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Self Improvement
A community which focusses on improving yourself. This can be in many different ways - from improving physical health or appearance, to improving mental health, creating better habits, overcoming addictions, etc.
While material circumstances beyond our control do govern much of our daily lives, people do have agency and choices to make, whether that is as "simple" as disciplining yourself to not doomscroll, to as complex as recreating yourself to have many different hobbies and habits.
This is not a place where all we do is talk about improving "productivity" (in a workplace context) and similar terms and harmful lifestyles like "grindset". Self-improvement here is intended to make you a generally better and happier person, as well as a better communist, and any other roles you may have in your life.
Rules and guidelines:
- Posts should be about self-improvement. This is obviously a wide category, and can range from advice, to finding resources, to self-posts about needing to improve in a certain area, or how you have improved, and many other things.
- Use content warnings when discussing difficult subjects.
- Do not make medical decisions solely because of a discussion you have had with any person here (e.g. whether to take or not take medications; diagnoses; etc.) as we do not vet people. All medical problems should be discussed with a real-life medical professional.
- Do not post harmful advice here. If this is seen, then please report it and we shall remove it. If you are unsure about whether it's precisely harmful advice or not but feel uneasy about it, please report it anyway.
- Do not insult other users and their lifestyles or their habits (unless they ask, I suppose). This is a place for self-improvement. Critique and discussion about a course of action is encouraged over shit-flinging. Don't talk down to people.
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.
I agree with what you said, i just want to add on something
The fun thing about the hierarchy of needs is Maslow actually made a totally lib version of what he observed from the Blackfoot nation.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-06-18/the-blackfoot-wisdom-that-inspired-maslows-hierarchy/
The First Nations perspective, which makes a lot more sense to me is Self Actualization on the bottom, Community Actualization in the middle, cultural perpetuity at the top
So, becoming/being your best self, enriching your community, and enriching your culture. This is a much less individualist way of looking at things. If you become your best self, you can give yourself to your community. Lib maslow had to add shit like "individual safety" since those aren't a given in colonizer land, but if everyone focused on community actualization - making it safe for everyone, there would be no need for those individual base needs to even be mentioned.
The other thing to note is no one actually treated it like a triangle, it's better expressed as a pie chart of needs
This is very cool, implying that having one unfulfilled need can make it harder to fulfill another regardless of it’s “position” on the “hierarchy”
Right?! it's so much better!!!
this makes so much more sense! thank you!