Ask HN: What mindset change made the biggest positive change for you?

> The second, and much more egregious crime, is that he’s a climate change denier....

He does not deny climate change, he rejects climate change catastrophe fear driven measurements of questionable efficacy with known unquestionable negative side effect for many many people.

AKA things like the west moving their emissions to poor counties in order to "green" their economy. Or things like raising energy cost in an attempt to incentivizes people to use less energy. The problem here is that this affects the poor people proportionally more. It may reduce emission from the "rich" a tiny bit but it pushes million of people globally into poverty.

Ofc anyone is entitled to disagree with him. Many do in fact think the end justifies the means. Many people think it is totally acceptable that some people wont make it but "saving the planet" has the higher priority else we are all not gonna make it. Unsurprisingly Peterson as a psychologist has the focus (or bias if you want) on the individual therefore it would be morally wrong to push someone into poverty today to solve a problem of the future.

Again anyone can disagree with him on that but calling him climate change denier isn't disagreeing its just slander to avoid the complex moral problems around the topic.

"Everybody thinks I'm an asshole" -> I think I'm an asshole. (Is something that I've realized about myself)

I don't know who Andrew Tate is (some sort of conservative political commentator, I take it? no thanks...), but kickboxing hugely improved my life for the better. And for what it's worth, some of the best fighters in my class were women. They don't have the size and brute force advantage of men, and had to hold their own with skill, agility, and relentless training. They were also seemingly much healthier mentally/emotionally.

Fitness is a necessary (but maybe not sufficient) component of a healthy life. It does not replace meaningful relationships or good emotional skills, but it's a great starting place for sure! Especially for techie types that don't get out much

The main one, perceiving successful people and material success as not being bad/morally unacceptable. I would have said 15 years ago it's really specific to growing up in Russia or the like, but I think it's getting more and more relevant in the current zeitgeist in the USA. That material success means a person is probably some sort of a criminal, a swindler or at the very least got lucky, is the general sentiment in Russia, and to be fair in the 90ies and even more so in Soviet times it was... more justified than in most modern societies.

However, aside from being mostly false, it's a really harmful and useless mindset. I actually changed my mind via a circuitous route, by reading some self-help book (I don't even remember why I would have done that, very unlike me then) and getting way into GTD/self-help/lifehacker for a year or so. After course correction back into sanity, I was left with an implementation of GTD that works for me, a real job, and generally a much healthier perception of work and success. It did wonders both in my actual life but also made me way happier. Combined with, from my anti-social times, still not caring too much about status symbols and such. It's great.

Second and weirder, and much later, one, is (mostly) embracing absurdism/nihilism. For a long time after I realized there's no god, I couldn't fully accept humanism cause it seemed arbitrary, so the fact that life has no intrinsic meaning whatsoever really disturbed me. I wonder if this is the stage of irreligion where people who don't just ignore the question get into ideologies and spiritual woo... if you don't do that, there's almost like a semi-dark valley you have to cross when you know intellectually life is utterly meaningless, but you haven't really internalized it so you keep looking for meaning. If you get stuck there, you will probably be less happy than you would be otherwise, but if you keep going you come out on the other side much happier and without brain fog of looking for "meaning". I wouldn't claim I came ALL the way thru, but definitely a ways.

Glad you’ve not started beating women (I imagine there are zero recommendations for that in his videos) and am glad that you got pumped to start things.

Sometimes all you need is a push or a kick in the butt to get in motion.

Please just keep in mind that many people “feel bad” for reasons beyond their control including trauma, depression and more - and need different kind of help.