Frank Lee

I disagree with the way meditation is taught, which I see as a form of severely conditional self-love. The way meditation is generally taught is to start by placing one's focus on the meditation-object, usually the breath. If one's focus then wanders and ends up on something else, one is taught to redirect one's focus back to the breath and restart. An analogy for what you're doing to yourself when you meditate like this is the following: Imagine you have a child that you want to become a professional basketball player (child - focus, basketball - breath). You tell your child to play basketball, and as long as it does what you want it to do you love it, but when your child stops playing basketball and goes to do something else, you no longer love it and tell it to go back to playing basketball. To confine your attention solely to a single object, such as the breath, is in my opinion extremely unkind to your attention, and thereby arguably yourself. It's like telling...

Foreword: Although this blog post can be seen as an attack on psychiatry, I do not mean to put any individual psychiatrists in a bad light. I have no doubt that many psychiatrists, just like I do, simply want to do their bests to reduce the amount of suffering in the world. It's just that in my eyes they are going about it the wrong way. Hence this blog post. Mental illness vs mental health vs emotional well-being What is a mental illness? Google defines it as: “a health condition causing significant changes in thinking, feeling, mood or behavior, leading to distress and impaired daily functioning in social, work, or family life, ranging from mild issues to severe disorders like depression or anxiety, and can be managed like other medical conditions.” I can poke holes in that and question why significant changes in thinking, feeling, mood or behavior are a bad thing. These can be great things. I assume that even psychiatrists, who diagnose mental illnesses, agree that if their t...

Democracy when defined as "majority rules" has a major flaw and can endanger the rights of individuals. Let me explain: Imagine you're part of a group of 10 friends from an early age. You go through elementary school together and form bonds with eachother. Now imagine that when you're all in middle school together, the economy in your country starts doing worse due to political unrest in the country. Your family is well off and has no issues buying you school lunches, but the parents of 2 of the members of your friend group lose their jobs, and so they aren't able to give their children lunch money anymore. In order to be able to eat, these 2 at first hang around the cafetaria and harass other students for money/food, but overtime it rises to straight up extortion/stealing. The friend group is divided on the matter, and so mostly a blind eye is turned, and it isn't really brought up much to preserve peace within the group. Now imagine that when you all go t...

This is a collection of my X posts on a variety of topics. Advertising The advertising industry is a cancer to society, and I wish advertising was illegal. Advertising emotionally manipulates people by targeting their emotional weaknesses, and does its best to manipulate people into buying things they don't need. Take a @MrBeast video for example. If there aren't enough people willing to pay enough money to see his content to cover production costs + salaries, then that is a sign that resources are being wasted and too much money/resources are being used to produce something that isn't worth that much to viewers. Some will argue that advertising covers the cost and viewers get to see content for free, but not only do advertising agencies make a profit, advertisers aren't dumb, they are making a profit. Where does that profit come from? From the individuals who watch the content and are emotionally manipulated into buying shit they don't need. Pushing people to ha...

This is a collection of my X posts on the topic of capitalism. Capitalism is beyond broken Capatalism is beyond broken. We're already living in a distopia, and it's getting worse every single day. You may not be aware of it if you're living in a bubble, but this is the reality we live in. Ask yourself what kind of world you want to live in. A world that prioritises building yachts, sportscars, and mansions for people whose annual expenditures are in the tens or hundreds of millions or a world that prioritises people who lack fundamentals such as food and healthcare? WE LIVE IN THE FORMER. Capitalism is how resources are managed in this world. Materials and labor go in, and consumables come out. How is this managed? Via money, and every person has some say in how it is managed via their spending choices. This system prioritises the people who spend the most, which are people who vote that the economy should produce yachts, sportscars, luxury goods, and the like. And it ...

This is a collection of my X posts on the topic of psychiatry. Psychiatry is a religion The existence of the mind is a belief that is widely held in human society, but a belief nonetheless because the existence of the mind cannot be proven. Therefore, the existence of illnesses of the mind, refered to as mental illnesses, is also a belief, and one that is somewhat less widely held in human society, albeit still widely held. This makes psychiatry by definition a system of beliefs, and therefore by definition a religion, not a science. Psychiatry is likely the most popular religion of all human religions. People can have multiple religions as long as the beliefs do not contradict each other. This would all be fine, except for the fact that psychiatry is posing as a science and most people believe that the beliefs that come along with psychiatry are facts, when in fact they are not. Perhaps worst of all is that psychiatry appears to want to be the only religion, because it is leveragi...