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50 percent of INTPs make Less than $30,000

bvanevery

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What will make me and my dogs happier? That's right. More time for me to do things unrelated to making money. Like going to the park Monday morning.

A fence will actually make you lazy. Happens all the time when I go to visit my Mom. I'll be with her a few weeks and the poor dog doesn't get as much walking. When we're living out of my car on the streets of Asheville, he gets walks all the time!

Buying better weather conditions for walking is important though. In Winston-Salem NC it's been too hot to want to do much in the way of walks. I've kept them brief. I've pushed them to night time, and even then it can be too hot to do it long. The streets are holding their heat from the day. It takes a long time for them to cool off. By the time they cool down some, it's often far too late in the evening for it to be appropriate to walk around a suburb with your dog.

Downtown Asheville NC is superior in this regard. Aside from being at higher altitude and a bit cooler, you can walk your dog at 2 AM and it doesn't matter.

The cost of my dog walking is however much gas it takes in the tank to get to different climates in the early spring and late fall. We oscillate between the mountains of NC and halfway down the Atlantic coast of Florida.
 

davidintp

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This is 100% true. INTPs should be able to research/figure out where the next trend is and which skill they can pick up. Too bad I can only do it for others.
 

hopeless85

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I totally agree. I don't make 90K :) but low wage jobs in my experience are the most stressful and you zippo autonomy. Plus, in the US at least, low income=poorer health outcomes etc.
 

precision18mom

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The problem for me is internet addiction. I'm 57 years old and I was around before the internet was invented. I know I was a lot more motivated and productive before the invention of the internet. I earned a degree in Chemical Engineering, worked for a large company as an engineer successfully. It all went to pieces after the invention of the internet. I was almost fired from two different good paying jobs at two different times because I could not stop surfing the internet at work. I did okay as a cashier at Home Depot where I could not use the internet while working. I am even now trying to enforce internet-free days upon myself every week so I can get more things done and accomplish some goals that I have. The internet is a wonderful and terrible thing. I love it and hate it. I could really accomplish a lot if my husband would cancel our internet subscription but I don't want that at all ever.
 

bvanevery

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Have you figured out what need in your life is being served by the internet? My own vice is usually computer games but it doesn't sound like I'm quite as compulsive about it as you're describing with the internet. One thing that tends to pull me back to reality is I have a dog I'm responsible for.
 

startsomewhere95

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Nobody would hire me, I mean nobody. So, I had to find something I could do on my own. INTP's, people hate us for I do not know what for. Anyway, forever alone, trying to figure out how to survive in this universe. After spending four long years in Air Force I went in business with my father building commercial buildings. Then I decided to try something new, like speculating in markets. Sounds exciting, not ease. I did lots of thinking on the subject and decided on some form of judgment approach. The trend was the main thing to know at all times. I put stocks in their groups, made lots of comparisons with the trend chart, these things do not move together. It was a lone wolf experience which suits INTP's like myself. Charts are the key, reading these charts correctly. It is not magic, men are behind ever move in markets. It is forces, physics, pressure, resistance etc. It is to complex to go into on this forum. But I can create these charts, like an architect draws building plans. That chart is the past and I have to try to project my thinking into the future, right or wrong. You do make mistakes, misread your charts, but you want to be right more times than wrong to stay in the game. And I have my good periods, and when I am wrong, try to cut those losses short.
A little story, a market concept: A snowball rolling down a hill-starting very small at first, and then gaining size until it finally, as it reaches the bottom of the hill, gains proportions many times the original size. This is about the way the re-investment of income works out. Of course, good investment at start and along the way helps speed things up a bit.
Another thing: an insurance company insures 100,000 buildings, only a small % will burn down in a year. Same with investments, diversify, spread money around because of 'The Law of Averages.' You are not inside the basket where the egg is, you do not control it, so you spread your risk for safety, Therefore putting all eggs in one basket and watching the basket in not a good idea because I need to be inside the basket to be assured of success.

Hi could you explain more about how you got into and learned trading?
 

Artsu Tharaz

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True by default really.

What percentage of the entire world even make more than $30,000 a year lol?
 

Architect

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The study basis is bad, a web based questionnaire run under no controlled conditions. Out of 25k respondents only 12k answered the income part, and they acknowledge that it was skewed towards young people, which was my first thought. Well off professionals are unlikely to respond to any questionnaire, because they know that time=money and they've got better uses for their time. So the results are bogus and basically say "young INTP's don't make a lot of money". Duh.

FWIW the last time I made 80k was not long after I got hired.
 

Artsu Tharaz

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The study basis is bad, a web based questionnaire run under no controlled conditions. Out of 25k respondents only 12k answered the income part, and they acknowledge that it was skewed towards young people, which was my first thought. Well off professionals are unlikely to respond to any questionnaire, because they know that time=money and they've got better uses for their time. So the results are bogus and basically say "young INTP's don't make a lot of money". Duh.

FWIW the last time I made 80k was not long after I got hired, many years ago.

hey architect can i have some money i only have like $2.40 and the $2 coin is actually a priceless heirloom so i cannot spend it sorry. plzz architect i will repay you with funny forum posts totally worth it trade!!
 

intp_xp

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This is why I like Socialism, it seems to fit my personality. Of course, that is assuming that I would always get a living wage and the ability to try as many jobs as possible. I am a very fast learner but rarely an expert, more of a jack of all trades, of course. That being said, my good is probably better than most so not really a bad thing. Now my memory, that needs some work. Not sure if it sucks or if I just don't care to retain most things.

It seems a bit silly but I believe the only reason I am where I am is because I have been very naive/oblivious against my type/feelings. I just went along with what came along and logically, made sense. I got married, had kids, went to college, got a good job. Seemed like the thing to do to provide for me and my family. Of course, if you read my other posts, you'd see I seem to struggle with that a bit but it has worked. For how long is another question.

I am starting to think of my type as very adaptive. However, that is a reactive trait, not a proactive trait. Having the ability doesn't do you any good unless you are satisfied doing it. I feel like i'd be happy to get paid and promoted to fill any duties necessary but not stay in the duty because that bores the shit out of me.
 

ENTP lurker

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Applying yourself < being lazy researching something outside of your expertise. That is my motto. :D

Well, ENTPs are the guys who throw stuff out from their heads for others for free. I'm fine with it.

Bunch of TJs with same education makes much more money than me. In fact I'm studying even more university courses never intending to profit from them. :kodama1:

Yes!
I need hymn for laziness.
Maybe I should study music theory.

xNTPs and their poor social skills might be the answer. Like I should go out and kiss people's asses and after that wipe them. That is not comfortable and I'm ideologically against networking.
 

gilliatt

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The INTP, the less than $30,000, that essential "you" which you cannot express or define, is not your emotions, dreams, but your intellect. Your self is your mind; you say I am this or that and you become a chunk of meat ready for any cannibal to swallow. 'The most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of truth. So we do not make a lot of dollars, well, we are living in a world where their purpose in to destroy the creator, the thinker, we are him, they are the second-handers, they invented altruism.
 

bvanevery

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xNTPs and their poor social skills might be the answer. Like I should go out and kiss people's asses and after that wipe them. That is not comfortable and I'm ideologically against networking.

I've taken this basic personality bent, to an extreme of imagining how humanity could possibly progress, in Marxist terms. I think individuals need to be in control of the means of production. Not collective groups; that just leads to the usual human primate bullshit where the E's dominate. So I think a lot about 'bootstrappable' technologies that an individual can control and produce. So that the individual can meet his/her own needs and those of immediate family / groups he/she cares about, and not be beholden to, say, macroeconomic Capitalist forces so much.

What I'm finding the real world, is taming nature and physics takes TONS of labor. Maybe at some point I will achieve some of my strategic objectives. But I'm made to realize that my vision for humanity is DEMANDING, and lots of people simply aren't going to do it. They don' t have to. They can just maintain their positions in the Collective and not have to do very much. My vision of a world full of rugged pioneers, is not likely to scale to the bulk of humanity. As long as environmental resource conditions remain what they currently are in industrialized societies at least.

Still, I have a vision of people having an alternate path they can walk down, where there are no bosses or companies needed to ensure their survival and prosperity. If someday I prove that the path can work, some people may walk it, in preference to the usual rat race.

I think though, that people should take on the problems and challenges of life, that they are temperamentally suited for. My temperament is not like most people's, and I shouldn't go at life the same way as them. Vice versa: I can't realistically expect that large numbers of people are going to try to do things my way.
 

ENTP lurker

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I live in a place where getting a 80k$/year as in paycheck would be utter stupidity. You would be taxed dirt poor. There are other ways to get around it, tough.

Well 30-40k$/year is about average master's level education pay check. Not wise to go much higher maybe 50 k$/year. (well you get education, health care, day care and other shit without paying extra. It is even wiser to stay unemployed than do 10-15k$/year job.)
 

Tannhauser

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Most moneymaking out there is happening via "talk big, play small". That happens to be what INTPs are bad at.
 

Sinny91

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I've done every single damn thing wrong since I left school. Didn't help that my parents practically ruined my life at every opportunity they got. Far from fucking helped.

When ever I have been in "decent" paying jobs the majority of my money went on rent and bills.

I got sick of that so quit trying to be "proper".

I so should have just lived with somebody else on the cheap.

Now I'm turning 25 with absolutely ZERO to show for it.

But I'm trying to count my blessings rather than burdens.

I've still got time to turn it around, right?

I hope.

Gulp.

WW3 not starting yet?
I'm pretty sure my ideal job role is leader of the free world.
 

bvanevery

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Now I'm turning 25 with absolutely ZERO to show for it.

I didn't even enter the professional workforce until I was 26. It was an artifact of my weird history of mostly self-education in computer science. I entered during the dot.com boom and made some money just fine from 1996 to 1998. Then as per the times, I quit to find my own star as a game developer. I neglected to make any money while I was at it and got into a lot of credit card debt. The dot.com bust happened and I went down the tubes.

I did the survival job of signature gathering for awhile, to keep a roof over my head. It was probably the best low end survival job I was going to get. Doesn't mean it had any realistic future for me. After 4 years of that it got old. I retreated to NC under my Mom's roof for a time and tried to regroup.

I got a brief gig that paid well with Mozilla. I got paid but I blew the contract, I didn't deliver the result I had pitched. I also hated doing the kind of work I was doing. It was a "scaled up" version of stuff I'd done for free in open source land, but the scaling to a massive body of code drove me nuts. It pretty much ended my so-called career as a buildmaster. I had gotten good at something that I really shouldn't, that's a dead end. Hateful horrible work.

That takes me to age 37. I lived off the Mozilla proceeds for a couple years, as I did get paid pretty well for that one gig. But eventually it ran out. I wrestled with my misgivings about the computer industry, and I'm still wrestling, I haven't found any solution. I started living out of my car because I needed an escape route from this boring horrible existence of being a tech slave for no purpose. The purpose has to be on my terms, otherwise there is no value in it.

Now I'm 46. I haven't given up on computer stuff, but man, it's amazing how the years drag on. I can definitely say I'm competent at living out of a car, including repairing it. There's a bit of a learning curve for both of those. I couldn't have kept this up if I hadn't learned that skill. I do find that the car thing is getting old, as it prevents me from getting certain other social things done in my life. For instance, I have to leave town during the winter.

I had a friend of mine who hemmed and hawed about college degree stuff vs. world travel for years and years. He finally did go back to school and take some classes in something belatedly, way into his "adulthood". I don't know if it helped him economically or psychologically. Our friendship soured over the years, with different attitudes about how one should deal with adversity. I firmly believe in denying oneself basic luxuries in order to make ends meet. Like, if you can't afford coffee, stop drinking coffee. Don't beg your friends for money to buy coffee, that's not something you should be asking others for. Have some fucking self-discipline about that sort of thing, the world doesn't owe you coffee. Arguably an industrial society does owe you food, which is why I take food stamps, but coffee is a luxury and bad for you anyways.

I think all one can really do, is try to decide on a path, then set oneself on the difficult road of trying to follow it. In the real world there will be many disruptions and distractions. You will get lost. Eventually you will realize you are lost. When you realize that, then you need to put your focus and concentration into getting back on track again. Beating yourself up about the fact that you get lost is pointless. Shit happens, you will get lost. The fully loaded cost of accomplishing anything, especially things that are nebulous and not cut and dried "widget" activities, is enormous.

It is best to seek what we are most suited to withstand, by temperament. For instance, I'm not going to put up with some fucking boss telling me what to do, at this point in my life. Nor did I particularly care for it at any earlier point in my life. So it's up to me to figure out a viable self-employment model. Signature gathering did work in that respect, that's what I liked about it, but it was a boring complete misuse of my intellect and not sustainable. Signature gathering favors people who love other people and like to sway crowds, and that's not me. I just did what I needed to do by brute force, with no particular guile or art, because I had to, to survive.

My temperament is suited to living out of a car, and to fixing it, so I do it. I don't always like it, especially when the car breaks down, that pretty much sucks. But my temperament can handle it, better than some other fires or frying pans I might jump into.
 

Sinny91

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Yea... I get that..

I've got some credits towards my degree, but made the mistake of going into work rather than full time Uni. I wish I could go back and just do what everybody else done... But the reason I didn't do that at the time is because my mom made it nigh impossible for me.

Dunno what the future holds in regards to work for me. I'm only skilled in the office and behind a bar. I fucking hate office work, and bar work isn't exactly a lifetime career.

My cousin is opening a bar and wants me to work there.... But still, can't be a permanent thing, makes me drink a lot too.

My only passion is in politics, but being the commoner that I am, I won't be moving up those ranks any time soon.

I dunno whether to stay at 'home' and prioritise my degree in International Development, or whether to look for some opportunities abroad.

The latter sounds more fun.

But if I don't accomplish something 'status worthy' by the time I reach thirty I think I'll truly hate myself.
 

smithcommajohn

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Yea... I get that..

I've got some credits towards my degree, but made the mistake of going into work rather than full time Uni. I wish I could go back and just do what everybody else done... But the reason I didn't do that at the time is because my mom made it nigh impossible for me.

Dunno what the future holds in regards to work for me. I'm only skilled in the office and behind a bar. I fucking hate office work, and bar work isn't exactly a lifetime career.

My cousin is opening a bar and wants me to work there.... But still, can't be a permanent thing, makes me drink a lot too.

My only passion is in politics, but being the commoner that I am, I won't be moving up those ranks any time soon.

I dunno whether to stay at 'home' and prioritise my degree in International Development, or whether to look for some opportunities abroad.

The latter sounds more fun.

But if I don't accomplish something 'status worthy' by the time I reach thirty I think I'll truly hate myself.
You seem so vulnerable at times, it reminds me you're human, Sinny.

You have a lot of pent up energy. You need an outlet for that where you can make money. Somehow I picture you being really good at starting a YouTube Conspiracy Channel where you discuss the validity of all the various conspiracy videos out there in internet land. I dunno how many views you need to start making ad revenue, but maybe worth looking into?
 

bvanevery

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But if I don't accomplish something 'status worthy' by the time I reach thirty I think I'll truly hate myself.

There are many goals that one can impose upon oneself, and many psychological consequences when one doesn't live up to one's own expectations. Myself, I think of myself as some kind of R&D guy, whether in games, programming, or art. I have extremely lofty ideas about what I think I'm trying to do. If I wasn't working on the most difficult problems I could personally contemplate, I think I would be misusing my intellect. Safer, easier, more conservative and materially productive paths are not for me. I have this high risk, high reward idea of how I'm living my life. And the reward, needn't be financial. I hope that I will come up with something that is either great art, or great benefit to normal people, or great benefit to techies pursuing the kinds of struggles I've been pursuing. I am deliberately swimming against the current. So if at times it seems to be drowning me, I can accept that it's by my choice, no one else's.

It is possible that I will flounder around and not get any of these lofty things done. But I haven't yet seen a reason to give up on myself. Rather, I have recognized the fundamental tedium of the world for what it is. I've said before, life is like this gigantic fractal maze. It has ever expanding surface area, like a mitochondria. You get to wander around in your own personal search space in this gigantic never ending maze for awhile. Then you die.

The measure of my life, is how far I got through that maze while I was here. I think I may yet get farther, make more connections, cause more things to happen, than I have seen happen so far. At least what I have gained so far, is an understanding of how reality works, and I have shared and left kindness and love with some other beings along the way. The simple love of a cat or a dog, can mean a lot. I have saved 2 creatures from bad fates, that got to experience love and a good life, rather than some grim fate while they were here. I wish I could have saved the 3rd, but Louise's problem was beyond my understanding and imagination at the time.

So... be careful what goals you impose on yourself, for "what is supposed to happen" by the time you're 30. Nobody really has a spreadsheet to determine what your life will be at 30. Not even you. If you had told my previous self 10 years ago where I'd be now, I would not have believed it. I could not have imagined that anything would have taken as long to unfold as it did.

Do ponder yourself, your existence, and set some goals of where you think you want to go. Be willing to evaluate where you are, compared to where you thought you wanted to be, or expected to be.

Oh heh if the Apocalypse comes in some form or another, I'm much better equipped to survive than lots of people in society. That time in the woods and otherwise "roughing it" will come in handy. Especially psychologically. It's almost a pity to have developed such skills, only to return to a cushy money driven civilization where they're not needed so much. But at least I've learned how to keep my mind mostly together.
 

Sinny91

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You seem so vulnerable at times, it reminds me you're human, Sinny.

Me? Human? Pffftttt.

Aha. 

You have a lot of pent up energy. You need an outlet for that where you can make money. Somehow I picture you being really good at starting a YouTube Conspiracy Channel where you discuss the validity of all the various conspiracy videos out there in internet land. I dunno how many views you need to start making ad revenue, but maybe worth looking into?

Possibly, I do love a good 'ol conspiracy theory!
 

bvanevery

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Possibly, I do love a good 'ol conspiracy theory!

Is there actually any money in that anywhere?

I have an inherent bias that I'm on the exact opposite side of this spectrum. I'm a scientific Skeptic and do not like conspiracy theories at all. I'm a member of the Asheville Skeptics. Every week, we spend time running our mouths about how to deal with conspiracy theories and the people who believe in them. The harms to society, what are we going to do about it, yadda yadda. Sometimes I wonder if we even have a purpose, as I think our political impact is close to zero. However we do manage to have a local community of rationally minded people, who aren't driven by guff, and are reasonably skilled at understanding and disseminating how guff works. Recently we've embarked on a semi-formal lecture format once a month. We take turns making presentations on whatever. 2 months ago I did one on a book criticizing religion. I wanted to do something more ambitious than a book report, but I found that was more time consuming than what I was willing to put in.

The main monetization I've noticed for conspiracy theory bullshit, is that crap on The History Channel about Ancient Astronaut Theory. I hate that shit! They're total fucking slimebags, they just say whatever without usually presenting any scientific or factual side of things at all. It's usually wild speculation couched in the language "is it possible that...?" "could it be that..?" because that way they never have to commit to bursting anyone's conspiracy theory bubble. Let the entertainment bullshit continue, they don't actually do so much history on the history channel anymore. Not enough money in people who want to know about the Third Reich or Roman legions or stomping on indigenous people or whatever. Just make some Ancient Astronaut Theory bullshit to get everyone all riled up, then watch the bucks roll in!

So who knows, maybe if you actually believe that crap, there's some production company in the UK that can take you on as their committed flunkie.

Not every fakeo-documentary has been completely imbalanced on The History Channel, but most of them have. To the point that when I'm channel surfing and I see one of those things, I generally just scream and move on.

Why do I hate this stuff so much? Because it's people who can't figure out how people actually figured things out. The rest of us who have a brain for engineering and science, whose ancestors actually fucking made atlatls and slid big stones over wetted sand in Egypt, we have to put up with these shitheads who are too stupid to figure out how stones can be moved around. They don't fucking have a clue, so they think there's some big mystery and Da Fuckin Aliens Musta Dunnit! LAAAAAME.

The Egyptians even did us the fucking favor of painting how they did this stuff on walls, so that we could know how clever they were, how they lived. And people just ignored it for a couple of centuries as mere ceremony! People are fucking morons.

[bimgx=640]https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://img.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp-content/uploads/sites/21/2014/05/EgyptianPRL-1.jpg&w=1484[/bimgx]
9k=
 

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bvanevery

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National Geographic and The Discovery Channel are way more respectable, with the kind of stuff they present. When The Discovery Channel tries to do something sensationalist, they don't lie to you about it. They posit a "what if?" like what if we completely drained the oceans, what would the bottom of the ocean look like? So it engages the imagination, it's creative, but it's not lying to you about the science. Same with their series about "what if all the humans completely disappeared? what would happen to all the cities and infrastructure?" Watching skyscrapers turn into jungles is pretty cool.
 

Sinny91

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No actually, I'm far more interested who funds the contracts/projects for the History Channel and the like.

More often than not they have dodgy and sometimes high level sponsors.

(Robert Bigelow, just to name one)

So hush with your 'elitist skeptic' bollox.
But with the kindest regards. ;)

I have James Carrion on my facebook who was the International Director of MUFON, who had worked a lot with the History Channel/Nat Geo, et al up until he started blowing the whistle on the contract frauds and disinformation plaguing the sector. (Which is obvious to anyone with half a brain cell)

And yes, there's lots of money to be made in that field - but not for seekers of truth, unfortunately.

Like, where 'Skeptics' like you go wrong is lumping all conspiracy theories together. The world is plagued by real conspiracies, that's a fact.

The ancient astronaut theory has some validity, if you actually start delving into human history. But that would actually mean cross referencing shit, and just who can be bothered to do that?! :rolleyes:

And dude, use a spoiler??
 

bvanevery

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Oh you mean for the giant picture? I think I'd rather just find a smaller version. So often, seeing is believing. Well that was a PITA, guess I have to settle for a small amount of seeing being a small amount of believing. Better luck next time. Hm, well, managed to point at the original and resize it for display. But that link could go stale, so I'll leave the local attachment as well.
 

bvanevery

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Like, where 'Skeptics' like you go wrong is lumping all conspiracy theories together. The world is plagued by real conspiracies, that's a fact.

There aren't so many. The ones that actually are, tend to be things like terrorism or organized crime. Sometimes political machines. There have been some verified false flags.

But the Big Humongous Controlling Secrets stuff, like the 9/11 Truther movement, is bollocks. You can't keep secrets like that from so many people, the command and control for it is impossible. 9/11 Trutherism is a simple inability to understand that military tactics have always progressed. Those 'towelheads' figured out a good one and gave the USA a really good bloody nose. I use that term to indicate that a lot of people in the USA are too bigoted to ascribe the necessary intelligence to their enemy. Partly because they're smarter than a lot of Americans, who just can't seem to wrap their head around creative ways of inflicting mayhem on another nation. Boy aren't they lucky that most of us who can creatively think like that, are on the side of Good [TM], and would sooner do the forensic analysis / criminology of figuring the Bad Guys [TM] out, than doing all the stuff we could think of doing.

Plus, you run out of highly trained teams of people who are going to commit suicide for you. Much easier to inspire people who are already suicidal to pick up an AR-15 and start shooting.

It bears repeating, that the collapse of the World Trade Center towers is a unique engineering event in the history of humanity. No skyscraper has ever been bombed, before or since.
[*] WW II was the last opportunity for seriously bombing the crap out of big buildings, and Europe didn't build any skyscrapers in that era. It was an American thing, and we had big oceans to keep anyone from reaching us. We managed to run some of our own small planes into them and do some damage, but nothing with the fuel load of a jumbo jet.

Yet so many people armchair this unique engineering event, like they know how things were "supposed to" happen, and things "can't be" the way the authorities decided they actually were. They can't understand really basic stuff like steel only needing to fatigue under heat stress, not actually melt, in order to lose structural integrity and have the whole thing come crashing down. They find thermite samples where none existed. They can't accept things like falling debris actually knocking the shit out of WTC7. They're a bunch of fucking morons. You can show people all kinds of video and forensic evidence and they're still too stupid to get it.


[*] That mattered. Al Qaeda did try to blow up WTC before, from the ground floor.

The ancient astronaut theory has some validity, if you actually start delving into human history. But that would actually mean cross referencing shit, and just who can be bothered to do that?! :rolleyes:
It doesn't have any validity. It flies in the face of archaeological evidence of all the stuff human beings actually invented. It's basically a secularization of the whole "God waved his magic hand and POOF we started getting things done" idea. What actually happened is we evolved intelligence and problem solving, starting with very basic things like carrying rocks and hurling them when we started standing more upright. You hurl things long enough, you get atlatls. But if you don't understand the systemic consequences of evolution, if you're incapable of thinking in those terms, you invent 'aliens' to do all the work for humanity. Then you're still left with the question of how the aliens figured out all their crap. It's the same answer, they had to evolve their solutions, same as anything alive anywhere. So why not humans? Especially since there's no evidence of alien visitations at all.

Don't get me started on people too stupid to understand carbon dating.

Are all the children's science museums really doing that bad a job, that kids aren't getting this shit, when they're young enough to just absorb how things work instead of getting clouded by political mumbo jumbo? I do know that some of the religious types, have had abysmal scientific educations as kids. I don't know how widespread that problem is, but it's definitely anecdotally true of a number of my peers in the Western NC Humanists. Things like that do actually happen in the Bible Belt, they're capable of breeding morons. Some of them eventually manage to pull away from it. Some even have huge dramas with their parents, when they're smart enough to figure out evolution on their own, and their parents aren't. Big stress when that happens.

But this can't be the whole story. I always liked science / natural history museums just fine, and we had good ones in San Francisco. Even modest sized towns have science museums, like Winston-Salem NC, or even tiny Hickory NC down the road from us. What's wrong with people that they don't learn the basics? Or maybe they learn them by rote, and don't know what to do with them? I just don't know. I think I'll bring this up at the next Skeptics meeting.
 

Sinny91

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I have an inherent bias that I'm on the exact opposite side of this spectrum. I'm a scientific Skeptic and do not like conspiracy theories at all. I'm a member of the Asheville Skeptics. Every week, we spend time running our mouths about how to deal with conspiracy theories and the people who believe in them.

I wouldn't waste your time on who believes in them, I'd spend more time looking at who peddles them.

From my experience there are 4 kind of conspiracy theorists:

1) Idiots who will and want to believe in anything
2) Enemies of that state
3) Disinformers of the state and/or private interests.
4) Truth seekers caught up in a web of lies.. Or not.

The harms to society, what are we going to do about it, yadda yadda.

So what are yous going to do about it? lol

Sometimes I wonder if we even have a purpose, as I think our political impact is close to zero. However we do manage to have a local community of rationally minded people, who aren't driven by guff, and are reasonably skilled at understanding and disseminating how guff works. Recently we've embarked on a semi-formal lecture format once a month. We take turns making presentations on whatever.

Got a website or any resources I can check out?

2 months ago I did one on a book criticizing religion.

What was the conspiracy slant on that?

The main monetization I've noticed for conspiracy theory bullshit, is that crap on The History Channel about Ancient Astronaut Theory. I hate that shit! They're total fucking slimebags, they just say whatever without usually presenting any scientific or factual side of things at all. It's usually wild speculation couched in the language "is it possible that...?" "could it be that..?"

It's on TV isn't it, what did you expect?

because that way they never have to commit to bursting anyone's conspiracy theory bubble. Let the entertainment bullshit continue, they don't actually do so much history on the history channel anymore. Not enough money in people who want to know about the Third Reich or Roman legions or stomping on indigenous people or whatever.

Like you'd get the truth on those subjects anyway.


Why do I hate this stuff so much? Because it's people who can't figure out how people actually figured things out.

I tend not to worry about idiots.

The rest of us who have a brain for engineering and science, whose ancestors actually fucking made atlatls and slid big stones over wetted sand in Egypt, we have to put up with these shitheads who are too stupid to figure out how stones can be moved around.

I thought we all had the same ancestors?

But, whilst you're on the subject of moving stones.. I'm pretty sure there are a few mysteries and enigmas surrounding some monolithic structures. I'd will deffo get back to you with some examples that you can try and explain for me.

They don't fucking have a clue, so they think there's some big mystery and Da Fuckin Aliens Musta Dunnit! LAAAAAME.

Mmm.

The Egyptians even did us the fucking favor of painting how they did this stuff on walls , so that we could know how clever they were, how they lived. And people just ignored it for a couple of centuries as mere ceremony! People are fucking morons.

I still there's much we don't know, but I'm not being specific in regards to just Egypt here.
 

Sinny91

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There aren't so many.

Ha, yea, OK.

The ones that actually are, tend to be things like terrorism or organized crime.

Granted that they are the most current and most prevalent. But I would venture to suggest the whole of human history has been whitewashed.

Sometimes political machines.

Nearly always.

But the Big Humongous Controlling Secrets stuff, like the 9/11 Truther movement, is bollocks.

LOL, as an ardent 911 Truther, I completely disagree.

You can't keep secrets like that from so many people, the command and control for it is impossible.

Evidently not.

9/11 Trutherism is a simple inability to understand that military tactics have always progressed. Those 'towelheads' figured out a good one and gave the USA a really good bloody nose.

Ok, if that's your opinion, I'm wasting my time here, and I'm going to cut this short.

I never stoop so low as to debate anything with the 'official story' believers.

It actually offends my soul, and every fiber of my being.

I use that term to indicate that a lot of people in the USA are too bigoted to ascribe the necessary intelligence to their enemy. Partly because they're smarter than a lot of Americans, who just can't seem to wrap their head around creative ways of inflicting mayhem on another nation. Boy aren't they lucky that most of us who can creatively think like that, are on the side of Good [TM], and would sooner do the forensic analysis / criminology of figuring the Bad Guys [TM] out, than doing all the stuff we could think of doing.

Plus, you run out of highly trained teams of people who are going to commit suicide for you. Much easier to inspire people who are already suicidal to pick up an AR-15 and start shooting.

It bears repeating, that the collapse of the World Trade Center towers is a unique engineering event in the history of humanity. No skyscraper has ever been bombed, before or since. WW II was the last opportunity for seriously bombing the crap out of buildings, and Europe didn't build any skyscrapers in that era. It was an American thing, and we had big oceans to keep anyone from reaching us. We managed to run some of our own small planes into them and do some damage, but nothing with the fuel load of a jumbo jet.

Yet so many people armchair this unique engineering event, like they know how things were "supposed to" happen, and things "can't be" the way the authorities decided they actually were. They can't understand really basic stuff like steel only needing to fatigue under heat stress, not actually melt, in order to lose structural integrity and have the whole thing come crashing down. They find thermite samples where none existed. They can't accept things like falling debris actually knocking the shit out of WTC7. They're a bunch of fucking morons. You can show people all kinds of video and forensic evidence and they're still too stupid to get it.

It doesn't have any validity. It flies in the face of archaeological evidence of all the stuff human beings actually invented. It's basically a secularization of the whole "God waved his magic hand and POOF we started getting things done" idea. What actually happened is we evolved intelligence and problem solving, starting with very basic things like carrying rocks and hurling them when we started standing more upright. You hurl things long enough, you get atlatls. But if you don't understand the systemic consequences of evolution, if you're incapable of thinking in those terms, you invent 'aliens' to do all the work for humanity. Then you're still left with the question of how the aliens figured out all their crap. It's the same answer, they had to evolve their solutions, same as anything alive anywhere. So why not humans? Especially since there's no evidence of alien visitations at all.

Don't get me started on people too stupid to understand carbon dating.
 

bvanevery

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So what are yous going to do about it? lol

At present, I am primarily concerned with small scale community formation and sustainability. Rational, skeptical inquiry into the phenomena of the world, has to be an interesting, sustainable interest for a sufficient number of people in a city like Asheville. Otherwise the concept dies, as not being terribly relevant to people's lives. Then when some Big Lie comes your way, like Trump's bullshit about thousands of Muslims cheering in the streets when the towers fell, or something inane from a local Church, or the next miracle diet that's gonna melt fat away, people lack the media literacy to deconstruct and critique it. Rational inquiry needs to be a promoted cultural practice, and people need to practice using their intellectual tools in non-destructive ways.

Got a website or any resources I can check out?

To be honest I'm poorly versed in the Skeptic movement as it exists online. I'm still going up a learning curve about that. I basically found this group of Skeptics in Asheville, then applied my sociocultural anthropology background to a lot of what they were talking about. There was a lot of overlap between what I already knew and understood, and what they were on about. If I had a critique of some aspects of Skepticism, I would say some of them spend way too much time trying to play scientific games of "whack a mole", constructing proofs about God or 9/11 Truther details or Pearl Harbor details or whatever. Going after what you can pin down as factual is all very fine and well, but what actually drives the conspiracy theorists are their psychology and belief systems. To be glib, "not enough liberal arts and social science" in Skeptical thought at times. That's ok, I can do my part to correct it, as do others of my peers who have backgrounds in things like cognitive science.

So I wouldn't tell you to go to some website. I'd tell you to go pick up texts used in a sociocultural anthropology class. Wanna know why people believe shit? Wanna know how it works everywhere, all over the world? Study all the world cultures, and find out what the ethnographers have been telling us for awhile, about what people actually believe. The patterns are overwhelming, even if the kind of data they present isn't as "hard science" as the physicists would like. Not all of experience comes in a chemistry flask.

What was the conspiracy slant on that?

The religious book, actually nothing. Skepticism encompasses more than just going after conspiracy theories. Religious baloney is also topical, like Creationism for instance. Or the anti-gay "they're choosing to be that way" stuff. One of our presenters did a big thing on epigenetics recently, which is probably the biological basis of people being gay. There isn't a "gay gene", but there is a mechanism which turns the expression of one's sexual traits on or off. There's more to understand than just "genes", it's slightly beyond what most of us learned back in high school biology class, but not that much more. Get your genes washed by the right chemicals, they 'methylate' and turn off.

It's on TV isn't it, what did you expect?

Not all TV is equally bad. It depends on the educational responsibility level of the network. "National Geographic" isn't going to sell out their integrity to get some more viewers for instance.

Like you'd get the truth on those subjects anyway.

Hey a ballista or onager is truth.

I thought we all had the same ancestors?

I'm not sure how the genes for intelligence have propagated through the generations, but it's pretty clear to me that lots of people didn't get 'em!

But, whilst you're on the subject of moving stones.. I'm pretty sure there are a few mysteries and enigmas surrounding some monolithic structures. I'd will deffo get back to you with some examples that you can try and explain for me.

There's this guy on YouTube who moves multi-ton blocks with simple wooden levers and pivots. It's not fucking rocket science, he did this stuff in his backyard. The reason people think it's oh so fucking mysterious, is they haven't been investing their social and life energy into moving big stones around, the way our motivated ancestors did. You think you've got some gods to please, seems you figure out how to do stuff.
 

bvanevery

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LOL, as an ardent 911 Truther, I completely disagree.

I pity you. I don't expect a debate, and don't really want one since I had a batshit crazy 9/11 Truther / alien conspiracy friend and eventually the friendship ended. I don't know why you personally believe this stuff, and he isn't necessarily a model for anyone else's reasons for believing it. But on the off chance there's an overlap, here's some food for thought...

Do you really have a grasp of world military history? Really?

Do you understand political history, especially of the Middle East, and why Al Qaeda wants to kill Americans?

Do you know what peer reviewed literature is, and what a vanity press is?

Are you aware of the psychological phenomenon of "externalizing the locus of control" ?

This friend of mine pretty much sucked / was completely clueless in all these depts. He didn't know anything about the Middle East or our history in Soviet Afghanistan. He thought Osama bin Laden was a paid actor for the CIA and that Al Qaeda doesn't even exist. His grasp of physics and engineering was absolutely terrible. He'd look at some video and think he could just "eyeball" whatever he wanted to think about what was going on, that he didn't have to know anything about structural engineering or simulation at all! He couldn't tell what a bullshit paper that's never been through a peer review process was. He had deep emotional baggage about his family, and was using all this conspiracy theory stuff as a way to psychologically externalize and joust at the demons of his life. When the Big Conspiracy is exposed, the endgame is everyone's gonna get their control back. As long as the Big Conspiracy exists, no one can have control.

His alien stuff was just as bad. He'd look at pictures of D-grade homemade special effects, the kinds of stuff from movies in the 1950s that people laugh at, and take them totally seriously. Any plausible explanation of, dude, here's how you could film this yourself, put a wooden stick behind this 'flying' saucer (that looks like a garbage can lid with steel balls welded on it) and it will appear to be floating in the picture frame... he'd insist it was all real.

You did already enumerate this kind of guy, 1) Idiots who will and want to believe in anything. He's a real case. I tried to be a good friend to him. We got to the point where we had sparred / blown out about these subjects enough, that I was willing to just leave them alone. We had other things to be friends about. But my attitudes made him feel inferior, so he kept finding petty ways to try to attack me about other things. Eventually I had to tell him to knock it off a few too many times, so we had to part ways.

Life lesson is you can't be friends with someone who's ego is too fragile. They will take it out destructively on you, as you become more and more of a threat to them. I don't tolerate dysfunctional bullshit like that, people like that have to walk. I can wish them the best as we part ways, and genuinely hope they find their way in the world, but I'm not going to spend the energy on them. They just try to suck you dry like a vampire with their own problems, trying to get you to participate in and legitimize their crazy. Can't do that for anyone, don't even remotely believe in doing that. You're just contributing to their own self-destruction in that case.
 

Sinny91

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Sorry, I thought you were a computer programmer (game designer/code person/whatevs), not a know it all. From a preliminary reading of what you just wrote it sounds like you cling to your own beliefs quite thoroughly, based on not much more expertise than any other common layman.. and you delude yourself into thinking you're in some sort of superior position and have it all 'sussed out' .

You're getting on a bit now, so you may not live to see the disclosures of the official secrets acts.

But I might. And me and my opinions will be vindicated, not all - probably. But 9.11 certainly.
 

bvanevery

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I am a computer programmer, artist, martial artist, forestry / car dwelling guy with a survival streak, got that sociocultural anthropology background, have even more hats I've worn that I'm not mentioning, have always tested in the 99.999% of whatever those standardized tests were, graduated from a tough Ivy League school a long time ago, have debated people on the internet for 20 years, and am 21 years older than you are.

You might want to consider whether some people have knowledge and experience that you don't, before claiming that they're 'clinging' to anything. I didn't "weigh in" on conspiracy theory stuff for a long time, since many other people said it was your bent, and I've had experience with at least 1 person's reaction to such things. But if after all I've posted on INTPforum you don't think what I have to say has any credibility or weight, then there's really no helping you. I would conclude that trying to establish a congenial virtual relationship with someone, doesn't count the minute it threatens core beliefs. You're just too young and will have to learn the world for yourself, anew, as every generation must.

At least you're not taking the typical 25 year old male bullshit way of receiving 'advice' from your elders, which is typically to repeat "fuck you fuck you fuck you" loudly and clearly and peevishly over and over again with your fingers in your ears. ;-) So who knows you may figure some things out sometime.

Actually I was never one of those, so I don't have much sympathy or patience for those. I did have to tell off "the older voices of reason" when I was younger, as all young people pretty much have to, to form their own identities and figure out their own way in the world.

Anyways good luck with all of that. What you believe about the world, strongly conditions what the world is for you. And thus what is going to happen next for you, absent any change of insight. When someone beckons to some other door, some other way of looking at the world, it is sometimes worthwhile to consider why you are so strongly invested in your current world view. You may find it's fine, there's no problem, you don't need any new input to move on with life. You may find you're hiding lots of things from yourself and you need these scaffolds of emotional identity, lest your whole world collapse around you and make no sense at all.

I've been tested in that way quite a bit longer than you have. So, hope you heed some small part of it, but you will do what you do.
 

Sinny91

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Yea, I appreciate you're older and have trodden more paths than me, but you have genuinely lost all credibility in my eyes, almost solely based on this 911 issue.

The 911 Commission 'report', and NIST 'report' are the biggest conspiracy theories in print to EVER to grace modern history. lol

But lets agree to disagree.

Until the next time.
 

intp_xp

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There are many goals that one can impose upon oneself, and many psychological consequences when one doesn't live up to one's own expectations.

So... be careful what goals you impose on yourself, for "what is supposed to happen" by the time you're 30. Nobody really has a spreadsheet to determine what your life will be at 30. Not even you. If you had told my previous self 10 years ago where I'd be now, I would not have believed it. I could not have imagined that anything would have taken as long to unfold as it did.

Do ponder yourself, your existence, and set some goals of where you think you want to go. Be willing to evaluate where you are, compared to where you thought you wanted to be, or expected to be.

This is good advice but I'd enforce that you should not fear not achieving them. That will just be another opportunity to evaluate what went wrong and how to do better next time. If you always set yourself up with an out then there really wasn't a goal worth striving for in the first place. Really, you may just be enforcing negative coping strategies.

As for goals, you need to set short, mid and long term goals. If you only set short term goals, you may forever wander without a real purpose. If you only set long term goals, you may struggle with your present purpose.

My current long term plan is to retire at 55 or earlier and I am currently on target to achieve that. I am struggling with short and mid term goals at the moment since 55 is still 19 years away. I want to better myself in other fields but have yet to find another position I think I can be happy in. Hobbies have kept me somewhat preoccupied short term but I struggle with their future purpose and cost. That and I am more of a solo hobbyist so it limits me a bit. I'd really like to put in some offline effort and get paid but I am pretty good at being lazy when I am not forced to accomplish anything.
 

bvanevery

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This is good advice but I'd enforce that you should not fear not achieving them. That will just be another opportunity to evaluate what went wrong and how to do better next time. If you always set yourself up with an out then there really wasn't a goal worth striving for in the first place. Really, you may just be enforcing negative coping strategies.

Over the long haul of a couple decades, I can assure you that chalking up yet another failure to "your learning curve" gets seriously old. It's all very fine and well to flounder when you feel like, in hindsight, you didn't really know all that much, and really didn't have all that much time put into it. Like a couple years, are you a God at something in only a couple of years? But if one manages to continue with patterns of failure for decades, in subject areas you claim to have expertise and focus in, it can really rattle you. You can find yourself standing back and saying, "WTF is my problem??" I do think people need to try and fail at things, that that's normal, and to be expected. But there comes a point at which you've put a lot of effort into something, and performance does matter.

When assessing WTF has been going wrong over a really long time, there are a number of conclusions you might arrive at. One may be that the problems you set yourself to work on, were a few orders of magnitude harder than you thought. So, do you still think it's important to work on them? Some of those kinds of things, I'm not ready to give up on yet, I'm gonna keep going. But ask me again when I turn 50 how I feel about this shit. Hope I've had "the breakthrough" by then, otherwise it may be time to hang it up and do something else with my life.

Another conclusion may be you're not actually very good at something, and you've been unwilling or unable to apply yourself in a way that would bring any significant improvement. You may end up having to say you are what you are and it is what it is. That wasn't too difficult for me regarding signature gathering for instance. 4 years of that, and my lack of talent and drive at it was clear enough. I was only good at the parts that weren't actually worth much money, like standing up to security guards, and making signs. It wasn't the core of the job, and I kept on trying to do things I liked better than the actual job. So I quit, and frankly I'm never going to gather signatures for money again. I might do it volunteer if something really really important came up, but for heavy lifting on that, I'd just as soon see the pros get paid to do it right.

A third conclusion may be you simply don't have time to do it all. Not enough hours in the day, or years in your life. You might have to make some hard choices about what you will and won't apply yourself to.

So, uh, yeah, if you're young and your "big plan" doesn't work out in 2 years, don't wallow in self-pity and despair and think you can never amount to anything. 2 years isn't a very long time. But don't get yourself in this mindset that your job is to fail indefinitely either. Performance does matter and it does erode your self-esteem when you consistently fail year after year after year after year.

Actually I think what holds me up, since my indie solo game development career is pretty much a wreck, is that I've gotten some other things done in my life meanwhile. So I'm not a total failure, I've just been consistently failing in the one area that I claim is most important for me to succeed in.

I can fix cars, I'm actually skilled at that. I can even fix them to some extent under real world survival pressure conditions, like "the fucking thing has broken down and I'm stuck here". I've gotten out of a few of those now. That situation sucks, but there's less fear each time, because I have a track record of prevailing.

I can repair computers in my sleep, but who cares. Fucking computer industry, I hate them. Shitheads.

I've painted a few decent things, although my art side is in a tailspin because I don't currently see much value in the images that come to my mind. That might change, but anxiety over needing to make progress on game stuff, tends to rob me of creative energy. That's a balancing issue really. Computers have been sucking the life out of my artistic energies for a very long time. Then when art itself sucks the life out of my artistic energies, it can take many months to recover from that.

I've done a decent job raising my dog. I can be proud of that. One less dog in the world that would have suffered a horrible fate, had I not rescued him. I've also twice saved my Mom's cat from bad fates. So I've got like these animal rescue merit badges.

I do have a viable social life in Asheville, it's just not complete. Basically, no dates. But I get plenty of intellectual stimulation and people like me well enough. Kinda sucks having to leave for Florida in the winter though.

The survival stuff, living out of my car, is no big deal now. It's pretty much second nature. It's actually a skill to live this way. This becomes more apparent when one meets someone who's recently become homeless, and one sees how freaked out and impractical they are about living out of their car or whatever. Plus I can do a fair amount of forestry stuff, although I don't do so much of that anymore. That said, I think I'm throwing the camp stove in the car and running off to the woods a bit this fall, before the season is over.

My current long term plan is to retire at 55 or earlier and I am currently on target to achieve that.
Thankfully I'm in a field where I have no reason to believe in retirement. I can program until I'm dead. Or paint, if that goes somewhere someday. My 'plan' is someday I'll just make a huge pile of money somehow, on some game or something. Won't need all that long term savings crap. Only thing that will stop me in that regard is some kind of apocalypse, and I can handle that too!
 

intp_xp

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I was just using a quick word (retirement) that meant the same but ideally, it's a plan to stop being forced to work. Not that I want to work when not being forced but if I have the inclination to set myself towards a goal, whether work or other pursuit, I don't want to be constrained. I still have a wife and family to care for so I do have a bit more constraints than some others may have. It's my own fault really and just took me too long to realize I was going down a path I may not be able to sustain. I am very curious as to what the outcome will be.

I am usually an optimist but I am not going to say anyone can do anything they put their mind to. Personality is part of the equation but not all of it. I am sure there are plenty of XXXX's that may be smart and some that may be stupid, some that have good physical attributes and some that don't. It may hurt some personalities more than others to be stupid while the same may be said for being smart.

However, there is probably something out there that is a good fit. The struggle is trying to find what will fit while still trying to live life and be happy about it. High school and college don't necessarily lead you to find what fits. It gives you general knowledge of stuff and then you are forced to choose what seems the most interesting and you hope you get it right the first time. College/life debt can add up fast. There has got to be a better way. Of course, it all comes down to what you want out of life whether homeless, living in a car (or a van down by the river), on $30K a year or more.

The last few paragraphs in this link is what I have been trying to find and research lately. It didn't do me any good until I really understood who I was, not that I entirely do but more so than ever.

Personality Repression
 

bvanevery

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Regarding "falsification of type", I had a friend of mine who thought he suffered from it as a young man. He got his 1st job at Microsoft during the dot.com bust, and had a lot of fear about his ability to hold the job. Very opposite my own experience coming in during the dot.com boom, when programmers were all treated like royalty and we assumed we'd inevitably own the whole world.

Anyways, he saw a lot of type behavior at MS that he thought he had to emulate in order to get ahead, or even just stay afloat. Probably E*TJ stuff, and I think he's INFP. Plus MS had an internal management culture at the time, where the top 10% of any given work group WILL be promoted, and the bottom 10% WILL be handed a pink slip. Didn't matter if everyone on the team was absolutely stellar, or absolutely abysmal, so this led to some serious corporate dysfunction and cutthroat behavior between employees. Pretty much every man for himself on a sinking ship!

My friend didn't have the basic ego armor of knowing that "if things are SNAFU, it's usually because other people are idiots." That is to say, I'm immune to groupthink. I know other people are systemically stupid, and it's usually driven by a few key individuals who are stupid. My friend thought there was something wrong with himself. He had to struggle in college with his finances, and the Cornell CS dept. treated him like shit, so those were yet more reasons that he felt inadequate.

He finally figured out he was having a really serious "falsification of type" problem. So I asked him: if you stop caring today, how long is it going to take before they fire you? He ruminated for a minute, then said "six months". I said, "Ok, that's how long you have to look for a new job." He did. He jumped ship for Google, which eventually got old as well, but for different reasons and his personal psychology was a lot better there.
 

intp_xp

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Thanks for the proper term, that makes things a bit easier. Sure would be nice to be able to judge how long I have left. Hopefully I find something in time.
 

theboogieman

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1. We live in the "Information Age", where information and ideas are the most valuable commodity.

2. $30k is a very low salary in the US. Even waiters in busy restaurants make significantly more than that.

In short, if you are living right on the verge of poverty, it's not because you're INTP. It's because you're lazy and have tons of self-defeating beliefs that are neither exclusive nor inherent to your psychological type.
 

bvanevery

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I dunno, I've been shocked by the number of blue collar people in Asheville working for low wages, and getting excited about "raises" that are still trivial amounts of money AFAIAC. Not all regions have a lot of jobs. Wages get repressed and a fair number of people, due to their education and possibly intelligence level, seem to just take what's offered. It does beg some questions about why people stick it out in a depressed economic region. Getting women pregnant and having to support a family could explain some of it. Otherwise, culturally maybe some of these people aren't very adventurous and don't have an inclination to travel in them. Maybe they don't have enough imagination or self-esteem to think they can do better somewhere else. It's puzzling.

News commentators have talked about "the income gap having gotten wider" in the USA, but I haven't looked at facts and figures for awhile.
 

theboogieman

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^ Yes, clearly there are problems with the economy. My point was addressing the claim that INTPs simply aren't suited for making money.

As I pointed out, we're in what economists consider the "Information Age". Things like entrepreneurship, freelancing, consulting, etc. are easier and more common than ever. In actuality, this is an environment that INTPs are well-suited to flourish in -- in more ways than one.

We're independent, frugal, and love exploring new ideas. It's an excellent combination for today's economy. Outside-the-box thinkers have never had more opportunity than we have now.
 

Intolerable

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I used to agree and still do so to some extent. But there is nothing wrong with simple hedonic pleasures from time to time as well. Minimalism can be nice, but I don't want to spend my life as a suffering monk believing that lifestyle will give me fulfillment. I missed a few opportunities in the past because of my lack of yolo.

Also, the problem that many INTP's may not earn the money they deserve can be a true unfairness, and moral relativism won't solve it. I know INTP's in general don't like complaining, but somehow we must still fight for our place in the world (read: not getting surpressed by stupid SJ's).

The aspiration of resources and status is one of the simple key elements governing human psychology. It can have nasty implementations, but on a macroscopic scale, it works quite well.

I can't say I agree. Lots of people in the 30-50 bracket are miserable. This can be seen in the divorce rate. The vast majority are married with kids, houses 4 times more than they make in a year and a huge amount of debt. The divorce is ironically enough the easiest way to reduce their stress but it isn't the marriage. It's the culture. The idea that you need brand new cars, home renovations, name brand jeans and college degrees, etc. It's the fact that very few people today in this bracket have savings. Very few of them are under leveraged. Most of them live paycheck to paycheck.

Basically their unhappiness can be summarized in their inability to escape. They cannot just up and leave a job they've grown to hate. They can't change careers, they can't find happiness even though they've leveraged themselves into debt for the next 40 years.

It's a depressing situation to be in. No doubts about it.

Mind, not everyone falls into this trap but all you need to do is look at how leveraged 30-50 year old Americans are today. It's a good indicator of how many are unhappy.
 

E404

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I like a lot of these comments (Tesla vs. Edison is a great point). I also agree that we tend to care more about the job than the money.

When I first learned I was INTP I did a lot of research into careers for INTPs since I'm never happy. What I continuously read was that INTPs need stimulation, don't like being in boxes, and like to work independently.

I really like what Ruminator said somewhere up in the comments... My brother and I (he's an INTP too) have talked about how we'd like to do jobs that don't exist anymore. Philosophy, inventor, detective, and many other jobs are not like they were. There are too many restrictions now and too much paperwork. We'd both love to have infinite funds and just work all day solving problems, inventing things, learning, reading... Doesn't everyone? lol
 
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