Amarna Forum

As a mostly coherent continuation from my last thread about character ideals: A thread about the topic of self improvement - both about meta-questions and on the actual question of how and why to achieve personal goals.

Two things struck me about my last thread. One was an observation about the thread itself: starting from my input, responses focussed on skills and knowledge, and neglected character traits ("I want to know x" vs. "I want to be wise"). Such traits were often implicit. This specificity may be incidental, but I also think it can be demonstrative of the way we think about our characters. It's hard for me not to link this to pop psychology in some way - most of us have some template in their minds on how to "change yourself". I'd like the discussion of this template to be part of this new thread.

The other thing that came to my mind was that in my days spent on imageboards (I'm 30-ish now, talking about when I was 16-18), self help threads were omnipresent. I think I mentioned in another place already that I spent a significant part of the time between then and now completely offlline, so the difference in attitudes towards this topic was rather stark to me. The prevailing wisdom on imageboards then has become mainstream by now. Peterson and Rogan, just to name two influencers I'm familiar with, are well known for varieties of "start lifting, eat whole foods, get sun, get laid". Meanwhile, the progeny of the chan-subcultures has come to question that approach from several angles. Most notable to me are the following: 

- Why would I want to fit into this society? What is success according to their terms to me?
- Why would I want women/sex/marriage? How does PUA help with finding true love?
- How does any of this advice help with problems imposed on me by economic/social tidal forces? How does bodybuilding help with being jeremylocked?

In short, in 2009, every other thread on /b/ was about "that feel when no gf". People were fat or on drugs or otherwise unhealthy, and looking to find a method to improve their well-being, and were rather open about the fact that this improvement would be measured in how much more pussy they would get. Today (at least on twitter), it would seem people are much less unhealthy, care much less about holes and much more about philosophical considerations (like meaning). 

From my own experience, one obvious explanation for this shift is that while the above approach does work to make you feel better, those changes are internal, while many sources for depression and dissatisfaction are very much external. 

For guys who are depressed or just feel unsatisfied with their life, the fact needs to be underlined that what I'm just going to shorthand as the "Rogan solution" is actually a solution, to a degree. If you get your diet and sleeping under control, start some sort of exercise regiment and use all of this to bring some structure into your life, you *will* feel much better and will be much better equipped to attack whatever challenges your life brings with it. This is not to take away from the valid criticisms stated above. I'm stressing this because I was definitely doubtful about that fact when I was depressed - you tend to not believe people who say it can get better. What is usually understated when this sort of advice is given is the timeframe - in an realistic setting, you won't change all your habits in a few months and stick to it. Usually, you take big steps forwards, small steps back, and do this dance over a few years. What's of course also understated is how insignificant these problems seem when you've solved them.

I'm by far not as online as I was years ago, so I'm prepared to hear that I'm misreading who has which view on this subject. If so, I hope the questions on their own are interesting enough to be discussed. I visited 4chan for the first time in years just now to see if I could find any self-help threads, and it was all porn, so in a way, not much has changed since my last visit there. 

So summarising:  
Attitudes towards self help or self improvement have changed in the online spheres that I visit, even though there is a lot of cultural consistency otherwise - I would like to hear your opinions on why that is, and also what your evaluation of the subject of self help is currently, and how it has changed.

Third/Fourth paragraph comment: the most unique xenomasculine idea I've encountered on the internet was andrew anglin on wangtown. paraphrased "why do you need a woman? You realize you are actually craving respect or recognition from women? Why? Your mother traumatized you to inflict this need upon you." This feels like a take that propagates by way of great resonance with a small percentage of men. I haven't seen it posted anywhere else except anonymously. I doubt the trauma stuff, I think there is a natural sexuality to making a woman feel strong emotions. (obvious evopsych pair-bonding argument)

There is also the "nothing more cucked than having a daughter" meme which only makes sense in a regime where the father cannot demand a bride price. It is particularly interesting to see guys like Nick Fuentes say that they don't want daughters only sons while the notable recent trend in the population is to prefer having girls, maybe for the advantages afforded them.

pretty sure /adv/ is supposed to be all self-help but it doesn't have the mindset or frame of earlier self-help stuff

Hamamelis Wrote:...

"tfw no GF" never died, just mutated. E-balkanization simply sorted different classes/types across different regions of the internet. On 4chan, it moved from /b/ to /r9k/ and incel forums. Twitter attracts egoists and it auto-segregates for different classes of people, with different kinds of problem. All of this is to say... 

Quote:People were fat or on drugs or otherwise unhealthy, and looking to find a method to improve their well-being, and were rather open about the fact that this improvement would be measured in how much more pussy they would get. Today (at least on twitter), it would seem people are much less unhealthy, care much less about holes and much more about philosophical considerations (like meaning).

...that I do not believe that this is correct. Neither statistically, nor in practice - if there was a change here, it was the shift from millennial optimism/despair to zoomer nihilism. The former retained a stronger spirit of hope that things would get better, and the latter has bleakly accepted a life of misery.

---

As to your main point, self-help works. Rogan and Peterson are about 80-90% right on what they say regarding it. It is good for people - but it is not good enough. 

Fundamentally, men (on average) lack meaningful friendships and grounding within a (real, non-online) community of men around them. To his credit, BAP has done good work in highlighting the importance of that, but it's one of those bits of knowledge that people struggle to actually implement. Though it is not always easy, one can find friends well at university or graduate school. However, around when you turn 25 or so and start going through several moves, it becomes very difficult to rebuild real communities in new places. 

Unfortunately, being fit or even very charismatic is usually not enough. My friends (at least those mostly between 25-40) who are such have no problem finding women, but they're still often deeply lonely - even when they have girlfriends/wives. This is the hard question that post-Peterson self-help would need to address - and it is hard because the issue is fundamentally cultural, rather than personal.

(11-28-2023, 01:10 PM)Zed Wrote: [ -> ]Unfortunately, being fit or even very charismatic is usually not enough. My friends (at least those mostly between 25-40) who are such have no problem finding women, but they're still often deeply lonely - even when they have girlfriends/wives. This is the hard question that post-Peterson self-help would need to address - and it is hard because the issue is fundamentally cultural, rather than personal.

This is basically why I'm making this thread - the lack of discussion that I've seen around this topic is in stark contrast to problems people seem to have. We talk a lot about Männerbünde, but I've never once seen workable advice on how to make friends with other men, let alone how you could leverage charisma to become the leader of a group larger than 2 (in the context of the armanite Cosa Nostra, or even just a neighbourhood nightwatch).

Discussion around this is comically naive. Most of us are repulsed by normies, yet the common quip is that you should just join some sports club or similar to forge strong bonds. "Start an MMA fight club with 20-30 of your closest friends".

Zed Wrote:Fundamentally, men (on average) lack meaningful friendships and grounding within a (real, non-online) community of men around them. To his credit, BAP has done good work in highlighting the importance of that, but it's one of those bits of knowledge that people struggle to actually implement. Though it is not always easy, one can find friends well at university or graduate school. However, around when you turn 25 or so and start going through several moves, it becomes very difficult to rebuild real communities in new places. 

Unfortunately, being fit or even very charismatic is usually not enough. My friends (at least those mostly between 25-40) who are such have no problem finding women, but they're still often deeply lonely - even when they have girlfriends/wives. This is the hard question that post-Peterson self-help would need to address - and it is hard because the issue is fundamentally cultural, rather than personal.

I agree, and I would say that these sorts of group-scale problems are not just challenging to solve, but also lie entirely outside the domain of self help.

Self help is at odds with helping communities, most obviously because the time a person spends in the gym/studying/waging, they aren't spending time with others. Even when a self help advice regimen makes the recommendation that you should go outside and interact with people, the justification for this is centered around how building relationships with others can benefit you personally. This is how an imprisoned feces-flinging zoo ape thinks ("I do this hand signal, human gives me orange"). Solving the problems discussed in the OP requires dreaming bigger to escape the local maxima of individual self-interest, as well as requiring each person take on some social responsibility for the success of their community.

When enough people view the world from this narcissistic self help frame, communities become commons to be plundered and cannot serve the social needs of their members. In such an environment it is wasteful to sacrifice resources to improve a community unless you receive proportionate returns, and so everyone becomes even more deprived and more desperately scavenges for hedonic scraps.

Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, etc. are socially harmful even though their messages are generally true. Their advice "works" for individuals in the sense that they help an individual to become stronger, but this messaging worsens the cultural problems that this thread correctly identifies as more significant. Even if self help was neutral and objective (e.g. some PUA stuff), normies (many brown, many low IQ) will only understand the parts that benefit them. They have no intellectual curiosity so will never question their beliefs and develop self awareness on their own. It can lock them into sociopathic modes of behavior, especially if they start to notice it "working" for them. And self help messaging is not merely neutral information, perhaps more significantly it's also the conformist emotive urging that normies require to make any decision: Andrew Tate assures each and every student of Hustler University that it's safe to be a retarded degenerate asshole now and if anyone calls you out you can just ignore or yell at them and nothing bad will happen to you I promise.

Therapy is the other more mainstream fang of this, criticisms of the social (dis)order are instead only heard as individual psychological complaints. Help the self, not the society. "Self care" (with or without ironic subversion) is when you disregard the interests of others and do what you want with no moral oversight.

Despite all this, it is hard to blame a friend in conversation if they have chosen to defect in today's horribly desolate social environment, since there is so little cooperative coordination. The idea of creating a nation where people help one another out of a common expectation of group reciprocity seems to no longer be on the table, even though we had this as recent as a few decades ago. Deporting all non-Whites from the US would be a good first step to rebuilding social trust. Today, all that is left of the social contract between individuals of different races is limited to whatever happens to be legally enforced by the state. After this is achieved, perhaps the incentives will be in place for the emergence of a healthy culture that informally holds individuals and institutions accountable for theft of intangible social value, but who can say, maybe religion is also needed.

TL;DR: Self help ideologies are not just insufficient for solving today's most serious social problems but play an active role in perpetuating them. The types of solutions that are necessary are ideological and political solutions that will demand the individual stop helping themselves and start helping their nation.

Hamamelis Wrote:...but I've never once seen workable advice on how to make friends with other men, let alone how you could leverage charisma to become the leader of a group larger than 2 (in the context of the armanite Cosa Nostra, or even just a neighbourhood nightwatch)...

The nature of male friendship makes this very hard to do isolation. For example, a highly charismatic man can attract male followers, and one can find a sketch of how to do that in the history of any modern cult. One cultivates a certain image and employs a certain kind of language. The problem is that a follower is usually not a friend, though you may deeply care about a follower - you cannot open your heart to them in the same way.

The best mid-scale alternative I have considered is a reformation of secret societies. Of course, they cannot be too secret, but they have to find a way to bridge online social-formations into the real. It's a difficult project, but I think it is workable given modest resources. Forums like this are potentially prototypes of this, but to transition these formations to real life - one has to find ways to overcome doxxing concerns.

Aside from that, I would generally advise that it is a good idea to start pushing - at least on a personal level - that it is fine and normal to move to a different location to live closer to friends. I think men have an issue with this. Perhaps it feels weak, gay, or needy to them --- Hard to say. Yet the same men will move across the country for a new job that pays 10k more. Why are they willing to move across the country for a job that provides a marginal increase in their living conditions, but unwilling to consider the possibility of moving to live in closer proximity to the online bros? If a man is single, this should not be an issue. Obviously, women make this more complicated - but you can sell them on it by the promise of building a lifelong community. 

So my advice: Talk that up with your friends, who likely share your anxieties, and build a workable plan towards creating an IRL community. More of them probably desire it than you know.

Anthony and Meredith are my butlers.

Zed Wrote:

Hamamelis Wrote:...but I've never once seen workable advice on how to make friends with other men, let alone how you could leverage charisma to become the leader of a group larger than 2 (in the context of the armanite Cosa Nostra, or even just a neighbourhood nightwatch)...

The nature of male friendship makes this very hard to do isolation. For example, a highly charismatic man can attract male followers, and one can find a sketch of how to do that in the history of any modern cult. One cultivates a certain image and employs a certain kind of language. The problem is that a follower is usually not a friend, though you may deeply care about a follower - you cannot open your heart to them in the same way.

The best mid-scale alternative I have considered is a reformation of secret societies. Of course, they cannot be too secret, but they have to find a way to bridge online social-formations into the real. It's a difficult project, but I think it is workable given modest resources. Forums like this are potentially prototypes of this, but to transition these formations to real life - one has to find ways to overcome doxxing concerns.

Aside from that, I would generally advise that it is a good idea to start pushing - at least on a personal level - that it is fine and normal to move to a different location to live closer to friends. I think men have an issue with this. Perhaps it feels weak, gay, or needy to them --- Hard to say. Yet the same men will move across the country for a new job that pays 10k more. Why are they willing to move across the country for a job that provides a marginal increase in their living conditions, but unwilling to consider the possibility of moving to live in closer proximity to the online bros? If a man is single, this should not be an issue. Obviously, women make this more complicated - but you can sell them on it by the promise of building a lifelong community. 

So my advice: Talk that up with your friends, who likely share your anxieties, and build a workable plan towards creating an IRL community. More of them probably desire it than you know.

Some of my deepest connections are from meeting people on the internet. I have an account on x where I occasionally post, but I mostly just talk to people in group chats and such. If you can move to a city, it’s easier to meet up. I live in nyc. There are many guys here who are tapped into this thing. I have never regretted meeting someone offline. Talking about this stuff with someone who gets it really changed my outlook.

Regarding doxxing, as long as you’re not an idiot you should be fine. The accounts who play up the risk a lot have a job AND try to make money with an anon account. If you don’t use it to make money, your follower count is less than ~10,000, and you don’t regularly antagonize the left, the risk is very low. Obviously don’t ever associate your face or name with a handle. There’s close to zero chance you would lose your job if there’s not direct evidence an account belongs to you.

I think the biggest danger to this thing we do online is becoming a split person. An online self and offline self. Surely getting doxxed is a possibility, but carrying around a separate personality that grinds away at the other self will do psychological damage over time. And I don’t think this is a hard problem to solve. For me at least, the internal tension resolved once I met a few people who are tapped in.

(11-29-2023, 04:52 PM)BillyONare Wrote: [ -> ]Anthony and Meredith are my butlers.

(me on the right)

Zed Wrote:So my advice: Talk that up with your friends, who likely share your anxieties, and build a workable plan towards creating an IRL community. More of them probably desire it than you know.

I don't want to focus this on me, but I'm not particularly interested in a community - I made those examples because these are goals often stated in our sphere, but nobody knows how to get there. Even in this post, you're doing the same thing. "You have friends, they share your anxieties, create a community". That's not a plan, that's handwaving.
I barely have friends, I have some people to hang around with. Some of them share some of my philosophy, in a minimal overlap Venn diagram. All of us have very varied life designs, there will be no "community", there aren't even common projects. I don't think this is a very unique situation.
The question is how to connect to likeminded people and make the connection last, any further enterprises come way down the path in my view.

kythustra Wrote:Some of my deepest connections are from meeting people on the internet ... There are many guys here who are tapped into this thing. I have never regretted meeting someone offline. Talking about this stuff with someone who gets it really changed my outlook.

I agree with this, seems like a practical way to find people. However, as twitter and other platforms are mostly used by people from big cities in the US, the success rate is somewhat different outside of those places. I have had some contact with people from my country over twitter, so it's certainly a valid approach.

Hamamelis Wrote: I don't want to focus this on me, but I'm not particularly interested in a community - I made those examples because these are goals often stated in our sphere, but nobody knows how to get there. Even in this post, you're doing the same thing. "You have friends, they share your anxieties, create a community". That's not a plan, that's handwaving.
I barely have friends, I have some people to hang around with. Some of them share some of my philosophy, in a minimal overlap Venn diagram. All of us have very varied life designs, there will be no "community", there aren't even common projects. I don't think this is a very unique situation.
The question is how to connect to likeminded people and make the connection last, any further enterprises come way down the path in my view.

It's less hand-waving than you think. I don't know your circumstances, so I can't necessarily speak to them. But by becoming a passionate vector of an idea, one naturally attracts others who are interested in it. I've often spoken of similar potential-projects relevant to my own circles, and I've had numerous friends, and sometimes just people I 'hang' with express an interest in being a part of it. As in, friends I talked to a few times a month suddenly taken by the idea of being part of such a project. I made no effort to try to evangelize them, they simply heard the idea and felt a resonation, and asked "What can I do to be a part of this?". Not just trannies, but regular heterosexual men who are lonely, and desire more meaningful friendships.

This may read like magic to you, but I promise that it is not: Simply being a person who talks loudly about the values of friendship, loyalty, and connection - who can speak candidly about the isolation and loneliness of our age, not in the voice of a disconnected substack article, but in a voice that draws from personal experience and shows your heart completely.  Such words will attract others to you that covet the same ideals, but who might lack the strength to speak loudly or to give voice to their loneliness with a view towards conquering it. This will, in time, bring you deeper friendships. This is the real magic of BAP and it is even the real magic of one or two other prominent people on this very forum. In some this skill is innate, but it is also something that can be cultivated.

In any case, when it is taken to it's logical extreme, the outcome of such a process will produce cult-like formations, but you do not necessarily *have* to take it that far.

Self-help has been a massive force for all of civilization's time, in one form or another.
It will work as much as the convert is willing to give to it. The student cedes and ceases to exist, becoming an instrument of the instructor. No, this is hyperbolic, but it is also one part of it.
Still, it is a small part.
The conventional wisdom: Health, Wealth, Sex. It works, nobody "feels bad" with these things guaranteed. Boredom may still strike because it is dull, and it is dull. Stakes are required, as men are all gamblers. Gambles are best when they are life or death, this is the most exciting. There are precious few avenues for such, and many of the existing ones involve fighting a war on x or y's behalf when that x or y is rather fake and gay (colloquially.)
The leap of faith is such that it cannot be written or expressed. Its nature? One, concurrent, fragments...I don't know.
Recall the stakes, and think of it this way. A man requires a rush. A rush can be found in drugs and peoples and foods and exercises yes. But a rush is best, most overwhelming, when it is the man turned into a drug for [i]something else[i]. It is easy to mock this of course, it is not in existence, it is across a chasm. It may be such a chasm that one cannot leap across it. I don't know, I am still here on the side that most are on.
Still back to the topic: Most I know who pursued self improvement succeeded and stopped somewhere that felt comfortable. They are comfortable there, despite troubles around, they are happy to stay. This is likely the majority of men. But for the small minority, impossible to place within a group (although likely to be the usual suspects in large part), this is simply not enough.
Or as the Sister's of Mercy song goes: Some people get by. With a little understanding. Some people get by. With a whole lot more. I don't know why. You have to be so undemanding. One thing I know, is I want more.
Eldritch makes the classic mistake here as well however in...wishing for company. You cannot drag people across the chasm, and you will simply leave them where they are when you leave. Even people in the business world acknowledge this (certain net worths create a chasm along these lines.) And the business world is rather tame compared to that other world.

I suppose I am at odds with what most are considering. Plundering the commons is the only way to make what is called a mannerbunde. Starting an MMO fight club with 20-30 friends is a good step. It is simply not something that most people can do or will do. If one is a natural follower, it is not their job to attempt to lead.

Or in the shortest formulation: Simply allow yourself to be subsumed by that which appears strongest. This is really what most should do, since it is the nature of fulfillment. The student ceases to exist.

There are far better men than me, and perhaps one of you is one of them. Or perhaps not. It is no shame either way, it is simply the way of things. If we play probability, I could construct a model where the probability of rapid change is right now or 1,000 years away. Like all gambles, the true odds are 50/50 to your heart. The chasm remains where it is and will not go, it will always call people towards it.

As I've said in various other contexts, this self-help stuff all ultimately falls short because it's not the individuals who need help, it's society. The two paths open on an individual level are the petersonian "Fuck you stop being a spoiled entitled lazy shitbaby and work harder, man up" until you go insane from benzos (because you are depressed due to sheer chance of brain chemistry and NOTHING ELSE) or you can plunder the commons and be a nigger, and push society further along its slow trajectory towards soviet union/PRC levels of social trust.

A helpful thought exercise to come back to is, imagine you are speaking to dbdr, or Jeremy. What do you say? How do you improve this life? If we turn them both into gymmaxxed dropshippers have we solved the social problems of our time?

anthony Wrote:As I've said in various other contexts, this self-help stuff all ultimately falls short because it's not the individuals who need help, it's society. The two paths open on an individual level are the petersonian "Fuck you stop being a spoiled entitled lazy shitbaby and work harder, man up" until you go insane from benzos (because you are depressed due to sheer chance of brain chemistry and NOTHING ELSE) or you can plunder the commons and be a nigger, and push society further along its slow trajectory towards soviet union/PRC levels of social trust.

A helpful thought exercise to come back to is, imagine you are speaking to dbdr, or Jeremy. What do you say? How do you improve this life? If we turn them both into gymmaxxed dropshippers have we solved the social problems of our time?

The term self help is somewhat charged, and I knew that when I started the thread. The association with gurus and scammers is notorious. I'd be open to using a more fitting word for "strategies to improve your well being and achieve personal aims", but I don't know any. Mabye I shouldn't have put Peterson in the title, my idea was that everybody was familiar with him (or Rogan) and that his brand of self-help could be exemplary for both the merits and limits of the *general* approach. 

But on the other hand, you seem opposed to it beyond the unsavoury connotations. I have seen this said in other places as well, so I think it's worth adressing: You cannot easily distinguish boomerish bootstrapism from any kind of advice that requires you to "get a move on". Cut the insulting paternalism from such advice and you're left with some variety of "give as much effort as you can, apply yourself", which is really all you can ever do, but it's also often exactly what you should do, but aren't doing.

So I strongly feel that  's life would be improved by "self help", as has mine been improved by it. To call it "gymmaxxed dropshipper" is a strawman. And to ask of it to solve "the social problems of our time" is far beyond the intended scope. And clearly it wouldn't magically make everything about his life great, as it hasn't for me - but exactly those limits are the topic of the thread, afterall. 

Zed Wrote:Simply being a person who talks loudly about the values of friendship, loyalty, and connection - who can speak candidly about the isolation and loneliness of our age, not in the voice of a disconnected substack article, but in a voice that draws from personal experience and shows your heart completely.

Again, why I feel this is handwave-y is not that I don't believe that this works, it's because you skip the steps that get you there. You need people to listen to your passionate speech, what if there's nobody there to listen? What if they are there but not in the slightest receptive to any of your ideas? To illustrate how this might go differently: in my personal experience, the people who were attracted to me talking from the heart about society and my place in it were exclusively women, while men were either indifferent or actually repulsed.

EDIT: I want to add in a working definition of what I understand as "self help", or "self improvement", or whatever your preferred term is, for later reference. I will put it here because it's my latest post, but I really should have put it in my OP. 
I understand self help as a general attitude towards your own life, in which you understand yourself as the subject of a constantly ongoing self-experiment. The goal of the experiment is gaining understanding about yourself and the world and improving your conditions through that. The method of the experiment is to achieve control over as many factors of your life as possible and keeping all or most of them constant while varying one or more of them to learn the effects of such variation. The idea is neither to find a final, ultimate way of life (as you cannot control all relevant factors), nor to find a solution to the problems of other people (even though many lessons may be applicable).

(11-30-2023, 10:13 PM)anthony Wrote: [ -> ]As I've said in various other contexts, this self-help stuff all ultimately falls short because it's not the individuals who need help, it's society.

Anthony Zizek.

(11-30-2023, 10:13 PM)anthony Wrote: [ -> ]or you can plunder the commons and be a nigger

Yeah I would hate to plunder the commons, because that would turn me into a NIGGER

(11-30-2023, 10:13 PM)anthony Wrote: [ -> ]If we turn them both into gymmaxxed dropshippers have we solved the social problems of our time?

Being shredded and rich makes you happy, yes, the fact most people can't do either is the problem. It's a harder problem than e.g. racial demographics, something which can be dealt with in a fortnight. You could make the argument that what Dbdr suffers from is societal in origin, and in a way it is, but what he complains about is being unable to get a job, and being unattractive to women.

(12-01-2023, 06:47 AM)Guest Wrote: [ -> ]

(11-30-2023, 10:13 PM)anthony Wrote: [ -> ]or you can plunder the commons and be a nigger

Yeah I would hate to plunder the commons, because that would turn me into a NIGGER

Yes. It would. Niggers do that. 

Quote:

Quote:If we turn them both into gymmaxxed dropshippers have we solved the social problems of our time?

Being shredded and rich makes you happy, yes, the fact most people can't do either is the problem. It's a harder problem than e.g. racial demographics, something which can be dealt with in a fortnight. You could make the argument that what Dbdr suffers from is societal in origin, and in a way it is, but what he complains about is being unable to get a job, and being unattractive to women.

dbdr is not his best possible self because of systemic social failures which sabotaged his upbringing. Some kind of corrective force could be applied now, but he's only ever going to be so attractive, which is equipping him to play a bad game which is getting worse all the time for everyone. And financially, a bad game that's getting worse all the time. The more people try to cynically find any leverage they can in these fields the harsher they'll get, and the worse everyone's outcomes will get, even in the face of more and more effort. This is why plundering the commons makes you a nigger. Because you cannot see the consequences of your actions.

You can say "yes but I can't stop this so I might as well" and I can't stop you any more than you can stop me calling you a nigger for it. This is where we stand until something greater changes.

Guest Wrote:You could make the argument that what Dbdr suffers from is societal in origin, and in a way it is, but what he complains about is being unable to get a job, and being unattractive to women.

He's also surrounded by depressing people.

Peating, sleep and exercise are all mostly ways to manage energy levels (Peating can arguably be more, if you go beyond treating it as self-help, that is). But why do people need to increase their energy? If you haven't answered that question, I'm not convinced you've actually helped them. You can do all of these things and still end up dysfunctional and unsatisfied, especially if you yearn for much more in life than some baseline of physical contentment and social acceptance, as most of us do.

Which is to say, if the goal is individuation, I don't think you can draw up a program for how to accomplish this, logically. I can give plenty of suggestions and advice. I can say that I would like to see people "consuming" more, in the sense of deepening and refining their desires, whether reading books or playing games or watching movies (normies don't actually do these). But you have to want these things in order for them to create depth, and I can't teach people how to want things.

This is the issue with Jordan Peterson as well. His "rules for life" are a manual for how to negotiate between different neuroses. "Don't actually desire anything, follow these rules. What you really desired was Chaos or Order, defined as being a nigger or a wholesome chungus niggercattle, respectively." His reading of Jung is completely overshadowed by his normie masochism as well (the "archetypes" are just metaphors for social adaptation), and I'm not even especially fond of Jung.