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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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Under no circumstance does individualistic self-help concepts being incorrect mean that you are helpless. Working towards bettering one’s life so you’re happier is something that does not require blaming oneself, and it requires an understanding of the material circumstances that are affecting you in the first place.
A holistic understand of improving oneself doesn’t imply complete helplessness, but a more pragmatic perspective, where you change your environment to then change yourself indirectly.
It doesn’t mean that it is impossible to change yourself, it means that it requires actual analysis and not just Willpower
Right, this is the issue, but I don't think self-blame is baked into the name self_improvement.
There's a feedback loop between your thinking and behavior and your environment, it's chicken and egg, it's a dialectic. Where to intervene in that loop is a case-by-case question. Sometimes you do have to start with the thinking and behavior. More often it'll be a mix of both environmental and internal work — you start with whatever changes you can make immediately in either category, and then work up to other changes that might have prerequisite conditions. Whatever your situation, often the first step is to decide to make a change, which is an internal decision that comes from deep inside you and is an expression of agency.
Your body is a system, not an anime power you can make start up by thinking hard enough. Sure, “willpower” is sometimes required, but laziness is not real. That’s the root of this.
Of course it’s a chicken and egg situation. You have the ability to change your circumstances in small ways BECAUSE it’s a chicken and egg situation.
It isn’t, and I’ve already (implicitly, sorry I’ve been bad at clarifying this) ceded that we shouldn’t change the name, but our general cultural conception of self improvement is pretty individualistic and that’s what people think when they hear those words.
you're reducing it to a question of willpower, but people can have maladaptive beliefs, attitudes, and patterns of thinking that can get in the way of them taking steps to change their situations. I don't think that's such a silly idea that you can compare it to an anime powerup.
Yes, true, but people don’t really seem to be talking about that when they talk about motivation or most individual perspectives. I do not disagree that those are factors at all.