@Tio I read the blog post and felt like I could relate to it very well, then I read the comments from @Sasha, @Dima and @Roma and felt like I could relate to those as well 😄

This time I feel like it's not just us, the world has gone to shit in many ways and it seems like everyone is feeling it these days.... The way I would describe it is that our world has lost its peace and sanity, I feel like there is no baseline stability anymore.... We lost our peace with all these wars and violence, when the most corrupt abusers and charlatans got into power. And we lost our sanity when we got hit with a flood of misinformation in the form of conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, etc. I don't know what happened during covid but all of these BS started gaining a lot of traction during that time, maybe sitting at home all day looking at their phones have made people loose their minds a little bit. And of course all of these things are interconnected, people loosing their sanity helped some of those corrupt assholes get elected, and then they in turn started attacking science and education because they see knowledge as a threat.

This maelstrom of shit has affected projects like TROM and others because people can't be thinking about future progress when there is no baseline stability anymore. Peace and sanity are essential for everyone to just take a break and look at our world, work on improving things, etc. But right now people are overwhelmed, all of us are. There are just too many problems and we can't fight them all at once.... And here I'm talking about the people who actually care about the world and these issues, because I always felt like this was a minority - most people are either busy doing their jobs or busy consuming in this society, now that even their attention is commodified and traded on these internet platforms.

I don't know what the solution here is, in some cases things are outside of our control so all we can do is hope and wait for it to get better.... And in the meantime it might be useful for us to focus on areas where we can actually make some impact in the world, even if by a little, so that if we ever get past this shit-storm people may have some things to look out for.....

P.S. BTW, I just gotta say that I'm kinda impressed with how well you were able to explain this thing (that we were all feeling to some extend) with the use of some simple diagrams made of stick figures and circles 😄 You have a good way of conceptualizing ideas and explaining it to people in a simple manner, that is a skill man.....

Recall a time when you felt the most joy and love you've ever felt in your life and feel the feelings that you felt at that time as much as you can for at least 30 seconds. What kinds of thoughts were going through your mind at that peak moment when you felt the most joy and love? (I'm not asking what you were doing at the time, but what thoughts were going through your head at that exact moment.) For many people that answer this, they realize that they didn't have any thoughts during that exact moment. For others, they say that the thought was that they were so grateful or happy.
For those that answered that they had the thought that they were grateful, did you feel that joy and love before you had that thought or after? Take 10-15 seconds to answer that question before moving on. What insights and epiphanies did you have? What's crazy is that most people didn't have any thoughts going through their mind when they felt the happiest and the most amount of love in their lives. For those that had the thought that they were grateful, they felt that way before having that thought. If they had that thought, it happened after they felt the feelings, so the thought could not have produced the feeling. This brings us to another truth:
you do not have to have thoughts or think to feel positive emotions. The beautiful part about truth is that it needs no justification because it can be experienced right here right now. It doesn't need to be proven or rationalized to you and you experienced this truth firsthand by the experiment we just did.
Here's why we don't need to have thoughts or think to feel positive emotions like joy and love.
Our natural state of being IS joy, love, ecstasy, freedom, and gratitude. This may be hard to believe because if it's natural, why don't we feel that way all the time? I'll answer this in a bit.
If we want to see the natural state of anything, one of the best ways is to look at nature and the state of it in its infancy (before it is affected and conditioned by its environment). For example, let's look at the natural state of a baby. What is a baby's natural and default state (assuming the baby wasn't abused, neglected, or had any physical issues)? Are babies naturally stressed, anxious, fearful, and self-conscious? Or are they naturally in a state of bliss, happiness, and love?
Our natural state of being is joy, love, and peace. Therefore, any thinking that we do will only take us away from those natural states of being, which is why whenever we feel extremely stressed, we are having a LOT of thinking going on. The strength of the negative emotion we feel is in direct proportion to how much thinking we are doing in the moment.
On the other hand, the intensity of the positive emotion we feel is inversely proportional to the amount of thinking we are doing in the moment. In other words, the less thinking we have going on, the stronger the positive emotion we feel in the present.
To see the truth in this, recall a few other memories you had when you were extremely stressed and anxious and see how much thinking was going on at the time. Take about 1-2 minutes to do this. Then recall a few memories where you were at your happiest or felt the most joy and love and see how much thinking you had going on at that time. Take another 1-2 minutes to do this before moving on to really experience and internalize the truth of what you see.
An analogy that my coach taught me that helped crystallize this concept was to imagine our mind has a speedometer (like in a car), but instead of miles per hour, it is thoughts per minute. The more thinking we have going on, the higher the “thought-o-meter” goes, and if we have enough thinking going on, it'll go into the red zone. This is when we feel extremely stressed, burned out, frustrated, and angry.
It is not the content of our thinking that causes us stress, but that we are thinking, period. The amount of thinking we have going on is directly correlated to the magnitude of stress and negative emotions we are experiencing at any given moment. When you're experiencing a lot of frustration, stress, anxiety, or any negative emotions, just know that it is because you're thinking, and the intensity of those emotions is directly correlated to how much thinking is going on. Therefore, it's not WHAT we're thinking about that is causing us suffering, but THAT we are thinking.
To summarize, we do not have to try to "think positive" to experience love, joy, bliss, and any positive emotions we want because it is our natural state to feel those emotions. The only times we don't naturally feel these emotions is when we begin to think about the thoughts we're having, thus blocking the direct connection to Infinite Intelligence and we feel stressed, anxious, depressed, and fearful. It is not about the content of our thinking, but that we're thinking, which is the root cause of our suffering. The intensity of the negative emotions is directly correlated to the amount of thinking we have going on in the present. The less thinking we have, the more space we create for positive emotions to naturally surface.

Reference:
Nguyen, J. (2024) Don’t Believe Everything You Think: Why Your Thinking Is the Beginning & End of Suffering (Expanded Edition). [Hardcover] Authors Equity. ISBN 9798893310153.