Thread: you might have noticed the #OpalPill in my bio, so here's a quick rundown of what it is. This is a work in progress.

The Opal Pill in 3 points:

1. Know what's valuable and the process of getting it
2. Guarding it
3. Gaining capital in to get more of it/guard it better

1. Opal mining is about getting lots of worthless rubble with some low/mid value opals + very few precious opals. This process exists in all creative activity in the widest possible sense.

In writing, you come up with all sorts of ideas and write a ton of text, but

only some of it makes it to the final version. Everything you decided not to include stilled played an important role: it was a part of the process that led you to the (valuable) end result.

When you meet new people, you find a lot of individuals that you just don't vibe with -

they're rubble to you, but they might be opals to someone else. (Sometimes they're just trash in general lol). And then you find some who're rly precious and justify all the previous grind that was required to get to them.

This also applies to music, design, programming etc

You have to try different ideas, approaches, get through a lot of grind to get valuable results.

2. Once you have the proverbial opals, you must guard them - just like actual IRL opals are guarded.

You need to guard them against predators and parasites.

Predators try to actively harm you through intimidation and violence. Parasites harm you indirectly by leeching off your energy: they may try to arouse pity or promise you rewards later on. They may even do so without consciously wanting to harm you - some people are black holes.

To optimize your defense against the above, you need to develop an automatic, visceral disgust reaction to it. That means you begin feeling disgust, even pain, every time you see something that's:
- not in line with reality but pretends to be (narratives designed to manipulate)

- is in line with reality but it's useless brain grating - stuff that doesn't matter but can consume lots of time and energy
- obviously also all direct violence/threats (this is a problem for some people who have a hard time saying "no" and often behave like prey)

3. To further optimize both the production of new opals and their protection, you need to gain capital!

There are several forms of capital: material, intellectual, emotional, and social. You need at least some of each: focusing on just one or two doesn't work well.

For example, if you just get lots of material and intellectual capital, you're missing out on a lot + are also vulnerable etc.

To improve capital gain, you need to stop playing the political game that you've been forced into. Don't embody the caricature that was designed for you

You attitude towards politics should ideally be that of a foreigner - be aware of it for pragmatic reasons, but don't get emotionally invested. Etc this is just Moldbug's clearpill.
In practical terms, this means that you don't waste hours doomscrolling or getting into arguments

on twittar, but that you focus on your career/business/studying/building relationships/therapy, trauma resolution.

This doesn't mean that you stop having political opinions: once you gain enough capital, enough power, you can start affecting things in ways that actually matter.

(This can include building communities of like-minded people, financially supporting causes, intellectually and emotionally contributing to conversations, theory, propaganda).

^ You can only be effective at this if you craft yourself into an opal, a part of an elite!

The #OpalPill doesn't have an inherent political alignment (if you can believe that), but it is inherently elitist. It's very capitalist, it's very r/K selection, but above all, it's about synthesis - understanding that both rubble and opals are valuable in their own ways,

that people around you have both negative and positive traits, and that to win, you sometimes need to stop playing for a while (or for good).
Just like there are lots of different kinds of opals, how exactly you go about all the above is up to you, and our results

will vary greatly. What matters is that the end result is valuable (meaningful!) and that it includes a kind of synthesis - just like opals always include a combination of different colors .

Thank you for reading the thread! I'd rly like to know what your thoughts are - do you

think is has value (which is kinda the entire point), would you maybe add anything to it, or would you remove some some parts for better clarity? Do you disagree with some (or all :/) of it?

Once I launch my blog, I'm (probably) turning this into a post btw.