The Good

• Ricky’s writing is provocative rather than comforting. That is not a flaw, but it requires care.
• Strong pattern recognition across psychology, behaviour, and society.
• Willingness to revise his own beliefs publicly.
• Emotional honesty without self-pity.
• An ability to name things others feel but cannot articulate.

The Bad

• Readers can feel talked at rather than talked with. Insight without visible process feels like proclamation.
• Ricky underestimates how fragile many readers are. What feels empowering to him can feel shaming to others.
• He sometimes contrasts “people who get it” with “people who don’t”.
• Suffering is occasionally framed as primarily a mindset issue.
• Complex social or psychological dynamics are sometimes reduced into clean oppositions.

The Ugly

Binary thinking dressed up as wisdom.

Examples include:

• Growth vs stagnation.
• Truth vs ignorance.
• Conscious vs unconscious people.

At times, Ricky writes like someone who has crossed a bridge and is shouting instructions back, rather than someone standing beside the reader describing what the bridge looks like.

Ricky’s Response

I accept that this critique is accurate and I am actively working to improve both my style and my underlying logic.

Growth is messy, partial, reversible, and situational. People move forward in one domain and regress in another.

I am currently in the process of rewriting parts of my books to improve the reader’s experience, increase nuance, and reduce unintended moral pressure.

I was a complete fuck-up until around the age of thirty-five. In my early twenties I developed schizophrenia, largely driven by heavy marijuana use. I was poorly medicated for close to a decade. It was only after hitting rock bottom, a full psychotic episode that landed me in a psychiatric ward, that I began to take responsibility for my life and my failures.

From there, I started studying psychology and learning how my own mind actually worked. Insight came slowly, through repeated periods of breakdown, change, and rebuilding. Today I am stable and healthy, though significantly overweight due to long-term medication.

I want to share the insights that helped me level up my life. Only recently, however, have I started thinking seriously about communication, about how to package this hard-won knowledge so it can actually reach and help other people

If I were to make a course about psychologically levelling up, growth, overcoming, and becoming, what sort of information would be beneficial to you?