rooshvforum.network is a fully functional forum: you can search, register, post new threads etc...
Old accounts are inaccessible: register a new one, or recover it when possible. x


Important Note to New Guys
#1

Important Note to New Guys

I'd rather not give the source of this, because it might distract you from your goals, and I'm going to demand you do your 100 Approaches and what not before I give you more fodder to do nothing. But this is an important snippet, and a bit of a different message than you'll usually hear, but it's just as important. Read this until you understand.

Quote:Quote:

Slightly off topic but here's an important example: say you yell every day at an/your eight year old girl for sloppy homework, admittedly a terrible thing to do but not uncommon, and eventually she thinks, "I'm terrible at everything" and gives up, so the standard interpretation of this is that she has lost self-confidence, she's been demoralized, and case by case you may be right, but there's another possibility which you should consider: she chooses to focus on "I'm terrible at everything" so that she can give up.  "If I agree to hate myself I only need a 60?  I'll be done in 10 minutes. "

It is precisely at this instant that a parent fails or succeeds, i.e. fails: do they teach the kid to prefer (find reinforcement in) the drudgery of boring, difficult work with little daily evidence of improvement, or do they teach the kid to prefer (find reinforcement in) about 20 minutes of sobbing hysterically and then off to Facebook and a sandwich?  Each human being is only able to learn to prefer one of those at a time.  Which one does the parent incentivize?

If you read this as laziness you have utterly missed the point. It's not laziness, because you're still working hard, but you are working purposelessly on purpose. The goal of your work is to be done the work, not to be better at work.

For a great many people this leads to an unconscious, default hierarchy in the mind, I'm not an epidemiologist but you got it in you sometime between the ages of 5 and 10:

<doing awesome>

is better than

<feeling terrible about yourself>

is better than

<the mental work of change>

You should memorize this, it is running your life.  "I'm constantly thinking about ways to improve myself."  No, you're gunning the engine while you're up on blocks.  Obsessing and ruminating is a skill at which we are all tremendously accomplished, and admittedly that feels like mental work because it's exhausting and unrewarding, but you can no more ruminate your way through a life crisis than a differential equation.  So the parents unknowingly teach you to opt for <b>, and after a few years of childhood insecurity, you'll choose the Blue Pill  and begin the dreaming: someday and someplace you'll show someone how great you somehow are.  And after a few months with that someone they will eventually turn to you, look deep into your eyes, and say, "look, I don't have a swimming pool, but if I did I'd drown myself in it.  Holy Christ are you toxic."

"Well, my parents were really strict, they made me--"  Keep telling yourself that.  Chances are if your parents are between 50 and 90 they were simply terrible.  Great expectations; epic fail.  Your parents were dutifully strict about their arbitrary and expedient rules, not about making you a better person.  "Clean your plate!  Go to college!"   Words fail me.  They weren't tough, they were rigidly self-aggrandizing.  "They made me practice piano an hour every day!" as if the fact of practice was the whole point; what they did not teach you is to try and sound better every practice. They meant well, they loved you, but the generation that invented grade inflation is not also going to know about self-monitoring and paedeia, which is roughly translated, "making yourself better at piano."

"You don't know how hard it is to raise kids," says someone whose main cultural influence in life was the Beatles.   The fact that you will inevitably fail in creating Superman is not a reason not to try.   Oh:  I bet I know what you chose when you were 8.

The mistake is in thinking that misery and self-loathing are the "bad" things you are trying to get away from with Ambien and Abilify or drinking or therapy or whatever, but you have this completely backwards. Self-loathing is the defense against change, self-loathing is preferable to <mental work.> You choose misery so that nothing changes, and the Ambien and the drinking and the therapy placate the misery so that you can go on not changing. That's why when you look in the mirror and don't like what you see, you don't immediately crank out 30 pushups, you open a bag of chips. You don't even try, you only plan to try. The appearance of mental work, aka masturbation.   The goal of your ego is not to change, but what you don't realize is that time is moving on regardless.  Ian Anderson wrote a poem about this, you should study it carefully.
Reply


Forum Jump:


Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)