What's your problem? You sitting there scrolling through threads complaining about your pathetic life while refusing to do the one thing that actually matters: WORKING ON YOURSELF. You think transformation just happens because you read some philosophy thread or watched a motivational video? WRONG. You are literally a being made of repetition, every single day you're either getting better or getting worse, there's no neutral. Your future is built on exercise, not just lifting (though you better be doing that too) but MENTAL exercise, SPIRITUAL exercise, the daily grind of making yourself into something worth existing. The universe is screaming at you "YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE" and you're too busy doom-scrolling to listen. You want to ascend? You want to become the übermensch? Then stop being a slave to your own inertia, stop letting your automatic thoughts and coping mechanisms run your life. Every single habit you have right now is either building the cathedral of your potential or digging the grave of your mediocrity. The trainers, the masters, the legends throughout history, they're all telling you the same thing: GET UP AND OPTIMIZE YOURSELF. You have this incredible auto-operative feedback loop where everything you do shapes who you become, so why are you wasting it on Netflix and tendies? This is your moment to secede from the ordinary masses, to battle your own interior demons, to make yourself into a work of art that even the gods would admire. Stop waiting for tomorrow, stop making excuses, GRIND SEASON NEVER ENDS.

>>24627390 (OP)
I like these threads. Good stuff.

>>24627390 (OP)
>muh exercises
synaptic weight change =/= gene expression changes

this is not how people are changed anon. and people cannot be changed at all. the act of inspiration can only be achieved through oblique means. you must change yourself and lead others through example.

"optimize" is satans word. you ask us to get up and work but you don't even know where you're going. you need to give people reason before you ask them to move toward one.

>>24627390 (OP)
All the useful stuff in these books is already in Plato and Aquinas, but then they also answer the question of why it is even worth pursuing anything at all. That's the problem with modern self-help. It's all the old praxis with all the old ordering logos removed.

>>24627428
and_this_is_where_i_keep_my_genetics.jpg

>>24627429
Well, anon, you keep waiting for that inspiration to move you while others get in shape, learn skills, and build their careers. See how that works for you.

Here's the real question: at what point can you assert that a soul is hopelessly lost and irredeemable (as in irredeemably cowardly and lazy for example)?
Sincere answers only please.

>>24627390 (OP)
you are born a winner or a loser... that is how I experience it... a winner gets a good and happy life while a looser is more of a sad life... it is your genetic code nothing else

>>24627437
Der Mensch ist ein Seil, geknüpft zwischen Tier und Übermensch – ein Seil über einem Abgrunde

https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.3421
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/FRIEDRICH-NIETZSCHE-LIEST-FRANCIS-GALTON-Haase/dec15bb4040c37ca810f44b48a038302cfbb9f0e

work on my life for what? having more sex? i just jacked off who cares. buying luxury condos in world cities? ok that might be nice but i already live in a major metro anyways. to collect art? speaking of art, why the fuck is every sotheby's auction for august some sports or luxury goods crap? are the new rich that tacky? or did sothebys just fall off.

>>24627390 (OP)
why do I doubt youve read this book

nah imma keep scrollin

>>24627390 (OP)
>a lens that sees "human life not in terms of a struggle between those who wield power and those who are subject to it (he dismisses this version of history as leftist kitsch), but in terms of the networks of 'discipline' through which we live our lives and construct our world".
holy based

>>24627485
i want to read it now too bad it normies will think it's self-help shit so it's too cringe to have a hardcopy of maybe i'll go audiobook

>>24627390 (OP)
Use more clapping emojis next time, faggot

>>24627390 (OP)
I know this, but knowing and acting on are so very different. I know there are things transcendent and beautiful and terrible in this world, things hidden and waiting for those with the wisdom to find them, places where the world runs thin and what is beyond can seep through. I know a man is the image of God but fallen, and that most men have not even dreamed of what they are capable of, what they are heirs to. I know that history and the course of centuries can gather a man up in their great iron arms and fling him towards the great and the powerful, that he need only assent to their movements on him. I know these things, but what do I do? Nothing. I am a 25 year old masturbation addict and I live alone. My life stands like a grain of sand on the shore of an immense ocean, of all the things beyond the mundane and the paltry which occupy me, and I do not move towards the waters. My own body gives me the chains of mediocrity and in my weakness I am always willing to bind myself with them. It's in my own body. My body. It's so easy, easy to lie there, easy to think of oneself as a poor wretch tossed on the currents of urges to powerful to resist, easy to bend to them today and put off change til tomorrow. Making excuses to yourself is so easy, while forcing oneself to change today is so much harder. My bookshelves are full of works of philosophy and theology and manuals on craftsmanship and histories and political theories and artbooks and I leave them there unopened because it's easier to think of myself as too weak to resist the urge to do the bare minimum of what is necessary and follow my base urges, easier than it would be to open one of those books with a trembling hand and force my mind through its sieve, force myself to a new shape, to really think rather than merely hold thoughts. I must change. I know I must change. Stars turn overhead, the seas rise and fall again, and the world beyond the world shines through all like stars in the dark sky, and I say, one more day, tomorrow I will start.

>>24627390 (OP)
I thought wasting a sunday on /lit/ was alright but I really should have focused on reading instead. It's so hard when the poison is in front of you. I stand up to the challenge.
Thanks, anon. I feel bad for coming here today. I could've read, gone for a walk, learned something. This post is the only worthwhile thing on this board currently. Call it serendipity.
>>24627866
>25
At 25 you're still at the helms of where to take things. Take being 32 and feeling like a complete failure, just fired from a dead end job in a crumbling system. There are answers, maybe. At this age I do believe belief is a powerful and scary thing.

>>24627390 (OP)
Okay, what would you have me do? I'm stuck dead in the water in the river of life and don't know what to do. Go run around the block a couple times? Say a few more prayers? By all means, tell me what you want me to do.

>>24627898
Be a man

>>24628029
Done, I am XY male who identifies as masculine. Now what?

>>24627390 (OP)
I only care about money. I wasn't born into wealth. I was born in a 3rd world shithole where children get raped everyday and there is no justice. That means game was rigged from the start. I don't want to rot but I rot. No job, no degree, no health, no wealth, no woman, just misery.

The ascetic life naturally draws me to it but I always get the sneaking suspicion that people advocate this sort of lifestyle as a cope for not being wealthy and resourceful, out of lack not as a 'beholder of the infinite affirmation of life'. Everywhere I look I see the Spirit of Revenge in action. Resentment and jealousy.

Furthermore, the efforts of the practiced one are inevitably swallowed by the apparatus of financialisation. Your efforts, your sweat flow through the instrument of value coding, your meaning reformulated into whatever ideology is floating around in cyberspace at the time, becoming complicit in its crimes. Good luck removing yourself from this process if you're not wealthy. Even then I imagine things would turn out differently. You'd become a biological experiment ala Johnson. That's the end game of 'changing your life': biological mutation. Drug addicts are the new ascetics.

>>24627390 (OP)
is this book actually good

>>24628079
Based

I know it is pointless but you have any book recommendations?

>>24628066
dude just do what everyone else does and come to the united states, enroll in a college, it will be full of leftists excited to help u evade immigration law

>>24627390 (OP)
I am just tired. World's suffering is really hurting me to the core. I am trying to look for positive things in life but I can't take my stuff together. I really just go with the flow and with the Zeitgeist altough I know I should transcend or do political career to make world better place.

>>24628100
>>dude just do what everyone else does and come to the united states,
How? Seems like a possibility reserved only for the most oversocialized rich pieces of shit.

I feel numb most of the time with periods of misery. I feel guilty and embarrassed. I feel tired with very little energy. Simple tasks feel like they take much more effort. I'm constantly anxious, especially about the future. I feel like I can barely engage with anything, like i'm totally debilitated. I feel like i'm not getting better, nothing is changing, and there's no point to try or anything anymore.

I am tired of the world but I am also tired of dreams and aspirations

>>24628095
Impossible Exchange - Baudrillard

Sloterdick is actually good, I do recommend this book. Chapters on the ascetic practices of Nietzsche, Cioran and an armless fiddler were interesting, so was his seething at religion, especially scientology

>>24628142
I read somewhere that Baudrillard presented the solution of becoming obese as "a way out". Was that anon meme'ing?

i was whining about being a loser who wastes all his time doing nothing at age 18. 7 years later, i'm still in that exact same spot. i don't know how to uproot this cowardice from my soul, bros. i really don't. starting to lose hope, because just doing something, anything, is so simple and so easy, yet i've consistently managed to sidestep it. what the fuck.

>>24627390 (OP)
Leave me the fuck alone

>>24627866
>>24628252
I was like you two last year, and spent the whole year doing oddjobs and drinking myself to sleep biweekly. Went cold turkey after my 26th birthday when I realized no one texted me or called, and now sitting here wondering where the fuck it went wrong. Don't be like me, don't distract yourself and try to drown out your anxiety.

who shall make straight what He has made crooked? or build again what he has destroyed?

>>24628156
why don't you see for yourself and eat those tasty looking cakes

>>24627444
A man has never gone far enough to be out of reach of redemption except for the dead.

Der Kasus macht mich lachen

>>24627390 (OP)
I liked this book a lot but feel like his conclusion with general immunology was tacked on, a simple call to action to leap from a dualisitc viewpoint to a polaristic one. It just reminds me of a confucian moral framework, meaning he didnt say anything new at all

>>24627390 (OP)
libslop

Sloterdijk wishes to dismantle religion as a dubious concept and replace it with something like regimes of training, monks as athletes. But he seems not to care about the ultimate goal of religion (east or west) viz. liberation. Symptomatical for this is his error in translating the Indian concept of "jivanmukti" (liberation while being alive). He translates it as "the one who is saved here and now". Thats literally like saying 'nirvana is the person who has achieved buddhahood in their lifetime".

>>24630468
The author was accused of being far-right after he critiqued German mass immigration.

Based book. Probably Slotijs best one.

>>24628079
The contents of the book don't necessarily point towards asceticism but rather use the first stylite monks as an example for exceptional practice towards a higher goal.
That is why the olympian athletes also take their place as equals beside them.
>Furthermore, the efforts of the practiced one are inevitably swallowed by the apparatus of financialisation.
But what does that actually mean to you? Nothing. (You) assign meaning to your actions and that is why you can make them point towards the stars. No zog machine can take that away from you. Why lie down and admit defeat if you haven't even faced an enemy yet. Capital doesn't have a will and you are defeated by it?

>>24630498
>Sloterdijk wishes to dismantle religion as a dubious concept and replace it with something like regimes of training, monks as athletes.
It's not as black and white as that in my opinion.
Across his works, religion takes on all sorts of odd jobs society has in store for it.
It is a storage vessel for the heroic thymos sometimes, it is sometimes simply anthropological and another sphere for interacting with our loved ones once they passed, it is training as seen in YMCYL and sometimes it's theater.
He doesn't wish to dismantle it. He describes one of it multiple facets in this book.

>>24627390 (OP)
Thanks bro, I'll get back to grinding rank in Mahjong Soul

im gonna write the next great american novel. itll be about all of the stuff im personally interested in and the characters that are shown in a positive light will represent the values that i hold dear.