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damn, i'm finding this LLM response actually useful. It feels weird.
Doesn't read like an LLM response. Its sentence structure is more sophisticated and it elides commas where I expect an LLM wouldn't.
The Self-Help Trap: What 20 Years of "Optimizing" Has Taught Me
41–50 of 79 posts
Re: The Self-Help Trap: What 20 Years of "Optimizing" Has Taught Me
#42Re: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:
A critical footnote got lost in the shuffle. In his later writings, especially notes compiled in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature from 1971, Maslow added a sixth level above self-actualization:
Self-transcendence
It means going beyond the self—seeking connection with something greater, such as service to others, nature, art, or the divine.
Why is it important? Well, for one thing, as Tony Robbins put it at an event long ago: “‘I, I, I, me, me, me’ gets to be a really fucking boring song.” But it’s not just a boring song; it’s dangerous to your health. Self-help [can be] dangerous precisely because it easily becomes self-fixation.
Re: The Self-Help Trap: What 20 Years of "Optimizing" Has Taught Me
#43This post strikes me as immature. Ask an older person like your grandfather what they think about “self help”. And ask like you believe they are wiser than you, not some doddering fool from “another time”. Look, we’re all slaves to our childhood learnings. But you can change and learn to think in a new way—in a way that’s you. Just be you.
The author is one of the biggest self-help book writers. Perhaps his self-help book sales started declining and he decided to pivot to some kind of anti-self-help genre.
That's a cynical take. Ferris has been for years now focusing more and more on things like meditation and psychedelics. Plus he is super loaded and his podcast is huge
Re: The Self-Help Trap: What 20 Years of "Optimizing" Has Taught Me
#44This post strikes me as immature. Ask an older person like your grandfather what they think about “self help”. And ask like you believe they are wiser than you, not some doddering fool from “another time”. Look, we’re all slaves to our childhood learnings. But you can change and learn to think in a new way—in a way that’s you. Just be you.
The author is one of the biggest self-help book writers. Perhaps his self-help book sales started declining and he decided to pivot to some kind of anti-self-help genre.
Exactly, the whole website is super PR-marketing wise, and a pop-up promotes his book with a "laid-back" portrait photo of himself. I think people are smart enough to find actual evidence-based self-guiding if they look at wikipedia or so .. we do not need 100.000 self-help gurus or as the tide turn gurus first promoting the former, now switching to the opposite.
Re: The Self-Help Trap: What 20 Years of "Optimizing" Has Taught Me
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everybody is adventurous; each in their own way. This is actually a common statement people make with whom I feel bored. I call it the "evasive defense". Me: "Let's fly to Paris tomorrow!" People: "Nah, I'm fine just doing what I did the last 3650 days. I wonder how I deal with this issue I have with my boss at work. That is enough adventure for me." Me: "Trash the job! Let's start a startup!" People: "Nah, that is n…
Some empathy for other people would go a long way.
I agree that more empathy would enrich mundane interactions.
But I also think it is worthwhile to look for other adventurous people with whom I can share my own interests.
Re: The Self-Help Trap: What 20 Years of "Optimizing" Has Taught Me
#46> Self-help is dangerous precisely because it easily becomes self-fixation. In my self-help journey I came across meditation which ultimately led me to altruistic-based practices. So can't relate. > A focus on improving the self usually first requires finding problems with the self Oh I got in there the other way around. I wanted a few things out of life socially speaking but society was blocking me somehow. So I wen…
There's a lot of "I"s in your paragraph there. I think it's worth it to be ok with everyone being a little bit in the same boat of wanting to self-help, then becoming enamored with buddhist ideas, then grappling with everyday being just another human. In whatever order. I'm sure you mean well but just kinda irked me that you immediately put in the effort to "nope can't relate"
I think that hearing other points of view is important.
I see time and time again that posts insinuate that there's no other point of view, and I think that highlighting one perspective is enough to show that this (as in the article) isn't some mathematically perfect piece of advice.
Re: The Self-Help Trap: What 20 Years of "Optimizing" Has Taught Me
#47Self-help books are based on first telling you you have a problem, then selling the solution. I get that some are actually correct, but the industry as a whole can only be sustained by inventing new problems and/or making sure newer generations learn about existing ones.
Ferris is a self-help book author, and while I kinda get where he's driving at, it also feels like he's just doing the same thing again, but meta - overconsumption of self-help book is like a dog chasing its tail (or a snake giving himself a BJ?), here's a solution. I'm somewhat surprised it's just an affiliate link blogpost instead of a whole book.
Re: The Self-Help Trap: What 20 Years of "Optimizing" Has Taught Me
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author is one of the biggest self-help book writers. Perhaps his self-help book sales started declining and he decided to pivot to some kind of anti-self-help genre.
That's a cynical take. Ferris has been for years now focusing more and more on things like meditation and psychedelics. Plus he is super loaded and his podcast is huge
The existence of this domain is to sell books to you and I don't think it's a cynical take. It's the norm.
Re: The Self-Help Trap: What 20 Years of "Optimizing" Has Taught Me
#49Hm - even an essay knocking down self-help has the same flaws that self-help itself. It tries to reduce everything to a couple of vague principles and clal it a day. It 100% reads like something written by someone who's been consuming self-help advice for 20 years. Useless.
Re: The Self-Help Trap: What 20 Years of "Optimizing" Has Taught Me
#50> the point was never yourself. > It was never the pyramid. > It was never the optimization. > It was the people around the fire.
These self-help people are always looking for one liners which are true in every aspect of life, and reality isn't like that. You can see this in how often 2 different deep-truth one-liners contradict each other.
On this post he says "it was the people around the fire", in other posts you have to find happiness in yourself and not depend on others for your happiness.