours seem like minutes. You lose track of the clock. This freedom from the tyranny of time [adds] to the exhilaration we feel during a state of complete involvement. That first point merits a closer look. To achieve flow, you have to find a balance between your abilities and the challenge of the task at hand. If what youre doing is too difficult for your current skill level, youll become anxious. If the task is easy and youre good at it, itll be a relaxing pastime. Heres a graphical representation of the flow model:

According to Cskszentmihlyi, The key element of an optimal experience is that it is an end in itself. You might need to complete the task youre working on for other reasons, but youd do it even if it werent required. Youre doing it not for some future benefit, but because the task itself is so rewarding. But heres the thing: Flow doesnt just happen. These optimal experiences can be encouraged and fostered. You can become happier by changing where you focus your attention. Garbage In, Garbage Out The objects and events around us exist in an objective world. They are what they are. Yet each of us experiences these objects and events in a different way. What happens outside must pass through the filter of your subjective mind before it enters your consciousness. You control what enters your consciousness (and, thus, what enters your awareness and memory). You and I go to the movies. We watch the same film in the same theater at the same time. You enjoy it. Youre wrapped up in the story and moved by the performances. I leave the theater unhappy. The kid in front of us coughed the whole time, I complain as we walk to the car. The seats were uncomfortable and the volume too loud. Plus, I dont like Nicholas Cage. We shared the same experience and yet we didnt. Consciousness corresponds to a subjectively experienced reality, Cskszentmihlyi writes in Flow. A person can make himself happy, or miserable, regardless of what actually happens outside, just by changing the contents of his consciousness. We choose what we experience, and we choose how we interpret those experiences. This idea can be challenging to people who possess an external locus of control, those who believe that their decisions and life are controlled by chance or fate or greater environmental factors. Cskszentmihlyi says that in order to achieve flow and happiness, we must actively create the conditions that lead to it. That means we must learn to direct our focus: [Happiness] is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control their inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any one of us can come to being happy. The shape and content of your life depends on how you use your attention. People who master what happens in their heads tend to be happier than those who dont or wont. While we are thinking about a problem we cannot truly experience either happiness or sadness, writes Cskszentmihlyi. Therefore, the information we allow into consciousness becomes extremely important; it is, in fact, what determines the content and quality of life. The bottom line? Garbage in, garbage out. If you allow yourself to think negative thoughts, your experience will be negative. If you want a positive experience, you have to accentuate the positive in all that you see and do. We can make flow moments more common and become happier people by structuring our focus and attention to bring long-term improvements to the quality of our daily life. There are two primary ways to do this: Change external conditions.Change how you experience external conditions. Each strategy is sound. But one is generally easier than the other. Which path you choose depends upon the situation. Changing Your World Sometimes the best way to boost your happiness is by changing the world around you. Imagine, for instance, that youre sitting at home reading a book. Youre comfortable except for one thing: Youre warm. Very warm. An external condition is causing you discomfort. You could change the way youre experiencing this condition (by removing all of you clothes, say), but in this case it probably makes more sense to change the condition itself by lowering the thermostat. Or maybe youre sitting in a restaurant writing a letter. Things are fine except that the place is too noisy, which is distracting. Your best bet is to change locations, to change your environment. The trouble, of course, is that you have little control over the world around you. My girlfriend was born and raised in northern California. To her, thats the ideal climate. Shes lived in Portland for five years now, and she loves much about the city and the region. But she hates the climate. This is an external factor thats beyond her control. As hard as she tries, she cant make it rain less in Portland! (Francis Bacon once said, Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.) When you reduce the size of your immediate environment stepping from outdoors to indoors, for instance you make it easier to control external conditions. You cant reduce the outside air temperature, but you can cool a room or a building. Even then, exerting influence over your environment requires a great deal of effort and energy. Usually, the most effective way to boost your happiness isnt by changing external conditions, but by changing how you experience external conditions. Changing Yourself

Now imagine youre reading in the park. Its cold. The sun is out, but the air is chilly. You could head indoors, but youre enjoying the lovely day. The solution is to change how youre experiencing the world around you. Put on your jacket and some gloves. You havent altered your environment, but youve changed how youre experiencing it. Or maybe youre backpacking through Europe, staying in hostels and cheap hotels. Sometimes its tough to sleep because the walls are thin and theres nothing covering the windows. Light and noise threaten to keep you awake all night. Again, the best solution is to change the way you experience the external conditions. If you wear an eye mask and earplugs, you can rest comfortably despite the chaos around you. Most people recognize that they have limited power over their physical world, but many cling to the belief that they can change the behavior of the people around them. In reality, changing others can be nearly as difficult. Writing in How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World a book well discuss at length in part three of this series Harry Browne calls the idea that you can (or should) control what others do the Identity Trap. He writes: [You cant] assume that someone will do what youve decided is right. Youve decided it from your unique knowledge and interpretations; he acts from his knowledge and his interpretations. Youre in the Identity Trap when you assume an individual will react to something as you would react or as youve seen someone else react. If youre unhappy with somebody, there are two options. You can attempt to change the other person, or you can change how you interact with that person. Youre almost always better off changing yourself altering your expectations, accepting new premises than you are attempting to change the other person. Heres Harry Browne again: You could make everyone else be, act, and think in ways of your choosing if you were God. But you arent. So its far more useful to recognize and accept each person as he is and then deal with him accordingly. You cant control the natures of other people, but you can control how youll deal with them. And you can also control the extent and manner in which youll be involved with them. The paradox is that you have tremendous control over your life, but you give up that control when you try to control others. For the only way you can control others is to recognize their natures and do what is necessary to evoke the desired reactions from those natures. Thus your actions are controlled by the requirements involved when you attempt to control someone else. People suffer a great deal of unhappiness because they assume that everyone wants the same things or that they should want the same things. But each person is different, with her own knowledge, experience, preferences, and attitudes. You can improve your quality of life by either changing your environment or by changing how you interact with your environment. Both strategies have their place, but one is generally much easier and more effective than the other. In most cases, its difficult or impossible to change the world around you. Attempting to do so simply leads to frustration and unhappiness. But its almost always possible to change how you perceive the world around you. In fact, its this ability that contributes most to day-to-day contentment. Permission and Control As children, were conditioned to ask permission whenever we want to do something. You need permission from your parents to leave the dinner table or to go outside and play. You need permission from your teacher to use the bathroom. Even as adults, we feel compelled to request permission. You need permission from your boss to leave work early. You need permission from your spouse to grab drinks with your friends instead of weeding the garden. You need permission from the city to build a shed in the backyard. As a result, most of us have developed an external locus of control. That is, we subconsciously believe we need permission to do anything. In personality psychology, the term locus of control describes how people view the world around them, and where they place responsibility for the things that happen in their lives. Though this might sound complicated, the concept is actually rather simple. If you have an internal locus of control, you believe that the quality of your life is largely determined by your own choices and actions. You believe that you are responsible for who you are and what you are.If you have an external locus of control, you believe that the quality of your life is largely determined by forces beyond your control, by your environment or luck or fate. You believe that others are responsible for who you are and what you are. Most people respond to the system of rewards and punishments that has evolved in the culture that surrounds them. If your culture prizes material gain, wealth becomes important to you. If it emphasizes familial relationships, family becomes important to you. But when you live like this when you make decisions based on your social environment the only happiness you can obtain is fleeting. As a result, many people suffer some degree of angst, of anxiety or dread. Is that all there is? we wonder, when we pause to reflect upon our lives. Isnt there something more? There is something more. Lasting happiness can be achieved, but not by being a puppet whose strings are pulled by situation and society. To achieve long-term happiness (and meaning), you have to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of your external circumstances. You have to create a system of internal rewards that are under your own power. If youre unhappy, nobody else can make things better for you. You must make things better for yourself. Focus on the things you can control, and use that control to fix the other things that are broken. In this way, youll gradually gain confidence and greater control of your future well-being. You live in a world of your own design. You have the power to choose. You create your own certainty. Life as you want to live, and do so without regret. Give yourself permission to do so. Caveat: Its okay to seek happiness by changing jobs or moving to San Diego. Its not okay to steal your neighbors television or to drive on the wrong side of the road. Remember the Golden Rule. Enjoy your life without diminishing the ability of others to enjoy theirs. Becoming Proactive Julian B. Rotter developed the locus of control concept in 1954 as part of his social-learning theory of personality. Stephen R. Covey popularized the idea in 1989 with his best-selling The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Like Mihly Cskszentmihlyi, Covey believes that we filter our experiences before they reach our consciousness. Between stimulus and response, he writes, man has the freedom to choose. Our self-awareness, imagination, conscience, and independent will give us the power to select how well respond to each situation in life. Covey says there are two types of people: proactive and reactive. Proactive people recognize that theyre responsible for how they respond to outside stimuli. In Rotters terms, they have an internal locus of control. They dont blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their state. They believe their existence is largely a product of personal choice derived from personal values.Reactive people believe their condition is a product of their physical and social environments. They have an external locus of control. Their moods are based on the moods of others, or upon the things that happen to them. They allow the outside world to control their internal existence. To illustrate the difference between proactive and reactive people, Covey discusses how we focus our time and energy. We each have a wide range of concerns: our health, our family, our jobs, our friends; world affairs, the plight of the poor, the threat of terrorism, the state of the environment. All of these fall into what Covey calls our Circle of Concern. Within our Circle of Concern, theres a subset of things over which we have actual, direct control: how much we exercise, what time we go to bed, whether we get to work on time; what we eat, where we live, with whom we socialize. These things fall into what Covey calls our Circle of Influence, which sits inside our Circle of Concern.

According to Covey, proactive people focus their efforts in the Circle of Influence. They spend their time and energy on things they can change. This has two effects. First, proactive people actually do affect change in their lives; and as they do so, their Circle of Influence expands. On the other hand, reactive people tend to focus on their Circle of Concern. They spend their time and energy on things theyre unable to influence (or can influence only with great difficulty). They try to change other people, to correct social injustices, to shift thought patterns of states or nations. Their efforts are largely frustrating and futile. Whats more, as they focus on their Circle of Concern, their Circle of Influence begins to shrink from neglect. Any time you shift your attention from your Circle of Influence to your Circle of Concern, you allow outside forces to control you. You place your happiness and well-being in the hands of others. If you dont act for yourself, youre doomed to be acted upon. But what about about luck? Arent there times when we really are at the mercy of the world around us? Of course. But our responses are always our own. Eleanor Roosevelt said, No one can hurt you without your consent. Covey agrees: Its not what happens to us, but our response to what happens to us that hurts us. Of course, things can hurt us physically or economically and can cause sorrow. But our character, our basic identity, does not have to be hurt at all. In fact, our most difficult experiences become the crucibles that forge our character. Shit happens. Shit happens to everyone. Ultimately, who we are and what we become is determined not by the shit that happens to us, but how we respond to that shit. Remember Reinhold Niebuhrs famous serenity prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Most people are reactive. Its likely that youre reactive too at least to some degree. Dont fret. Im reactive also. But with time and effort, Ive managed to shift from an external locus of control to one thats primarily internal. You can too. Focus on the things you can control. Use that control to remove constraints and complications from your life. Strengthen and stretch your Circle of Influence. This is the only path to changing your Circle of Concern. You have no control over the hand youre dealt, but you can choose how to play the cards. Exercise: Heres a simple idea from Seven Habits. For thirty days, commit to working only on your Circle of Influence. How? Keep your commitments, to yourself and others. Dont judge or criticize other people, but turn your attention inward. Dont argue. Dont make excuses. When you make a mistake, accept responsibility and fix it. Dont blame or accuse. When you catch yourself thinking I have to or If only, stop yourself and choose to reframe the thought in a more positive light. As far as possible, accept responsibility for your circumstances, actions, and feelings. The Search for Meaning Victor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who survived the Nazi death camps during World War II. The extreme suffering and harsh conditions caused many inmates to lose their will, to welcome death. To be sure, prisoners often had no control over whether or not they died. But Frankl observed, A man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp. When treated like an animal, Frankl said, a person can choose to be an animal or she can choose to be brave, dignified, and unselfish. According to Frankl, the way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entailsadd a deeper meaning to his life. In the classic Mans Search for Meaning, Frankl states his thesis thus: Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose ones attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose ones own way. Frankls experience served as a crucible for his theory of personality development, which he called logotherapy. Before him, Alfred Adler had argued that people possessed a Nietzschean will to power (more here), and Sigmund Freud had argued that were all motivated by a will to pleasure (more here). Frankl, on the other hand, believed that humans are born with a will to meaning, a fundamental need to discover their purpose in this world. The three basic tenets of logotherapy are: The search for meaning is the primary motivation in each of our lives. This meaning is unique and specific to each individual. (Frankls philosophy is one reason I ask Get Rich Slowly readers to do is create a personal mission statement.)Life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable ones. What matters most isnt the meaning of life in general, but the meaning of each persons life in each moment.Humans are self-determining. That is, we dont just exist, but choose what our existence will be. We have freedom to find meaning in what we do and what we experience or at least in how we respond to each situation. Frankls argument that youre always free to choose your attitude is echoed in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyis statement that how we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depends on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experience. It also echoes Johnstones Impro: People with dull lives often think their lives are dull by chance. In reality everyone choose more or less the kind of events that happen to them.

Accepting responsibility for your own fate and attitudes can be uncomfortable and intimidating. Theres a kind of solace when you can attribute your situation to the winds of fate, the whims of the gods, or the inner workings of the universe. But recognizing that youre a free agent can be liberating too. When you take matters into your own hands, you shed your fears, create your own certainty, and discover that youre freer than you ever imagined possible. If you struggle to know what youre life is about, youre not alone. I get email all the time from folks who are stumped about what it is they want to accomplish. They know they dont like how things are going, but theyre not clear on just what they should do to make things better. To finish this discussion of meaning and happiness, Im going to share three exercises designed to help you find direction. (If youve read my stuff at Get Rich Slowly before, youll probably recognize one of these. Thats okay. If you still need help finding your purpose, you should work through it once more.) First up, lets talk about how to prioritize how you currently spend your time. Your Big Rocks You lead a busy life. There never seems to be enough time to do the things you really want to do, the things that make you happy. Youre too preoccupied with work, errands, and other demands placed upon you by the outside world. In Work Less, Live More, Bob Clyatt argues that you can make time for the important stuff. The secret, he says, is to prioritize, and he offers an analogy. (Ive learned recently that this idea might have originated with Stephen R. Covey in his book First Things First.) Heres how it works: Imagine you have a jar. You want to fill this jar with some rocks and some sand. Whats the best way to do it? One way is to add the sand to the jar first and then add the rocks. If you did this, however, youd quickly find that its impossible to make everything fit. With a layer of sand at the bottom of the jar, theres no room for the rocks.On the other hand, if you begin by putting the rocks in the jar, when you pour in the sand it will sift downward to fill in the gaps and the cracks between the rocks. Everything fits. Heres a video that demonstrates this idea in action: [embedded content] This same principle applies to your personal life. You can achieve well-being by prioritizing the Big Rocks in your life. This may sound elementary, and you may be tempted to ignore this advice. Dont. This one idea revolutionized my life. It made me happier and more productive. By focusing solely on the things that were most important to me by making room for the Big Rocks I was able to reclaim my life and time. A few years ago, after first reading about this idea, I sat down and drafted a list of the things that were most important to me. I decided that my Big Rocks were fitness, friends, writing, Spanish, and travel. If these werent in my jar, I wasnt happy. So, I made sure to squeeze these in before anything else. Once these rocks were in place, once these things were on my calendar, then Id fill the remaining space with the sand television, email, errands, and so on. Because of this simple exercise, I got lots more done and had a better time doing it. Who Are You? and What Do You Want? In order to get things done, to be productive, to achieve greater meaning and happiness in your life, you need to make sure youre spending more time on the big rocks and less time on the sand of everyday life (such as errands and email). But how can you determine which things are important? George Kinder is a Certified Financial Planner. Unlike many CFPs, Kinder isnt just about the nuts and bolts of money. He moves beyond the numbers in an attempt to address the goals and values of his clients. Without life planning, he says, financial planning is like using a blunt instrument on the organism we call the human being. Near the beginning of his work with each client, Kinder challenges her to answer three questions. These questions are designed to lead the client deeper and deeper into her desires until they reveal her goals and values, the things that bring her meaning and purpose. Kinder shared these questions in his book, The Seven Stages of Money Maturity. Your next task is to set aside half an hour to answer Kinders questions as honestly as possible: Imagine youre financially secure. You have enough money to take care of your needs, both now and in the future. How would you live your life? Would you change anything? Let yourself go and describe your dreams. What would you do if money were no object?Now imagine that you visit your doctor. She reveals you only have five to ten years left to live. Youll never feel sick, but youll have no notice of the moment of your death. What will you do in the time you have remaining? Will you change your life? How will you change it? (Note that this question does not assume unlimited wealth.)Finally, imagine your doctor shocks you with the news that you only have 24 hours to live. Nothing can be done. At this time tomorrow, youll be dead. What feelings arise as you confront your mortality? What did you miss? Who did you not get to be? What did you not get to do? Answering the first question is easy (and fun). There are many things wed do if money were no object. But as the questions progress, theres a sort of funnel. They become more difficult to answer, and there are fewer possible responses. Life planning is all about answering that final question. Note: If youd prefer, you can download a free PDF with a similar exercise that I used in the Money Boss crash course: Your Personal Mission Statement. Someday, Ill update that for Get Rich Slowly. According to Kinder, the third question usually generates responses that follow five general themes: Family and relationships. Ninety percent of responses to the final question contain this topic.Authenticity or spirituality. Many responses involve leading a more meaningful life.Creativity. Surprisingly, a large number of respondents express a desire to do something creative: to write a science-fiction novel or to play guitar like Eric Clapton.Giving back. Further down the list are themes about giving back to the community, about leaving a meaningful positive impact.A sense of place. A fifth common theme (though nowhere near as prominent as the top three) is a desire to have some connection with place: a desire to be in nature, to live someplace different, or to help the environment. Kinder says that some people the facts and figures people look at the life-planning process and ask, What does this have to do with money? It has everything to do with money. When you understand what you want to do with your life, you can make financial choices that reflect your values. All of these questions and the entire life-planning process are meant to cause the participant to ask herself, Who am I as a person, stripped from what I do as a job every day? Is it possible to derive meaning and satisfaction with this stripped away? Inevitably, the answer is yes. Your Lifeline Heres a third and final exercise, which I picked from my friend Jim Collins. Youre going to create a graphical representation of your life past and future. Before we start, grab a piece of paper and a pencil. Ready? Great! Heres how this works. Step one. With the paper in landscape mode (wider than it is tall), place one dot on the center of the left side. Place a second dot on the center of the right side. Draw a line to connect the two dots. Your page should look something like this:

Step two. For the next step, youll need to do some guesswork. Based on what you know of your health and your family history, estimate how long youll live. I know theres no way to be sure you could be hit by a truck tomorrow, or maybe next week scientists will find the secret to living 1000 years! but do what you can to best guess the date of your death. (If you need help, try one of the many on-line longevity calculators, such as the one at livingto100.com.) Once youve calculated your projected date of death, write it below the right-most dot. Example: As my long-time readers know, the men in my family dont live long. In fact, they often die on or around their fiftieth birthdays. Also, for strange reasons known only to the universe (or god), many of my family die on or around Independence Day. Thus, I often say that I expect to die on 04 July 2019, when Im fifty. This may sound morbid, but I like to think of it as hedging my bets. I hope to live longer, but Im fully prepared to have a short life.

Step three. Below the left-most date, note your date of birth. On your paper, youve created a visual representation of your lifeline.

Step four. The next step requires a bit of math. Youre going to add a third point to your lifeline, a point that represents today. Today will fall on a different point on the line for each person. To find the proper place for you, divide your current age by your expected lifespan. For instance, Im 45 and expect to live until Im 50. For me, the point representing today is located about 10% from the right side of the line. If youre 20 and expect to live until youre 80, your today point would be about one-quarter of the way in from the left. And so on.

Step five. Finally, choose a handful of major events from your life and place them on the lifeline in (approximately) the appropriate location. You might choose to list your first day of school, your wedding date, or the birthdates of your children. Add three to five major events to your lifeline. Example: On my lifeline, Ive included these key events: Writing The Meanest Inchworm in third grade, which was the first clue that Id one day become a writer. Getting married. Writing my first blog. Selling Get Rich Slowly. Re-purchasing Get Rich Slowly.

Your lifeline is now complete. On the piece of paper before you, you have a representation of your life, both past and future. But before were finished, theres one final step Id like you to take. Using an eraser, a marker, or another piece of paper, mask everything on your lifeline that comes before today. Blot it out. Hide it. Make it go away.

All of the time before today is past and does not matter. What matters is the future: today and everything after. For folks like me, our projected futures contain just a small amount of time. Knowing that, I cannot wait to do the things that I want to do. If your projected future is short, you shouldnt wait either. Dont dwell on the past. You cant change it. Focus instead on making the best quality tomorrow you possibly can. On the other hand, if your projected future is long (say youre 20 and expect to live another 60 or 80 years), cultivate patience. Take time. Make smart choices. Do what you can to set yourself up for future success. And dont get down on yourself just because youve made a few mistakes in the past. The past is the past. Look how much tomorrow lies before you! For another take on this exercise, take a look at the life calendar from Tim Urban at Wait But Why. The Path to Purpose We covered a lot of material in this article. Lets review what weve learned.

You can improve the quality of your daily life by learning to focus your attention and choosing to filter your experiences through a lens of positivity. But while it might be simple to find happiness in a single day, it can be much more difficult to link a series of days into a meaningful whole. Still, just as we must be active agents in creating our own happiness, we must also take an active role to create meaning in our lives. Creating meaning involves bringing order to the contents of the mind by integrating ones actions into a unified flow experience, writes Mihly Cskszentmihlyi. To give meaning to life, to achieve this unified flow experience, you need a purpose an overall goal around which your lesser goals are clustered. The path to purpose is different for each of us. Exercises like those Ive shared here the big rocks, the three questions, and the lifeline can help you identify your personal purpose, but often this process requires many years of experience and soul-searching. Dont feel bad if you havent found your purpose. And be aware that it takes more than cultivating purpose to make meaning out of life. To make meaning, you must also forge resolve. You must take your goals seriously. If youre not willing to accept the consequences of the goals you set, or to put in the effort required to achieve them, those goals become meaningless. Curiously, it can often be easier to find meaning and purpose by limiting your options. The more choices we have, the more difficult it is to maintain our resolve. Commitment to a goal and to the rules it entails is much easier when the choices are few and clear, notes Cskszentmihlyi. When we can imagine only few opportunities and few possibilities, it is relatively easy to achieve harmony. Desires are simple, choices are clear. There is little room for conflict and no need to compromise. Because life is complex (and becoming more so every day), its vital to keep your psychic energy focused on the things that matter most. Exercising personal restraint and preferring simplicity can help you stay glued to your purpose, on your goals both big and small. Restraint and simplicity reduce the possibility of distraction. But restraint and simplicity arent enough. When life gets busy and you feel overwhelmed, you must do more than just simplify your environment. At these times, action and intensity become your allies. Harmony is restored to conscious indirectly not by facing up to contradictions and trying to resolve conflicting goals and desires, but by pursuing chosen goals with such intensity that all competition is preempted, writes Cskszentmihlyi. Action helps create inner order. Action cures fear; apparently, it also imparts purpose. The final piece to the making of meaning is self-knowledge, the process by which you sort through conflicting choices. Based on your personal history, preferences, and passions, you must filter the available options to select the goals that truly reflect who you are and what you mean to the world. Example: At any given moment, I have many options available to me. Do I want to write another book? Do I want to speak at a conference in India? Do I want to continue to write about money? Do I want to study Spanish? Do I want to travel more? Less? And so on. Most of these options are good (by which I mean theyre positive, both for me and for the world). Who I am and what my life means is a product of the opportunities I choose to pursue. Ultimately, its up to each of us to discover our lifes purpose though a combination of simplification, action, and self-reflection, by being true to who we are and what we believe, and be setting goals we find worthy of pursuing for their own sake. Shares 104 https://www.getrichslowly.org/how-to-be-happy/

Addiction, therapy, future, mental illness, bad social constructing, and the huge danger of boredom

These questions keep coming up in my head and I haven't done a brain dump on these specific thoughts to get them out, so here we go:

1. Are people addicted to drugs because the chemicals have addicting attributes of is it more than that?

2. Are there better alternatives to therapy and why do we think the current models work?

3. Is mental illness genetic or the life experiences you encounter through living?

4. Do we give enough concern to the problem of "boredom" and it's correlation to depression?

5. Are the people designing our new social world really qualified to do so and what adverse effects are the results of these design?

A study that was done in 1978 tested the addiction to morphine in rats that I think is highly relevant today. Now there we plenty of other studies before that showed rats would prefer morphine water over plain water and that it was addicting and blah blah blah. The difference here is Alexander made a rat park, basically Disneyland for rats. When this alternative was introduced the rats, who are social creatures like us, took the regular water over ol' bama water( Alabama has the highest opioid use in the country). The idea being that if you give rats and therefore humans rewarding alternatives, you have less drug use.

(study) https://www.summitbehavioralhealth.com/…/overview-rat-park…/

I was talking with my kid who knows people who have addiction issues as many of us do now considering it will only be a matter of time before we all have a loved one in the same boat. One thing she noticed was that the people she knew that were home-schooled all seemed to jump right into every drug known to man once they got to the real world. She thought it was because they were deprived from the experiences of interaction and then kind of went loose with all the sensory enhancing once they got a chance. This is kind of what is happening in rural areas everywhere. Most addicts when interviewed in these small towns will tell you there is literally nothing to do here besides drugs. Of course there is no real job opportunity, no future of that changing, and it doesn't help that Big Pharma has just been allowed to send pallets of dangerous drugs to cities without any oversight. (Link) https://www.vox.com/…/opioid-epidemic-painkillers-west-virg…

Two things interest me in this information. One is that you could probably see a map of the issues with Opioids and where places have dick all to do, Buckeye ring a bell? Apache Junction isn't known for its parks people.

The other is this conservative idea that the decline of western society is in divorce, the liberal agenda, and not wanting to have this nuclear family model from the 60s. The way they combat this is by homeschooling their kids to hide them from influence and liberal programming. The problem is the result of this is drug addiction is ramping up more kills than Mortal Kombat.

The bible belt is hit very hard by drugs, my kid pointed out some terrible success rates with the rates of the kids she knows that were raised in home school christian settings and their battle with drugs. One example is two brothers both dying from alcohol excess, one a complete shut in with a heroin problem, the other who just slammed a bottle of fireball after heart surgery due to the effects. Overall it was 8 out of 10. The ones that joined the military seemed to avoid the issue the rest were swept away.

So the question is how dangerous is boredom? How dangerous is not having prospects of a future? I think the rat park is an example of idle hands make devil's work. We know that parents that get their kids into extracurricular activities have better outcomes but considering that most poor areas don't have the option of one job, and purchasing soccer outfits for kids, this may be a luxury of the rich. Rehab is a pipe dream for most poor people as well. Job opportunity and college plans is also a luxury of the affluent as much as the model of one parent working per household. So how do you combat and epidemic that poor people cant fix without an economic plan to shift poor and bored to middle class and working? Not by cutting funding but that is another debate. There is a finding that shows poverty is linked to mental health issues as well which makes perfect sense and the ramifications on addiction fall perfectly in line with that sense. (link) https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/10/30/499777541/can-poverty-lead-to-mental-illness

So how do you combat the addiction we now know exists? This idea of habit forming is true and dangerous if you don't respect it but do you heal the mind or do you fix it chemically? Some people have been going to extremes in the psychedelic frontier but I think they're missing something in some areas and completely bullshit in others. Where does the mental illness reside? Some think it is in your DNA. Others believe that is its a genetic trigger, like you are born with the genetic disposition but if certain events happen then the genes change. One example is how you can be predestined to develop breast cancer but it never triggers. Another is a linking between smoking at an early age can cause your child to be overweight. One other study was done on the MAOA, the warrior gene, or psychopath gene to some. The study showed that if certain environmental factors did not happen the gene would not trigger and the person would not be more impulsive of violence. (link) https://www.psychologytoday.com/…/evol…/201410/gene-violence

So how do you go about fixing yourself? Reset the brain with mushrooms? Do some therapy while on ecstasy? Microdosing LSD? Go on a Ayahuasca retreat? Take some electric volts to the brain? How bout regular therapy or counseling? I think you first got to find out one thing. Is your mental disorder something you are born with or something you were wired with through environment?

I tend to think it is the latter and here is my evidence. PTSD is a good example of something that was triggered through an event. Now some could say you were predisposed to be effected more so than someone else but they cant deny when it changed from dormant to affecting the individual. Another is the way they treat Schizophrenic behaviors with electric shock. They could literally wipe your brain of the existence of the disorder if you didnt mind losing your memory. This is a very good documentary on the subject of Bi-Polar but I want to note 2 things here. Most people dont just have one disorder, a ton have PTSD and considering they didnt look like vets I can assume their childhood was one of nightmares. The other is the woman who didnt want to lose her memory for the cure. Memory is paramount in these disorders even if you make a case for genetic predisposition you would also have to admit that environment plays a huge role in all these and in some it is seems like it is 100% that. (link) https://youtu.be/eyiZfzbgaW4

I believe the big reason why therapy works is because you play out the trauma over and over and talk about the terrible things you endured to someone. This could be a friend that doesn't mind hearing the story over and over or a therapist. I think the addition of medication is scary but as a stop gap I can see this as a necessity in a small timeline but there are a ton of adverse effects that are dangerous if going unchecked. Most mass shooters were on some anti depressants or adhd meds. This is why the holistic view garners some respect if used in logical ways and for a short time as well. Case in point is that you cant overdose on marijuana. So holistic does trump pharmaceutical if you cant die from it or the side effects of a pill meant to help you be happy makes you want to harm yourself and others. PTSD effected military folks have been swept under the rug by subscribing them some meds and sending them on their way. This is not being monitored by therapists but by doctors who get kick backs from the industry that benefits solely on people using more and more of their drugs. As you can see, business is good. (pic) https://margaretfarenger.files.wordpress.com/…/rates-of-pre…

This is an example of re-enacting trauma in a light way can repair the mind, this is similar to continuous telling of the story of your trauma. There are more elaborate studies that help people cope by recreating high quality versions of the trauma over and over till the brain can cope: (link) http://www.latimes.com/…/la-ss-morningside-can-paintball-he…

Now I think most people go to far on the merits of psychedelics and definitely on the catch all uses of marijuana. There are cases where it helps and the evidence in seizures is proof in the pudding. The over exaggeration of its effectiveness on cancer when its anti inflammatory effects are equal to you using tumeric or eating blue berries. Now I do think that if you were to take some ecstasy and focus on therapy, either talking about trauma or working out relationship issues, the different perspective and openness could make what would have been a toxic conversation one that is more easy to cope with. They have shown similar success with drugs like Ketamine and huge effects with mushrooms.

Now if you were to take ecstasy and sit there and talk about a bunch of bullshit like music or how could a mouse have a dog for a pet in Disney films, you are not getting shit out of the experience. The same could be applied to doing a bunch of psychedelics and going to burning man, what would you really learn from that? Intentions matter is all im saying. Other drugs like Ayahuasca and mushrooms have a different effect but the results on heroin addicts cannot be ignored. This isnt because you became one with the universe but the effects that brain wiring has on your life. If you were raised in a household where love meant violence and calm could be interrupted by chaos in any moment, you would have some fucked up wiring. It would effect the relationships you choose and the friends you can keep. There are ways to rewire the brain with actions. This is where therapy comes into play again. Someone telling you that what you think is boring is boring because your wiring needs enough positive links to love and relationships before it is wired to normal. The same reason why habits are formed like drinking while gaming, or the need to workout once you missed a day. (link) http://bigthink.com/ex…/how-to-rewire-your-brain-for-success

These drug may have an effect of getting their sooner by escalating the progress and putting you in a frame of mind to take it in more. Now these effects are fleeting but with practice and focus on the therapy and not just watching a shit Dead cover band you may get there without the danger of mood altering drugs that can have terrible reactions.

So what about our current social mediums? Do they actually do what we need them to do? Many people have talked about the dangers of social media and the addiction to likes. Here is a study which ranks them on how bad each one sucks but I have an idea behind why. (link) https://www.forbes.com/…/…/2017/05/31/instagram-depression/…

Here is a study showing the uptick in stress issues as a whole: (link) https://youtu.be/vqevGkjuLW0

Now most of these can be contributed to the asshole in charge, health care(mental as well), and economic concerns. 30% showed concerns about trust in government as well. Overall, people are not mentally better than they were last year and there are plenty of studies that show stressed households or classrooms can have huge effects on learning and stress in general. Stress is deeply tied to your health in a biological way as well so it is cause for concern.

I don't want to get to far down the rabbit hole but I think it is because we have people who have no idea how to talk to people creating social media apps. We have people that have no idea on dating making dating apps. That these applications dont take into account what is best for the user but what is best for making money and in return programming people to behave in a way that makes the developers money and provides mild success in the results desired by the person.

For example, the interfaces are one indicator that no one cares how you think. No one needed a tile interface for Windows 8/10 but here we are. Games are designed for in app purchasing and are curbing gamers to be loot and grind hounds that keeps them playing an unrewarding experience for continued activity and not a desire for rewarding game play. FB does a few things right but there are no ways to actually meet real people compared to AOL chat rooms in the 90s where a ton of people found love. World Of Warcraft does a better job match making friends/lovers than the current offerings and the reason why that is could be attributed to the way the app makes its money. Snapchat rewards users by encouraging them to stay active and post often which in turns means more ad clicks etc. None of these reward the user in the ways they want, you get a few clicks but no fill for the loneliness.

Use FB,IG, SC, Tinder all you want but in the end you will be no better off than when you started since there is nothing gained. I can use it to dump my thoughts into the ether but I dont expect anyone to read it, and no reward will be given for the effort. It has its merits but they are few. FB is great for connecting to the family and friends you already know but rewards you by making meaningless fake friends with no geographical filtering. Friends without the actual benefits of being one. It is devoid of filtering to location, unlike Tinder. Tinder on the other hand is devoid of emotion, information, and compatibility. You are given enough to explain yourself in emoticons and maybe your dick size :) but all you did was find out of someone 5 miles away swiped right, which is usually done be default for people not wasting time. So you match and it is cool you are close but now you have to sift through all the fake matches and see if you are compatible by having shitty after shitty conversation with people too busy maintaining their social media presence to respect your time. Also beware of neckbeards and the crazies. Other sites like OKCupid have personality matching by asking questions, sounds cool until you realize you match with an 80 year old woman or man in Novia Scotia, too bad they didnt have age or location sorting. It is no wonder ghosting exist, that people have moved their respect of the fake meaningless friends that accrue on social media and it has bleed over to someone literally unswiping you in front of your face and not caring about a human they were intimate enough to reply with one sentence over a text.

Twitch(Also any live shows with chat) is an interesting case for me. People watching gamers play is a simplified term for what it really is. The parts, well some, missing in other applications. For example, FB should have geographical filtering so Tinder half asses it. FB should have ways to talk to others and socialize so another app will half ass the lack of it by creating something that almost gives you everything but not quite to keep you along. Twitch fills in the gap of chatrooms no longer existing but also plays to a need of the socially awkward in the guise of gaming. What it really is, is a sense of community without the need for working on your social interaction skills. This is what is lacking in the current apps, this is why men cant put together 3 sentences before they say "I hope you get raped" for being ignored. So they go into a chatroom while someone is gaming who is successful because they talk to the discontent and not because they are good at them. These people are the therapists, a way to belong while remaining awkward. They can have one sided conversations with other regulars but they can still have a connection with the streamer of vlogger who reads their comments and validates them.

You really do have to appreciate the gift of gab, especially when it pays to keep the fans relevant, if you watch the successful ones they are really good at stringing people along and keeping then engaged by responding, the game is secondary: (link) https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Fortnite

It is no wonder an asshole who couldnt keep friends failed at successfully making an application where people have the same effect. They are just not capable of it sometimes, and other times your mental health has nothing to do with profits so it takes a bad seat. Much like our democracy got in the way of paid ads during our presidential campaign, we wonder why we keep getting sicker and never understand that the tools we have at our fingertips have not helped us at all but have made us worse if we put any faith in them. While developers not listening to the users in an Office suite may effect productivity, and a developer not listening to a user on a game may effect entertainment. Social media applications can effect your life, your stress levels, your sleep, your job, your mental health. So we better make damn sure we take that into account when we keep looking to them for happiness when I know they can never bring it.

How Blockchain Revol

How Blockchain Revolution is Going to Make Global Economy More Fair: Federico Pistono Interview Federico Pistono is a charismatic writer entrepreneur researcher angel investor TV presenter and public speaker who routinely tours around the world lecturing on exponential technologies and their economic impact on society. In 2012 Pistono wrote the book "Robots Will Steal Your Job But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and be Happy" which became an international success. Recently he published another book Startup Zero to help his compatriots Italians get a better understanding of the startup culture. In addition Federico has more than a decade of professional experience in different fields that vary from IT Management and human machine interaction to screenwriting and directing. We speak with Federico Pistono about his views on how Blockchain could really change the current global economic model that is unfair how close we came to the AI ruling the world and how could we find our place in the emerging paradigm. CG: How did you get involved in the fintech industry? FP: Computers always fascinated me and systems in general and just learning new things.I have a background in mathematics and computer science so that was double spending and operating research data structures algorithms. Those were things that really interested me at the mathematical level. To then think that those principles could be applied for social change it was kind of a love at first sight of blending these things together. I started programming when I was 12 or 13 and got into Blockchain around 2011 when I read the Bitcoin whitepaper written by Satoshi. At the time I was very interested in the Byzantine generals problem. Then I was one of the first people to get into Ethereum and from then on it just grew more and more. Now I am leading the Blockchain theme at Hyperloop Transportation Technologies which is this new tech thats essentially a supersonic speed travel on a train. So you have an evacuated tube you got a tube you suck out the air you put a capsule inside with about 30 people and then you have got magnetic levitation-passive magnetic levitation its called Indutrack. And you can just move this thing at super high speed- supersonic so more than 1200 km/h. CG: What would you say about the relationship between AI and Blockchain? FP: Regarding AI and Blockchain I would say one of the biggest issues probably is how we decide to structure the algorithm and the incentive mechanisms that we put into the system because in the end you get your reward. AIs today and probably for the foreseeable future are not really intelligent in any sort. They perform narrow tasks and they optimize for specific things that we tell them to do and so we dont know really know how to give them the right constraints. If we just say hey make profit and do this they may find all sorts of ways around to perform that task very well to optimize for that factor. Now we have a system where there is a huge centralization of power centralization of capital centralization of risk and in particular the big players are de-risking everything by hedging the risk on the small guys particularly in developing countries. I think every time that you have a shift in technology or dramatic shift you have the ability to change things by creating a new incentive structure by changing the rules of the game. Right now that is that moment that seismic event that can change the incentive structure and the mechanisms underneath. The Blockchain is a way to do it distributively securely and I think we can do great things but they dont come by themselves we have to actively pursue a specific goal and to agree on how to design these new systems. CG: Are we ready for above-mentioned inventions or do we have to evolve further? FP: I think currently we are not ready for this change. Well first of all the technology isnt ready. We havent figured out still so many things about Blockchain systems. We are still in the very very early stage of the protocols and of the mechanisms that we are building. I mean we dont know how to scale we dont know how to do it securely we dont know how to do it fast enough. We really dont have the game theory behind it; we dont know how all these things are going to be put together. We dont have the social infrastructure and the technological infrastructure. But its a feedback loop its a system of systems so by interacting with the system by allowing ourselves to make mistakes and to do it faster and faster we create resilience in the network. Where a single entity might die or go bust the overall network captures some of that value and then you can increase the value again again and again. Hopefully we can find something thats not just resilient but its anti-fragile so that by stressing the system it becomes stronger- something like your body. When you go to the gym and you do exercise you actually stress your muscles and you break them apart and because you break them apart they become stronger afterwards so thats an anti-fragile system. We should do that for the economic system and also for decision-making and everything. Since we know that we are going to make mistakes- we should design a system that gets better as we make more mistakes because we learn from them instead of just repeating the same shit over and over and not learning from it which is mostly what has been happening recently. CG: Tell us about your books FP: I wrote a few books. First one is called Robots Will Steal Your Job But Thats OK. I wrote it six years ago. Kind of unsuspected time I was told I was a charlatan I didnt have a PhD in economics I wasnt a professor from MIT or Oxford I should just stick to my computer science and not talk about these things how little do you know. Then two to three years later professors from MIT and Oxford have written the papers that say exactly the same things with exactly the same numbers but using different methodologies so they were kind of validating everything that I was saying. Thus I went from a charlatan to an oracle. It was kind of weird but you know same stuff just has caused different reactions from people. Then I wrote another book a fiction book this time called Tale of Two Futures. Its a short sci-fi. It shows two different paths we can take. One where things have taken the decentralized open source model and a more sensible approach on how to use technology to better society and the other is this hyper-capitalistic narrowly focused mindless repetitive work that leads to a dystopian society. The third book I wrote was a book for Italians about how to build startups because in Italy no one knows how to build startups. Very few people know and the few people who do they leave the country and go elsewhere and they never tell anyone back in town. Now they call startups everything like if a pizzeria were a startup. No thats not a startup- a startup is something else! So I wrote this most recent book thats called Startup Zero.0. To kind of give the idea that we are not even step one we are at step zero we should get the basics first and understand them. So I have been doing that a lot of that. I also have a TV show in Italy on national TV its called Codice La vita è digitale it means Code Life is Digital. We have had about two or three mln people watching it every week. First it was just about Blockchain and Bitcoin. We went to BitFury China Japan we interviewed Roger Ver; we had a bunch of people there. I think it was very well done the episode on Blockchain. We did one on IoT smart cities the cognitive revolution artificial intelligence robotics synthetic biology genetic engineering. We are bringing these emerging technologies to the wider audience. Also I am an angel investor. I invest in about 20 companies so far- mostly in Blockchain but also I am moving to the medical sector things that I think will help humanity in one way or another. I try to give my contribution in some way. Now I am spending most of my time doing Hyperloop. CG: What does that mean Blockchain Revolution? How will it change the globe? FP: I think one of the biggest opportunities we have is to use autonomous agents to automate all things that should be automated particularly in bureaucracy and in how systems interoperate. There is no reason why I should go ask a person to verify my identity or to stamp something and wait for months for a paper to come back or fax it somewhere I mean some places still need a fax machine. A lot of this stuff is because you dont trust the computer to verify that transaction or that information that is being conveyed. Now the Blockchain can solve that. Not only can it solve it but it can solve it systematically securely and for anybody. Also its censorship resistant not just the government censoring information but also a company not releasing some of the data that maybe you should own. For example from all the social networks the only one that gives you the contacts is LinkedIn. Everyone else doesnt allow you to export the contacts. They are your contacts! Why shouldnt you be allowed to have your own contacts and information about them? Its crazy but this happens! Think about all the corruption that happens throughout the world- trillions of dollar worth of value and hundreds of millions of people in distress who can be forced into doing things because they have no legal recourse. The Blockchain can help all these people. Before it helps the First World it can help the long tail of the supply chain thats now being held hostage by the owners of capital who have an unfair advantage in that game. They can be less efficient than them but still win just because they have access to cheap capital. That is really unfair. All the risk is on these people who have no power no legal recourse and their lives are miserable because the game is tilted. The game is unfair. Blockchain can allow for that to change but we need to actively pursue that goal because it will not come automatically by itself. I think thats a moral responsibility that we have. I think we have to step up and take that responsibility. Follow us on Facebook

http://ift.tt/2A4OePm