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this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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Self Improvement
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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.
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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.