Now that I’ve caught you with the clickbait title,
Basically every post has included some form of toxic self-hate, minus one or two mentioning exercise. While I do like being able to confront these in the first place, the purported goals and name of this community gives people who are giving the exact wrong advice far too much credibility, and the last thing these people need is a comment with the most upbears regurgitating individualistic self-help concepts at them.
If we’re going to keep this sort of community around, I suggest doing some serious research and basing it off of DBT, and integrating serious critiques of CBT style mental healthcare and improvement.
I am just some random nerd who is terrible at self-improvement at general, so I understand taking this with some serious doubt. But I just had to get this off my chest.
Thank you, WithoutFurtherBelay
Reading this again I think it’s interesting there doesn’t seem to be any active effort besides someone like bell hooks in making a conception of self improvement that moves beyond both a conformist perspective and an individualistic perspective. I swear bell hooks is the only person I’ve ever heard of who’s even somewhat attempted to meld the revolutionary mindset with “improving oneself”.
I do think there is also something to be said about how old manuals like those on honor or virtue are toxic in their own way. They presumably would also have their own simplistic explanations for why people don’t act “optimally”, and therefore their own toxic regimens to “fix that”: Think Stoics suggesting people basically just change their mind about something being bad whenever they dislike a situation (contrasted, of course, with Epicureans that just assume people enjoy horrific things because why wouldn’t they 4head?). I haven’t read any of those old manuals, and I’ve already been burnt today already despite how early it is for me on not reading into subjects, so I could be completely wrong.
I’m tempted to think the main issue with most self-help or improvement is that it assumes a significant amount of agency on the reader, that they have immense power over themselves , even though their behavior is also heavily influenced by their environment. Or to put it in way more blatant terms, there doesn’t seem to have been a seriously materialistic approach to achieving one’s goals made yet, besides the abstract, wide ranging goal of Communism.
I believe unironically that any example of laziness or poor character implies an unexamined systemic or medical issue. Granted, it could be an issue we are physically incapable of even identifying with our current level of understanding, but saying that it’s just a case of Poor Character implies it comes from literally nowhere which makes no sense
Strong agree. You have to wade in with an established set of beliefs and at least some kind of understanding of the bs of the time to sort through all the horrible stuff and find the good bits.
Nah, you’re right on. A lot of ancient self help stuff is written for aristocratic men who were often expected to be total bastards. So like, advice on how to be resilient and steadfast in the face of hardship can be good sometimes, depending on what they’re actually suggesting (I’m a big fan of what I see as a sort of positive, you can’t choose your fate but you can choose how to meet i fatalism in Norse mythology), but a lot of it was trying to train men in to do awful things.
Again, strong agree, and it’s rare to find ones that get away from that. There’s a bunch of sayings I like in, like, the Havamal for instance that are shit like “Look, you need to treat your friends well because without friends someone’s going to stab you in the back during a sword fight” or “Take some time to watch what’s going on before you give an opinion bc that way you’ll have a better grasp of the situation” but they make it sound cool.
Yeah, again, strong agree. Laziness almost always turns out to be a language barrier, or ADHD, or stress, or whatever. “Laziness” isn’t a real thing, it’s just a way to justify social and soemtimes physical violence against people who don’t conform. Poor character is often more about different cultural expectations or people being judged for neurodivergence or disability.
This is probably something we, like leftists around the world, need to fix. We’ve got scads more biomedical research to pull from, we know a lot about behaviorialism, like the science and psychology of behavior, we know a lot more about physical exercise, allergies, food, all that stuff factors in to what the olden days were called “Good character”. And we’ve got the last 10,000 years of people trying to puzzle this out on paper to draw from.