/lit/ - Literature

If you want to improve your concentration, it'll have to be an all day affair. I've found the most important things are: unitasking and task commitment.
Unitasking is pretty straightforward, just try and do one thing at a time. There's been a bunch of research on multitasking, and the consensus is that it really kills your facility of concentration.
Commit to a task. Decide on a goal and stick with it. If your goal is 'I will read for an hour', read for an hour. You'll undoubtedly start feeling a strong urge pulling you away from reading, but you have to power through that, because that's when you're really training the concentration muscle. It sounds like some captain obvious shit, but task commitment is probably one of the most important things. Do it with everything. If you're watching a movie, watch the movie all the way through. Don't start shit posting on /tv/ 20 minutes in.
Start small if need be. If you can only focus for 5 minutes on something, focus for 5 minutes, but actually do it. You can then start working your way up.
That's what I've been doing for a couple of weeks now, and I'm seeing tangible benefits and it feels like I'm finally uncucking my mind.

Also meditate.
>>10832797 <- this guy has the right idea, keep it simple.

It's kind of like physical exercise in the sense that it can take the form of varying levels of practice and that in turn manifests in certain results.
Somebody who jogs 5k on the weekends is going to have a different experience than somebody who trains for marathons; you average DYEL is going to have a different experience in the gym than some guy on roids who's in there for 4 hours a day and watches his macros.

Meditation can be almost negligibly positive to life-transforming so I found it difficult to speak about it in the general sense.

witnessed

Most forms of mysticism are very heavy on non-attachment, and very strongly opposed to material hedonism of any kind. I don't know if that full fills your notion of rejecting the human condition, but I suppose in ways it's similar.

The problem with that is: if you simply turn away from all sensual pleasure you're left with a life that sucks even more dick. That's why pretty much every form of mysticism rest on the backbone of ecstatic practices. Jhana, Dhyana, Samadhi, equivalent Western concepts found in the works of Christian mystics, etc.

People are very unaware of this aspect of life, but the potentiality for an experience better than sex and drugs is right under their noses. If you're really that despondent towards life I suggest you look into these practices. These days it's very easy to find (good) material on Jhana (a Buddhist meditative practice), and Yogic practices.

>>8059240
>I've never been able to draw, I tried learning, but with no significant improvements I got frustrated and quit.

Let me guess, you dabbled a bit for a month and then gave up?
I started drawing 3 years ago; I'm barely starting to get gud.

Cultivating a skill takes time, and you're gonna have to power through hours, days, weeks and even months of frustration.

Stop being a babby.