developing mind to keep girlfriend happy?

develop your mind — reduces chance ex will leave — makes both happy :)🙂

my ex said she didnt want to start over. but then we got back together 7 years later.

think of it like an RPG like morrowind or baldurs gate - many paths — more points in utility spells to help solve more scenarios 🙂

RPGs are a model of reality

lets reverse roles - more empathy good - thanks honey i accept and learn from good feedback

what i would have done differently to keep rena?

Specific practices which helped me?

Yes. Meditation, therapy, reading, journaling, and taking good actions are all ways of improving your mind. But there are many more.

I would organize mental development into 12 trainable abilities, including awareness, reasoning, emotional regulation, judgment, self-control, empathy, learning, and character.

And one of the most powerful abilities is exactly what you mentioned: thinking about thinking, also called metacognition.

1. Twelve ways to improve your mind

Ability

Ways to develop it

1. Awareness

Meditation, mindfulness, sensory observation, noticing thoughts

2. Metacognition

Thinking about thinking, examining assumptions, recognizing biases

3. Reasoning

Logic, philosophy, mathematics, debating both sides of an issue

4. Judgment

Decision journals, forecasting, studying consequences, getting feedback

5. Emotional regulation

Therapy, CBT skills, acceptance, breathing exercises, self-compassion

6. Attention

Concentration meditation, deep work, limiting distractions

7. Memory and learning

Reading, active recall, spaced repetition, teaching others

8. Self-control

Delayed gratification, habit-building, deliberate restraint

9. Empathy

Active listening, volunteering, perspective-taking, relationships

10. Character

Courageous actions, honesty, keeping promises, practicing virtue

11. Creativity

Writing, inventing, experimenting, connecting unrelated ideas

12. Mental resilience

Exercise, sleep, gradual exposure to manageable difficulties, supportive relationships

The crucial insight is that these abilities reinforce one another.

For example, awareness helps you detect an impulsive judgment. Reasoning helps you examine it. Self-control helps you avoid acting prematurely. Courage helps you choose what is right.

2. Metacognition: Thinking about thinking

Metacognition is the ability to observe, evaluate, and regulate your cognitive processes.

There are several levels:

1

Thinking

"She doesn't like me."

A thought appears.

2

Awareness of thinking

"I'm having the thought that she doesn't like me."

You recognize the thought as a mental event.

3

Examining thinking

"What evidence supports that interpretation?"

You evaluate the quality of your reasoning.

4

Changing thinking

"I don't have enough information to know."

You deliberately adopt a better-supported judgment.

5

Improving how you think

"Next time, I'll check the facts before assuming rejection."

You create a better habit of reasoning.

The fifth level is especially interesting.

You're no longer just correcting one mistake. You're improving the process that produces your future judgments.

Marcus Aurelius practiced something very similar by repeatedly examining his impressions and reminding himself of his principles.

3. Mental training needs more than introspection

Think of developing your mind like developing your body.

Reading about exercise doesn't produce strength unless you exercise. Similarly, understanding virtue intellectually doesn't necessarily make you virtuous.

There are four complementary ways of learning:

Learn

Read philosophy, science, psychology, biographies, and history. Gain better mental models.

Observe

Notice your thoughts, emotions, assumptions, impulses, and behavior.

Act

Practice difficult conversations, kindness, courage, self-control, and making decisions.

Get feedback and improve

Compare your expectations with what happened. Learn from mistakes and adjust.

This creates a cycle: Learn → Observe → Act → Reflect → Improve → Repeat.

Without action, reflection can become rumination. Without reflection, action can become repetition of the same mistakes.

4. Seven additional practices worth developing

These go beyond traditional meditation and journaling.

Socratic questioning: Ask yourself "How do I know this?", "What assumptions am I making?", and "What would change my mind?" This develops intellectual humility and precision.

Prediction training: Before important events, write down what you think will happen, how confident you are, and why. Compare your prediction with the actual outcome. Over time, this helps calibrate judgment.

Deliberate discomfort: Gradually practice manageable things you avoid, such as admitting mistakes, meeting new people, or receiving criticism. Learn that discomfort can be tolerated without controlling your actions.

Active listening: During conversations, suspend your rehearsed response and concentrate on understanding the other person's meaning. Ask questions and summarize what you heard.

Teaching: Explain something you've learned in plain language without looking at your notes. Gaps in your explanation expose gaps in understanding.

Service: Volunteer, mentor, or help people without expecting anything back. This trains attention outward, reinforces compassion, and gives moral principles practical expression.

Physical foundations: Get consistent sleep, exercise regularly, eat adequately, and maintain social connections. These strongly affect attention, memory, mood, and the ability to regulate emotions.

5. Create your own mental gym

Here is a practical daily routine combining the most valuable activities.

Daily mind-training routine

0/6

Meditate

10 min

Observe breathing, sensations, and thoughts without immediately reacting.

Read and study

20 min

Read something challenging and recall the three most important ideas.

Practice metacognition

5 min

Examine one assumption or judgment you've made today.

Take a virtuous action

Throughout day

Choose one opportunity to practice honesty, courage, justice, or temperance.

Exercise or walk

20–30 min

Support your physical and cognitive health.

Reflect and journal

5 min

Review one mistake, one good choice, and one lesson for tomorrow.

Reset checklist

You don't need to complete every activity every day. Consistency and application matter more than the number of techniques you accumulate.

6. The next level: Train your judgment, not just your awareness

Suppose someone insults you.

An untrained reaction may be: "They've disrespected me. I have to respond."

Mindfulness might help you notice the anger.

Metacognition helps you recognize the belief that an insult threatens your worth.

Reasoning asks whether that belief is true.

Wisdom asks what response best fits the situation.

Justice considers the other person's humanity.

Temperance prevents unnecessary escalation.

Courage allows you to respond firmly when needed, even while feeling uncomfortable.

This is why good judgment requires more than being aware of your own thoughts. It requires accurate knowledge, the capacity to reason, sound values, and practice applying those values in real life.

7. The highest skill: Learning how to improve yourself

One advanced practice is to regularly ask these five questions:

One caution: thinking about thinking is useful when it leads to greater clarity or better action. If you repeatedly analyze the same thought without gaining anything new, that may be rumination rather than productive metacognition.

The Stoic goal is not to spend every moment observing your mind. It's to train your mind so that you can increasingly give your attention to the world and other people.

My favorite way to summarize the whole process:

The ultimate goal isn't simply to have a calmer, smarter, or more disciplined mind. It's to become a person who sees reality more clearly, makes better decisions, treats people better, and acts wisely even in difficult circumstances.

The key is to train yourself to experience ordinary reality with less automatic judgment, more curiosity, more wonder, and greater flexibility in how you interpret things.

You don't need to hallucinate to experience something profound. You can change how you pay attention, what you notice, and what meaning you give things.

There's a useful distinction:

Here's how I'd practice it.

A 20-minute daily practice

Rhymember | Turn Study Notes Into Songs That Stick Forever

1. See familiar things as if for the first time — 5 minutes

Look at a tree, your hand, or a glass of water. Notice colors, shadows, textures, reflections, and movements without immediately naming them.

Ask: What would this look like if I'd never seen it before?

7 Rare Traits of Deeply Spiritual Individuals That Set Them Apart | by Denise Williams | Medium

2. Observe your mind thinking — 5 minutes

Sit comfortably and notice each thought as it appears. Rather than following it, quietly label it memory, planning, judgment, or imagination.

Ask: Can I watch a thought without becoming absorbed in it?

Colorful houses along the canal in Amsterdam, the Netherlands

3. Deliberately change perspectives — 5 minutes

Take something you believe and imagine three genuinely different ways of understanding it. For example, a rainy day could be inconvenient, nourishing for plants, or visually beautiful.

Ask: What else could be true? What am I failing to notice?

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4. Cultivate awe and interconnectedness — 5 minutes

Consider how your body depends on sunlight, food, water, ecosystems, and countless other people's work. Try to feel gratitude rather than merely think about it.

Ask: How many things had to happen for this moment to exist?

A powerful exercise: The ordinary object experiment

Pick up an ordinary cup.

Minimalist Mug in Sunlight Photo on Lummi

CHOOSE A WAY TO SEE IT

Perception

Science

Connection

Imagination

Imaginative perception

Imagine you are an alien seeing this object for the first time. What strange ritual might you think it serves? Invent three completely different uses.

What happens when I stop assuming I know what it is?

The interesting thing is that the cup hasn't changed, but your experience of it has. That's a trainable ability.

The deeper skill: Changing your relationship to thought

There are three particularly useful disciplines here.

Mindfulness: Learn to notice experience before automatically reacting to it.

Metacognition: Recognize that the meaning you assign to an experience is constructed by your mind, and can often be reconsidered.

Cognitive flexibility: Practice holding multiple interpretations without needing to immediately decide which one is correct.

This connects beautifully with Marcus Aurelius's Stoicism: distinguish the event itself from the judgment you form about it. The difference is that you're not merely trying to become more rational. You're also learning to experience more beauty, playfulness, and curiosity.

One more exercise I'd recommend: once a day, take a 20-minute walk without headphones or a phone. Find ten beautiful, surprising, or strange things that you'd ordinarily ignore. Don't force yourself to feel anything; practice noticing.

After two weeks, look for changes in your everyday curiosity, emotional flexibility, and appreciation rather than trying to reproduce a drug-induced state. These practices won't reliably reproduce psychedelic effects, but they can help cultivate some of the qualities people value in those experiences.

The goal isn't to be in an extraordinary state all the time. It's to become extraordinarily attentive to ordinary life.

specfic people who helped me

Book Shelf

The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey

stream is my ex they will only help me if i change

Improving other people’s well-being is a major part of Stoic virtue, but it is not the whole thing.

For the Stoics, a human being is both rational and social. So living well means using reason well and relating to other people well.

Virtue = understanding reality as clearly as you can, choosing what is just and appropriate, and acting with courage and self-command—for both your own character and th good of the human community.

So yes, helping others matters enormously. Marcus repeatedly treats humans as parts of one larger organism: what benefits the community generally benefits the individual part too.

Suppose your friend is addicted to gambling and asks you for money. Giving it to them might increase their immediate pleasure, but refusing may be the more virtuous action.

Suppose someone wants you to lie to protect their reputation. The lie might temporarily reduce their suffering, but justice and honesty could require telling the truth.

Suppose someone is angry because you established a reasonable boundary. Their emotional well-being may temporarily decrease, while your action is still fair and appropriate.

They'd mean something closer to human flourishing—becoming capable, reasonable, cooperative, courageous, trustworthy, and able to live well.

So the Stoic question isn't simply:

“Will this increase their happiness?”

It's closer to:

“What does wisdom and justice require of me toward this person?”

You can still keep the practical insight without accepting all the metaphysics:

Reality is not necessarily personally attacking you. Events arise from causes. Separate what happened from the story that the universe has wronged you, then decide what response is actually good.

The shortest translation would be:

“Nature has no grudge against you. Things happen as part of the larger order of reality. External events may hurt, but they do not automatically corrupt your character. Your task is to respond well to what nature gives you.”

And there's another component: your own inner governance.

Imagine you could increase everyone else's happiness enormously, but you had to become dishonest, cruel, cowardly, and completely enslaved to your impulses to do so.

A Stoic would say something has gone fundamentally wrong. You aren't merely an instrument for producing other people's pleasant experiences. You are also responsible for the quality of the person doing the acting.

                VIRTUE
                   │
   ┌───────────────┼───────────────┐
   ↓               ↓               ↓
understand reality govern yourself relate well
│                  │                │
wisdom         self-control      justice
                   │                |
                 courage          common good

And these interact.

For Marcus, the mature human isn't asking only:

“What do I want?”

nor only:

“What does everyone else want?”

but:

“Given that I am one human among other humans, what is the most reasonable, just, courageous, and disciplined thing to do here?”

That is much closer to what he means by virtue.

And if you wanted to compress the social part into one sentence:

Virtue means becoming the kind of person who can see clearly, govern himself, and reliably contribute to human flourishing.

insult
↓
anger
↓
"What actually happened?"
↓
"Is my interpretation correct?"
↓
"What response is appropriate?"
↓
chosen action

While doing these ordinary social duties, remember that you are one small part of a much larger whole.

That keeps ego from taking over.

Instead of:

“Look how important I am for helping.”

it becomes:

“This is simply what a rational and social being does.”

Find your peace in doing the next good thing for others, then the next one, while remembering that you are part of something larger than yourself.

| “Whatever the nature of reality ultimately is, I don't need metaphysical certainty before I can behave courageously, justly, rationally, and helpfully.”

Dont take it too personally what people think

             THE UNIVERSE

      ┌────────────┴────────────┐
      │                         │
    CHAOS                     ORDER
      │                         │
things arise/dissolve providence/nature
      │                         │
 don't cling                  trust
      │                         │
      └────────────┬────────────┘
                   ↓
             YOUR RESPONSE
                   ↓
           Don't be disturbed
                    ↓
             Choose virtue
                    ↓
        Do the good in front of you

see clearly
↓
help where you can
↓
act justly
↓
move to the next task
↓
remember the whole

Don't waste your short life fighting reality.

So life becomes something like:

help
  ↓
work
  ↓
speak honestly
  ↓
care for someone
  ↓
solve a problem
  ↓
help again

Not one giant heroic act.

Just one useful human action after another.

Logic was particularly important

Marcus was trained to examine impressions.

Something happens:

“He insulted me.”

Then your mind immediately produces:

“He has harmed me.”
“This is terrible.”
“I must retaliate.”

Stoic training asks:

EVENT
↓
IMPRESSION
↓
Is the impression accurate?
↓
What do I actually know?
↓
Should I assent to this judgment?
↓
ACTION

INTELLIGENCE
ability to understand and solve

    ↓

RATIONALITY
use that ability to judge correctly

    +

SOCIAL NATURE
recognize other humans as fellow participants

    +

VIRTUE
wisdom + justice + courage + self-control

    ↓

GOOD HUMAN ACTION

This is also why Marcus's daemon isn't simply your intelligence.

A very intelligent person's mind can serve anger, greed, vanity, fear, or ambition.

The Stoic ideal is that the ruling faculty uses reason properly, in accordance with reality and with our social nature.

So I would phrase the relationship like this:

Intelligence gives you the capacity to think. Rationality is the disciplined use of that capacity to see and choose well. Wisdom is knowing what is worth doing with it.

And that's why, for Marcus, merely becoming smarter would not necessarily make you a better human being.

One especially powerful rule

For high emotion:

Don't make important decisions at the peak of the emotion unless action is genuinely urgent.

If you're furious and composing a six-paragraph message, write it if necessary.

Don't necessarily send it.

Come back when the physiological wave has declined and ask:

“Do I still endorse this?”

That's the ruling faculty reclaiming control.

Helping someone flourish vs. making them comfortable

Sometimes they're identical:

feed someone who is hungry
comfort someone grieving
teach someone a useful skill
protect someone from abuse
cooperate on something beneficial

Sometimes they're not:

telling someone something difficult but true
refusing to enable destructive behavior
allowing someone to experience the consequences of their choices
disagreeing respectfully
maintaining boundaries

GOOD ACTION

    ┌── Is it TRUE / rational?
    │
    ├── Is it JUST toward other people?
    │
    ├── Does it promote genuine human flourishing?
    │
    ├── Does it require COURAGE?
    │
    └── Am I exercising SELF-CONTROL?

Virtue = the ability to choose and do the good thing for the right reasons.

Your distinctive human task is to use reason to live well—as a rational, social, embodied being.

activity of the soul in accordance with reason and excellence.

Eudaimonia isn't merely obtaining outcomes.

It's partly about what you become through participating in life.

Tzeentch: ambition, manipulation, schemes, knowledge and change pursued without a stable moral center.

What is actually true?
What evidence supports this?
What am I assuming?
Could I be wrong?
Does my conclusion follow from the evidence?
Am I letting fear, anger, desire, or pride distort my judgment?
Given my goals and values, what action makes sense?

I can only handle one wife — thanks though

REASON:
Why?

What would it cost?

Is my judgment distorted?

Would this harm others?

Am I becoming dependent on it?

What kind of person would this make me?

“Reason is the faculty by which I can understand what I am, examine what is worth pursuing, and deliberately participate in a good human life.”

Reason + good values + self-control + concern for others.

Some extremely intelligent beings become bad/illogical precisely because intelligence gets recruited by obsession, ambition, fear, pride, or desire.

if you start with nonsense you may reason yourself into a nonsense

REASON
What is actually true?

COURAGE
Can I do what is right despite fear?

A person sitting alone reasoning for sixteen hours every day is not necessarily fulfilling human nature.

Reason: understand what is true.

Wisdom: distinguish appearances from reality.

Justice: treat other people properly.

Courage: face pain, uncertainty, loss and difficulty.

Temperance:Am I being controlled by an impulse?

Service: contribute to the human community.

Relationship: participate in other people's lives.

Justice:What is fair to everyone involved?

EVENT
↓
clear perception
↓
better judgment
↓
more proportionate emotion
↓
deliberate action

Rationality = how well you use those capacities to form accurate beliefs and make sensible decisions.

And eventually the daemon / ruling faculty doesn't need to fight every emotion like an enemy. Your emotions themselves become increasingly educated by your judgments.

The goal is not “I feel nothing.”

It's:

“I can feel anger without becoming anger. I can feel fear without obeying fear. I can enjoy pleasure without needing pleasure. I can hear the crowd without becoming the crowd.”

Do a two-minute evening review

Marcus's Meditations itself can be understood partly as this kind of practice.

Each night ask:

Where did impulse control me today?

Where did I notice it before acting?

What judgment was underneath the emotion?

What would I like to do next time?

Not:

“I'm terrible because I got angry.”

But:

trigger
↓
interpretation
↓
emotion
↓
action
↓
better response next time

love: potentially something much larger: “I care about its flourishing, not merely the pleasure it gives me.”

The transformation is:

emotion → information

instead of:

emotion → command

“knowing others is intelligence;
knowing yourself is true wisdom.
mastering others is strength;
mastering yourself is true power.

— dao de jing

"The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao"

if you change yourself -— others may potentially benefit and learn from it ?

Imagine this future:

OLD WORLD

human effort
    ↓
survival
    ↓
some leisure
    ↓
"What do I want?"


AUTOMATED WORLD

survival handled
    ↓
massive freedom
    ↓
"What do I want?"
    ↓
"Why do I want it?"
    ↓
"What is worth doing?"

Automation removes many constraints.

But constraints used to answer part of the purpose question for us.

I need to work because I need food.

Once that disappears, you're left with something much harder:

What deserves my attention during the finite interval in which I exist?

That is almost exactly Marcus's question.

my purpose = to reason??

LOGOS
universal rational order
↓
human reason
↓
DAIMON
inner rational guide

Who should control civilization if technology gives someone almost god-like abilities?

Marcus: discover and correctly use the divine reason already within you.

Deus Ex: technologically amplify intelligence until human/machine reason begins looking divine.

Comlink in the game is not as sophisticated as the one from telepathy wizards

Don’t wait for a deus ex machina. Consult the daimon.

life is a series of choices. i like to take walk

Marcus keeps relocating power from the outside to the inside:

“Can I control what happened?” — often no.
“Can I control other people?” — no.
“Can I guarantee fortune?” — no.
“Can I examine my judgment and choose my next action?” — yes.