Posts by Drew Chase68

If you’ve got a handle on English and feel like diving into something deep, there’s this one book that hits the nail on the head regarding all the weirdness in modern society—it’s called *The Matrix* by Jean Baudrillard. You can pretty easily track down a digital copy online, though I’ll skip dropping any direct links here just to stay on the right side of the rules. It’s easy enough to find if you know what you're looking for.

quiethawk13 said:Has anyone actually managed to pull any cash out of FanDuel lately? I noticed my Skrill option just vanished into thin air. It looks like they’ve stopped processing payouts to Americans via Skrill altogether. They still have Neteller listed, but only for withdrawals—you can't even use it to deposit anymore. So, if you haven't topped up yet, you're basically stuck. The only thing left is a direct bank transfer, which is honestly the last thing I want to deal with right now.

Just grab your money and walk away. I’ve never touched them myself, but their poker room is absolute garbage.👎

It feels kind of paradoxical to me how all this technological progress is actually just pushing us further away from our primal sources of motivation—things like eating real food, getting decent sleep, moving our bodies, or even the raw hunt... We invented speech, then we invented an abstraction of speech, which led to writing, and now we’ve moved on to an abstraction of writing, which is just tapping away at a computer keyboard 🤣 so how can we honestly expect people in the future to be any happier than we are now, especially when our brains are hardwired to crave experiences that we don't even engage in anymore? 🤷

edit: I mean, sure, there are things like meditation that actually work and can make you feel centered without needing to satisfy those basic instincts, but it almost feels like cheating to me. Plus, nobody is really encouraging people to actually do it, and we certainly haven't needed to invent some high-tech gadgetry to make it happen either :/

placidwolf27 said:Well, athletes serve as a perfect case study

what they actually do is entirely unnecessary, unproductive—frankly, quite absurd

I mean, let’s be realistic here—if a human being spends more than half their life training just to sprint down a hill, or run in circles, or throw a heavy metal ball... well, damn, it's not as if they are achieving something "objectively measurable" in any meaningful sense

And yet, that is precisely why it's such a prime example; in this day and age, we are all essentially forced to function this way. We are all expected to perform arbitrary combinations of ridiculous tasks with a certain level of competence just to receive some kind of reward

So, any sort of "objective assessment" of the action itself becomes irrelevant—the organism doesn't distinguish between them anyway. The only true distinction lies between actions driven by internal necessity—say, eating, sleeping, smoking—and the things we do "for various reasons" that are, more or less, socially constructed constructs

That is why sports, as an activity, is much closer to dance or other art forms. In fact, many spiritual or even occult practices—when you strip them down to their operational elements—function almost identically to sports. They utilize similar methods: autosuggestion, visualization, mastering internal states, managing will and focus, the ritualization of specific movements, the gradual self-modification through repetitive practice, and so on...

I suspect a lot of this would become clearer to us if we truly understood how athletes operate from the inside—specifically psychologically—and how they reach those states in the first place

Think about it for a second: sports prove that a person can be brought into a state where, for several hours of intense effort and focus, they execute a sequence of absolutely nonsensical actions while remaining highly motivated. This implies that what is being done is actually secondary; what matters is *how* it is done, or rather, what is happening within the individual during the process, and how they managed to arrive at that mental threshold to begin with

sports actually have way more in common with the lives of our early ancestors than "normal" jobs do. take a typical office job, for instance—you're just tapping away at some pile of plastic and decoding little symbols on a screen. what does that have to do with anything we've been doing for the last two million years? sports are physical; for millions of years, we were chasing animals and using our muscles to hunt them down and eat them. it’s pretty obvious why engaging in sports feels good to people—those whose brains didn't trigger endorphins to encourage this behavior died of hunger early on and never passed their genes down to the next generation

what I find most fascinating is the motivation behind completely abstract pursuits, like mathematics. where do we get the internal drive to mess around with stuff like that? how did the genetic predisposition to find joy and fulfillment in activities that had absolutely nothing to do with survival or reproduction a few thousand years ago manage to survive?

Scott Rodriguez7 said:Honestly, it doesn't have to be that way, and frankly, it really shouldn't be.😁

If you've got drive and actual ambition, there ought to be a real shot at climbing the ladder, snagging a raise, or taking on more challenging projects—assuming your industry even allows for that sort of thing.

You have to find a way to push yourself so you don't feel stuck or useless, and so you can actually prove what you're capable of.
The best way to handle that is by setting a specific goal to act as a motivator, which is something I touched on in my other post earlier in this thread. ☕

That goal is supposed to be the spark that keeps a person working hard.

I remember reading somewhere that people really need internal motivation to hit their targets, but let's be real—for a lot of folks, that inner drive just isn't strong enough on its own.🤷
A ton of people look for external motivators instead (like support from friends or family), and it makes me wonder: is that still okay, as long as they actually end up reaching their goal?

That sounds fair on paper, but from an economic standpoint, it might not actually be the smartest move. Being "hardworking" just means you're motivated to do your current job well, which doesn't automatically mean you'll be good at management, nor does it mean you have more potential for leadership than some other employee who isn't quite as driven. Plus, if your boss promotes you to a manager role, they’ll probably just fill your old spot with someone less driven who’s willing to do the exact same work for the same paycheck.

What might actually make sense is offering a raise as an incentive to step up or as a reward for hitting certain milestones, though I honestly have no clue how profitable that truly is. External motivation is almost always weaker than internal drive, and most employers aren't interested in gambling with those kinds of incentives; they usually just settle for the status quo. At the end of the day, figuring out how to use money to motivate someone to produce high-quality work is still an unsolved problem, even if I think we're getting closer to a real solution than we used to be.

Scott Rodriguez7 said:Honestly, it doesn't have to be that way, and frankly, it really shouldn't be.😁

If you've got drive and actual ambition, there ought to be a real shot at climbing the ladder, snagging a raise, or taking on more challenging projects—assuming your industry even allows for that sort of thing.

You have to find a way to push yourself so you don't feel stuck or useless, and so you can actually prove what you're capable of.
The best way to handle that is by setting a specific goal to act as a motivator, which is something I touched on in my other post earlier in this thread. ☕

That goal is supposed to be the spark that keeps a person working hard.

I remember reading somewhere that people really need internal motivation to hit their targets, but let's be real—for a lot of folks, that inner drive just isn't strong enough on its own.🤷
A ton of people look for external motivators instead (like support from friends or family), and it makes me wonder: is that still okay, as long as they actually end up reaching their goal?

I feel like external motivation matters when you're on the fence about making a decision, but if you don't have any intrinsic interest in something, you're just not going to do it. And finding that internal drive is way harder than finding an outside reason to act. If there's nothing in a task that actually interests or fulfills you, that's pretty much the end of the road. 🙂 For instance, I would be a total nightmare working at a local Starbucks because the sheer routine of repeating the same tasks over and over would drive me insane. I'd end up forcing myself through the shift regardless of what kind of bonuses or raises were on the table, simply because there's zero challenge there, whereas someone else might thrive in that environment and be incredibly productive.

Thomas Martinez9 said:True. You've got a point there. I hadn't looked at it that way.
My grandmother was a workaholic and fell ill around 50. Now she’s mostly bedridden, knitting constantly because she feels useless if she isn't doing something.🤷
Maybe I'm veering off track here... but I think what you're saying is the truth.

But we can't spend our entire lives being lazy just because our bodies want to lounge around.☕
We have to actually accomplish things.

I mean, I don't think it's quite that simple; we’ve got these deep-seated instincts driving us to hunt down food whenever we get hungry, whether that means raiding the fridge or actually heading out to grab something, and similar drives push us toward reproduction and stuff. Obviously, in modern American society, you can't just act on every primal impulse that pops into your head, 😬 but your body ends up giving you a lot more useful intel than people realize.

Honestly, I feel like arguing about whether someone is "lazy" or "hardworking" is kind of a waste of breath since those are just external labels people slap on things. It isn't equally easy for everyone to be "lazy" in a specific moment, just like it isn't equally hard for everyone to be "productive" when tackling a certain task. When you're genuinely obsessed with something, doing it feels effortless—in fact, it's actually pretty hard to be lazy when you're in that zone. But when you're staring down something you have zero interest in and you force yourself to do it anyway, your brain is going to be nagging you the whole damn time. What we should really be digging into is motivation, but unfortunately, figuring out how to actually stay motivated for something is a total mystery to me. 🙂

Set up a foreign currency account; it clears without any drama and you can stack up a fortune just by dodging those annoying currency conversion fees. You’ll probably save a ton on the hidden junk fees tied to prepaid cards, too.

I'm not entirely sure if they'll let you withdraw straight to a prepaid card, but hey, there's no harm in trying. DraftKings is a legit operation—if things don't pan out, you aren't going to lose your shirt.

Tyler Taylor82 said:I’m pretty much a novice when it comes to casinos and poker, and honestly, whenever I’ve glanced at the terms and conditions, they always seem like a total rip-off—especially since most casinos restrict those bonuses strictly to slots.

I used to mess around with this stuff a few years back when there was actually some decent money to be made. I can't speak for the casino side, but when it comes to poker or sports betting, you always want the smallest bonus possible because that usually means better terms. With sportsbooks, and occasionally in poker, you get these bonuses that basically refund you about 150-200% of the house margin. So, instead of getting standard odds like 1.9-1.9 on a tennis match, you might end up with something closer to 2.1-2.1, which lets even a complete amateur hunt for value bets. The catch, obviously, is that these bonuses are usually capped at maybe $20 to $50, so you aren't exactly going to retire off them. 😁 They make their bank if you stick around later to play at the regular odds and start betting on games where the lines were set way too generous.

Then you’ve got the massive poker bonuses—I’ve seen them go as high as $5,000—but those things only really claw back about 20-40% of the margin. At the end of the day, to actually see a profit after the bonus, you still have to outplay the other players and cover the rake; the only difference is you're fighting a slightly smaller rake this time around. It’s definitely not for beginners; to actually clear a $5,000 bonus, you have to play a ton of high-stakes hands, and if you don't actually know what you're doing, that margin discount won't save you because luck eventually runs dry. 🙂 If you want to play poker but you aren't a shark, you're better off looking for places that give you actual account credit rather than a "bonus," because a bonus always comes with strings attached that you have to play through.