Oh my God, just realized it’s been 27 days since my last entry here.
I kept running the aforementioned stack until October 14th, at which point I went on a long washout, primarily because I started getting concerned about my examination that took place at the end of October. I could no longer deal with recon taking up some or all of my mindshare, so to speak. So most of my socializing attempts came to a halt as I realized that I fallen behind in school.
Thankfully, the intense weeks that followed culminated in a successful examination.
What makes me uncomfortable is the realization that the pattern this year closely resembles that of last year. Last year, too, I was intensely looking to build my social/romantic life and found few opportunities and got generally lacklustre results. To top this off, I hadn’t found a way to balance things so that I fell behind and had to switch to Limitless to help save my studies. The only difference this year is that I did it without the help of Limitless.
And now I feel…strange and somewhat beside myself. I feel like I regressed. The cycles on GLM gave me very palpable progress, and I felt less concerned with external validation, and the discipline scripting calmly made me organise my life in a better way(however, I didn’t quite notice how little I was concerned with the schoolwork). Either GLM or the “I am ATMAN” synergy that I attached to it made me question my place here and my intensions real hard. I know that I am compromising by choosing this quantitative field. I was unemployed for three years before and disturbed by the fact that neither in academia nor on the job market did I find anything suitable for myself. So my ex at that time suggested that I get another Master’s degree, and originally I had planned to go to Sweden and get her here as well so we could move back in together(to help with the visa issue she had). However, she broke up with me and now I am here on my own. She recently apologized to me, saying that she meant well and couldn’t have known that I wouldn’t have a good time here. And she’s right, neither of us saw this kind of situation coming, but now I have to deal with it.
Winter has begun in earnest here, and temperatures have dropped hard, along with almost constant rain.
The few socializing opportunities I had before now seem to have disappeared entirely, save for the random ESN event every other month. The degree has picked up in intensity again to the point where I realize that I cannot justify learning Swedish on the side, seeing as there is just no ROI to it. I probably have less than 9-10 months left here. And I have realized that I really don’t want to stay in Sweden long-term. But I also don’t want to be alone for that period of time I have left.
The reason why I am feeling beside myself is that there is a lot of reconciliation going on in my mind, with or without subs. A month ago, I was still visiting all kinds of second-hand shops to upgrade my wardrobe and looking for events to attend. I didn’t find much, but the thought was there. While GLM’s effects were apparent from the first loop, Wanted only noticeably kicked in in terms of self-grooming and in my attempts to look for dating opportunities and taking care of my appearance. I also enjoyed my playfulness in my interactions. However, I neither manifested any unusual encounters, nor did I find the social opportunities to regularly meet new people. Neither did I get IOIs or impulses as I went about my life when the weather was still good.
So my first impression with Wanted is that it is cleaning up things on the inside and that it might take me longer than others to manifest anything notable in my actual dating life. Admittedly, I was hoping that I’d just run into interesting social encounters or that I’d get an IOI here and there that I could act on.
That informal dating aspect the copy for Wanted mentions. I really like that idea. However, things have stayed the same as last year, so I must still be doing things wrong.
I was also surprised how that interlude of preparing for exams for a couple of weeks seems to have made most of the effects I had noticed before disappear. I am hoping that they have just become more subtle, but I feel far less certain in myself than before when I am out and about. I can tell that my subconscious reacted to my baseline changing with fear and tries to revert back into the known and comfortable, but also unsatisfying life I am used to. I can even tell by my immediate surrounding. When I am really executing, my room is very tidy. When I let myself go or get deep into recon, I live surrounded by chaotic trash. It is a direct reflection of the state of my mind.
To make matters worse, the gym I had just gotten a sweet deal with sent me a notice that they’d close down permanently in the middle of October. That was the only affordable gym in town. Speaking of which, I hadn’t noticed any physical shifting so far(no hot flashes or sore parts), and the progress I had made could have occurred without the subs. My stomach became more rounded, even. Since the gym closed, I had lost weight real fast, and I feel weak and thin again. I was alarmed how fast it happened. It is tough fighting against the inner voice that says “why do you bother so much to put on muscle when you lose it overnight the moment you stop training?”. But I want to press on, so I re-calculated my finances and found the one other gym I can barely afford. The Mirror King effect of Wanted was there on some days, but now after a few weeks without it, it has reverted to feeling critical of my appearance again.
So what I take from this is that Wanted really isn’t easy for me to run and requires very long exposure for things to stick, and that my mind protests against its scripting a lot, making progress slow. I’d like to not reinforce this thought that it is hard to run for me, but I cannot deny that pretty much any other sub has much more immediate effects for me.
I just need more social/dating opportunities in general, since I can execute on the self-grooming and bodybuilding aspects, but meeting girls on a new basis is a tough one for me here.
From asking around and browsing for opportunities, I realized that what my Swedish acquaintances here say seems to have some truth to it: Most of the action seems to be confined to the big three cities in Sweden. Outside of them, it is tough, especially when you aren’t native in Swedish. There is just not a lot going on. Which is why I am hoping for unexpected encounters in daily life.
The only overt thing that has happened is the encounter with the Chinese anthropologist girl I mentioned further up in my journal, who I had met before these subs, but sometimes comes by, as she is a friend of a friend. She is about to leave Sweden for China(she has dropped out of her degree) as she is fed up with Swedish society, but when I accompanied her back home with our mutual friend, she started feeling up and groping my biceps and told me in Chinese that I have a good figure. I should have taken that as a compliment, however, I felt weirded out in that situation, because while I find her quite interesting in terms of her cultured mind, she is very unattractive to me and quite a bit older. When I got home, instead of feeling good(I hadn’t received a compliment like that in a very long time) I just thought “is that all I can attract?”.
The last thing I was doing before the exam break was trying to find spots where I could take better pictures of myself for the dating apps, since the ones I have yielded me zero matches last year. I wish I had done this in the late summer, as now it is just dark all the time or rainy. I still need to do this, however, since I cannot think of other ways to meet women here. I try not to think of the results last year and hope for the best.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of GLM so far has been the massive series of highly symbolic dreams I have on it. Within 80 days or so, I have accumulated about 50 pages of my interpretations of them. I started playing with AI to make more sense of them, and to my surprise, some of the connections it has made have really made things clearer for me than before.
An example of this is one I had recently:
I bought 3-4 eggs and they seemed to hatch on their own(or I heated them for some reason). I was overwhelmed at first, because I saw 3 birds hatching in each egg. Not all of them made it, and for some reason, I saw some birds dying immediately, and sticking to random surfaces. One bird was born flat and stuck/compressed between paper sheets. It died immediately after hot oil dropped on it, for some reason. I had little control over the little birdies. Some of them jumped on my hand, but to my surprise, even though I had not thought about how to feed them, they immediately set about eating all kinds of insects in what turned out to be the room I grew up in as a child, and the living room in my parent’s house. There were all kinds of yucky insects, and the birds seemed to systematically eat all of them. I was very happy that the birds took care of the insects, although I was concerned about seeing a massive centipede leaning against a wall. It didn’t seem to do anything to the birds though. I went away for a short bit. When I returned, I was very surprised to find only one of the birds, and it had suddenly grown into an adult version and was healthy, red and black in color. I motioned my hand and whistled to it, and it immediately flew and sat on my hand. I called my dad and showed it to him proudly.
The next day, I had another dream of this kind: I found myself in the living room of my parent’s house, and tried to hide a book with many sheets from my mother. I was writing the sentence “Question the assumptions behind your knowledge” in that book, but as I tried to hurriedly hide it from my mother in a stash, the book slightly opened, and insects starting falling out, among them a wasp like creature that fell on my body and felt uncomfortable against my skin.
I won’t bother you with the interpretations, this is just to give you an idea of the symbolism that I experience since I started running New GLM.
Going over my notes, I notice that almost all of my dreams were directly connected with GLM and the I am ATMAN synergy. Wanted didn’t directly turn up except for one dream. So my mind seems to mostly be busy processing GLM.
Another thing is that most of my dreams and the issues they reveal are deeply emotional.
I recognized that likely, I will only make good progress on Wanted if I pair it with Regeneration, but also keep running GLM, as it simply works for me the best.
Since the exam is over now, I have begun running GLM and Regeneration every other day at micro loops. I feel like I need to stick to GLM and Regeneration for some time before re-introducing Wanted again, especially since I still haven’t figured out how to meet new women on a regular basis.
In other news, I surprisingly feel a strong pull towards expressing myself more creatively. I received the guitar from my friend, and I have become fascinated with Alla Prima Paintings. I have also lost most of my interest in the coding that I do for the university, and want to spend my time more on indie game development, for which I just picked up a relatively new language named Odin, a better C, so to speak.
I want to be able to conceive of and be able to build apps, rather than just call some libraries in R. And I want to have fun while doing so.
So, for the time being, I am running GLM+Regeneration, but I would really like to continue my Wanted journey. And to make things more complicated, I might need to run Index Gate for both the uni and my private interests. But how to balance these things? I seem to do well with 2 titles max, and certainly cannot run 4 titles.
I am close to about 80 days on the new GLM now, if I count the two weeks without actively running it. So I am most used to it. I am extending it with Regeneration, and initial results have been great. Everything I love about GLM has been intensified by Regeneration, and after the first loop, the “trailer effect” was great, as I experienced a profoundly deep nervous relaxation I have been yearning for.
However, it didn’t persist, and I still feel a vague sense of dread and anxiety most days, perhaps because of all the deadlines for the uni assignments, my master thesis preparation, the uncertainty of my future/job search and the non-existent social/dating life I still haven’t made much progress on.
Best I can think of is to hone in on that disciple I had before things got derailed, sign up for the new gym, plan my days strategically so that I can also relax with playing guitar and coding games, while getting that haircut I have been looking for, getting enough good pictures to have some chance on the dating apps, and crucially, staying on top of my uni studies so that I won’t get derailed or overwhelmed with them when I temporarily focus on getting somewhere with my social life.
