william-t-power

In all seriousness, do you think your condition has necessarily made you more intelligent than most? My thought is, similar to Mr Glass's concept, you work you mind much more than an average person and it works much better consequently.

Like how if a person can only ever used one tool, they'd end up really really good with using it since there's no other option.

Thanks for the frank response, I meant it earnestly. I generally figure people's minds usually compensate in amazing ways for things one way or another.

I have always been frank and earnest with women. In New York I'm Frank and Chicago I'm Ernest.

Not OP but I am someone who made that transition. I was also an active alcoholic who got sober, but I had those same problems prior to my alcoholism and self medicated for my anxiety; among other things.

The general pattern I found that got me out of my depression, anxiety, and isolation was by looking at my life, deciding to start fixing things from the ground up and fully immerse myself in it. I just picked one thing at a time that was around me in my apartment and fully tried to solve it, which made me think about what "solved" meant to me. It was kind of a mix of mindfulness through being fully into what I was doing, and the discipline of doing it to full completion. Over time, I started doing things that involved going out more. The more I built up this collection of skills and work, which reflected in my well run life, the less I was anxious and depressed. That and I started looking at myself as one small part of a larger world, rather than things being centered around me and my ego.

I don't know if it would work the same with you but that worked with me. Along with therapy along the way.

The answer to this IMHO is much simpler than people think. Earning money and keeping money (i.e. building wealth among other things) are two separate skills. Someone that earns lots of money can be wasteful with money easily, and I would say that being wasteful with abundance is a natural thing for most people. Learning to not be wasteful with abundance is like learning to diet or exercise, to a large extent you have to fight your nature to start doing it.

Thus, any given person likely does not have the skill of being conservative with abundance. Even if they do, they don't necessarily have the skills for an abundance that's orders of magnitude larger than they've ever dealt with. Therefore, giving someone an abundance of something powerful is much more likely than not to cause them to be wasteful with it. If they're wasteful to a larger magnitude than the abundance, they can destroy past their original baseline. With credit and con artists, that is very easy to do.

e.g. if tomorrow someone gives you $100k free and clear you can take out a car loan and mortgage for $500k easily. Once the hundred k runs out you still have payments to make.