The second step: music hack for black-pillers

If you’re like me, you have zero baseline internal motivation and willpower. Maybe you went through a burnout, maybe you acquired the CFIDS, maybe you took all the red pills at once, or maybe you were born with biological deficiencies. Either way, your typical day is spent waiting to die, and the only thing that stops you from killing yourself is a moral proscription or fear of the unknown. The only benefit of ego death, so far as I can tell, is that it kills the part of you that cares about impressing other people, which makes intellectual honesty and realistic appraisals very easy. (E.g. people on 4chan don’t hesitate to identify themselves as “Gamma” if they are one). On the other hand, knowing without doing is useless (inb4 Heaviside countersignals) and despair also kills off the part of you that fights for something better (i.e. dopamine-seeking behavior).

Don’t take it from me, take it from Dr. Wong: you need dopamine to Make huWhite Children Great Again. You actually can’t get an erection without it. The connection between reproductive viability and happiness is so strong that I use it as a heuristic for diagnosing depression vs. mere sadness: if you can do a helicopter with your dick and not smile, you’re depressed. Therefore your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find free, healthy sources of dopamine to rebuild your baseline willpower.

The fundamental idea comes from Bakadesuyo: controlling your music intake is the cheapest, easiest motivation hack there is. Bombarding yourself with upbeat, major-keyed music will make you happier, on the average, and so on for other types of music. This probably has something to do with evopsych and cultural transmission of abundance mindsets (R-selection: pin-up calendars) versus cold-adapted mindsets (k-selection: MegaTokyo’s patented “sad girl in snow” feelzporn). Rather than naively following your gut’s tastes and surrounding yourself with the things that appeal to you most strongly, exercise some judgment in meeting your tastes halfway. Motivational music like the Rocky theme is the musical diet equivalent of red meat, filled with delicious and nutritious saturated fats. If you can’t handle schmaltz, find something you like that’s still in a major key.

If you have an associative horizon-inclined personality and a UHIQ, you may want to try your hand at learning music, if you haven’t already. Since people read this blog for the insight porn, I might as well drop a fun idea here. Associative horizon is predicted by skull width (all great philosophers are hyperbrachycephalic), and I expect both genius and Vox’s “brilliance” are ventral stream functions. So if you’re more of a lateral thinker, there’s a lot of good life lessons to be found in learning, playing, and composing music. Plus, there’s no drug in the world that compares to the frenzy of writing a melody over a dramatic chord progression.

To bring things back around, here’s the hack: listen to uplifting music for inspiration to compose your own motivational music, and then learn to play it. This activity simultaneously fills a lot of mindset needs:

-Playing your own music automatically induces a flow state, which is an important part of happiness: see Dario Nardi.

-Learning to play an instrument will teach you how self-education and improvement work in any technical subject, and the two main lessons of CONSCIENTIOUSNESS: 1) by drilling fundamentals you can learn to combine them at a level of skill that you can’t even imagine, and 2) you aren’t a savant and learning any technical skill is going to take way longer than you’re expecting.

-Learning to play a motivational song will engage you with the aesthetics on a level that mere singing or dancing can’t. This will cure your learned helplessness by shifting your worldview and improving your baseline mindset toward seeking real accomplishments.

-Composing music will teach you how creative enterprise works, and how the three personality subtraits (intelligence, associative horizon, and conscientiousness) come together as real productivity.

If you’re quick to generalize new ideas, you may have noticed that this idea can be generalized beyond music intake to all of the ambient aesthetic choices that make up your daily life. You already make decorating choices, reading choices, movie and TV choices, internet choices, and even ambient noise choices—like the effect of diet on the body, these can either help your brain or hurt it. This is why, when I finally had the money to get my own apartment, I made a point to pick one out in the ass-end of nowhere. So even though my head is usually off in the clouds somewhere, the first thing I see each day is trees and the first thing I hear is a kickass Dragonforce solo.

Further reading:

• Bakadesuyo Blog Boil Down
• What The Music You Love Says About You And How It Can Improve Your Life
• What does the music you love say about you?
• How To Increase Motivation: 4 Secrets From Research
• Neuroscience Discovers 5 Things That Will Make You Happy

Just remember, reading is useless without doing. Do the easiest, smallest improvement you can imagine, because shitposting is the way of the nobilid.