Moving To A New City (A Reflection on 4 Years of TRP)

First time posting here. I've been on TRP for a bit over four years ago. I'm about to move to a new city, and it has me reflecting on some things I've learned over the past few years. TRP helped me out a lot in the early days when I was 21. Sometimes it makes me feel like I'm going crazy that anything I've gleamed some semblance of truth from ends up getting banned, quarantined, marked as hate speech, given slanderous titles, etc.

Modern American culture made me hate myself. My life was a fucking shitshow, and I lost decades of what could've been a fun life thanks to it. I still see that same culture at work every day everywhere I look, while groups like this become increasingly more difficult to access. I'm thankful I'm out, but I'm disheartened by what it took.

Now that the preamble is done, here are some things I learned since then. Some apply to my life, and some apply to relationships. I hope they help. I'll follow these up with questions I still have.

• If for nothing else, begin working out to increase your level of self-discipline. If you have no discipline, you'll be less able to will yourself into doing what needs to be done. Similarly, willpower is finite from day to day, but you can increase it by building up good habits that compound over time. Life is competitive to some extent, and you have to actively fight if you want a better life.
• What people mean by "never break frame." Shit-tests are absolutely real, and I think women do it innately. I don't think it's a malicious act; I believe its origin is biological and gets conflated with the way we socialize. If you really like a girl, it can definitely affect you; but if some girl can break you that easily, how can they trust you to withstand time? I've been called an asshole by girls who ended up fucking me later, and I haven't fucked girls who made me insecure from prodding at my ego. The difference for me was I didn't want to fuck the former, and I did want to fuck the latter lol, but I think the easiest way I've found not to break frame is to have your own mission in life and devote yourself to that. I've read on here before something along the lines of "a man needs a mission," and I found that to resonate. Basically, stand up for yourself and don't get hung up on the little things.
• Sometimes your infatuation with a girl is an anima projection. It's a concept in Jungian psychology where you create a false archetypical projection of who the person is based on idealized feminine qualities you believe them to possess. This is the guy who's taught to treat a woman like a princess and then wonders why she won't fuck him. Women aren't anima projections. Any well-adjusted woman won't feel comfortable around you if you treat her like a God. Hold them to a normal standard.
• Be aware of self-doubt, your fear of failure, and your desire to control things. Self-doubt can show up if you continue saying you want to do something, but then you don't actually end up doing it. If you yourself don't have this issue, you certainly know someone who does. This is similar to your fear of failing. Your ego is fragile, and it has the potential to break any time you try something new. My father never resolved this issue, and both our lives suffered for it. Don't be like him. Be strong for your kids because their lives depend on it. The desire to control things can also play into why people end up not doing shit, but I found it more applicable to social settings. I would tend to shut down in large social groups, and I believe it was because the more people present, the less able I was to control each person's perception of me. I'm still practicing just letting go. It takes faith. You have to have enough faith in yourself to let yourself go. You have to trust yourself.
• Your problems are just opportunities met with fear. If you're at all highly neurotic like I am, you'll tend to be like P. Hoffman in Synecdoche, New York. You'll always find something to worry about. As the band The Books said: "Enjoy your worries, you may never have them again." And as Brad Phillips painted: "What if something is wrong? What if nothing is wrong?" Sometimes nothing is wrong, and you need to let go and stop thinking something is wrong with you or your life or others lives. It prevents you from being a fun person to be around, and it stops you from enjoying life.
• Lastly, the crab-bucket mentality. This one sucked to learn. I started acquiring the mildest forms of success as an artist not too long ago, and I ended up finding people who I assumed were close friends distancing themselves from me - almost as a form of punishment. This has been well-documented in the friends who smoke trying to give the guy who's quitting a cigarette, but when it's your friends, and you're the guy quitting, it can be hard to accept what's going on. No one wants you to show them up; no one wants to confront that they could be more. The best advice I found for this is don't associate too much with any one thing and don't place your value in any social paradigm. The road to greatness might be lonely.

Oh! Also, for anyone like me, at some point, you may have decided for yourself, no one wants to see you happy. The crab-bucket mentality validates the theory to some extent, but it's not wholly accurate. Some people have worked on themselves and genuinely want the best for others. If you have this same issue, try to address it immediately. You'll surely sabotage your own life if you don't.

I think the way to do this is by being upfront and honest with yourself about what is and what isn't working in your life. Paint a picture of what you want your life to be and then address why it isn't that. I think there typically ends up being something you told yourself about the world and who you were when you were younger that perpetuates over time to give you some things in life but not others. True freedom is on the other side.

If you're a millionaire but it's spite that's driving you, I could give a fuck. If you're acting from a default way of being, then you're not truly free, and that'll show itself in the distance between you and your son, or your inevitable divorce, or your loss of friendships, or the success/failure of your business.

Take all of this with a grain of salt. I'm only 25, and I've noticed men in their 20's assume they know a lot more than they truly know. Everything mentioned here I discovered in my own life by failing into them head-first and trying to pick up the pieces afterward, hoping to make sense of what just happened. I like to think I have a fair bit of self-awareness to discern what's helpful and trustworthy from what isn't, but I'm open to that not being the case.

Here are the questions I still have.

• In what ways can I make myself more charismatic? I'm still on the extreme of introverted, and I don't want that to negatively impact my ability to build a network of people in this new place.
• I still have a poor relationship to my finances, and I've never been financially comfortable or even stable. Have you found anything that helped you?

I'm sure I have many other questions, but my mind is blanking after writing everything I have thus far. I might make a new post with questions later once I flesh everything out. Anyways thanks for the stories, laughs, and advice. I do hope the best for all of us.