/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20540163]

Are self help books a spook or a meme? Thinking of reading Atomic Habits to stop being pic related

[Anonymous No.20540180]

>>20540163

[Anonymous No.20540242]

>>20540163
Well you could start your self help journey by just fucking reading the book and seeing if it's worth anything yourself instead of sitting around like a faggot waiting for other worthless faggots to tell you what do.

[Anonymous No.20540247]

>>20540163 T
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[Anonymous No.20540261]

>>20540163
First of all don't read anything written in the past 50 years.
Second, you guessed it, start with the greeks.
Third, avoid the stoics.
Fourth realize that you either accept nihilistic hedonism, some well established faith, or logical positivism and get in the herd with the rest of the normoids in academia.
Motivation isn't your problem, you lack wisdom.

[Anonymous No.20540278]

>>20540261
>You realise reading the whole philosophical canon and studying it is going to take many years right? It's just going to further ingrain him in inaction.

>academia
Yikes

[Anonymous No.20540298]

>>20540247
The Rapy Now?

[Anonymous No.20540382]

>>20540163
No just read the /fit/ collection and you're good.

[Anonymous No.20540639]

As with all books, you'll get from self-help books what you bring to them. I like Atomic Habits, there are definitely worse self-help books out there, but you have to actually do the exercises and stick with them. Reading the book in and of itself, in a vacuum of inaction, won't do it for you.

[Anonymous No.20540705]

>>20540261
>Avoid the stoics
Why?
>nihilistic hedonism
You meant to say hedonistic nihilism.
>some well established faith
You meant to say Islam

[Anonymous No.20540763]

>>20540163
I don't even want a GF, I want friends who can actually give me advice on how to be a human being again.

[Anonymous No.20540798]

>>20540163
Running 15 miles a week and eating healthy has done more for my mental health and motivation than books and therapy ever did. What you need is to get out into the world and get your body moving/blood pumping. You need to feel alive. Forget about books for now. I was that wojak a few years ago but I managed to get my shit together, but I didn't get there by reading books

[Anonymous No.20540819]

>>20540163
read pic related and go to a church instead lmao

consider this fact: in medieval bongland, an estimated 1 in 50 people were in some kind of religious vocation. the "man of inaction" meme comes from the fact that this gap in western societies is no longer filled, because you are totally without god or any kind of authority in your life besides your own agency, which is reddit and not how humans were designed. you are not better than your betters, and 200 or 1,000 years ago such a spiritual, mental, and vocational exile from your own society would mean a metaphorical and often times literal death

>but religion is just a cope! it's pathetic to be a tradoid and i just can't go into that life because religion is going to die and these ways of life are no longer valuable besides as modern freak shows!

this has literally happened multiple times in every century since antiquity lol, you are actually behind the curve because if you research christian revivals you will see that they happen all time in situations like our current one and you'd have to try real fucking hard to get rid of them, they are like cockroaches that come along and toss everything into the aether just when everybody thought things were decided. you couldn't get rid of them if you tried. plus, it IS a cope, and there is literally nothing wrong with that. god is cope for this reality because that's how he designed it. without cope you are just completely fucked.

tl;dr you got psy op'd out of realizing christian revivals are cyclical and we are about to hit another one and you really need this activity in your life

[Anonymous No.20540847]

>>20540163
The most important ingredient is action. Whatever you decide to read, if you aren't actually trying to use some of it, the book won't make a difference. I read Atomic Habits. I don't use a fair amount of what's in there. But there's some ideas I did like, such as habit stacking. So feel free to read anything that looks like it has some backing, take what seems useful, and utilize it.

[Anonymous No.20540865]

>>20540261
>avoid stoicism

ok sophist

[Anonymous No.20540867]

>>20540819
It wouldn't help him. He will be rejected by the church brunch club and driven to suicide by the absolute stupidity of meme christianity.

[Anonymous No.20540879]

>self help books
The act of acquiring and reading a self-help book is a neurological substitute for actual kinetic action to improve your life, which is often difficult, dull, and as repetitive as my prose.
The blacks are correct about "grindset" being the path to improvement.
Upon reading about improvement and fantasizing, your brain will briefly dispense reward chemicals as if you've completed the task. It's a flaw in our neurology.
This is what self-help books are selling, and why some people are (briefly) absorbed by the western pop psyche self help nonsense.

[Anonymous No.20540886]

>>20540163
now the self loathing man of inaction in his 30s.

can't even be bothered to kill himself.

[Anonymous No.20540901]

>>20540163
No book is going to fix your low self esteem, in fact overthinking has the exact opposite effect. You need to stop indulging in whatever copes that your brain has created for itself, figure out what it is that you really want to do, what is stopping you from doing it, and act. Cleanse your mind from the all meaningless bullshit and look at what is truly essential.
Or you could take the coward path like the guy above me is telling you to do and become religious, so you could derive whatever meaning you will from a bunch of semitic myths and tell yourself you're doing something of note in that life of yours.
Not saying it doesn't work, but you'd be wasting whatever potential you have.

[Anonymous No.20540907]

>>20540879
what if you actually applied the content of the books though

[Anonymous No.20540915]

>>20540867
like i said

>you are actually behind the curve because if you research christian revivals you will see that they happen all time in situations like our current one and you'd have to try real fucking hard to get rid of them, they are like cockroaches that come along and toss everything into the aether just when everybody thought things were decided.

you are describing a very limited form of christianity that does not represent the whole. meanwhile in like 100 years there will be another massive round of these tier guys across the entire planet lol. god protects.

[Anonymous No.20541976]

>>20540163
bump

[Anonymous No.20542179]

>>20540163
Nearly 90% of this is me. I want to kill myself now.

[Anonymous No.20542188]

>>20542179
Go hardcore improover mode, turn your brain off and get to work. Basically just stop being a neurotic faggot and act.

[Anonymous No.20542285]

>>20542188
Thanks Fren. I use to have a normal life but now I just stopped caring. A literal parasite.
>turn off your brain
This, Overthinking destroyed my life.

[Anonymous No.20542326]

>>20540163
Self-help books are guidelines, they don't *do* anything for you. Better/worse, a lot of grifting and cult-like bullshit is hidden in the subtle useful information, so you can end up falling for bullshit.
But if you HAVE the discipline (NOT motivation, motivation is useless and follows activity, NOT the other way around), self-help books can give you a framework to work around.
Thinking, Fast and Slow is not a self-help book, but written by a nobel prize winner about how the brain works. It's a fantastic road-map to "how your brain works", albeit dry in some parts, but will help you realize "ah, this is why I think/do this way". I'd always start there. Next depends on your problem or what you want to get out of shit. The Power of Habits is a bit of a fluff book, but does a very good job of outlining how habits control your life and how you can react to over-write them. But it only tells you how; you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. That's the definition of self-help books. You have to be not willing, but you have to be actually improving your life already before you even get to self-help books. That's where the true action/power lies.
I was working out and considerably improving my life when I started reading self-help books. I hate them with a passion, but there are some nuggets of wisdom, and they helped correct the path *I was already on*.

[Anonymous No.20542345]

self-help books are good if you never thought about time management, goal setting, etc. before but you only need to read a couple. the returns on reading self-help diminish pretty fast. i like this one by some google engineers. it's mostly about how to have time for a life while still maintaining a fulfilling career, however you define a life. it's pretty realistic and reasonable.

[Anonymous No.20542372]

>>20540261
>Second, you guessed it, start with the greeks.
I've been carefully reading Plato Dialogues and am now onto the Nichomachean Ethics... now please explain to me why I still don't have a job (non-minimum wage - because we're talking about excellence and self improvement, not the bare minimum)? And how I'm supposed to use the method of diairesis used in the Sophist to subdivide the female population into women who will make good wives and mothers and be attracted to me? And more importantly: the specific way that reading the Greeks is actually supposed to help, in some way that doesn't distill to some decidedly common or non-greek notions of "take action" "you need discipline" or "be courageous" or worst of all "it's your mindset bro"? Like what can anons actually expect to glean from reading "the Greeks" that will improve their lives, change their Ethos and Hexeis in meaningful ways?

[Anonymous No.20542376]

>>20540798
>>20540798
this

[Anonymous No.20542380]

>>20540886
iktfb

[Anonymous No.20542398]

My advice: decide on a outcome or goal you want to accomplish. Don't read a 'self-help book'. Instead find an instructional manual that gives you exercises to master the skills needed accomplish that goal.
If you don't know what goal you want to accomplish, provided you're not depressed in which case stop wasting time and go to >>20540247 therapy now, then you're probably not looking hard enough. Who are the people you look up to? What do they all share in common? What makes them different to you? That should suggest to you at least one goal you can work towards.
Although chances are you do have a goal or something you'd like to do, if you've always thought "naw, that's too expensive" or "I don't have the time" - then either make money and time, or find a smaller stepping stone prototype of the same goal.
Now you can find an instructional book directly related to the technical skills needed to accomplish that goal. Now you'll be making meaningful and obvious self-improvement.

[Anonymous No.20544319]

>>20540163
bump