Self Improvement

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.

This is literally the exact reason I made this comm. You can call it "revolutionary_behavior" or "how_to_be_a_better_communist" or "flurgle_bungle", the name of the thing doesn't change its character. To be able to do revolutionary behaviour, you must go through the self. There's no way to interact with the world other than through your own actions. Communities are made up of a lot of individual people, ideally all pulling in one direction. A community where all of those people eat healthy and vegan diets will be better than one where they do not. In the absence of a state-driven or society-driven initiative to propel these changes on a big, structural level rather than the individual level, we don't really have much choice but to take things into our own hands, at least in much of the imperial core where such large projects are generally anathema. Positive routines and good habits are important to establish, regardless of the framework in which you are doing them. Eating healthily and becoming fit is fairly necessary to be able to outrun cops or, if it comes to it, do a Long March. Your own eyes must read books (or listen to others) to learn information about how to organize a revolution.

It might be self-improvement, but you're not really doing it for the self, you're doing it so you can be a better and more effective revolutionary, and when these revolutionaries are combined, they can change the country they're living in and ultimately the world. Obviously if you don't believe in vanguards then your mileage may vary.

I don't want to cede the "self-help" or "self-improvement" ground to the right-wing by uttering the talismanic phrase "Organize your community and unionize" when like, you're not even approaching a mental or physical state where you could attempt to do that. I want to create a new ground, call it "self-improvement", and then use communist framings of those ideas that are actually helpful. I am monumentally sceptical of the monolith of self-help bullshit that has been spewed out over the last few decades and think 99% of it is useless garbage invented by CEOs who don't do any actual work, and grifters who are just trying to sell a product. There is no real salvation through the pathway of "merely become more disciplined and read five books a month titled like 'The 50-1 Method: How To Become A Better Boss." But like, going on daily walks and shit does actually help me and others, exercise makes me feel better, dressing nicely makes me feel more attractive, etc. We should take what is salvageable and ditch what is not.

I completely support your effort to get DBT in here over CBT, and other such methods that are disconnected from that massive tsunami of grift that is the modern self-improvement community.

I suggest doing some serious research on CBT

collectivist ball torture

Damn bro, i just posted about wanting to be in the garden more

If were doing a struggle session on how this comm will look and work, I see some of you confusing your doomerism/self-hatred/personal failings for criticism of doing good things for yourself and neoliberal ideology.

Welp it looks like we have run into the dialectical paradox of needing to practice self-acceptance in order to change our lives. A real DBT both/and moment.

Agree. The California Self-Help paradigm tends to be individualist, lacking or opposed to materialism, and focused on concepts like "willpower" and "discipline" that modern studies in to human behavior suggest are questionable at best.

Historically, the concept of "Self Help" that we're most familiar grew out of New Age movements centered in California after the hippie orientalism of the 60s and early 70s collapsed. There were many ealier, both modern and ancient, ideas about improving the self. Many of these, like the old rennaisance Italian concept of Virtue, or the modern Pashtun concept of Pashtunwali, have strong social and community components as well as individual aspects. The point isn't just self-actualization, but rather becoming what is expected of you in community (which, depending on the culture, might involve some pretty toxic stuff).

But, point is, the American self-help concept is often very individualistic and anti-materialist and should be approached with great caution. It also infiltrates western concepts of psychological therapy to some degree, with many therapists focusing far too much on the individual and not being able to really place the individual in a community.

Stuff like, idk, bell hooks, steps outside that paradigm with a much more community oriented analysis of life in the modern west. For men, men-ish, and amab people, for instance, bell really digs in to how western masculinity is a whole process men+ are forced to learn under threat of violence, and how un-making that harmful masculinity is a process that requires a community. She's real smart and worth reading.

There's a lot of other stuff you can look to; Old world manuals on how to be a warrior and a good citizen, which are often very different from the Prussian militarism and 20th century Fascism we're familiar with. Lots of old manuals on civic duty and shit. You have to discard a lot of bad stuff about violent, reactive honor, but there's some good stuff to find too. Likewise, there's real value in breaking down why and how we're alienated and oppressed in society. I find it extremely helpful to be able to recognize when my problems and limitations are the result of social and economic violence, or the result of biomedical problems like ADHD, so I can separate those issues over which I have limited control from notions of "poor character" or "laziness".

Edit: Also, ROWING! Hexbear trireme club when?

I hate to say it, but we do need more role models who kind of have most of their shit together. Otherwise who is going to follow us? We need more people who are at least looking as jacked/healthy as Hasan Piker because yes, the halo effect is real. I hate to say this, but if the only thing people think about when they see leftists is some skinny guy getting decked by a proud boy, we're in big trouble. And yes I hear this shit from normies quite often. I know its propaganda, but it's working.

yeah a lot of comments sections on here are central

i was thinking about maybe posting about my issues but it doesn't seem like we're going to generate anything actionable, the support structures i need don't exist, and i don't need dipshits telling me to use willpower i don't have.

i had these same thoughts but was too cowardly to post. seeing someone belittle themselves as 'immature' for being unemployed and living with their parents, or for smoking weed, just reminds me of my own toxic internal monologue loops i work so hard to avoid/ignore/break. its toxic individualistic bourgeois framing of systemic issues. i'm mostly happy with my unemployed stoner life, a little lonely but it works for me. every time i try to get a job and be a real adult i end up having a very embarrasing public mental breakdown. i literally cannot handle the social and psychological stresses involved in most jobs, and frankly its ableist to imply that its just because i'm 'lazy' or 'immature' or 'not a real adult'. when you take fire at yourself, you might hit anyone standing behind you.

I think that's a good idea. Not the comm replacement, but the commitment to providing coherent and generic advice and guidelines for self-improvement.

In my experience, self-improvement does start with working Maslow's hierarchy of needs as goal posts to define self-improvement. That's a good foundational start. After your physical needs come social needs, and social needs and skills are subjective.

Because they are subjective, this is where advice begins to branch off and become helpful to detrimental, and often become unreliable. Older communities of self-improvement across the internet, like reddit, often just limit the scope of the advice.

I suppose if you were to start from zero, we prioritize : Hygiene, grooming, clean room/house, exercise, healthy diet. Then having personal goals, professional goals, and relationship goals; the complications arise in these goals by the very processes of time causing attrition of effort making consistency an art of discipline that most of us will fall onto a spectrum of diminishing returns if we treat it like a chore; our labors must become habit.

I think part of what could benefit this comm is the cultivation of encouraging and providing intellectual foundation for healthy habits.

literally lobsters pulling each other down smdh

Of course this comm is full of toxic self-hate. We’re leftists on the internet.

Very disappointed by the advice I received (90% was telling me to dress better, other 10% was telling me to go out to cliched places) the other day when I both did a bit and also revealed a little kernal about myself and wishing to be romanced/pursued someday. It was more about how docile and boring and unromantic and patriarchal women are here, not how I'm UGLY YOU FUCKS. I DRESS WELL WITH FLOWING, CURLING LOCKS.

Anyway, not mad about it, just disappointed.

Support this post proposing a name change to anti_self-help_aktion

When this comm does book club put Laziness Does Not Exist by Price in the top 10 first books, please I beg you.

This is a good idea. This should be a com about building value and worth through community and organizing.