/hobby/ - Hobby

I suspect I have ADHD and am using the pomodoro technique to get stuff done. It's working so far and when I finish all my chores, projects, exercises, etc. I like to reward myself by allowing myself to watch 1 or 2 hours of YouTube, but the catch is that I only watch things in a language i'm learning so that I can get practice in that language while i'm being rewarded. It's a pretty effective system for me.

I am also doing NoFap and Noporn because I do not want to be addicted to masturbation or porn. When I get urges I go outside and wait it out because it only lasts 2 minutes and that's all I have to endure.

>>3525
Best of luck, OP.

I'm doing a lot to improve myself, but what I'm focused on right now is learning how to let go. Ever since I was a child I had a bad habit of getting tamper tantrums over having these uncontrollable daydreams where I imagine people I hate to provoke or attack me in some way or I relive shit memories. While I improved in various aspects of my life this has been an enormous psychological crux that stifles my ability to be contempt with life. It's like having demons in my head, it's torture. But I do daily meditation and informed myself a lot about emotional intelligence and how to let go. Managed to not indulge in any of these daydreams or aggressive monologues for a good while now, so it seems like I'm actually getting over this.

>>3571
>by allowing myself to watch 1 or 2 hours of YouTube, but the catch is that I only watch things in a language i'm learning
That's a very interesting idea. I'm learning Japanese at the moment, so I could try that out.

Reposting a cleaned up old /leftypol/ post

One of the biggest problem of the modern left is the open display of decadence and lack of discipline. The alt-right memes about leftoids and radlib effeminate soyboys, sexual deviants and limp-wristed middle class kids come from the most vocal minority of the left, and it's pathetic that the left delivers right-wingers more and more material to mock us with by trying to defend this, which transpires into the already problematic mainstream opinion.
In my opinion, there are several things to tackle on a personal level for success:
- Sexual deviancy and promiscuity: Who you fuck and what your kinks are belong into your bedroom and nowhere else. Get pronouns and self-proclaimed sexual fetishes out of your bio and political analyses if you want to run a serious political or philosophical account. Put that crap on a private account if you want to.
- Scruffiness: Groom yourself and work out. Get decent clothing. By treating your body with respect you will raise self-esteem and passively demonstrate that others should respect you as a person well. Moreover a healthy mind, resides in a healthy body, so working out regularly, not doing drugs and eating properly is important. Simple attire but not too casual. No punk shit either. The Communist Party isn't a Social Club, a minority or gay advocates rights group, or some shitty Mac Store where your faggot boss wears a Turtleneck sweater and asks you if you've had a good fuck; it’s a group dedicated to socialist discussion and thought.
- Behave in IRL political events: Don't show up intoxicated, don't use leftist events as an excuse to party and chill, do not aimlessly riot, whatever you do, try to outcompete your political opponents, the libs and the right-wingers, in terms of respectability: If they drink a beer and sit in a camping chair, don't drink a beer, and don't bugger yourself into a camping chair. If you want to have fun, don't use your politics and do this with your friends. Disciplined public behaviour =/= no fun whatsoever in your life. You can easily have three beers later in the evening, with your comrades, or maybe with some people who got interested in you, just don't start bingedrinking while still in a political sphere or shout shit like "kill all white people tbh XDDD fukkk I want trap dick LOL".
- Anti-work rethoric: Do not ever try to make you look like you want free shit. Reduction of the work day is reasonable, nonsense like "abolishing work" will make you look bad and it is utopian, it straight-out ignores the material conditions of production, especially the reliance of the material wealth of the western service economies on Third World labor. Wage labor isn't "work". Wage labor is a historical phenomenon. Nobody abandons the ideals of communism by working within the framework of what is materially possible - see Cockshott's schemes of organization of labor in socialism. You won't get your Star Trek replicators anytime soon unless you want to greatly reduce the living quality of everybody.
- LARPing/sloganeering: What we need is actual relevant political knowledge, we need to equipped with actual modern data and statistics, so we can uncompromisingly maintain our claim to be scientific. While defending the USSR or other socialist countries is important, it is also important to understand the current political climate and the differences of today.
That being said;
When most normies think of Communists, they think of Red Army, Commissars, "COMRADE WE KILL THE CAPITALIST EXPLOITER", and that sort of Spartan mindset of "destroy the Decadent West".
Seriously, there is such an appeal to Communism I think every Communist is initially attracted to but because there's so much in the way of Theory and History it just becomes more and more implicit until it is just fades completely at the back of his or her mind. Think of it is as a sincere - as opposed to ironic - self-awareness. If we want to "rebrand" we don't act like the Right and pretend we are something that we are not, we simply use the perception people already have about us and amplify it positively.

>>3599
> self-improvement is actually self-flagellation
fuck off

>>3584
Thank you anon! I broke down and had one yesterday but I didn't buy a pack so that's good at least.

>Agressive monologues
I think a lot more people do this then even realize it. I've caught myself doing this a few times. It's never been so prevalent that it causes problems for me though. Best of luck and I'm glad you are letting go if it was impeding functioning!

>>3599
My god… both those pics are cringey as fuck. What is wrong with long hair? The copypasta makes some decent points.

>One of the biggest problem of the modern left is the open display of decadence and lack of discipline.
I agree.

>it's pathetic that the left delivers right-wingers more and more material to mock us with by trying to defend this
Who cares? There are much bigger problems with the people he's criticizing then the fact that they defend soyboys… I think we need to address their lack of any theoretical understanding before we fix their boring senses of humor and decadent social mores (because that's really what this is, let's not delude ourselves)

>Sexual deviancy and promiscuity: Who you fuck and what your kinks are belong into your bedroom and nowhere else. Get pronouns and self-proclaimed sexual fetishes out of your bio and political analyses if you want to run a serious political or philosophical account. Put that crap on a private account if you want to.
I agree, but the fact that anyone would think this is the biggest issue facing the left is extremely juvenile.

>Scruffiness: Groom yourself and work out. Get decent clothing. By treating your body with respect you will raise self-esteem and passively demonstrate that others should respect you as a person well. Moreover a healthy mind, resides in a healthy body, so working out regularly, not doing drugs and eating properly is important. Simple attire but not too casual. No punk shit either. The Communist Party isn't a Social Club, a minority or gay advocates rights group, or some shitty Mac Store where your faggot boss wears a Turtleneck sweater and asks you if you've had a good fuck; it’s a group dedicated to socialist discussion and thought.
Yeah I agree although I am pretty scruffy most of the time. I do try to clean up when I go to political functions…

>Behave in IRL political events: Don't show up intoxicated, don't use leftist events as an excuse to party and chill, do not aimlessly riot, whatever you do, try to outcompete your political opponents, the libs and the right-wingers, in terms of respectability: If they drink a beer and sit in a camping chair, don't drink a beer, and don't bugger yourself into a camping chair. If you want to have fun, don't use your politics and do this with your friends. Disciplined public behaviour =/= no fun whatsoever in your life. You can easily have three beers later in the evening, with your comrades, or maybe with some people who got interested in you, just don't start bingedrinking while still in a political sphere or shout shit like "kill all white people tbh XDDD fukkk I want trap dick LOL".
Yeah I agree and the kinds of people he is criticizing do exist and are annoying. I don't find it to be very prevalent though, at least not in the organizations I work with.

>Anti-work rethoric: Do not ever try to make you look like you want free shit. Reduction of the work day is reasonable, nonsense like "abolishing work" will make you look bad and it is utopian, it straight-out ignores the material conditions of production, especially the reliance of the material wealth of the western service economies on Third World labor. Wage labor isn't "work". Wage labor is a historical phenomenon. Nobody abandons the ideals of communism by working within the framework of what is materially possible - see Cockshott's schemes of organization of labor in socialism. You won't get your Star Trek replicators anytime soon unless you want to greatly reduce the living quality of everybody.
Yeah I agree.

>LARPing/sloganeering: What we need is actual relevant political knowledge, we need to equipped with actual modern data and statistics, so we can uncompromisingly maintain our claim to be scientific. While defending the USSR or other socialist countries is important, it is also important to understand the current political climate and the differences of today.
Yeah I agree. We shouldn't rely on common statistical methods though. Quantizement is turning out to be a dead end in the sciences and if we can avoid going down that path we should. When these methods are applied to social sciences it just leads to these cargo cult behaviors like the null ritual. I think we should be trying to do theoretical / economic calculations geometrically or algebraically rather than primarily with statistics.

>When most normies think of Communists, they think of Red Army, Commissars, "COMRADE WE KILL THE CAPITALIST EXPLOITER", and that sort of Spartan mindset of "destroy the Decadent West".
Yeah and that's kinda based. I don't think the first world communist inclination to appear non-threatening is constructive. Lift weights

>Seriously, there is such an appeal to Communism I think every Communist is initially attracted to but because there's so much in the way of Theory and History it just becomes more and more implicit until it is just fades completely at the back of his or her mind. Think of it is as a sincere - as opposed to ironic - self-awareness. If we want to "rebrand" we don't act like the Right and pretend we are something that we are not, we simply use the perception people already have about us and amplify it positively.
We do NOT need to rebrand. The communist "brand" is very effective. Red is the best color from a marketing perspective. The hammer and sickle looks dope. It has name recognition. It has been shown to be effective in the past. I don't see why we need to stoop to the level of burgoid propoganda… the point of having a communist party is to consolidate the most advanced and resolute sections of the proletariat after all.

>>3607
How is pic 1 cringe tho? Its true. If you don't self-reflect you may swiftly find yourself careening onto a whole different path, this happens quite often considering how many avowed communists ended up being traitors (ironically Yeltsin is a big example).
>what's wrong with long hair
Its more of an over-all description of druggie metal-heads who have mush for brains.
>the fact that anyone would think this is the biggest issue facing the left is extremely juvenile.
Have you seen /GET/? Or hell the furry thread and their sheer COPE in trying to defend furries as being "totally legit" as part of a movement and that they should be appealed to. It is very apparent that sexual deviancy is a massive part of many modern leftists who attention whore their idpol as a method of gaining acknowledgement, and then justifying their egoism with a red coat of paint.
>Who cares?
Non-class-conscious workers who we are appealing to. Socialist movements can't work without the people going along with it and they'll only go along with it if they wanted it.
>I think we need to address their lack of any theoretical understanding
That's important, but The repost is addressing personal self-improvement. Reading Theory is sort of obvious.

Thanks for the decent response.

>>3603
Great argument there

>>3619
>How is pic 1 cringe tho? Its true. If you don't self-reflect you may swiftly find yourself careening onto a whole different path, this happens quite often considering how many avowed communists ended up being traitors (ironically Yeltsin is a big example).
Yeah the actual message isn't cringe. The whole format of motivational posters is pretty cringe though, don't you think? It just reminds me of what was plastered all over the walls when I was institutionalized.

>Its more of an over-all description of druggie metal-heads who have mush for brains.
Fair enough. What became of hippies and metalheads though? It just kinda passed. I think that the decadence of the left since the 1970s is a symptom of a left that is without a head (an international vanguard) not the primary issue.

>Have you seen /GET/? Or hell the furry thread and their sheer COPE in trying to defend furries as being "totally legit" as part of a movement and that they should be appealed to. It is very apparent that sexual deviancy is a massive part of many modern leftists who attention whore their idpol as a method of gaining acknowledgement, and then justifying their egoism with a red coat of paint.
Yeah this is exactly my point. The fact that the biggest issues for you are the degenerate behavior of posters on GET tells me that you spend too much time on the internet and aren't involved in IRL politics. I also spend too much time on the internet and am not involved enough in irl politics, and I could be wrong about you but it's what it kinda looks like when you say "one of the biggest problems on the modern left" and then go on to describe kids shitposting on GET and I assume twitter.

This is a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself. The real problem on the left is that we don't have an international vanguard party that can help us impose discipline on people in our ranks. I think our efforts should be focused on building an international vanguard using the tools that are available to us (ie the internet). I've been working on a party program for my vision of what this would look like and if you're interested I can fill you in. I'm a leftcom not an ML but we may have more in common than you think if you are anti-revisionist.

>>3634
>It just kinda passed
Yeah, into something even worse. At the time they were the lowest degenerates, though now by comparison they look like them make art.
>The fact that the biggest issues for you are the degenerate behavior of posters on GET tells me that you spend too much time on the internet and aren't involved in IRL politics.
Except that It's VERY present IRL too, as I know through actual political events I've either been in or observed.
>The real problem on the left is that we don't have an international vanguard party that can help us impose discipline on people in our ranks
Very true, but a vanguard is formed of people; people who are come from the left and who attempt to adhere to the discipline I was stating. Degeneracy is not the biggest issue, sure, but it is part of a set of issues that make the modern socialist movements outside Russia and the Third-World a fucking joke. I recently posted about an absolute nutcase Succ-dem LARPing as Rosa Luxembourg on their blog spot where they spend article after putrid article about how the USSR wasn't real people's movements and how it was so terrible and outright stated that Soviet people were subhuman trash who didn't stand up for themselves and their lack of support for the USSR in 1991 meant that they and the USSR weren't real socialism… She then goes on to cite Hong Kong Protests as a legitimate and SUCCESSFUL socialist protest as well as the Pussy-Parade from when Trump was elected…

I can only compare her examples to a real socialist protest in India made up of over 1 million people, spanning months and backed by people marching with banners of Lenin and Stalin, and who are even now, agitating against Modi's corrupt rule and obviously faked election.

>>3638
Read your post. Do you see why I am getting the impression that you are basing this assumption off of too much time spent on the internet?

When I go to IRL meetings of communist organizations, the biggest issues that I encounter have nothing to do with decadent behavior or whatever. Sure, there are people with died hair and too many pins or whatever, but it's not like they show up drunk or spend the whole meeting talking about HRT or whatever. It also isn't that they have bad takes on the Hong Kong protests or whatever. Most of the crypto-trots in the PSL are pretty based on that stuff.

The biggest issue I find at IRL organizing meetings is how much time and resorces people are willing to devote to preventing what is apparently an imminent rise of fascism in the United States (meme related) and how much time they want to devote to arguing about which side in the Syrian civil war they should announce their support for (as if this critical support actually accomplishes anything).

Idk, that's just my perspective which comes from working with trots and crypto-trot MLs in the US. I think we really do need to get our priorities straightened out, and I'm afraid that I don't think some degenerate larping as Rosa Luxemburg on her blog is much of a problem at all.

>>3644
>The biggest issue I find at IRL organizing meetings is how much time and resorces people are willing to devote to preventing what is apparently an imminent rise of fascism in the United States
Yeah that must be in your area, and a good point.
>getting the impression that you are basing this assumption off of too much time spent on the internet
Except that I'm comparing both?
> I don't think some degenerate larping as Rosa Luxemburg on her blog is much of a problem at all
Given that her point of view is often repeated by "leftists" I've met… it really is. Again, maybe not where you are but that's an individual issue.

Regardless your point doesn't make ME wrong, it just means that YOU know of other issues to address as well.

>>3735
I'm actually not saying you are wrong exactly, I more want to suggest that we look at this problem structurally rather than in terms of opinions and aesthetics. Is "leftists" holding incorrect opinions really a problem? Why should we care about peoples hot takes? It's only a problem if those incorrect opinions gain traction within the vanguard organization, and since we literally do not have a vanguard it is a moot point. Maybe I have a one track mind but my stance is that the reason the international left has stagnated since the 70s is that we do not have such an organization to impose discipline among our ranks. I think all of these aesthetic and opinion related issues can be solved by reestablishing an international vanguard, and they only really matter as problems if they are preventing us from doing so (which I don't think they are for the most part). The responsibility is on US as actual communists to build the revolutionary organization and we really need to stop worrying about changing peoples opinions, because peoples opinions are ultimately pretty inconsequential.

That's just my take, and I'm not just responding to you. It seems like a pretty typical mode of discourse on the internet and also in the left in general to be concerned primarily about getting everyone on the same page about whatever issue (vanguardism, discipline, professionalism, etc), and the idea is that once we are on the same page about it then we can apply it.

While theoretical unity is important I think this approach is backwards. We need an organization to maintain theoretical unity, and that unity is only relevant if we have an organization. Thus, the organization itself must come first.

Does that seem to hold up? I'm kinda just now grasping the totality of how backwards this disorganized form of sectarianism is so I could be overstating it, but it seems to me like we are in a position where sectarianism is no longer just about actual organizing issues or theoretical considerations, because it's not just being engaged in strictly in organizational settings. It has also become a way to signal things about your identity. When those of us who aren't in an actual vanguard party (so all of is since there really is none) call ourselves Leninists are we really saying anything constructive? It might be nice to feel like we're engaging in polemics and that our online or in person debates are matters of theoretical necessity, but we aren't talking about actual organizational matters as they relate to OUR material conditions. It's always done vicariously in a sense. Which side in the Syrian civil war do you support? When exactly did the USSR become revisionist? These questions are extremely important, and need to be addressed theoretically whatever the circumstances. But is convincing people that your answer is correct even consequential if it isn't in the context of maintaining party unity? And if not, what is the function of engaging in these debates as individuals and as sects? Is it just a way to signal something about your identity? Is tweeting "victory to hezbollah" any or arguing with people about vanguardism any different from idpol???

I don't know the answers. I'm just losing faith in this "overton window" model of politics and I think we need a more structural way to address the issues. I really do think it's up to us as communists and marxists to just ignore the BS, find eachother and get organizing. All these arguments in the current situation are just distractions.

>>3741
>holding incorrect opinions really a problem
>why care
Because you can't get a unified front when everyone has different opinions on what to do. It is better to streamline things and be pragmatic than ideological.
>Does that seem to hold up
Your point makes sense. It's just that the issue is individuals of various ideologies cannot be controlled and many will disregard this for "fuck you, got mine" mindset.
>we need a more structural way to address the issues.
You're absolutely correct… unfortunately we lack charismatic leaders like Lenin and Stalin and Castro who can influence people enough to focus on current problems. Ironically reddit is doing this better than any chan.
They have a giant google doc dedicated to debunking anti-communist myths of every country and this ought to free people up to discuss real world politics instead of bitching and moaning about "muh evul Stalin purges" for the 2000th time.

>>3750
>Because you can't get a unified front when everyone has different opinions on what to do.
What can a unified front accomplish if it is not lead by a party?

> It is better to streamline things and be pragmatic than ideological.
Ah, but it is better still to be SCIENTIFIC.

>Your point makes sense. It's just that the issue is individuals of various ideologies cannot be controlled and many will disregard this for "fuck you, got mine" mindset.
And if such individuals adhere to an ideology rather than a scientific approach, what will they accomplish? Why do they matter?

>You're absolutely correct… unfortunately we lack charismatic leaders like Lenin and Stalin and Castro who can influence people enough to focus on current problems.
See, this is exactly my disagreement. We don't need charismatic leaders when there is nothing for them to lead. We need to build the party and in that process we will figure out who is charismatic enough to be the face of the party.

>They have a giant google doc dedicated to debunking anti-communist myths of every country and this ought to free people up to discuss real world politics instead of bitching and moaning about "muh evul Stalin purges" for the 2000th time.
And I'm saying that debunking these myths is inconsequential and a waste of time. Well, not exactly inconsequential, just that they have already been thoroughly debunked and that info is out there to be found by anyone who actually cares about the truth. Instead of convincing normies that Stalin was good, we should be identifying who already knows this and try to get together and actually build something. If our theory is correct then that will be demonstrated through the success of it's implementation.

>>3770
> if it is not lead by a party
That's the point, nobody can agree which party ought to lead, and a single party won't arise because no-one can put aside their differences long enough to do anything worth a damn
> if such individuals adhere to an ideology rather than a scientific approach, what will they accomplish? Why do they matter?
They matter because they can still influence other people and lead them in their own direction and to spurn "us" and thus undermine any efforts other than their own. Why do you think Anarchists were crushed by the Bolsheviks after the main Revolution ended? It's a well recorded fact that they kept leading revolts and insurrections, destabilizing the country and forcing the Red Army to divide its attention between them and the Interventionists/White Guard, setting back the movement for years.
> I'm saying that debunking these myths is inconsequential and a waste of time
Its not a waste of time, to debunk them, but it is a waste of time to rehash the same debunks over and over. At this point we shouldn't engage in arguments about "gorillions" and "gulags" and just link them to pre-written debunks and continue current-world discussion, which is my point.
>we should be identifying who already knows this and try to get together and actually build something
That's what I'm saying… I'm agreeing with you m8.

>>3773
>That's the point, nobody can agree which party ought to lead, and a single party won't arise because no-one can put aside their differences long enough to do anything worth a damn
This might be the difference between those of us who believe in organic centralism and those who instead want to maintain democratic centralism, but I don't think these differences matter. Marxism is science. Whichever party correctly implements this science will be able to demonstrate it's tactical superiority through its correct party line and it's effective actions. I don't think we need everyone on the left to be in the same party or all parties to agree, we just need one party that does have the correct theory, and if it's theory is correct it will outperform all other parties and become the international vanguard. We know that there is currently no such party.

>They matter because they can still influence other people and lead them in their own direction and to spurn "us" and thus undermine any efforts other than their own.
Right, but this undermining will only be effective if our forms of organization are equally as ineffective as theirs. If we have the correct political formation then it won't matter.

>Why do you think Anarchists were crushed by the Bolsheviks after the main Revolution ended? It's a well recorded fact that they kept leading revolts and insurrections, destabilizing the country and forcing the Red Army to divide its attention between them and the Interventionists/White Guard, setting back the movement for years.
Right, and why could they crush the anarchists? Because they had a centralized party to organize the broad masses of workers into an army, where as the anarchists did not. We won't be able to silence the contemporary anarchists until we have a party, so what is the point of arguing with them when that time could be spent trying to organize a party?

>Its not a waste of time, to debunk them, but it is a waste of time to rehash the same debunks over and over. At this point we shouldn't engage in arguments about "gorillions" and "gulags" and just link them to pre-written debunks and continue current-world discussion, which is my point.
Fair enough. I don't really come across new things that need debunking though. TBH I think reading blackshirts and reds is a sufficient way for most people to be redpilled on this issue. Instead of trying to constantly defend Stalin's legacy I think we should just recommend that book and then move on. It is their choice if they want to read it or not.

>That's what I'm saying… I'm agreeing with you m8.
Great! I have been trying to draft a party program for a 21st century international vanguard party. I think some technological developments have brought the potential for certain organizing strategies to be outmoded. We still need to have IRL meetings and such to actually put things into practice, but I think the theoretical work can be done online.

What tendencies do you think could be included in a true vanguard party for the 21st century? I would be willing work with anyone who actually believes in revolutionary socialism as science rather than ideology. This may include Hoxhaists and MLMs and maybe some MLs… maybe even some Cockshott fags. I don't know if other Bordigist's would be interested in such a project since they tend to be offended by my overall positive view of ML states.

>>3775
>What tendencies do you think could be included in a true vanguard party for the 21st century
Cockshottists definitely, MLs and MLMs are definitely a positive (excluding thirdworldists). Hoxhaists tend to also have good ideas and are generally agreeable people.
Leftcoms are definitely out. Some are really good on theory but this never goes anywhere and they like to deride pragmatic socialist takes like those of Lenin, Stalin and Parenti as "not adhering to Marxism". The main direction is to approach things from pragmatic and logical positions, based on science, but also on human interaction. After all, people follow understand and like simple slogans far better than lengthy, dry facts.
>Work, Land, Bread
>From each according to their ability, to each according to their need
and other such phrases are good examples. However those are outdated and appeal more to simple workers and peasants rather than today's people.
>technological developments have brought the potential for certain organizing strategies to be outmoded
Definitely. It also creates new ones as well. >theoretical work can be done online
100% this, though it will need proper moderation since we don't want /pol/ 2.0


>We won't be able to silence the contemporary anarchists until we have a party, so what is the point of arguing with them when that time could be spent trying to organize a party
An excellent point, which is why I tend to avoid arguments with ankids unless they outright spout anti-communist myths, which is when I refer them to articles debunking them.

…It's ironic that this relatively simple conversation is already far more productive than the dozens of "what to do" threads in /leftypol/.

>>3779
>Leftcoms are definitely out. Some are really good on theory but this never goes anywhere and they like to deride pragmatic socialist takes like those of Lenin, Stalin and Parenti as "not adhering to Marxism".
Yeah this can bug me sometimes. It's the derisive attitude I don't like though. I do hold that mode of production in the USSR was capitalist so I am a proper leftcom in that sense, but I don't really see there being much common ground between myself and anarchists or council coms or even most "contemporary" leftcoms. I don't like the Stalin and Mao bashing in these circles because I see these people as the greatest revolutionaries to ever live, even if they where romantic revolutionaries who established capitalism from feudalism rather than communism from capitalism (which seems to be the ML line). It kinda leaves me in a weird spot in terms of who I can work with though since other leftcoms don't like that I have a positive view of Stalin and national liberation movements and the third world, and MLs don't like that I hold the mode of production in the USSR and PRC and DPRK to be / have been capitalist.

>Definitely. It also creates new ones as well.
I agree.

>It's ironic that this relatively simple conversation is already far more productive than the dozens of "what to do" threads in /leftypol/.
No kidding! Especially since it is in /hobby/ lol. I sorta treat /leftypol/ as a place to blow off steam rather then to have super serious discussions. I like the alt boards since it is a little slower and people tend to be a bit more thoughtful.

What do you think of this take? I sorta think we need to rethink what "scientific socialism" means today from the ground up. There have been developments in science and technology that have some drastic implications for what a science of revolution might look like. I don't mean revising Marx or Engels, and I also don't mean trying to make Marxism conform to Bourgeois science. I do mean looking at the successes and failures of bourgeois science though and thinking seriously about what we should and should not emulate.

There are people like Anwar Shaikh that are taking a scientific approach to Marxian economics, but I think this approach is revisionist and it is limited by the fact that it is being done within the confines of academia. It is based on this trend in economics towards quantizement, which is inspired by certain approaches to particle physics that are turning out to be something of a dead end (theoretically that is, they are useful experimentally).

Then there is Cockshott who is also trying to rethink socialism. I like his anti-revisionist stance quite a bit, and that he bases his theory more off of Marxism then Marxian economics, but there is also a sense in which his approach is utopian. I don't want a science of what communism will look like. I want a science of revolution! Cockshott moves away from centralization which I think is kinda problematic. It may have advantages from an economic planning perspective, and maybe there are ways this can be implemented once we have a workers state, but the revolution is not going to happen in a decentralized manner. That is just wishful thinking. Maybe that isn't what Cockshott is actually saying but it's something I hear a lot from his disciples. We need the most advanced and resolute sections of the proletariat to all be in communication with each other if we are going to develop the correct party line. Maybe this can happen over the internet, but the actual structure of the organization is not going to be decentralized.

I think if we can develop a modern science of revolution (a project which I believe Marx, Engels, Lenin, and also in some ways Mao all contributed to) I think it will be quite different in appearance then what we have seen before. I think democracy is going to be completely outmoded. If our theory is really science, then shouldn't we be able to make theoretical calculations? We already do this by hand in in our heads to a degree, and a lot can be accomplished this way, but on principle shouldn't computers be able to do part of this work for us? I know it sounds kinda crazy, and even if it is possible it is very ambitious, but think about the enemy we are up against: the technological capabilities of alphabet soup. The cyberwarfare capabilities of Israel and the US and South Korea. It's a totally different playing field then what we had in the 20th century and we have barely mastered the mediums of blogs and imageboards. This is somewhere that the DPRK is doing a very good job, but there is no way that I know of for the international left to actually collaborate with them in that regard. Idk, that's just what I've been thinking about. I'll attach the PDF of the program I've been working on, it's very much a work in progress and you might have already seen it in the /cybersocialism/ thread, but this conversation provides more context. I'm already rethinking the line on the ICP / PCI in the introduction because idk if it's realistic to say that they where ever the international vanguard, even if I agree with most of the theory they articulated. If you've got thoughts on any of this or ideas of your own to share I'd love to hear them.

>>3525
Bumping for good yet underrated thread

The obsession with "degeneracy" and "idpol" and people with "too many piercings" or the "wrong coloured hair" that posters in this thread and on /leftypol/ generally have is pathetic and pointless

Perhaps if the average hardened internet ML wasn't a cringing little boy who'll write paragraphs on an imageboard defending every spec of shit on the NKVD's boots or argue about whether this or that tiny sectarian cult movement was revisionist or based and actually managed to do some IRL work with people that didn't look exactly like them they would realise how meaningless those kinds of words and the ideas behind them are.

At best, its a kind of ignorance born of inexperience, more usually its red elitism, the poor, stupid proles won't follow us revolutionaries if we have people that look a bit different, or, Marx forbid! have unusual ways of living or seeing the world in our vanguard party,because of course, such betrodden, unenlightened workers couldn't possibly have their own opinions on what normal looks like, or if its OK or not to be not normal, at worst, its internalised reaction and bigotry masquerading as "anti-idpol" and "historical materialist" stances, with no real reasoning behind it other than "it makes me uncomfortable, so it must be idpol, it must be idealist nonesense"

I have seen more IRL work done and more people convinced by a blue-haired punk trans anarchist than I have by any Iron headed, straight laced communist, maybe if any of those actually managed to pry themselves away from their keyboard and come out into the world more people would take them seriously, and maybe they would realise that its not the 1970's, the average worker was born anywhere between the early 80's to the late 90's and don't piss and shit everywhere at the site of someone slightly different breathing the same air

>>9867
>>4920
>it makes me uncomfortable, so it must be idpol
&ltif you dislike idpol you're just closeted!
&ltbourgs supporting idpol? Nah fuck that, u just hate gays
See pic related
I know plenty of gay people who, for example, think gay parades as repulsive because it turns their private lives into a public circus and creates an association with perversion and fetishism in the public mind. The fact that capitalism pushes this as "major step in progress" and actively funds such activities should speak for itself
>no real reasoning behind it
&ltI'm just going to ignore the clear evidence that focusing on idpol as something important to be flaunted is a liberal idea created by the CIA and which actively divides people by telling minorities they're special and oppressed, rather than the actual oppression of the working class
Most identity oppression is of material basis, perpetuated by material conditions and thus can be solved through the change in material conditions by institution of socialism. Everything else is attention-whoring. Dividing focus for petty issues before revolution is counter-productive, period. Trans issues and gay issues should not be tip-toed about. There is no doubt on leftypol that gay people are humans, the debate is that, for example, "(little) kids can be gay too!" is retarded and ought be discouraged from socialist discourse.
>seen more IRL work done and more people convinced by a blue-haired punk trans anarchist
Sure, you're totally not making that up. But fine lets pretend this is real. Was their IRL work independent from their identity of being a "trans anarchist punk? If yes, then you're confirming the point; identity is irrelevant and shouldn't need to be brought up. If you start bringing it up as something important to support, then you're being just like /pol/ about "muh trannies" from the other side of the coin
>muh blue hair punk
No-one has a problem with dying your hair, so stop emphasizing that. No-one brought up punk at all considering that punk-rock is pretty well known and supported here.
>internalised reaction and bigotry masquerading
&ltPeople CAN'T have legitimate arguments against idpol, you're just hiding reactionaries and bigots! Help, help I'm oppressed!
Stop making shit up
>by any Iron headed, straight laced communist
Yeah, no honey. For every gay and trans person in America there are far more straight people. This difference of population is reflected in socialist movements as well. It is far more likely that because your supposed "trans, punk, blue-hair, anarchist" stood out, you noticed them in comparison to others.
>if any of those actually managed to pry themselves away from their keyboard
&ltur all keyboard warriurs
1) A large number of /leftypol/ users are active IRL
2) Doing shit doesn't exclude posting online considering the sheer ease of this
3) Online agitation and debate is also important in the internet age
>they would realise that its not the 1970's
LOL for all the bitching about how "its totally not idpol guyz" you chose the wrong time-period to reference, considering how most liberal idpol movements started then. Moreover said movements were confirmed to be
A) The basis of things like third-wave feminism and other related political movements today
B) Involved CIA assets who were sown to shill "cultural marxism" and "degenerate Americans"
In short, that's a bad example
>he average worker was born anywhere between the early 80's to the late 90's
You don't seem to realize that the 1990s was 30 years ago
>don't piss and shit everywhere at the site of someone slightly different breathing the same air
Woooow you sure showed us… by stating obvious facts and trying to relate the utter indifference of most people to blacks and gays and /leftypol/'s 'outrage' against blatant obnoxious faggots and deliberate snowflakes.
You're proving the point again by pointing this out, because people don't care about gays or race as long as its not some overt identity politics and isn't flaunted in public.
TL;DR: Idpol is trash and no amount of 'muh white cis leftypol!' will change that

>>4922
just came flying from the overview to call whatever this poster a retard.

seek help idpol fag.

@9879
imagine seeing a poster dismantle an argument and resorting to ad hominem buzzwords

>>3525
My reward system is fucked. I can barely feel positive emotion, it's mostly just stimulation I feel. This extends to everything, I can only emotionally bond with people who are emotionally stimulating to be around and I can barely get shit done because I receive no emotional reward no matter how well I do something, if the action of doing it isn't stimulating then the end result doesn't matter. I think I'm damaged far beyond what I could ever fix by myself and should probably go get screened for personality disorders or something.

>>4960
>personality disorders
You're probably suffering alienation.

>>4965
>You're probably suffering alienation
Well of course, CSA is very alienating.

Meditation guide I got off of /x/ from a while ago. Just posting the first couple since they're the most useful and least abstract.

>>3599
>>3741
>>3784
>>9867
>>4922
pdf related

Step 1: self-discipline
Step 2: clear goal
Step 3: Plan a proper path to said goal (mini-goals and whatnot)
Step 4: execute the plan
Step 5: If you did it, enjoy, if you failed, try again.

>Self-improvement
&ltOP image is a smoking anime girl
LOL

Hello everyone. I was just wondering if anyone has any helpful resources for improving your life but from a left wing perspective? I find all the vacuous and trite content of the 'self help' industry where it's basically just con artists pretending to be rich and successful so they can scam other people for the secrets to be rich and successful, and I can't engage with absurd alienated advice about 'being an entrepreneur', 'marketting myself', 'just visualise your BMW until you have it' and so on.

I'm very depressed and I find it hard to do anything. I don't have a job either and I live in my parents place. So any steps forward would be helpful. But for whatever reason I find it really hard to 'just do X' to improve my life. I feel like everything is fucked so what's the point in doing anything. Whilst I might understand that capitalism is a cause for many of the problems in the world including the ones that affect me, it doesn't really help me deal with it or find a way to make my life tolerable. So, is there anything that has helped you?

Clean your room lad

Midnight gospel

I was watching Midnight Gospel earlier today, it was about a guy that did Magick (an occult religion made by Alister Crowley), nothing groundbreaking, but it reminded me of my new age/spiritual past and how it relates to my leftist present. It led to the idea that the left is missing something that people have a dire need for (because current year neoliberal capitalism sucks balls).

I'm sure a lot of people feel the need for some type of ritual in their daily lives, like praying before food, saying magic words when washing their hands. Many people lose those things when they lose their religion. I was never truly religious, but I know a lot of people that seem to derive comfort from repeating small rituals in their daily lives. Of course, mandated rituals for the left is ridiculous and should be rejected. The lack of this ritualistic experience I think derives more from a need to produce something with intent. A type of mindful exercise.

Another thing that is truly in dire need in our society is self-help/spirituality. I've written before that I was looking into writing something about self-help/spiritualism for the left, but I haven't really thought about what direction to take it and I'm not really that awesome in my personal life (I am probably in a better position than Jordan Wash Your Penison was when he wrote the lobster book, but alas). There's several points here, I'll try to summarize them.

>Understanding of nature/society
Chaos and uncertainty are terrible, especially for people who struggle financially or live in unsafe environments. When there is an overarching model that encompasses reality, it makes it much less scary and makes it feel less chaotic. For example, christian good vs evil, Karma.

For the left, we have marxism as something that bring clarity to the motion of politics and society. It is incredibly holistic, much more than a lot of religions. With a marxist understanding of society, you can explain the existence of a variety of cultural phenomena.

A (perhaps dangerous) middle ground is to use marxism as the foundations to build a quasi-religious mythos. A type of animistic phantasm that is both real, but also "a social construct". I quote an anonymous author,

>Matt Christman for instance seems to have adopted a gnostic, syncretic philosophy. Capital is basically the same thing as the gnostic idea of the demiurge: a blind, malevolent idiot god that created and directs this fallen realm. It's an emergent phenomenon created from the collective activity and decisions of millions of people, but taking on an agency of its own that is apart from the desires of the owners of capital, and subordinating them to it its own will. But there is no "it." It's a nothing, just an outline of a thing. It isn't the numbers in the computers on Wall Street. It isn't even the collective will of the bourgeoisie. It's a metaphysical non-being brought into "being" by the market system, which nevertheless controls the world as though it were an actually existing dark god. We are all slaves to this terrible, dark god. This also means that if capital is the demiurge, and the capitalists the high priests and servants, that implies there must be an opposite. As Moloch was created from the sum of the will of the bourgeoisie, a blind drive towards accumulation at all costs, perhaps the true God is the collective manifestation of mankind's better nature. Where Moloch is the will to dominate, to treat other people as tools to be used, then God is our drive to cooperate, the hatred of injustice, the will to liberate ourselves and our fellow humans. Thus, the class struggle is not just physical, but spiritual. A holy crusade, and we communists are the faithful. Thus, Karl Marx was God's prophet, sent to light the way to liberation and to the fulfillment of mankind's promise. But even if we are to fail, and the dialectic is broken once and for all, we can say at least that while our bodies were slaves to capital, our minds and souls remain free and we remain faithful to the true God, the god of love and fairness, of cooperation and justice, while the minds and souls of the capitalists are in the thrall of Moloch. I think you could call that a kind of spiritual salvation.

Basically capitalism is an evil AI god that we must help defeat and bring about the "oppressed" god of socialism, via the writing of prophets like Marx and Lenin. Of course pushing this religion is borderline impossible, but if it succeeded, I wonder if it could have any effects on the support of class struggle. I am not really educated on the subject, but I've heard that there are secular rabbis that are also jewish scholars. The parallel there would be secular socialist scholars who read "the word" and further the study of socialism.

>Mindfulness, gratitude, meditative praying/meditation
Especially in this mad world we live in, where it's becoming increasingly rare to not be diagnosed with a mental issue, where even children are joining the ranks of pill-poppers, something that stops the world for a second, that gives a little rest and clarity to the mind is almost a luxury. Almost all of these practices are attached to religious or new age ideas. There was a "secular Buddhist" movement that was unfortunately tied to charlatans like Sam Harris.

Some might criticize that the practice of gratitude might remove your revolutionary potential, making you satisfied with mediocrity. But, the practice of gratitude can be really fulfilling and can make you enjoy your day to day life more. Is your anger, your hate the only thing that motivates your revolutionary desire? If you were happy, you would accept the state of affairs, Bangladeshi slavery and all? If so, your conviction to the socialist cause is more flimsy than you thought, because it is based merely on your emotions and the hand that life has handed you out.

Meditation or meditative praying is the act of easing your mind and slowing thought if only for a moment. It is a training that you do with your brain as with any other muscle. Some just take the breaks they have while waiting for the coffee to brew, just like some only do the exercise it takes to get from their bed to their desk and back. Meditation helps in reducing the incidence of these terrible mental afflictions, including media-induced ADD that compels us to grab our cellphones or do *anything* when we feel bored for more than 30 seconds. This also helps with other revolutionary habits, such as reading boring and dry theory. It helps in developing more complex thoughts because it develops the patience to construct them and inspect them.

1/

>>6487

Mindfulness helps bring clarity to the day to day activities. We're always telling ourselves stories in our heads, sometimes it 's fantastical stories of a world where our dogs could suddenly talk, sometimes it's about a conflict with another person, a stressing meeting scheduled for next week, a difficult problem that is not easy to solve. All of these narratives that are clouding are heads all day are also clouding our judgement. If we are to experience the world as it is, we must also clear the clutter that impedes our vision. For leftist, the obvious obstacle for clarity is ideology, but it is also the clutter of our personal lives that makes us see things differently. If you are hungry and tired, you will more likely misinterpret someone's tone. This is where mindfulness helps, apart from the benefits of general meditation mentioned above.

>Self-actualization/realization
This is the hardest to come to terms with. Not all religions have "enlightenment" as a core goal. New age spirituality and (my western understanding of) buddhist religion do, and it's practitioners seek to further their overarching goal of reaching it, because that's the reason they came into this world.

Capitalist ideology plays a very cruel game in terms of self realization. First it speaks about everything in terms of productivity, and of course, makes labor power a commodity, which further gets internalized as making humans a commodity that is owned by the individual. It promotes reaching self-actualization by having large quantities of money. It promotes the idea of entrepreneurship as a viable way to get out of poverty. It figuratively and literally says that your "worth" is tied to your personal assets value. Of course, people lose meaning and purpose all the time, modern capitalism is so alienating that it is very hard to see one's "value" in the chain of production, many modern workplaces have evolved to have easily replaceable human resources too. If one has pursued money accumulation their whole life, they might doubt the goal, what type of self-actualization is "having a lot of money" after all?

I see at least 3 ways that people seek self-realization through capitalism: climbing the corporate ladder (or selling better in the employee market), starting their own business, maximizing cash/asset value. I see 3 other ways that people seek self-realization outside work: hobbies, children, religion/spirituality.

As a leftist, seeing past capitalist ideology can be very depressing and demotivating. If you don't particularly enjoy your work, it can be even more alienating than it was originally.

Where is the non-ideological self-realization for leftists? There are no catch all, be all, self-realization for leftists, instead, if one looks to Marx for inspiration, creation and non-alienated work is the cure of one's ailments. I once heard someone make the remark that our hobbies are what we used to do as work before industrialization. It is true that a lot of hobbies bring us satisfaction because they are productive unalienated work, but not all hobbies are work or productive. Many hobbies have a strong component of growth (skill or knowledge), that require a lot of patience to get going, but after some time start reaping large rewards. Many hobbies also have a component of community even when the activity of the hobby is individual (watchmaking individually, but also going to watchmakers conventions for example), which contribute greatly to fulfill the need of belonging. Is it possible to make leftist activism an attractive hobby? If so, should we?

I see two core leftist related activity that act as a tool for personal self-realization. Organizing politcally is working towards a common goal, with a team, and putting in productive work. Depending on how tight the ship is run and how involved you are, people might depend on you to get things going. When you organize, ideally you bring your skills, knowledge, etc to help out. Likewise, others bring their experience to the table, which means that organizing will expose you to a myriad of different industry practices, teach you how people solve problems, how to interact with and organize people effectively, and potentially teach you useful skills that you can put into practice elsewhere (such as work or life). The learning, the unalienated work, the community, and the wider purpose makes political organizing a source of fulfillment of self-realization. My local org hosts cookouts, which makes organization much more relaxed and fun (and delicious). Perhaps the question is better phrased, should we work towards making political organizing more enjoyable? If so, how?

Another leftist activity is reading and writing. Besides the activity being enjoyable itself, there's also a sense of progress either in a book's page number or a tackling of a field of study, there are always more books to read, more nuances to write about, and new cultural phenomenon to be analyzed. It definitely helps if you don't have media-induced ADD, depressive hedonia, etc. which can be mitigated by the mediation discussed above. These are thoughtful activities that can't be passively experienced, like watching TV or appreciating bourgeois art. And it also has that component of delayed gratification, where the more one reads/writes, the more gratifying the experience becomes. Reading circles and book clubs add the sense of community that makes the sessions more enjoyable, plus it is a good experience that deepens the understanding of the read material.

>Personal development/self-help
Personal development is always rife with charlatans, and the books are always windy, self-important, and conclude boring platitudes. That said, there are books which are salvageable, one of those being 'How to Win Friends and Influence People'. It is a classic in Sleazy Salesman school, but it also contains advice that is actually helpful for building relationships. I'm sure there are more, even when they are written by and for liberals, and are riddled with liberal ideology, there are some good points in self help books that can potentially improve our lives. The need for self-help is evidenced in the ridiculous success that even second rate charlatans have had in this area.

Living under capitalism, being bombarded constantly by psychic attacks, is no easy ordeal. It is bound to leave scars and trauma, and it is also bound to leave some ideological biases we might not be aware of. For this we have the practice colloquially known as "deconstruction" of the self, self-criticism, and we have psychoanalysis/psychotherapy and other therapeutic for-pay mediums that should not be immediately discarded (if one can afford it).

The goal is to uncover traumas you might be hiding from yourself. To do this, you want to analyze deeply what discomforts you, angers you, etc. The goal is to analyze as detailed as possible why you think, do, or feel certain things, with which you might uncover unwanted traumas, ideological biases, habits, and do your best to remove them from your life.

2/3

>>6488

Of course, this is not an easy process, and we do have a tendency to ascribe bogus reasons to things when the real reason might be "I'm angry because I'm hungry and tired". Note that you do not want to victimize yourself or create pitiful narratives about why you have the traumas. This protagonism is poisonous and is also something that is best being exorcised.

In fact uncovering the reasons of your traumas is almost useless, except for potentially uncovering more traumas. We are animals of habit, what we want to uncover is not why we have traumas but what traumas we have and how to get rid of them. For example, a gay person will probably have internalized homophobia, it is good for him to do the exercise of being on the lookout and constantly try to spot himself being homophobic. The reason of the internalized homophobia here might look obvious, but don't get fooled, this hypothetical gay person might have grown up in a very supportive household or might have grown up in a backwards anti-homo city; the trauma is there, the only thing that matters is to identify it and to overcome it. I will repeat this because self-victimization is very common and counter-productive: the reason why the trauma exists is almost useless, it is a mistake to get hung up on it.

Identifying traumas is the first step, the second step is to solve it. Sometimes being constantly aware of it is enough (relevant: mindfulness), but sometimes it requires a material change in the external world to help fix trotted out thought patterns or normal habits. The change might be small, like deactivating social networks, or might need to be large, such as avoiding friends that could eventually lead to a relapse. As Zizek says, ideology is identified by putting the anti-ideology glasses ON, there are no ideology glasses to take off. In the same way, this exercise is an active process, you need to put the critical lens ON.

There is a pitfall with criticism in general that must be stated. Criticism is useless if there is no concrete action attached to it to fix or mitigate it in the future. Just knowing you have a trauma is not enough to fix it. Find the root cause that triggers the trauma (note: this is different than the reason of WHY you have the trauma), and take actions to eliminate or mitigate the root cause.

>Media-induced ADD/Depressive hedonia
To tie this back to the mindfulness and the fulfilling hobbies mentioned above, consider your patterns that might be taking your capacity to concentrate or might be leading you towards a spiral of depressive hedonia. Mark Fisher writes,

>Depression is usually characterised in terms of anhedonia, but the state I'm referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that 'something is missing' - but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle.

In simple terms, this is occupying your time playing candy crush, refreshing social media feeds, having constant doses of dopamine, but never actually feeling satisfied or particularly happy. I argue that this is in great part caused by our constant access to media, such as games, social media, news, etc. Especially on our phones. This depressive state of constant pleasure, destroys our ability to engage more deeply with the activities we do. Even gaming can be reduced to a laborious process that derives little pleasure.

>Conclusions
All of the points described above are very case dependent. Not everyone has the same ailments, not everyone has the luxury to be able to do something in their lives to solve them. The intent of this essay is to begin the conversation of finding non-ideological, non-bullshit ways to better our lives as individuals. Self-help as it exists now is a field of landmines, where there is more mines than land! It is evident that self-help/religion/spirituality fills a void that many of us need desperately to alleviate the alienating and isolating experience of living in modern capitalism and it might be a good ground to develop theory in.

3/3

My advice it to find a productive hobby and try your best to get good at it.My hobby is drawing. Everyday I try my best to get better and better. You'll probably be dogshit at whatever you do at first but conjuring up the will to continue on will make you stronger. I keep my old sketchbooks as a reminder of the progress I made.
It may sound like I'm telling you to "just do x" but building up your discipline and willpower goes a long way trust me.What you learn from trying your best at getting good you should spread to everything else in your life.It won't be easy but its worth it.

>>6485
I hope something in the long ass article I posted helps you. What has helped me is just giving in to not doing anything, but also severely limiting the "easy" habits (social media, bunkerchan, etc). Also drinking enough water (sounds weird, but knowing I get depressed when not hydrated has helped me tons). Also small amounts of modafinil in the morning, like 50 mg. Waking up in the morning sometimes helps. Taking a 1 hour walk without electronics lets me cool down a little too. I've heard exercise helps, I don't like doing it though.

My advice is, change your daily habits until something clicks. Try doing something that makes you progress. In the article I wrote I think I hint at more solutions.

FYI We already have a Self-Improvement thread m8s

>>6493
That one is a bit messed up with weird puritan nofap type junk though.

>>6491
Hey. Your article was pretty insightful, I am impressed. To be honest I read it while I was super depressed and promptly forgot about it, but I should read it again now since I'm still feeling sad I guess.

>>6490
I guess… I've sort of tried some shit like that but I can't muster up the energy to do anything creative because it upsets and angers me too much when I'm bad at it or not perfect. It upsets me when I fail at stuff so I just don't try stuff.

I want to try to 'be better every day' but usually I'll just have one good day and then be back to the usual shit the next day and end up asleep during the day and awake at night again.

I dunno, bros. I'm just sick of feeling sad all the time but it's been a decade like this basically. I just don't feel like there's really any hope in life for me.

>>6657
>It upsets me when I fail at stuff so I just don't try stuff.
I understand that feeling and I apologize if my advice read as nothing but "try harder" or whatever.

I started drawing cause I thought it was fun no matter the quality. It wasn't til much later actually that I started to care. However, despite that it is the process of drawing and not the result that i love so much. Learning how to cope with failure I think is important. Learning from your mistakes and succeeding next time is encouraging.
Failure isn't exclusive to art of course. Whatever skill you pick up will come from lots and lots of failure. I sorry to say but to improve yourself you must try. You can read all the self-help advice in the world and it would mean nothing if you don't put it into practice. Think of it in terms such as theory and praxis. Theory is useless if not put into practice. Try and think hard to yourself what it takes to be happy then put that into practice. However small a step it may be at least you took a step.

>>6485
>I don't have a job either
You can get a year of the Headspace mindfulness app free.
https://www.headspace.com/unemployed
These type of apps have been criticised as the McDonald's of Buddhism. Personally, being a junk food junkie, I like it for that reason. Headspace doesn't take too long and it is satisfying.
The "Prioritisation" course in the app is good if you want to get your life together.
If you just want to feel good, choose one of the courses with "visualisation" techniques.
Select "female voice" if you haven't got a GF! It's better than listening to e-thots or cam whores.

>>6487
Reminder that Damien Echols unironically killed, raped and genitally mutilated children and was never exonerated for it, merely got out of death row via a technical loophole by literal Hollywood satanists

Oh fugg, I forgot to self improve and now I feel shitty :^DDDD

I really need to like, change my life or some shit. I randomly slept like 13 hours last night and felt awful and still tired when I got up. I set an alarm too and it was just blaring when I got up, probably was for hours.

Sigh.

> So any steps forward would be helpful.
Do you have a destination in mind?

>>6869
I guess I'd like to have a career and stable income and my own place to live. Little things I know.

>>6882
>a career and stable living
&ltlittle things
Not so little in this day and age

>>6883
I was kidding.

>>6884
…I wasn't

>>6882
What kind of career do you want and what are you missing to get it?

This thread is seriously under-rated if idiots keep making duplicates

I want to help this anon

>>6887
Idk… Anything that feels like a 'real job'. But realistically I don't think I want to do anything. Any job I get I'll just be exploited by parasites at the top, what difference does it make? I have no real ambitions in a concrete sense, just an overriding sense of failure and lack of hope.

>>6969
Thank you anon, that's kind of you.

Anyway… I was laying in bed being sad and googling shit like "failure at life" "I want to die", "depression wasted life" et cetera like I do sometimes, but I couldn't take the con artists and grifters that popped up. What do they know about it? What does anyone know about it if they have a career and a successful life? How the fuck could they give me advice about anything? Fuck them! Fuck I hate everything. I really feel like shit tonight, so often I do. I don't think I can deal with how things are…

I wish I had the strength to do anything other than just sleep and play video games and try not to think about anything… I wish I could just not wake up. I can't bear it…

I'm sorry. I wanted to make this topic to help myself but I'm never going to do anything to help myself. Any kind of adversity or something I don't want to do and I just won't do it. I just can't…

>>6885
I meant that I know they're not little things. I'm sorry if you are struggling as well.

Sigh. I feel the urge to vent more even though it doesn't achieve anything. I just want to die.

>>7752
Anon you will have to set some goals yourself otherwise you will forever rot in your current state. If you want a stable income and your own place to live, getting a job will help you with that.

>>7752
Get some postick notes, each morning write down what you got to do that day. Literally as basic as 'empty bin' or 'tidy room'. Start small. Gamify your life. Once I started doing this my tasks became bigger as I was able to win small victories for my self. I was a down beat student with a drinking problem. I still have a drinking problem and occasionaly the black dog comes to visit, but I have pushed my self much further with this and I can actually see the light. Start small to win big.

>>7754
I feel helpless and like I can't look for a job. I get halfway through the morale-sapping job application to the bits where you have to write bullshit like 'why do you want this job, what did you learn at your previous job, what are your life goals' etc and I can't deal with them and I just give up. I can't imagine trying to explain my 3-year unemployment/mental health crisis to anyone. Plus, there's no job I really want to do anyway.

>>7828
I tried downloading Habatica on my phone a few days ago. I've only looked at it like once or twice though. I guess you're right that I should just try to focus on some small stuff though. I guess I could clean my room and so on. But I just don't feel the motivation to do it, or anything.

I don't know. I just feel worthless…

Why not try getting a part time job and stick with it for a couple of months? I feel like it would be easier than jumping from neetdom to full time right away. If this doesn't work maybe try working for some fake contractor apps like uber or food delivery.
For self help stuff there was this reddit stuff about "non zero days" where you basically strive to achieve one thing a day, however insignificant it may be, like going for a run, cleaning your room or cooking something. Basically do something productive every day to gain confidence.

>>8741
I don't really know how to get a part time job either, and I can't drive or anything like that so I can't really do 'gig' shit. I don't wanna work in a supermarket again cause it was genuinely the worst, and those are the easiest jobs to get so eh.

I guess you're right I should just try to do stuff, it's not easy though…

>>8740
What kind of jobs are these? Chances are they won't even read your answers, so just write some generic bullshit. Don't mention the gap and if they ask about it just say that it's family issues that you don't feel comfortable talking about with strangers.

I'm currently listening to 'The Compassionate Mind'. He's spent the last two hours lecturing me about how our society is anti-human and is making us sick. But I already know that, what's the solution exactly?

>>9211
>what's the solution exactly
Until a socialist revolution occurs and finishes there is no universal solution. We can only do our best as individuals and improve ourselves
See the posts in >>3525

>>6387
>smoking
Eh, that's the least of our problems

>>6897
Probably cause there's no real solutions for any of this shit

>>9220
O RLY?

>>5141 Meditation guides
>>4976 Rewiring the brain guides
>>5783 Communist OPSEC
>>6323 Basic fucking plan to improve
>>3599 Actual basic self-awareness
If you mean concrete exact solutions, well bud, the duplicate threads don't have those either.

>>9222
Yes I meant there's no actual solution, but also, I want actual useful advice not just a bunch of fucking right wing shit. Like half of those posts you linked

>>9263
>Right wing shit
Are you retarded? How is "discipline" and "meditation" and "keeping yourself healthy" or "behaving civilly" fucking right-wing?
Pathetic.

>>9264
The first point of the last post is basically 'yeah right wingers are right, we really are all soy boys', then there's the nofap shit, I'm tired of these fucking weirdo Maupin types that want us all to dress in suit and tie like that is gonna make any difference to how people see us

>>9265
>Hey help me self-improve
&ltOK: Do X, Y, Z, 1, 2, 3
>No that's right wing!!!!
literally you.
>Yeah we're soyboys
No it doesn't say that, idiot. READ:
>The alt-right MEMES about… radlib effeminate soyboys (etc.) come from the most vocal MINORITY of the left
>[this] transpires into the already problematic mainstream opinion
In other words The right-wing makes fun of us as a bunch of limp-wrist faggots because of a small minority of pathetic losers who happen to be given the loudest outlets. The working class is not interested in watching teens, in all their edgy glory, spout half-baked theory and hot-takes, they want to see organized workers movements that are concrete and show that they're a serious group and not some kids with nothing better to do. Thus socialists cannot afford to give the right-wing more opportunities to mock us and make us look bad in the eyes of the working class.
>Muh nofap
Where does right wing come into this? Did you read EITHER post about it? Both posts refer specifically to 'helping with concentration' and more specifically porn/masturbation/internet addiction, which is a real problem for a lot of internet users, especially on chans. This is quite evident if you go on /GET/ and see their one-handed ERP and porn posting.
>Want us all to dress in suit and tie
You're a fucking moron, unironically. If you can't read, get some glasses.
Let me repost for your dumb ass
>Simple attire but not too casual
As in don't come in wearing your PJs or wearing something you would wear at home. Dress for the occasion, not "dress like a white-collar suit at all times!!!!". Stop strawmanning about "muh Maupin"

I wonder how OP is doing.

>>6485
self-help is bougie crap and as such has basically no leftist proponents except like, stirner i guess

>>9337
i'm a leftist proponent of self-help. it's just the practice of applying psychology to yourself without involvement from professional therapists, which is a very leftist concept. sure, it's vulnerable to grifters and rife with individualist propaganda as it is, but that's only because everything is shit under capitalism, plus it's been completely disregarded by the left and/or the left has been basically dead for decades.

if you could clean out the parts that don't belong there anyway, and do self-help socially, it could be a hugely effective form of mutual aid. it's basically the thing that people crave more than anything, the most direct response to alienation that is possible short of abolishing the commodity form, and by the very nature of the process creates social bonds and radicalizes people.

>>9329
Not so great, not the worst, I'm playing a new videogame and being distracted. When I'm not thinking about my problems or trying to solve them, things aren't so bad.

Strive to become the overman
read and lift weights
denounce comforts
don't destroy your dick 10 times a day
don't be a cringe nofap cultist either
clean your room
realize that 99% of other leftists are cringe soy bugmen, including this board and resent them and yourself.

>>9350
also becoming a christcuck helps, ignore the rituals and beliefs and dig deeper into the religions philosophical and moral meaning. It will help, all enlightenment ideas have their roots in christian humanism.

Why the fuck hasn't anyone denounced "self-help" as part of neoliberal ideology yet?

Fuck you OP

>>9354
self help is cringe, but being happy with medicority or worse is even more cringe and the left is full of it.

>>9354
Limpdick asceticism can genuinely help you maintain some semblance of discipline in an environment that constantly insists on you giving into your impulses and wasting your life away wageslaving and then consuming services. It's obviously not at all the magic pill to making you happy and complacent that shitty grifters make you believe it is, and self-help ideology is constantly used to basically shame people for not being rich, but i think the fair thing to do here is to just scavenge what can be useful to you instead of just decrying it. Self-hatred is just another spook after all

>>9354
because it's moronic to let libs keep everything they touch to themselves. they touch a lot of good things too.

>>9374
if you can't be happy with mediocrity, then you can't be happy. most people are thoroughly ordinary and there's nothing wrong with that.

>>9412
>most people are thoroughly ordinary and there's nothing wrong with that.

Cringe. This disgusting bourgeois complacency is everything wrong with the left. Even if you are average you should not be content with being so.

>>9435
Based. People should strive to do more than to just be average.

>>9346
Did you give up?

>>3784
Speaking of Stalin bashing and practical opposition of it
https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2019/02/28/response-to-garry-maclachlan/

>>9267
>The alt-right MEMES about… radlib effeminate soyboys (etc.) come from the most vocal MINORITY of the left
Well we can at least count on having reduced that effect a bit with the whole /pol/cel meme war we had last month, the meme is still making rounds on 4chan and has basically crushed most /pol/ spam about "muh soyboy left", at least on the internet. Now for real life.

Anyone here know if meditation is legit? what are good sources to start learning it?

>>12699
I mean to an extent it is legit in that it calms the mind and lets you organize your thoughts, see >>5141

>>12701
Are there maybe some more… scientific sources with which I could learn it?

>>12703

There’s plenty of studies done on beneficial effects of meditation. I highly recommend it, it helps bring the mind back focus and be clearer of all the background noise internet pollutes the head with.

Just stick to the zen/zazen meditations that focus on breathing and clearing the mind or focusing intensely on one topic, the other ones with third eye ones are all libshit idealist garbage.

Also in my experience the effects dont last longer than 2 days so have to stick with it

>>12704
whats the difference between zen and zazen?

>>12703
There isn't much science to it, you breath deeply and let your mind and body relax sometimes by focusing on only one sense of the body, or by trying to think of nothing or by trying to remember your day

>>12706

I think zazen is a branch that is heavy on sitting meditations and having no particular ends/goal objects. It’s more focused on reaching ‘enlightenment’ through the self rather than through some idealist rituals that other buddhist disciplines have.

>>4976
has anyone tried the impulse control thing?

>>12775
Yes. It helps… a lot

What's the line between self help and self delusion? I've read a lot of self help books now but they just wanna make you a cuck for capitalism or make you live in a fantasy land. What is leftist self help?

>>12843
See the following posts
>>5783 Communist OPSEC
>>6323 Basic plan to improve
>>3599 Actual basic self-awareness
>>5141 Meditation guides
>>4976 Rewiring the brain guides

>>3525
have quit 3 times for 3+months at a time, what's worked for me isn't tapering down (that just means you spend more time in the day wanting a cigarette) and instead going cold turkey and committing myself to hour long /nightwalks/ for 2 weeks. After that you won't feel any sort of cravings just the occasional urge no worse than a sweet tooth. I've also relapsed as many times after 3+ month quits, having even 1 cig has been a guaranteed relapse for me - I'll buy a pack 3-5 days after the initial smoke and return to my former smoking rate 1 week later.

Also if you haven't already, try not smoking when you are at work its a lot easier to not smoke at work than it is when you are at home doing nothing. You can also immediately go exercise after work with having a long enough break between your last smoke (16+ hours) that your lungs will be able to keep up with a strenuous cardio or lifting workout for an hour.

Best of luck, it massively sucks. Gonna quit later this week I think.

>>4933
You first

I havent done opioids or smoke cigarettes since i was in middle school but honestly lately it just seems so tempting especially the cigarettes maybe ill just buy lollipops, I used lollipops as a way to keep the habit steady but I fortunately had no problems with withdrawals.

just wanted to vent because some things i just cant talk about.

>>20261
>just vent
that's a-ok m8
>since i was in middle school
>since
You did drugs as an elementary school kid!??!?!

Did any of you improve your memory, what technique did you use?
Do you have any good resources (books, studies), prefably scientific.
I've searched online, but I got overwhelmed with books, videos, articles, etc. so I gave up

Just got a good job after several months of unemployment. I’m moving to a big city soon from parents house, going to start all these initiatives
>jiu jitsu
>lifting (kettlebell)
>weekly visits to shooting range
>going hard on dating apps
white vegan btw

Ok guys, I recently saw this meme and I know it isn't supposed to be taken seriously, but it still made me think. How can I become a man or mature. Not a "man" bound to the norms of a capitalist society like suburban us-conservative propgaganda wants you to believe, but a sense of maturity that other people, man and woman alike are able to recognize. A "manchild" is something I truly believe "exists" for a lack of better wording.

I constantly succumb to my urges like procrastanating, watching porn, browsing the internet instead of studying, doing chores, working or just taking care of myself in general. I feel disgusted, but I am too weak to change in any meaningfull sense. I picked up reading again, which is atleast something positive.

So my question to those anons who have figured it out already, is: How to become a man?
A man like Lenin or Che was. Somebody who had his life in order and wasn't swayed by the impulses of those around them or their own impulses. I am want this for myself. I am tired of my parents telling me to grow up. I am tired of the women I was dating(casual dating that is) telling me I am not mature enough for them to consider a long-lasting relationship. So, help is badly needed here.

>>21311
Honestly the most cohesive answer to your query is the following poem, I personally have gone through much of it and it has helped me:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

>>21311
Have you ever had a coming of age experience?
Like hiking through the woods for 2 weeks or something?
That sort of experience helped me to feel more like an adult.
Also are you susceptible to psychosis? If not I would recommend psychedelics.
Anyways those aree just two "things" you could. Other anons in this thread have also pointed out broader dynamics for living a more mature life.

>>21316
Thanks. This an unorthodox answer, but I really appreciate it. I have a bit of trouble deciphiring some phrases like:
>If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
>If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
>If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same

>>21317
>Also are you susceptible to psychosis?
Idk. I guess not, because I never really had anything close to it. I am kinda afraid of taking psychedelics though, apart from weed ofcourse

>>21322
I mean its pretty straightforward. Being able to have dreams and hope, and yet not forget and give up on things unrelated or sacrifice everything to it.
Being able to think (deeply) about things and questioning them, without ending up mental wanking and thinking for its own sake.
triumph and disaster are more about perception and social cred than the real events that caused them and their consequences. In both case stay cool, profit from the good and try to reduce the bad, think materially, rationally and dont fall prey to your emotions.

its basically about maturity and dominating your instincts and bad mental habits/pitfalls

>>21311
Maturity == conforming to the status quo and to the expectations of others

>self-improvement thread
>filled with insecure reactionaries whining about loss of "masculinity" and idpol
Every. Fucking. Time. The images of old busts really got me hollerin.

>>4922
>>4920
>>>9867
Part 1 got deleted during the split, so I'm reposting it for posterity
Nice trash
>The obsession
How is there an obsession? Its brought up
A) When some lib starts shilling their "there are 500 different genders" and other rubbish
B) When /pol/ starts baiting with liberal talking points
C) when discussing some of SEVERAL issues of the left in America and Europe.
All of these instances are pretty rare and the conversations only tended to spiral out of control in the idpol containment threads which was essentially a troll and sjw piranha tank that the mods used to prevent talk on these irrellevant subjects
>the average hardened internet ML wasn't a cringing little boy
>defending every spec of shit on the NKVD's boots
<Muh whitey tankies
<Muh NKVD!
See pic 1 and GTFO liberal. Defending the USSR is done on the principle of defending the primary example of socialism in action. This does not exclude self-crit
>argue about whether this or that tiny sectarian cult movement was revisionist or based
<implying that only MLs do this and that it isn't a pointless wankfest
>work with people that didn't look exactly like them
<what was the Red army, what was Vietnam/China/Korea/Burkina Faso
<If you don't actively state love for black people and gays you're a racist homophobe!
<If you think that pandering to minorities, fetishists & liberals is wrong and enables dumb shit you're not doing anything IRL
See pic 1 again. People who do actual shit IRL don't care about these things at all, and its fairly obvious that this is the majority opinion of /leftypol/ majority. The only complaint regards liberals dominating public left-view and shilling idpol 24/7 to where even the most tolerant of socialists are rolling their eyes. Not only is it token "bailing capitalism" but also used to shut-down the urge to revolt by appeasement and distraction.
>its a kind of ignorance born of inexperience
<if you're not a woman or gay or black or a punk then you don't understand, wah!!!
Pathetic. If people of different races, sexes and cultures cannot empathize with one another then there is no left unity to be had. Human experiences are never 100% the same and yet somehow that has never stopped empathy before.
>red elitism
<Muh commissars!
How delusional are you? Majority rule is a principle part of communism. Pandering to a minority is counter-revolutionary. You're replacing capital with race or gender, which makes it no-longer about communism
>poor, stupid proles won't follow us
revolutionaries if we have people that look a bit different
See pic 2 and stop making shit up. You're obviously referencing the shit with "muh furries are workers" and the shite about "muh fat is healthy" which are so esoteric and retarded that its not even worth serious consideration past a simple understanding: There is no point pandering to a minority fetish subculture with divisive radical left politics when its supposed to be addressed towards the working class as a whole, irrelevant to what your legal bedroom antics are. Keep your personal-private life out of politics because rallies, protests and other activities are not places to "have fun".
>Marx forbid!
People reference Marx because he and Engels and Lenin and even the highly anti-Soviet Orwell considered such bullshit to be counter-productive. That's why /leftypol/ has always been derisive of 'muh free love' hippy movements since their biggest success was being annoying to the US government during Vietnam.
>unusual ways of living
Differences in culture is not the same as the bohemian "why can't I parade my gimps in public during the gay parade?!" and "what's wrong with young children being drag-queens!?" and "Why can't we lie about fat being beautiful and healthy?!"
If you defend any of this you're part of the problem.
>betrodden, unenlightened workers couldn't possibly have their own opinions
Their opinions lack class consciousness and reek of a complete lack of genuinely caring. Everyone should not have the right to an opinion, but the right to an informed opinion, because parroting Fox and CNN gets you nowhere. The majority of the US lower class are lumpenproles. Hormone-loaded 'bread' and constant low-brow 'circus' give them the endorphins needed to keep them docile, and the long history of defending "the right" to sexual fetishes and other tertiary bullshit over the right to live as decent human beings. They care more for their hedonistic short-term pleasures than the long-term good for themselves and others, because the former is easier to give in to.
>if its OK or not to be not normal
Stop trying to take this out of context as if its "le evul cis white male" persecuting 'le X-men' for no reason.
>actually managed to do some IRL work with people that didn't look exactly like them they would realise how meaningless those kinds of words
You're contradicting yourself. Moreover the argument of those "MLs" has always been that idpol and the FOCUS on pandering to it, ENCOURAGES segregational views. Being a furry should be irrelevant in a movement, because its not part of your identity as a prole, it is a private fetish. If your sexuality is a major part of your identity to the point where you can't talk about workers rights without bringing up something specific for your minority before the revolution, then you have no personality… something capitalism encourages. This is something Lenin stated and even more liberal leftists have noted as well. People turn their minor sexual activities into major identity issues because the alienation and shallowness of capitalist life leaves people hollow and looking for something to fill this gap.

>>21330
>Hurr muh reactionaries!
>muh idpol
Take your projecting butthurt elsewhere, liberal. Nobody posted "old busts".

>>21336
>face the wall xd
Well that was unexpected.

>>21329
Soooo…maturity is fake and/or undesirbale?

today I've exercised for the first time in forever, doing day 1 of the starter workout from You Are Your Own Gym by Mark Lauren:
>pushups with hands on an incline (I ignored that last part)
>let-me-ins (starting sitting on the floor with bent knees, pull your chest up to a door handle or bar you're holding with an overhand grip while keeping your knees bent and your feet on the floor)
>seated dips with feet on the floor (again, I ignored that part and did the more difficult variant with legs straight and only my heels touching the floor)
>bodyweight rows with bent knees and feet on the floor
holy shit, have I gotten weak, towards the end I couldn't do even one row with proper technique
though that might be cause of shitty bar positioning or the fact that there's a threshold under the doorway where I put my bar, next week I'll try to put my feet on top of something so my shoulders are effectively not on an incline

>>21361
No, they mean that maturity is not necessarily as conforming to societal expectations.

>>21382
Good job m8, more of a /fit/ topic (there's a thread) but good to see someone start to exercise again!

>>21384
>No, they mean that maturity is not necessarily as conforming to societal expectations
Hm ok. But how does this line of thought play out in the practical? Maybe you can help me, by idk explaining it to me? Idk, I guess I always connected an inners sense of maturity to being atleast somewhat perceived as mature by societal expectations.

>>21399
>mature by societal expectations.
RATIONAL Societal Expectations.
To act mature is primarily to be responsible; understand and think over your actions, their consequences and necessity. You shouldn't permit yourself to let emotions cloud your train of thought and should b able to comprehend concepts that a child or teen is not going to actually understand. No tantrums or similarly IMmature behavior. This comes from discipline. It doesn't mean you need to be an uptight bastard, just a reliable person capable of making decisions and keeping your word.

I'm learning to sing and play guitar. I want to go busking, but get better than the average busker warbling out "Wonderwall'. Even the fucking original was crap so how is a busked version going to be any good
I'm doing a few other things which are good in themselves but will to help with it, like a side benefit.
Yoga. You need to be relaxed when singing. No pain no gain doesn't apply here.
Reading books on the things I'm interested in. I'd be doing that anyway, but it's an added benefit if I can get ideas for lyrics.

Anyway, if getting better than average is the aim, how is it possible for the average guy?
Well it's kind of like you need both of what ozy here calls regular uncertainty and Knightian uncertainty.
https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/knightian-uncertainty
Or rather, you need to pull some Knightian uncertainty into the regular uncertainty.

Regular uncertainty is like the entropy of dice. Vid related. The sum of multiple dice rolls are going to end up in the middle range, mostly. "Keep doing the same things and you'll get the same results." So you need to explore outside of what you know a bit. For example, I saw a vid on YouTube called Dramatic Vibrato by Madelyn Harvey, thought it sounds a bit musical theatre ish but I'll give it a shot. It improved my singing 500%.
But you need" regular uncertainty" too. You have off days in whatever you're trying to do, but you need to keep turning up, plugging away at it. If everything was edgy Knightian uncertainty nothing would be possible. You couldn't even get out of bed in the morning safely. Everything would be chaos.

>>3599
>>3619
>How is pic 1 cringe tho? Its true. If you don't self-reflect you may swiftly find yourself careening onto a whole different path,
Imagine being such a laughable failure that the preface of the first draft of Das Kapital blows your shitstain idealist pure ideology out of the water
"Karl Marx 1859
Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy"
>>In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm
Soulless radlib loser with no historical materialism whining about "soy" as they post idealist inspirational memes like every neoliberal instagram drone. This leftoid website is the most hilariously pretentious out of any I've seen. You should stop doing soy mindfulness and self help and KYS, now that would be a revolutionary materialist praxis!

>>3525
you can get opiate dependency from regular kratom use so keep that in mind

I been improving the last couple of years but I can't get off my mind that I wasted so many years of my life and that I'm going to be so old when I get where I want to be.
How do i deal with this?

>>22496
You had to pass through where you were to get where you are now. You can't change the past, so you need to accept it, which might involve processing being sad that things turned out in a way that was bad. We all play the hand we're dealt, and there's no shame in having a slow or late start.

>>21923
Imagine being such a laughable, projecting failure that you
A) Use Argument by Authority of a Theoretical Text analyzing 19th Century Capitalism and its impacts on Society, and attempted to make a prediction of the future of Western Society using materialist analysis in regards to Western Capitalist Social Structures (and not being fully correct as the course of History demonstrates, in regard to Revolutionary action and socialist Revolution in Russia that Marx thought to be highly unlikely at best).
B) Using an excerpt ignoring the full context of the passage and that out of context this part of Das Kapital essentially implies that the Proletariat cannot escape or progress and so Capitalism remains self-perpetuating. Despite later passages of the same Theoretical text specifically stating that Class-Consciousness can and will arise, again demonstrated by history and the many grass-roots revolutions in countries that did not reach industrial capitalist development. Moreover the quote itself admits that change can be made within the system, but it is limited by the issues endemic to the system, and it is later stated that hitting said limitations is part of the driving force in the demise of Capitalism and the Class System.
C) Having no argument of your own and just spamming a response to justify your hedonistic doomerism

>Soulless radlib loser
And yet you're the one assblasted over a post about self-improvement because "Nooooo, let me regurgitate quotes I don't understand out of context!" and "N-noooo don't call out my destructive decadent behaviours!"
>no historical materialism
And yet you are the one that demonstrates a complete lack of comprehension of history, nor understanding of actual theory of communism as can be applied to real life. Marx's statement that society limits the consciousness of people in said society is not the same as saying "do nothing there is no point because 'society' limits you!" If that had been the case Das Kapital and revolutions could never occur to begin with.
>"soy"
Nobody complained about Soy at all you speedreading ignoramus, the post replied stated specifically that the IMAGE of "soyboys" presented by the Alt-Right is detrimental to the image of communism in the public eye and gives confirmation to the idea that communists are just entitled brats, though sadly your pitiful post seems to prove the point.
>KYS
Ah yes, so mature, so MANLY - using a pitiful acronym for an edgy phrase used by teenagers to bully kids ten years ago, boo hoo.
>post idealist inspirational memes like every neoliberal instagram drone
<Everything I don't like is idealist, and Neoliberal and fascist and nazi and hitler and Muh soshul media boogieman too!
Good lord you negative Nancy, get off your high horse before you break your neck.

>>22496
Life is a journey, aging and the passing of time is largely irrelevant to simply living your life.

>>22496
The fact that you're working on yourself enough that you have an idea of how old you will be when you get to where you want to be means you're doing more for your life than 99% of people. Keep at it, anon. I'm sure you're doing great.

>>22501
Yeah. Get his ass anon 💪

>>22501
And more importantly good advice. There will always be some toxic fool here trying to nip at a person's heels and bring their energy and enthusiasm down to his level. Ignore him and pursue progress. As communists and leftists we have a critical role to play in society by moving towards a better world. Our work is too important to sit down and circlejerk in ennui. Proletarians of the world unite! We have a world to win!

>>22497
>>22502
>>22514
It's not that simple, I just feel this clock ticking and that all good things in life already passed by.

need some vegetarian/vegan food recommendations that will let me get recommended nutrients. not exactly vegan, as ill eat meat when i can as a treat, but because it's cheaper to make vegetable dishes. i like mushrooms.

>>22524
Sounds like you're depressed.

>>22524
Get on the road to somewhere or something and you will feel less like this I suspect

>>22527
Probably.
Breaking up with my gf really set me back, specifically because I felt moving and living with her will solve these concerns.
>>22542
I have no means tot ravel right now

>>22558
>I have no means tot ravel right now
Not literallly speaking. I mean like have some kind of goal/goals you are working towards

>>22558
Someone else is never gonna fix the problems in your life. That's something you have to fix solo.

>>3525
I'm trying to read more.
It's hard to get myself focused on a book for too long nowadays, but I've managed to read 3/4 of the first book of Dune in 2 months.

>>22524
>I just feel this clock ticking and that all good things in life already passed by.
That's called depression. >>4965
You have to push past it. Most of us have been there, done that, and moved past it through grim determination. It isn't about being some uber-special dude, just try to be the best you can every day; you fuck up? Try again tomorrow, your efforts already make you worth acknowledging.

>>22525
That's more a cooking thread thing >>38

>>22562
>>22558
>Someone else is never gonna fix the problems in your life
Just to clarify the other anon; YOU make the decision about your life, your environment and other issues can set you back, but you can still do something to self-improve, and while you must firstly rely on yourself, relying on the help of good people as you are going forward is also ok.

>>22565
>It's hard to get myself focused on a book for too long nowadays, but I've managed to read 3/4 of the first book of Dune in 2 months.
Good job m8! you can do it, after some time it'll take you no effort at all.

>>22655

Thanks, man. I finished it yesterday, finally.
Moving onto reading some theory and finishing What is to Be Done, but that'll be much harder. Is there a beginner reading list for leftist theory around?

>>22676
Yeah, /edu/ has some reading lists. I heavily suggest Das Kapital by Marx, and Lenin's State and Revolution.

Don't be Self-Hating is a good self-improvement for many people
https://archive.fo/Dhksm

Something I think could help and I've noticed in my own life is laziness in small things, like changing your pants from comfortable house pants to more utilitarian jeans if you go outside or making sure you're cleaned up before going out into public. It's not about "muh appearance to others" though that is a secondary bonus, but about your personal attitude to yourself. If you indulge in minor laziness often you become more indolent in other things, less motivated and uncaring and more inclined to fall into being a NEET. As the saying goes, the power of little things is that there are many of them.

This a technique based on those Internet quizes to tell you what psyche disorders you may be prone to. The idea is to watch out for and recognize the manifestations, so you're not as much in their grip. So you get a bit of distance from them.
Doc. Hyatt was around a few years ago. Many of the people into his stuff have got Black Cat Syndrome. If you've got a mental health quirk, they're psychos. If you're into crystals, they've caught a demon in one. If you've got a black cat at home, they've got one too. But it's blacker.
Anyway, that aside, it does work. He basically ripped it off from reichian therapy, old school psychology texts, and other places.doc hyatt had a misanthropic world view so anons might like it if you find things like mindfulness a bit fluffy.

https://youtu.be/SFybBuxoJd8

<a de-victimisation technique
<the idea is to bring out what is in your unconscious as quickly as possible
<one of the things you're going to learn from this exercise is how to use the superego, that is, the interjected, that is taking in like an amoeba the values and consciousness of this society and of your parents… you know when the superego's talking anytime you feel shame, embarrassment or you hearbthe word should in your mind

https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/app-review-amaru
<you can’t exchange real-world money for in-game money. You can complete your item collection only by playing the game. There’s no incentive for Amaru’s developers to make in-game money increasingly difficult to get over time, forcing you to spend money on the game in an illegible way once you’re sucked in. All the possible payments are clear and upfront. While much of the game is free, if you like it you can spend $10 in a lump sum to unlock the full game, forever.
I got the app after reading the review. Its basically a combo of a virtual pet app, and a self-development /meditation app.
The virtual pet bit seems like an old school tamagotchi, so anyone using such defunct methods like anonymous imageboard's might like it also.
The self development thing is good, and basic. You basically choose 3 things to work on, like meditation, journalling, or switching off your phone. It's not to much to make you give up and quit.
The meditations are great. I've used hesdspace in the past but this is better. . Less emphasis on woke and being inclusive of "teachers" or "coaches" of variable quality. Surprising Prince Harry and Meghan Markle haven't popped up on headspace as "teachers" yet . It's just a mellow sounding Californian - sounding guy giving the instructions. He also goes into better detail on things like getting a good posture for meditation. Also one of the "3 part" breathing techniques, where you expand the belly then the ribs then a bit of shoulders gives a better feel, it almost has a tantric deathy feel to it anons.

>>3525
Hey I found your image in a higher resolution

I want to stop watching porn (includes girls/traps at social media like tiktok or instagram) and just to fap one time at week, i have readed easypeasy twice but didn't work

>come here expecting shitty attempts at self-help
>find a long ass boring discussion about muh idpol
Never change faggots.

>>22524
Smash copious 18 to 26yo pussy

>>32312
this tbh. fuck normies and their rules.

>>32311
>come here expecting shitty attempts at self-help
>find a long ass boring discussion about muh idpol
>Never change faggots.

sounds like you came here hoping to be disappointed, but got disappointed by something other than you were hoping for?
Shitty attempts at self help, eh? Well it's like anything, you have to start somewhere
muh idpol can get tedious, tbf
and of course, idpol is often criticised in bad faith, not wanting oppressed groups to have their own place in the sun

Mentioned this in /leftypol/'s QTDDTOT but I regularly have moments where I turn into a fash eugenicist for several hours of the day and the delusion has gotten to the point where it affects my relationships and work life. I have to recluse to the deficit of everyone to make sure I won't start ranting about Jews or transhumanists or whatever. Studying Marxism doesn't help, studying fascism(and its logical conclusion of class collaboration) doesn't help, the gym, books, religion, even creature comforts like vidya don't help. If it weren't for me being aware and remembering the episodes I'd be tempted to call it a second personality altogether. How do I fix this?

>>40678
stop 'studying fascism', just stop engaging in any kind of way with right wing content, eventually your brain will detox kinda

>>40678
i guarantee most of your fascist and 'marxist' studies are terrible books lol, stop wasting your time

>>40680
Really? I've mainly just been reading Capital Vol. I and Imperialism in The Twenty-First Century recently in terms of theory. The other books are more mainstream histories like Hofheinz' The Broken Wave and Wheatcroft's Years of Hunger. I've stopped reading fascist primary sources and just started reading analyses of fascist regimes like The Wages of Destruction and Fascism and Big Business, and if you're wondering why my choices are so surface level despite being "invested" in this study then that's because I was cursed with ADHD-brain and had to borrow the physical versions after I tried and failed to read the PDFs.

I've been lifting dumbbells for the last 3 weeks. I'm making my drawing a daily habit. I'm on a 5:2 diet to get to 200lbs.

Got a job that starts in April so will have some moolah then. Life is getting back on track 😎

>>40725
Based, keep strong comr8

I literally need to work on my muscles because I'm lacking in definition so much my body is getting deformed but due to mental issues I can't work out at home and I'm too poor to go a gym. What do?

>>40772
Watch some scooby1961. His old vids may get you some inspiration

https://youtu.be/5eV33roibqc?si=fzJKKvfWUwVGudGT

>>40775
Marx never said this.

>>40779
Marx did say it: >>>/alt_archive/4835

>>40780
Thanks for proving me wrong, I was tired of exclusively seeing this quote on gym walls and never finding the source. The context of the quote makes it funny.

Happy Easter, comrades.

How's the self improvement going?

I am number one best medic in TF2 gaming