Vivarium: Philosophy Discussions On Any Subject

Who are you trying to fool, me, or yourself?
This thread is a cry for help.
Unfortunately what I'm good at is observing and analyzing behavior, not tarot cards, or astrological readings.
What I do is not magical, only extraordinary.
I would have to observe you directly, if I am to fill in the missing details, because I've already diagnosed you as an incorrigible liar and pretender, of the American type.
Like ****-Stain....all bragging and infantile methods of trying to impress and cultivate a specific image.

Your experiences in the army is where you are stuck.
Must be a seminal point in your development. Took you out of a mundane upbringing, placed you in exceptional, exciting, circumstances, but not really....because armed service is routine, regimentation of time, or how war was described by another..."long periods of boredom separated by moments of sheer terror", or something like that.
It's the 'terror' we miss in our modern lifestyles - so we seek it in movies and hyperbolic sexual affairs, or adrenaline highs and adrenaline depressing narcotics.   

I doubt you came to philosophy because you were curious about the world, or how life works.
You came to it for help, like what drew you back to Christianity, seeking a self-help manual, or insights into why you are as lonely and unhappy as you are.
What you describe as an absence of connectivity with others - they disappointing you, you disappointing them.
You pretend to be offering personal, intimate, details in all your posts, - self-assessments really - wanting others to enter your world, become participants in your life, to alleviate this loneliness, but most of it is hyperbole, inflating or deflating half-truths because you cannot bring yourself to speak of it, openly, or to admit it, to yourself.
Saying something honest would be a undesired admission.

Did you not admit that you preferred paradoxes?
It's how you escape being seen - word-games rather than clarity, because you fear that what you see will be too much for you to handle.
You, like most others, love the idea that you are incomprehensible, that human beings are so complex that nobody can know anyone.
All is a conundrum, you find relieving.
You make a point out of contradicting yourself, to substantiate this desired escape. 
To not be fully seen, or to remain too contradictory to be comprehended, offering you the leeway to cultivate that image.

It works, when you are dealing with mediocrity.....in other words for the vast majority of the people you come in contact with, but fooling them can only be fulfilling for a short time.
So, you come on-line looking for a challenge. A higher and longer term fulfillment.
But, how long can a relationship based on exaggerations and secrets last, and how fulfilling can it be when you know its based on inflating and deflating the facts?
You innately know the image is a poor reflection of who you truly are, even when it convinces some naive other.     

What you expect from 'philosophy' is a solution, or access to people of a 'higher' caliber to give you what you cannot find on your own.
It's why most of your posts are banter, and charming personal anecdotes cultivating an image to attract the 'right' kind of people....particularly of the feminine kind.
But the image is not really you, but how you wish to be perceived, and so you attract the needy, seeing in the inflated image a compensation for their of deficiencies, or hypocrites, seeing in you themselves.
You're not, really, extraordinary, in this respect.
The majority approaches philosophy in the same way.
For healing.
For solutions to their personal issues.
For validation of what they've already decided is the 'truth', or a truth they can live with.