Life and Death are Normal.

It's true that really thinking about death can cripple certain egotistical ways of life, but I don't think it's crippling all-in-all.

I will comment since this is somewhat related.

I don't personally tape my mouth, but I have been making an effort to "mew" while sleeping, i.e., keeping the tongue on the roof of the mouth. Presumably, the more unconscious that practice becomes in daily life, the more easily it can be applied while sleeping as well.

This seems to have worked wonders for my snoring (i.e., subclinical apnea), as reported by my wife. You can give it a test easily too, try breathing through the nose in the unconscious fashion (i.e., deeply and relatively "hard"), and see how the position of the head, neck, jaw, and tongue might alter any blockages or mechanics.

I wake up feeling more refreshed, often feel better with less sleep, and have more vivid dreams more often.

I wonder if besides breathing mechanics, this is due to increased CO2 retention, as the mouth is relatively more blocked from the airways this way?

Orienting brain/other development around a competitive process is often paired with a model of life as a kind of random accident of thoughtless self-replicating genes. The usual high-school biology stuff where Random Mutations produce change which is then carried on. The Peaty view is more about life an an intrinsic and intentional thing. Energy and Structure and all that, it is not an accident of genetics. In some sense intelligence is the exactly harmonizing (not competition) with the state of things before us, the building of an objectively correct and useful reality-model.

Read "Mind and Tissue" by Ray Peat for more details. Great book.

Murray Bookchin and Pyotr Kropotkin talk about the role of cooperation in nature itself, somewhat contrary to the "rules of nature" kind of stuff.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-sociobiology-or-social-ecology

Not an anarchist. But found this stimulating when I read it a year ago.

The conflict in nature between different kinds of organism has been popularly expressed in phrases like “struggle for existence” and “survival of the fittest.” Yet few people realize that mutual cooperation between different kinds of organisms—symbiosis—is just as important, and that the “fittest” may be the one that most helps another to survive.

I find this mentality in a lot of the more successful and intelligent people I know. Being as helpful as possible to as many as possible can be a form of competition: you have more favors to call upon and so on. (and go on for creating useful things that are valued by others in the economy or whatnot)

And, on mitochondria:

Much the same is true of the eukaryotic cell’s “powerhouse,” its mitochondria. The eukaryotic cells are the morphological units of all complex forms of animal and plant life. The Protista and fungi also share these well-nucleated cell structures. Eucaryotes are aerobic and include clearly formed subunits, or organelles. By contrast, the prokaryotes lack nuclei; they are anaerobic, less specialized than the eucaryotics, and they constitute the evolutionary predecessors of the eucaryotics. In fact, they are the only life forms that could have survived and flourished in the early earth’s atmosphere, with its mere traces of free oxygen.

It is now widely accepted that the eukaryotic cells consist of highly functional symbiotic arrangements of procaryotes that have become totally interdependent with other constituents. Eucaryotic flagella derive from anaerobic spirochetes; mitochondria, from prokaryotic bacteria that were capable of respiration as well as fermentation; and plant chloroplasts from “blue-green algae,” which have recently been reclassified as cyanobacteria. The theory, now almost a biological convention, holds that phagocytic ancestors of what were to become eucaryotes absorbed (without digesting) certain spirochetes, protomitochondria, and, in the case of photosynthetic cells, coccoid cyanobacteria and chloroxybacteria. Existing phyla of multicellular aerobic life forms thus had their origins in a symbiotic process that integrated a variety of microorganisms into what we can reasonably be called a colonial organism, the eukaryotic cell. Mutualism, not predation, seems to have been the guiding principle for the evolution of the highly complex aerobic life forms that are common today.

So it is the cooperation/economy of the division of labor that makes development and differentiation possible, expanding the possibilities and energy open to one person.

@IkeIkeforever Hm. I don't know what to tell you. I think you need some kind of Work in your life (easier said than done). Not necessarily a formal job but something productive that you're intentionally doing and are good at. You can't build a good life out of solipsistic observation of others, "Catcher in the Rye" style. You will find no hidden secrets at the public library. It would be best to drop that whole flaneur thing for a while and get down to work.

Very Cool. I have tried to use niacinamide in coconut oil for toenail fungus, which wasn't very effective (using povidone iodine now to good effect). It didn't occur to me that I might've had more luck with a solution in liquid.

From what I am reading, your sugar intake is not very high (or consistent):

Sometimes it's just one tangerine because even though I'm hungry, I don't want to eat.

If I were you, I would increase sugar intake.

I often find that if I have some kind of downcast mood, a few glasses of orange juice treats that almost instantly. This often happens when I'm sucked into work and don't have time to eat much.

@Rah1woot

I would personally expect a rapid widening of living standards between the trade-surplus countries (Russia, China) and the trade-deficit countries (USA, much of Europe), as exponential-level effects begin to kick into high gear.

This aged well.

Can't comment much on "this iodine protocol".

I've actually had a lot of success with using topical povidone iodine as an antifungal treatment for ringworm and toenails.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4599634/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1569938/

I know that it's generally advised against increasing iodine too much on this forum, but I've personally had some amazingly good moods from consuming seaweed (in olive oil), which has somewhat high levels of iodine. Perhaps this was the result of a deficiency at the time. Part of me thinks that a background in swimming and being a lifeguard caused some chlorine buildup in the thyroid which was "dislodged" by iodine intake, but this is really just wild conjecture.