Self-Transformation & Build A Better You.

There is a widespread, I would say almost institutionalised, culture of feminine self-improvement. Have a better body. Acquire these craft skills. Learn how to do this advanced make-up style. Colour-match your furnishings. What not to wear.

It has no specific political valence. It can even code as feminist, or as something that feminists should value because it is self-expression and empowerment and mutual aid (albeit sometimes in a rather competitive frame). It is not generally regarded as the particular province of reactionaries or right-wingers.

And it does overlap with a certain spirituality: be beautiful inside and out, achieve balance, access the numinous through mindful attentiveness to the everyday. Sometimes this gets a bit woo around the edges, sometimes it meshes directly with new age language and practices.

It's also massively commercialised, amplifies and preys on insecurities, and involves a level of make-believe about things which people not in the game - men in particular, but also women who don't find that they really want to play along - can find difficult to stomach. At its worst, it's neuroticising, feeding into anxieties about whether one's life and self are as fully realised as they could or should be, which are exacerbated by ceaseless comparison of oneself with the primped, insta-filtered, ruthlessly curated avatars of others who have achieved high status within the game.

I'm not sure I want that for myself. When I see women kvetching online about how little effort men put into simply slobbing around being themselves, I think "yes, and that's healthy. What you do, all that fussing over self-fashioning, that wouldn't be healthy for me. I'm not sure it's healthy for you, either". But I think it very quietly.

I don't find that I value effort in general. I've always been a "work smarter, not harder" sort of person, i.e. extremely lazy and coasts as much as possible on such talents as I natively possess. I'll spend endless hours on something I care about, like learning to play something on the guitar or writing some interesting code, but I don't regard that as effort: it's something else, a kind of absorption, which is if anything anaesthetising: nothing like the nerve-wracking grind of real work.

I went to Yoga for the first time on Sunday, it was fucking torture. Being put in one stress position after another and told to relax. Apparently it gets easier the more you do it, which makes sense. But it's a nerve-wracking grind to begin with. I'm going to persevere with it, because I'm curious about what it might feel like to be able to do those things without feeling physically awkward and agonised the whole time. But that's an endogenous motivation, it's not about what anyone else thinks of me. I'm not doing it to get buff or better at sex. I'm not even doing it so I can present as more calm, centred, physically confident. Those are things other people want for me, or from me, but I don't care enough about any of them to go through even the mildest discomfort. I have very bad character.

Yeah, it doesn't feel good. Like doing PE, or some shit like that, that you decided was definitely not for you and completely dropped the moment it ceased to be compulsory.

I do regret not having kept up, at university, the cross-country running I'd started to find I enjoyed at school. I hated everything else about sport and physical exercise, but long-distance running suited me in a way nothing else did. If I'd only kept that up, I'd have felt the benefits. But I dropped it with everything else, because it wasn't compulsory any more.

luka said:

why are we not who we want to be? What is resistance? Who is the enemy? Why is self-sabotage?
How can we achieve self mastery and become hyperborean, lusty, with flashing eyes and wolffish grins?

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I think a critical point that a lot of self-help stuff misses is that desire is alienated. People need to get underneath all this stuff about shagging lots of women and having huge muscles and reflect on what drives that.

And this stuff about what "I" is, is essential too. The terrain of manipulating women into having sex with you is the ultimate shitty individualism which is a series of individualised pleasurable experiences which miss out on the bigger picture of how you fit into the world.

There needs to be a dialectical process of collective and individual transformation at play.

This is also a time-of-life thing I think. When you're in your mid-40s, if things have gone more or less all right, you should be at a stage where most of the competencies you need to get by are just purring along. Whatever your stock in trade is, whether it's your intellect or your looks or your people skills, you've cultivated it to the level where it just sort of works for you. Now's the time for worrying about the meaning of it all, or how you'll handle your impending obsolescence as the world inevitably moves on. Maybe you need to shake things up just to feel alive. Crack out the dice, or whatever. But a certain self-satisfaction may well have set in, just because your abilities are more or less equal to the demands that are regularly placed upon them.

If you're my son's age, 19 going on 20, you have a still quite unfashioned self to fashion. You could drift to the bad in all sorts of ways. You might feel lost, anxious, in thrall to habits or needs that aren't fully integrated into your pattern of life. That's when Jordan Peterson telling you to clean your room, embrace your manly essence, stand up and count for something, has a particularly poignant appeal. Even if you know he's a huckster, you can't help but feel there's something in it. You need direction, you need challenges, you need to level up, to amount to something. The world isn't telling you what to do. You don't have compulsory PE, or compulsory maths lessons. What's compulsory is, you have rent to pay. It's a very unsettled time.

luka said:

I don't disagree with that.

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Cool.

WRT self-sabotage...

People do get stuck in cycles in habits in narrow ways of thinking about who they are and what they can do.

Partly now this is because everyone is too exhausted to try and bust out of those traps too.

Most people have incredible untapped potential, but this is very differnent from saying "you can do anything!"

You have a thing you do which is yours which you're unarguably very good at.