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Self-improvement is embracing your messy, imperfect life

theguardian.com

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Re: Self-improvement is embracing your messy, imperfect life

#51

Post by dazc »

127 wrote: post #15
yesenadam wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nowhere in life change happens without trauma. I found that shocking to read. It's a million miles from my experience of life. That sounds horrible. Perhaps you've found it true, but please stop saying it like it's true for everyone, a fact of life. I can't even imagine how you could believe such a thing, well, it works for you or something, I guess. Also, saying that then complaining in the same breath that someon…

It depends on how lucky you are. Some people just have to work hard to get where they want to go. Some are just handed everything they need.

Some are just handed everything they need yet still fail. I started out in life with advantages, although didn't realise it at the time. Went through a series of dead end jobs, a failed business, a few failed relationships, ended up on the street.

My real luck came along when someone gave me a chance to get back on my feet and start afresh with the benefit of all that experience and the knowledge of what can happen. I realised that, previously, I was just unmotivated to do what was necessary to achieve anything in life, I was coasting along and not really trying.

I do OK now, I work hard and make sacrifices, don't waste money and invest all my spare income. Not exactly rocket science, I just wish I had started sooner.

Re: Self-improvement is embracing your messy, imperfect life

#52

Post by noduerme »

I made it two weeks without drinking more than a half bottle of wine a night. Then I finished my project and now, yeah. Fuck it. And fuck the bbc and the guardian as well. They just contribute to the general feeling of everything you could possibly think of having already been controlled for. We're living in a desperate state, ladies and gentlemen. Almost all of our autonomy has been taken away. You can't travel to another country, or get back, and at times you can't leave the house. Wherever you go, you're surrounded by the same stew of idiocracy that's exploded from being an American backwoods hillbilly sociopathic mania into a generalized trend where everyone is constantly expecting the apocalypse, all the time, everywhere. And you can't escape the idiots because there is literally no other outlet except this ludicrous online world, largely run and managed by botnets, whose primary purpose is to keep you agitated and off-balance most of the day. For what reasons we might speculate but it would behoove no one to claim to know. Nonetheless, that's there. The ever-present, constant, unceasing, morning-to-night traumatization of you and me as individuals by this machine of fear and panic and rumor. Which even if we don't subscribe to, gets to us because our boomer parents subscribe to it and call us and tell us the latest insane ideas they've fallen victim to. And we're living as a really traumatized group of people now. I feel it and see it all around me. Literally everyone I know has PTSD as a result of this pandemic.

So thanks a lot, Guardian, for telling us how embracing my messy life is a form of self-improvement. Seriously, go fuck yourself.

Re: Self-improvement is embracing your messy, imperfect life

#53

Post by noduerme »

dasil003 wrote: post #9

This article resonates with me, but I don't think it would have when I was in my twenties. It's the kind of thing you come to realize after longer years as an adult and you see patterns play out in radically different life contexts, and then you start to grok who you really are in ways that aren't available when you've been an adult for less time then you were a child. What I've learned about procrastination and esca…

No, that's just called learning how to socialize when you're semi-autistic. It's not and shouldn't be a rallying cry for people who can't/never get their shit together.

Re: Self-improvement is embracing your messy, imperfect life

#54

Post by thenerdhead »

I love self-improvement. There’s many in this camp of “you’re perfect the way you are”. I don’t agree at all. I believe more in Kaizen, the idea of changing for the better. It’s similar to the ship of Theseus paradox where you slowly replace each plank on the boat, is it the same boat?

Knowing about your short comings is the key. Knowing you are lazy will help you be more productive. Knowing you’re depressed will help you break the cycle.

People typically say they wasted certain years of their lives. I would also say the same thing. I was stuck in terrible loops of internet addiction and playing too many video games while doing the bare minimum at work.

These cycles didn’t break themselves because I embraced my mess. They broke because I became aware of them in comparison to my larger life goals of getting married, having kids, getting a prestigious tech job, and retiring early.

Many of those behaviors still cast shadows of my life many years later. But the secret to it all is that I can become aware of them when they happen and disrupt my pattern to put me back on track towards my life goals. That way I’m not a total waste man most days, and do something worthwhile instead.

Re: Self-improvement is embracing your messy, imperfect life

#55

Post by bsrhng »

smokel wrote: post #49
blackbrokkoli wrote: post #40

Honestly, if I learned one thing about self-transformation it is that it's quite personal, so I don't want to call the author wrong per se, but the article does not reflect my experience at all. The times when I experienced the most drastically successful change when I realized that there really is nothing stopping me from entirely changing my identity and self if I so desired. Obviously, this only works for things a…

Firstly, I love your approach and if it works I am happy for you! However, how can we be sure that a person can actually change even some parts of ones identity? It seems to me that most people assume that our brains can be molded at will, simply by repeating some intended behavior. I'm not saying that this is impossible, but I highly doubt the extents to which this works. There are so many variables at play, that it…

Your diffuculties arise from the way you talk about the problem.

You ask how you can be sure that a person can change their identity? Your question already presents a mechanism that naturally doesn't work. What is implicit in what you're saying is that changing somehow involves taking something out and putting something completely different in. As in taking out one set of desires and replacing them with some other desires. That is certainly not what happens.

To change some of your desires is to understand them and understand how they arise. That's very related to how you talk to yourself and what expressions you use and where they implicitly lead you. That is the way you speak imposes a certain view of the world, what it consists of and what is possible within it. (That's not to say that you would suddenly be able to fly but there is a whole human domain that you might start discovering from the inside as a human being rather than looking at yourself from the outside as a collection of organs).

Re: Self-improvement is embracing your messy, imperfect life

#56

Post by feanaro »

noduerme wrote: post #53
dasil003 wrote: post #9

This article resonates with me, but I don't think it would have when I was in my twenties. It's the kind of thing you come to realize after longer years as an adult and you see patterns play out in radically different life contexts, and then you start to grok who you really are in ways that aren't available when you've been an adult for less time then you were a child. What I've learned about procrastination and esca…

No, that's just called learning how to socialize when you're semi-autistic. It's not and shouldn't be a rallying cry for people who can't/never get their shit together.

I don't understand your comment. What are you saying "no" to?

Re: Self-improvement is embracing your messy, imperfect life

#57

Post by jamescostian »

smokel wrote: post #49
blackbrokkoli wrote: post #40

Honestly, if I learned one thing about self-transformation it is that it's quite personal, so I don't want to call the author wrong per se, but the article does not reflect my experience at all. The times when I experienced the most drastically successful change when I realized that there really is nothing stopping me from entirely changing my identity and self if I so desired. Obviously, this only works for things a…

Firstly, I love your approach and if it works I am happy for you! However, how can we be sure that a person can actually change even some parts of ones identity? It seems to me that most people assume that our brains can be molded at will, simply by repeating some intended behavior. I'm not saying that this is impossible, but I highly doubt the extents to which this works. There are so many variables at play, that it…

> Being able to change wants and desires at will however seems almost unattainable.

Operant conditioning makes this very attainable. Depending on how long you've had these exact wants and desires, how much you've thought of them, and what exact conditioning program you design, you may even get results in a matter of hours (unlikely though without spending a ton of time on it, it usually takes me at least a week). Keep up (and space out) conditioning and you eventually won't need it.

Initially you probably won't go from "I always would/wouldn't want to do this" to "I always wouldn't/would want to do this" - typically, you'll have super short periods where you have your old want/desire, and then you rapidly switch to your new want/desire. But it doesn't feel disingenuous or anything - it's a natural switch due to the conditioning. Over time the period with your old feelings shrinks. Combine that time with varying conditioning (maybe a different-feeling conditioning program, or even something random that happens in your life and conditions you), and you may be able to entirely eliminate those short periods.

Here's an intro: https://www.verywellmind.com/operant-conditioning-a2-2794863

Re: Self-improvement is embracing your messy, imperfect life

#59

Post by noduerme »

feanaro wrote: post #56
noduerme wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's just called learning how to socialize when you're semi-autistic. It's not and shouldn't be a rallying cry for people who can't/never get their shit together.

I don't understand your comment. What are you saying "no" to?

"No" - the parent poster's obsession with their own neuroses which drive feedback loops toward overthinking their own (previously mentioned) neuroses, are not a sample from which the parent can draw conclusions, even if those conclusions encourage them to be a bit less neurotic. Self-analysis is great, but when it becomes a form of auto-immune disorder, the entire vehicle - where self-analysis becomes central to one's understanding of self - needs to be jettisoned, because it's fucking selfish, childish and stupid.

Re: Self-improvement is embracing your messy, imperfect life

#60

Post by noduerme »

ibn-python wrote: post #12
dasil003 wrote: post #9

This article resonates with me, but I don't think it would have when I was in my twenties. It's the kind of thing you come to realize after longer years as an adult and you see patterns play out in radically different life contexts, and then you start to grok who you really are in ways that aren't available when you've been an adult for less time then you were a child. What I've learned about procrastination and esca…

Wow you described exactly what I'm starting to feel in my late 20s. Especially the point about neurotic feedback loops.

Don't be like this person. Literally, throw away all the video game machines you own and take an extremely long walk in Tibet if needed. This is a cautionary signal. If you relate to this, you're going to throw your life away.

I was responding to a sub-thread but it got deleted before I could finish. This is what I think about this:

Someone said: >> it could be hurtful to people to attempt to archive by getting sucked into cycles of attempting to break a neurological predisposition

That's rather well put.

From the outside, some people are an abyss, permanently dominated by this type of cyclical thinking, in which getting out of the abyss creates new and interesting forms of drama. And the attraction of that gravity well to newbs who haven't e.g. been long-term alcoholics or locked up for suicidal tendencies, is precisely the fact that it gives one a temporary satisfaction (even worse, maybe, a way of lording it over others) of having addressed a particular neurotic trait, while substituting a load of other negative traits in exchange.

Nothing good ever comes out of the speech where one has repressed a particular neurosis by coming to terms with it in some crystalline fashion. It's a speech either designed to scam others, or to scam oneself.

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