Yeah I don't know if you noticed the white patch on the lower part of the terrarium, that to me looks like a mix of the plants root system and mycorrhizal fungi, so there should have been microbes present within the soil when it was first planted.
Do checkout "Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?", It's a concise book that talks about capitalism and its effects on culture and public thought. I haven't read lost futures yet but I found this really good video discussing Mark's idea by Cuck Philosophy called "Hauntology, Lost Futures and 80s Nostalgia" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSvUqhZcbVg
Reading Capitalist Realism really helped pull me out of a depressive rut, tbh. Highly recommended, and it really is short, something like 80 pages. The part where he talks about how on the surface, the students in his classroom appear to be hedonically satisfied, but then he introduces the term “depressive hedonism”, really stuck with me.
edit: another part that really stuck with me was how there is a modern tendency to privatize the burden of stress; consider how mental illness is the individual's burden so it must be handled at the individual level, etc etc. Fisher wrote an article in the Guardian about this, "Why mental health is a political issue" in 2012 - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental...
Capitalist Realism is an incredible read. Since discovering him just a couple years ago, his ideas and his work have impacted me probably more than any other cultural/political theorist has. His death was a real loss, but his work is more vital than ever. Can’t recommend his work enough, and I’m excited to have seen his name pop up a couple times on HN over the last few days.
One thing that recently made me immediately recall the book was a story I read about "fake influencers", that is people who go on holidays, but pretend to be paid social media influencers to prop up their own instagram channels and whatnot to appear successful.
This seemed so absurd to me that I had to think of the Soviet joke about the workers "pretending to work while the bosses pretend to pay". And it struck me as sad but also funny that we are entering a stage of economic development, that for an increasing number of workers, looks more like a giant collective inside joke than actual meaningful or genuine labour.
Of course recommended reading on capitalism's effects on culture and thought are the works of Adorno and Horkheimer, and Marcuse - who seems to have fallen a little out of favor but his work is as important as it was in the 60s.
Do you have any recommendations on what books I should pick up? , I've only read about the authors you mentioned on https://plato.stanford.edu and also through some philosophy podcasts..
"One Dimensional Man" by Marcuse certainly, "Escape From Freedom" by Erich Fromm and for more contemporary review, Mark Fisher of course. You also can't miss Guy Debord (his Society of the Spectacle) and, although I haven't read him yet, Henri Lefebvre's "Critique of Everyday Life" is looking promising from what I've seen so far. I'd suggest browsing the Verso catalogue for old (republished) and new books, almost all of them center around cultural critique of capitalism[0].
I don't know what advice to give you regarding finding that "balance" in life and I don't even know if I'd be considered a founder but for the last 9 years I've been working as a freelance programmer, I was initially diagnosed with chron's disease in 2014 and was reclassified to having ulcerate colitis a couple years later. The first 4 years of living with this problem was a total mess, It was difficult to balance my work and personal life while managing my health problem. It held back my development as a programmer and my relationships with people. I was constantly filled with anxiety, anger and frustration, It felt like there was no light at the end of the tunnel for me and I even considered suicide at one point. Over the last 9 months I started to experiment with taking psilocybin mushrooms as an alternative to anti depressants and I have found it to have helped me tremendously. It has helped me overcome the anxiety and fearfulness of this health condition, come to terms with the passing of my dad and grandparents and also has made motivated to have goals in life again. Things have been looking up since then and I've begun to turn my life around, slowly but surely.
That resonates a lot with me. I don't want to do any promotion of those substances (every drug, good or bad has physical and/or psychological risks involved with the user) I self-medicated with psilocybin mushrooms and also used psychological support and so far I'm free from having recurring depression (I exclude seasonal affective disorder "SAD" because I can manage symptoms easily with healthy habits without requiring any external help). My first first year of medication was really intense mentally because I had to face a lot of inner issues. I feel like I learnt a lot about the traps I used to fell into when I was depressed. I consider myself in the best form I ever been in my life. Psychedelics helped me to better adapt to the society I live and contribute to.
I don't need to trip a lot. 1 trip was enough to have positive effects (I did between 10-15 trips in a 2 years interval). Those effects included a profound desire to realize myself and to better adapt to society. Mushrooms gave me a kick in the a so I was able to work on myself. It opened my eyes but I had to do all the job of rebuilding my vision of the world and determine where I'm seeing myself in that regard.
I'm curious about this, any references for me to read about?