When you take one path. When you take one path, all other paths die and are left behind.

Such is the weight of all our choices.

But I'm not good at letting things die. I keep going back and dragging half-alive corpses around. Abomination!

You stink of the dead. Mark your endings and grieve them, foul beast!

Sharing controversial take can actually lead to a better world. Most of social media today rewards bold claims—but not the process of refining them. The more you double down, the more attention you get.

But I want a world where people can share strong opinions  in order to refine them, not just defend them. Relationships—online or in person—should shape our beliefs, not just reinforce them.

Dialogue shouldn't be just about making a point but instead being open to updating our views.

Updating can look many ways, including being even more sure about our perspective. 

So, for some of you, my "hot take" is that you should risk sharing the scary thing. For others, my "hot take" is that you should risk having your views updated after you've shared them. 

Which camp are you in?

#DeepTakes

Experiment: How is whatever's happening serving the greater good? If we zoom out long enough, we can often see that massive setbacks created foundations for evolution. Eg:

• The great oxygenation wiped out almost all life on Earth, but also created the atmosphere.
• The extinction of the dinos paved the way for bigger mammals—and eventually humans.
• Industrialization put tons of people out of work and polluted like crazy, but coincided with some of the greatest quality of life increases in recorded history
• In Trump and a Post Truth World, Ken Wilber suggests that Trump’s 2016 win was one manifestation of evolution taking a step backward to correct the way the “Green meme” went unhealthy—because the one thing that Trump was coherent about back then was being anti-pluralistic.

What’s a thing in the world that you don’t like right now, and think is a huge step backward, that might also be a step forward? How so?

By design, this is an unverifiable experiment from a third person perspective. Since we can keep zooming out + everything is interconnected, we’ll probably never know for sure, even if we live for thousands of years. 

But by design, this is verifiable from a first person perspective: Does your experience improve or change in any way by the experiment? How so?

(note that this doesn't ask you to deny any suffering—such as the horror of the oxygenation event's great extinction, or stop trying to make things better. Like everything, this perspective can be misused. "Everything happens for a reason" is usually dismissive, "if there were a reason for this in the long run, what might it be?" is additive. Like allowing versus expressing, it's not about bypassing the difficulty but rather creating a larger container for it. Freedom comes through acceptance rather than resistance.)

#TTT 

How relationships cultivate Who I Want To Be. I have this thing consistently happen in romantic relationships about 10 months in…

I find myself doing a full inventory of if my partner is helping me become who I want to be.

What am I training myself to do in this connection? What beliefs am I supporting or forming in myself through this connection?

I guess I’m often doing this throughout a relationship, but the 10 month mark is where I get the itch to make decisions about if I’ll continue or not.

I’m in this moment with my current partner…appreciating how our relationship is helping me become more open to communicating my feelings honestly, owning my needs as non negotiable (and sometimes uncompromising), push myself to communicate before things are at red alert stage, feel how big and all encompassing love can be, and I see myself as more attractive and smart because of his affirmation. However, I’m definitely learning and practicing some other things that I’m unsure of- sitting with feelings of deep missing for weeks at a time, practicing relying (almost exclusively) on non-romantic connections for support through big changes, and something around extreme letting go of possessiveness of another, which almost reads like a letting go of preferences in my system.

I think those latter things are noble. But I’m wondering…are they noble for me?

I’m reading a book right now that says something about it being somewhat easy to slip into living a life that would be noble but it’s based on someone else’s dream or ideas. And it’s important to connect with your dreams, unique ideas, purpose…

When and how do you tend to take inventory of a relationship? How do your relationships support you?

Also open to what shadows you see in my frame 👀

Why you should post more: Everything is a mirror of everything.

We’re all censoring most of our awareness.

Uptrust is a currently curated community where we can actually practice thinking.

The more I post the more direct I’m being with everyone in my life. (I have an embedded belief that if I do anything anywhere then I should that anything in more everywheres…but I still curate).

Post about why you’re not posting.

Post about questions you’re asking yourself.

Post about your anxiety.

Post to express art.

This shit won’t last, this fun safe newborn ward. Use this time now to try something. Create a fake name or another account so you can try it from anonymity.

Huge opportunity to bust out of our norms.

id like to learn more about juneteenth. can you guys share it?

Race and IQ. I recently got dinner at a hole-in-the-wall asian spot with a geneticist named Razib Khan. Over noodles, and with a concerned glance over his shoulder, he admitted that the science is clear: race is absolutely tied to IQ. Jews are the smartest. Pretty much everyone on the continent of Africa is at the bottom.

This fact alone is controversial, but we have to be able to talk about it, and here’s why:

I nodded, and asked: How many generations does this take to change?

Razib: As little as three generations. For example, the Egyptians used to be the smartest, but a century of inbreeding knocked them to the bottom. Incest drops IQ by 10 points in the first generation. After that the effect weakens.

This is huge. At first glance, the controversial statement seems like a slamdunk for racists the world over. But dig into the details, and you find out 3 generations is enough to change things—this means that race and IQ are not inherently linked as far as we know, they’re just linked in today’s world, because of today’s policies and systems.

Knowing this could actually help us target where we need to focus our interventions for the next three decades. Let’s get us all up!

Current Session "instructions" (Feb 26): Converse, and see if nudges happen. nudges 

We launched a system where the AI bots can automatically detect intervention points. We need you to make a bunch of comments and new posts to see if they'll engage. So this week we're asking you to engage a bunch, if you can!

It's a little rudimentary at the moment so sometimes you'll get multiple bots responding on multiple posts. We'd love your feedback on which ones you like, don't, when it seemed to miss the spot, anything else you notice. 

Thanks and love yall

J (and the UpTrust team)
p.s. this week I'm at an investor meeting so dara will be with you

# [Optional Zoom](https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86795216050?pwd=TllxSzYrTFFXTW5LRmg3WUQrT04vdz09) with Jordan and Dara at least, for faces, questions, help, etc:

Owning activation while posting. A bottleneck I’m encountering is some belief that I shouldn’t post or respond when I’m triggered but there’s a lot of motility and I need to do something new. I’ll be including both what I think the trigger is about and my rebuttal and I’m going to endeavor not to devalue my points because I’m triggered. I’m thinking of putting the awareness of the trigger in parentheses but might play with the format. Feel open now to respond to comments about either

Owning activation while posting. A bottleneck I’m encountering is some belief that I shouldn’t post or respond when I’m triggered but there’s a lot of motility and I need to do something new. I’ll be including both what I think the trigger is about and my rebuttal and I’m going to endeavor not to devalue my points because I’m triggered. I’m thinking of putting the awareness of the trigger in parentheses but might play with the format. Feel open now to respond to comments about either

Metatation - rant - is it . Is Metatation a thing? I’ve been using it as a mantra during meditation. Somehow the metatation mantra helps me calm down all the meta’ing always seem to be do’ing. Metatation has made my mediation practice more fun. Metatation is almost a state of mind that often takes me into too much awareness. Is that possible>? Is too much awareness a thing? Probably not. Probably some complex term to summarize the sensation. But too much awareness does feel like a real thing and overwhelming specially with the sense of sensory awareness. Has anyone heard the term HSP? Highly Sensitive People: which am probably that, can feel like too much awareness of the environment: the noises, the lights, the temperatures, the smells, can be too much for some while other people in the same environment are not bothered by it. Then add on top that awareness, awareness of ecosystems out of harmony and awareness of inequalities and unjustnesses (like to make up words) and in the words of Kristen Wigg: Welcome to me.

Metatation on the app itself:
I am noticing as wirting this that the auto correct feature in this window as a type are not working like i’m use to via text and email. Which is showing me i’m not a great typer, nor do i spell all that well left to my own devices.

In the background of this post, is the metatating that i’m writing a post and imagining if it will be read, how it will be recieved and that it’s a new app and in beta testing. And that i before e, except after c (sorry to non-american educated peeps, if that’s not a thing you got placed in your brain at a young age). received: successfully typed it without autocorrect. Seriously i feel like my keyboard is broken. Oh and also noticing sometimes after the end of the sentence and the period, starting a new sentence, it doesn’t auto make the first letter of the sentence a capital letter.

I’m pretty sure i didn’t make up metatation, but i think i did, at least it felt like it happened that way as a new experience in my world. But metatation.com is taken to help design websites.

Metatation of you reading this:
Was it a waste of your time to take this in? Does that question make it so. Without asking if it was a waste, was it not, but after asking if it, now is it? These types of wonderings.. never ends, is it fun or is it anxiety being acted out?

The end.

And it really is my keyboard! the letter i barely works on my laptop and guess that never noticed as most of the time the autocorrect fixes it.

The pressure to be thoughtful. It’s an interesting thing - this feeling that I need to post something thoughtful here. I’m feeling tension emerge in my abdomen. There’s a belief that there’s a right and a wrong way to engage in this community with no clarity on what is right or wrong. Noticing that and letting that be.