Too much Self-Help!

You are consuming too much self-help and you aren't putting in the work that is needed to truly improve yourself. Self-help is a great tool to learn different ways of thinking and escape that victim mentality a bit, it helped me but after learning about all this stuff about the brain and how it works, how we can build good habits, and what habits are good, and what is doing you harm without you knowing. You acquire so much knowledge and learn that you can use in life and it's very useful to know. BUT when you are learning so much theory and not doing anything with that knowledge then you are just wasting your time and that is what I was doing the whole time and caught myself procrastinating by trying to search for a new method of doing things that I know need to be done and in the end, I don't do anything. I don't change at all but I think I have changed its an illusion because you get a fake feeling of accomplishing something just by watching or reading self-help content. Be honest with yourself and look in the mirror, tell yourself how you are not doing anything and that you are gaining weight or that you don't apply any knowledge you attained. Maybe it's time to stop doing self-help and help yourself. There is a different way of doing things and if you really need to read 20 books on doing something and still don't have an answer then find it yourself. Look at philosophy, it's great to read books and see the minds of great people but at some point, you need to stop following them and create your own path. You stop thinking for yourself and you are making yourself hopeless because you don't have the tools yourself to do it. While growing up my family liked to do everything for me and wouldn't let me struggle, I don't say that I am not grateful for their affection but now that I don't know how to deal with struggle myself and that I don't know how to do some tasks that I should know just because they didn't let me learn it for myself. Hope you understand what I am trying to say to you.


“Set your course by the stars, not by the lights of every passing ship.”
Omar N. Bradley

“I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning to sail my ship.”
Louisa May Alcott

“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there someday.”
A. A. Milne

“You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it.”
Paulo Coelho

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
Douglas Adams

 

I also need to limit my time on youtube, listening to music a lot and watching things instead of doing things. I don't want to play games anymore because I use them to escape life. Used to call it self-improvement for a really long time but now I use self-help and yes it's problem when it makes you feel like a terrible person telling you what you are missing promising that they can fix that problem you didn't know you had. Exploiting people's feelings and insecurities for money, I mean it's an Industry for a reason and they make a crazy amount of money. Love the animation you attached!

 

Thank you for your recommendation, I am using an extension called UnHook and removed everything even comments and all except the search bar on the top. We are both in the same fight brother, wish you the best!

 

I can't agree more with you when it comes to effort and all the time that you spend working on something but people don't know about that because it's done behind a closed door. Often we forget how awesome we were and what things we have done in the past and we should remember that the next time we feel discouraged. Again a very good point you have there and I guess for me too in the fantasy world and mostly the mythology of the ancient civilizations from ancient Greece, Nord mythology, and other tales that show you human psychology thru a story. My guess is that those Myths were created and shared to teach people how to live back then thru stories.

 

Self-help is not bad but there are people like David Goggins for example that didn't read any book but went deep into his mind and found himself and understood some things and knowledge that is "lost" in today's world because we don't read books from great minds of the past. We don't read philosophy, Nietze was one of the Philosophers that like Goggins went deep into his mind and found a lot about the human mind, some of the most famous Psychologists were influenced by him. It's hard to be alone in the room and with your thoughts, we are afraid of ourselves, we cant look ourselves in the mirror and be honest for one second. I do recommend you watch channels like Academy of Ideas it's a Philosophy and Psychology channel that has some great videos that are easy to understand and are mostly hard topics. I think reading books like that and watching those kinds of channels are even more valuable than self-help and maybe but just maybe looking to seek the lives of a great man and follow in their footsteps and I don't mean modern entrepreneurs and gurus, men of the past. There are many great and "successful" people in the present day but they are mostly not honest and don't tell you the harsh truth that you need to hear and they suffered and found meaning in that suffering, today its mostly pleasure and we have more free time than any of our ancestors. People used to create art and had hobbies as food for the soul but now we want to capitalize on everything and when you start making money off of the time that is "your time" then things really do lose meaning. There are studies that I heard of where they took three groups of kids and they all liked to draw things, the first group was paid and got an external reward from money, the second group didn't get anything but maybe praise and were driven by their intrinsic motivation to create art and the third group got a money reward hut it was random and they didn't know where it was coming. The group that did art just because they liked it did good, the group that got money at random occasions and dint expect and dint have in mind any external reward was said to do the best and the worst was one that expected the pay, they did good art but weren't as satisfied and after it, they lost the love for creating. It's a sad way to kill that spark. You again might think what does that have to do with self-help well it does because it's all about squeezing the most and optimizing to the extreme to be the most productive person you can to do as much as you can but that is honestly nothing else but TOXIC.

Self-help is teaching you how to become a really rich person and create a business, how to optimize your time to do more and get more, how to be better with girls/boys and how to seduce them, how to get laid and get any person you want, make yourself charismatic or learn how to read other people, learning on how to manipulate to get what you want or ways you can change your appearance to become better, how to be the "alpha male" and make other guys respect you and girls chase you, looking for tricks that can change your mind fast and make you do the things that you don't want to do but you have to, how to "reprogram your brain", tricks and secrets that other people don't know, how to be a superhuman, learning and knowing stuff that other people don't know to get ahead in life, other people on the internet that you don't even know their lives and they don't know your lives but they give you advice to live a better life, people selling you crap to make money on your misery, mistirical forces that will attract whatever you want, trying to fix your broken self, ways to remove bad habits and all the strategies they can give you, things you should not do anymore and avoid or things that you need to do everyday and will change your life.

I know because I WAS THAT PERSON, I searched all those things and wanted to be the most powerful, charismatic, alpha banging chicks everywhere and don't know what to do with my money and power type of guy that has a meaningful life and knew the secret to life that nobody else knew but down here on Earth things weren't like that and to first rip myself a new asshole I would like to say how selfish and evil was that and don't know how could I think of myself as a good person things like that, how could I justified wishing those shallow things that I criticized so much myself. I need to be honest to myself and see how unrealistic I was, there were some complexes that I didn't realize I had. We really need to do the work on ourselves alone and yourselves we could use resources online but we have to do the work ourselves because we know ourselves the best and if we don't we are the ones that are tasked with finding who we are and where do we want to go in life and you cant search that thing on google and get an answer just for yourself.

All these thumbnails and the clickbait titles and knowing in the back of your head that there were so many fake gurus caught using people for money and scamming, there are great channels out there like coffeezzilla if I typed it correctly but I am sure you will find his channel on the youtube. They don't help you for free, you eighter watch their videos and they hook you to watch more and more creating them "passive income" every month and creating the lifestyle they are faking, and if you are one of those that paid for self-help books and paid thousands of dollars for seminars and tips to become whatever they said then no wonder the industry is making so much money. Why would a millionaire share secret on how to become one if it means that he would create competition for himself and besides that why would somebody that has so much money pay for a book if the first have enough money and second wish to help you so desperately because there were in your shoes or so they say? There are rare and to be honest, I would say extremely rare cases of people that share knowledge and would help a complete stranger without gaining anything from it.

 

I can be really hard on myself sometimes but there needs to be brutal honesty towards myself and the ways I lie. But at the same time, I don't want to beat myself for no reason, when I really have done something good then I need to give credit where credit is due. I don't know many things and life is maybe hard for me now or harder, not to make you feel more empathetic for me but to say that my pleasure and carefree life didn't pay out well in the long run. Life is suffering and you need to find meaning in suffering to find meaning life, what am I willing to suffer for? What do I want to endure? Everybody looks at that mountain peak and thinks about the view from that height but the claim is so hard and dangerous at some times that they just admire it from the far or think of it. You can think of it metaphorically or in a real-life scenario. I really like how people express life through poets, fiction like in books, myths, and legends that teach you about life.

 

Read the Subtle art of not giving a fuck and have heard about the war of art but haven't read it, don't know but I don't know if I plan on reading any self-help books anymore. There is a great book "Steal like an artist" and was thinking of reading it. But again as I said not really sure that I wish to read or consume any of that content. I think we all kinda know what we already had to do but we procrastinate by searching on the way we could do it differently or better, just do it.

 

You said everything very well and I agree, people also tend to look at others that "are not trying hard enough" or "want to say mediocre" as lazy and less worth people that will not be as good or are not as good as you who are improving on yourself and "doing something with its life". Self-Help got into my head making me think Im special for some reason.

 

I do know who he is and watched a video or two of his. I don't want to talk and think of life too much and wish to do more than I talk, don't want to follow other people such as online gurus telling me how to live my life.