Some ideas are great to improve your life, but they implicitly assume that you are in a prison and that there is no way to get out of it. For example:
§1. The focus on mental health as an isolated thing to focus on is somewhat useful, far better than doing nothing about people’s problems, but it also neglects other incredibly important aspects of life, such as a) emotions b) community c) living for something beyond just yourself—spirituality, love, etc. d) embodiment.
The commonality between those neglected aspects is that they cannot be addressed by manufacturing things or scaling a method, the same way that you can teach a bunch of psychiatrists to talk to people a certain way, or produce and distribute drugs to numb people's symptoms of deeper problems.
As such, trying to make someone more functional while they have no real relationships in their life, don’t have any interests besides playing video games and are utterly out of touch with their body is completely useless, because the problems will creep up again sooner or later.
§2. The focus on finding your passion for your job is useful, again it is better than giving up on any meaningful work entirely, but it also comes with the assumption that you are fine working within the system, which will impose massive limitations on several things.
For instance, on the impact of your job, since helping rich people is far, far more profitable than truly helping others, and building scalable systems is far more profitable than being there for the people in your local community. Or limitations on the freedom you have, since you will either take immediate commands from a superior, or at the very least need to conform to the standards and demands of the machine-world.
In my experience, those two aspects, impact and freedom, might be even more important than whether you are truly "passionate" about your job. I do not wake up from bed with a flaring interest for moving out furniture, but if a person close to me needs help for that, then I'll gladly help, because of the personal connection, and also because most tasks become significantly more enjoyable with a friend, and when you have the freedom to go at your own pace.
§3. The advice "Don't care what other people think" assumes that you should stay with those same people your entire life and become better at dealing with their sneering, when you could also simply … spend time with other people. Of course, even great people can overstep their boundary and meddle in your personal life when they really shouldn't, and as such being able to not care too much what others think is genuinely useful, but it is very interesting how few people talk about finding better company.
My suspicion is that people secretly love being the odd one out, because it makes them oh so special. To be the one that no one in the entire world of 8 billion people can understand because their mind and feelings are so deep and subtle. But at the same time they do not have the courage to simply leave their current social circle and search for other people. 14 As a result, the resentment of others becomes the odd one out's pride, i.e. they feel superior by being cast away, and leaving those people would make them lose their feeling of being special.
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2024-11-30