Thread 24701082

Why do you guys hate self-help? Is there even a self-help chart from /lit/?

I mean, you could learn about manipulation, creating habits, becoming better step-by-step everyday, masking your lack of empathy.

That's a lot of very good stuff

>>24701082 (OP)
I don't need help

>>24701082 (OP)
Instead of self help books and therapy believe in god and have a strong family and run a homestead and have a community and tribe and nation and race and culture and heritage and tradition and glory and honor and live your life with the goal of dying in a blaze of glory.

>>24701107
whats your secret

>>24701082 (OP)
>creating habits and becoming better step by step everyday
Seneca
>masking your lack of empathy
The Bible (iykyk)
>manipulation
Our own mothers

>>24701082 (OP)
In oratory, poetry, and every kind of literature, Emile will find the classical authors as he found them in history, full of matter and sober in their judgment. The authors of our own time, on the contrary, say little and talk much. To take their judgment as our constant law is not the way to form our own judgment. These differences of taste make themselves felt in all that is left of classical times and even on their tombs. Our monuments are covered with praises, theirs recorded facts.

“Sta, viator; heroem calcas.”


If I had found this epitaph on an ancient monument, I should at once have guessed it was modern; for there is nothing so common among us as heroes, but among the ancients they were rare. Instead of saying a man was a hero, they would have said what he had done to gain that name. With the epitaph of this hero compare that of the effeminate Sardanapalus—

“Tarsus and Anchiales I built in a day, and now I am dead.”


Which do you think says most? Our inflated monumental style is only fit to trumpet forth the praises of pygmies. The ancients showed men as they were, and it was plain that they were men indeed. Xenophon did honour to the memory of some warriors who were slain by treason during the retreat of the Ten Thousand. “They died,” said he, “without stain in war and in love.” That is all, but think how full was the heart of the author of this short and simple elegy. Woe to him who fails to perceive its charm. The following words were engraved on a tomb at Thermopylae—

“Go, Traveller, tell Sparta that here we fell in obedience to her laws.”

It is pretty clear that this was not the work of the Academy of Inscriptions.

>>24701082 (OP)
Once upon a time, before self-help, there was something called a "classical education", where people called humanists would educate themselves and the young through the greatest and most important texts in history to try to learn how to be a better human being. It was similar to self-help in a way, but the texts they read were a lot more beautiful and meaningful and weren't trying to sell you anything or turn you into a more productive wageslave.

>>24701180
You also value what you hear from a great man more than the same advice coming from the mouth of a YouTube grifter or a New York Times bestselling fag author

>>24701082 (OP)
>Why do you guys hate self-help?
Because is not helpful? People who get shit done don't need shit like this

>>24701180
>people called humanists
>NYT bestselling authors are fags
That's not very humanist of you, anon.

>>24701118
>iykyk
I don't know desu

>>24701131
OP here. Pretty damn based I have to admit. I'll definitely read some historical stuff once I'm done with my current bookshelf.

>>24701114
Basedbros, now THIS is redpilled!

>>24701082 (OP)
Starting getting into literature with self-help stuff. But after a few books in just became clear, that it is a modern und stupid version of actual philosophy. Most of it is just bro-level stoicism. So why not just read philosophy.

Apart from that it is a one dimensional perspective in close to all of it. Working hard and becoming successful will make you fulfilled and happy. Like that is the meaning of life. Sure, there are exceptions, but that is what most of it was.

Its all 'good boy' talk. Reading the new book of a author. One after another. Talking about how good it is that you now wake up at 4 am and journal for 30 minutes.
'getting better step-by-step everyday'. Towards what? Escaping the 'matrix'? By just becoming a part of the 'matrix' through working 70 h a week?

>>24701221
That's not what the youtubers told me.

>>24701114
No. Your kind has spammed this garbage so much that I now repudiate all of it. Fuck off.

>>24701082 (OP)
READ.
CHRISTOPHER.
LASCH.

>>24701082 (OP)
Self-help books are top-down programming and social engineering projects to direct hyper-atomizied individuals within the matrix of the neoliberalist hellscape we all inhabit.

Within a morally relativistic frame, ungrounded by tradition or virtue, people are "free", by require guidance in a way that protects their perception of their own freedom.

"Self help" allows people to optimize themselves in a way that maximally benefits the demands of the system, and alters the game theory-esque decision making of the masses on the macroscale.

To read mainstream self-help is to aspire to be more normie than normie.

>>24704607
*but require guidance

>>24701082 (OP)
I don't hate it but I've noticed that the people that write self help books don't have any real accomplishments in life, and the people that read them usually aren't successful either. There is more interesting and applicable nonfiction that isn't littered with platitudes.

>>24704607
This. Almost all self-help bullshit is designed to help you be a better capitalist drone. What little self-help stuff that isn't bullshit is basically philosophy repackaged as feel-good woo. At that point, you may as well read classic philosophy, eastern or western.

>>24701082 (OP)
Because 99% of self-help is just religious or philosophical insight, watered down and repackaged as "how to be a productive idiot in the capitalist machine" (no, I'm not a commie). I say 99% because I'll leave the slim chance there's something out there that isn't pure garbage. Buddhism and Stoicism are the two most common sources, which are already midwit magnets on their own. You'd be better off going straight to the originals (scripture, philosophy), or to great literary fiction where you get the same ideas but with actual depth and aesthetic value. That is, if you aren't too stupid to register the message behind the style and prose. Only idiots waste time on self-help garbage.

>>24701082 (OP)
Self help was nice as a teenager starting to read and for the first time in my life caring about improving myself.

I hit a wall with the genre at 20 years old where every book I read and every video I watched with rare exceptions I felt I not only knew already but could do better and shorter than the author.

Then I picked up Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics and was completely stumped.
Now, soon to be 25, I may try once more with classics that far back, but I will certainly not entertain self-help goonslop any longer

Don't hate self-help books, am just not interested in them. The Scripture provides all the spiritual help that I need.

Don't want to learn about manipulating others, already have a daily habit of prayer in Salah, work towards a better life, and am not a sociopath who needs to mask a lack of empathy.

To be honest, I think these books are manipulative in themselves. They are often written as a money grab as well, much like smut. Both of these genres seek to take advantage of the spiritually weak for profit.

For example: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Here is how to make friends: Be friendly and kind to people. It just happens naturally. To influence people? Like a manipulator? You can make an impression that is earnest and sincere without thinking in this way.

Spiritually, culturally, am just not the kind of person who would seek out these kinds of books. I see why they are popular, but again, as a religious minority I do not relate to the majority.

>>24702322
>getting better step-by-step everyday'. >Towards what? Escaping the 'matrix'? By just becoming a part of the 'matrix' through working 70 h a week?

Climbing a mountain step by step grants you a view and perspective that is not quite like the postcard of the photo taken there that is included as the cover or first image of the book.

The book is a map, and it won't exactly map onto reality, which means that the only way to know what it would lead to is to use it. You can sit there and think you can fully imagine what it would be like, juat as any book no matter how much you heard about it, will affect you exactly as you expect before you read it.

It's true that sometimes the postcard is very current and very accurate, but it can not predict how your eyes will see, how your legs will feel.

Why would you ever not want to get better step by step, day by day? Whether it is towards an unknown direction, or away from something (escaping matrix or otherwise), why could ascending ever be the wrong direction?

>>24705369
I think we have different understanding of 'getting better, step by step'.
I read books and I like it. I once did read self help stuff too. My grades went up and I got better socially. But for what? It just doesn't matter. Life has no ultimate direction. It just passes. One may make it his task for life to have more money than other, but in the end it just doesn't make a difference. It has no worth. It just is a big, directionless void.
The only thing worth getting better at is coping with life. And the modern self help just isn't the right thing for that.

Self-help books fit so nicely within this system because it already bombards you with thousands of desire vectors that promise long-lasting happiness. If you get into psychoanalysis, you realize none of them can be kept, which doesn't make for a very marketable conclusion. Most of these books go unread, but even just purchasing one makes people feel better, because it implies that there really is a way to achieve this endgoal, giving them some kind of forever-unfinished project. The best kind there is.

>>24701180
Classical education is still a thing, in fact you can do it yourself if you follow the guides of people like Mary Bauer. She has a book called 'Well Educated Mind'

Self-help books aren't inherently bad, but the vast, VAST majority are too long for their own good. It's too much filler to pad length.

>>24705477
You contradict yourself. First you argue that value doesn't exist, then you place value in coping.

-

I agree we must see things differently, because I don't understand why you would abandon something if it does improve you socially, as doing well socially is a very impactful. Unless maybe it was approached more like casting spells
>doing x will get me y
and less about facilitating the creation of authentic connection. Human bonding.

Even if coping was an ultimate goal, how did doing well socially not facilitate that?

>>24705623
>First you argue that value doesn't exist, then you place value in coping.
I said that one can get better at anything he wants, but ultimately it leads no nowhere. There is no meaning. There is no objective value. And once you realise this human predicament, you probably start to despise life itself. And the best thing one can do at this point is to cope (or suicide, obviously). So coping is the last real activity with subjective value. If coping for you is to distract yourself with becoming the best programmer or earning as much money as you can, than of course that becomes valuable for you too. But objectively, there is still no meaning of course.

>I don't understand why you would abandon something if it does improve you socially, as doing well socially is a very impactful.
Because there is no more worth in it. Of course I still have basic decency. But what good could improving social skills do? Better salary? Don't really care. One night stand? Don't care. Girlfriend? I am not really compatible with intime relationship, so don't care.
The more you want, the more pain you will experience. So just try to flow with it instead of trying to change everything.

>>24705873
You say there is no objective value. But you see a subjective value. When seperated that way, why is coping the only subjective value?

If coping has subjective value, then it seems reasonable to think so does pleasure and contentment, as they are antidotes to the suffering, pain or void of meaning that has to be coped with.

Then if suffering, pain and void of meaning are of negative subjective value in yourself, they would also be so for anyone you care about. I don't know if you have family, friends, acquintances, neighbours or other people that you would like to have better subjective experiences in the world. If not, I would have some doubt about the social skills, though you don't sound like they're an issue for you.

If you care not just about your own coping but that of others, there's value to change things and not just passively go with the flow.

You don't really sound nihilist as your claim of absence of objective meaning implies. You sounds more like you're tired of trying. I dunno, maybe I'm wrong, I don't think about this kind of thing much.
If you do put stock into subjective value, what would it matter if there was a lack of objective value?

>>24701082 (OP)
In principle, there's nothing wrong with books that share advice on how to improve your life. However, the advice that most (all, really) of these books share is really quite banal and unlikely to be without of reach of the average consumer (buying a book is unnecessary). Moreover, I get the sense that people who buy these books do so to say that they "have them," or that they "read them," rather than to say that they actually implemented any of the advice in these books into their lives.

To touch on my prior point about the banality of their advice, most of these can be categorized into one of three kinds:

Type 1. Conceive, believe, achieve.
Type 2. Make your bed, bro.
Type 3. Your habits are compounding!!!

Do you really need a book for any of that? Maybe.

>>24706370
>When separated that way, why is coping the only subjective value?
Its just the next logical step. For example just look at Tolstoys 4 ways of responding to lifes meaninglessness:
1. Ignorance: not knowing, not understanding, that life is an evil and an absurdity. People of this sort have not yet understood that question of life
2. Epicureanism: While knowing the hopelessness of life, it makes use of the advantages one has. People in this circle are furnished with more of welfare than of hardship, and their moral dullness makes it possible for them to forget the advantage of their position is accidental.
3. Strength and energy:Having understood that it is better to be dead than to be alive, and that it is best of all not to exist, they act accordingly and promptly end this stupid joke.
4. Weakness: consists in seeing the truth of the situation and yet clinging to life, knowing in advance that nothing can come of it. People of this kind know that death is better than life, but not having the strength to act rationally - to end the deception quickly and kill themselves - they seem to wait for something.

Note from Tolstoy to the epicureans:
„The dullness of these people’s imagination enables them to forget the things that gave Buddha no peace — the inevitability of sickness, old age, and death, which today or tomorrow will destroy all these pleasures.“
„I could not imitate these people, since I did not lack imagination and could not pretend that I did. Like every man who truly lives, I could not turn my eyes away from the mice and the dragon once I had seen them.“

I am currently at the fourth, trying my best to imitate the second. But maybe I will find strength in the future.

>If coping has subjective value, then it seems reasonable to think so does pleasure and contentment
Sure. That may be in the form of religion, drugs or a coping mechanism like that of Cioran.

>If you care not just about your own coping but that of others, there's value to change things and not just passively go with the flow.
The people I care about seem to do good on their own. But there isn't anything I could really do for them, that they couldn't do better for themselves. They have other stuff that is important. You may want to be rich, but your mother may want to be closer to god while your father wants an European fascist Imperium. So either you give up on your values and help them or you just don't.
But ultimately nothing changes for them anyways. Just look at the hedonic treadmill. In the end, the pleasure would just become the norm and nothing changed. Nothing ever happens.

>If you do put stock into subjective value, what would it matter if there was a lack of objective value?
Because you would always know that all the effort goes down the void. You may be rich at the end of life, but the process of getting there would feel pointless, while the final result is a nothing burger.

>>24705213
trvth nvke