Now that I’ve caught you with the clickbait title,

Basically every post has included some form of toxic self-hate, minus one or two mentioning exercise. While I do like being able to confront these in the first place, the purported goals and name of this community gives people who are giving the exact wrong advice far too much credibility, and the last thing these people need is a comment with the most upbears regurgitating individualistic self-help concepts at them.

If we’re going to keep this sort of community around, I suggest doing some serious research and basing it off of DBT, and integrating serious critiques of CBT style mental healthcare and improvement.

I am just some random nerd who is terrible at self-improvement at general, so I understand taking this with some serious doubt. But I just had to get this off my chest.

Thank you, WithoutFurtherBelay

  • Zodiark [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    I think that’s a good idea. Not the comm replacement, but the commitment to providing coherent and generic advice and guidelines for self-improvement.

    In my experience, self-improvement does start with working Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as goal posts to define self-improvement. That’s a good foundational start. After your physical needs come social needs, and social needs and skills are subjective.

    Because they are subjective, this is where advice begins to branch off and become helpful to detrimental, and often become unreliable. Older communities of self-improvement across the internet, like reddit, often just limit the scope of the advice.

    I suppose if you were to start from zero, we prioritize : Hygiene, grooming, clean room/house, exercise, healthy diet. Then having personal goals, professional goals, and relationship goals; the complications arise in these goals by the very processes of time causing attrition of effort making consistency an art of discipline that most of us will fall onto a spectrum of diminishing returns if we treat it like a chore; our labors must become habit.

    I think part of what could benefit this comm is the cultivation of encouraging and providing intellectual foundation for healthy habits.

    • Gay_Wrath [fae/faer]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      I agree with what you said, i just want to add on something

      The fun thing about the hierarchy of needs is Maslow actually made a totally lib version of what he observed from the Blackfoot nation.

      https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-06-18/the-blackfoot-wisdom-that-inspired-maslows-hierarchy/

      The First Nations perspective, which makes a lot more sense to me is Self Actualization on the bottom, Community Actualization in the middle, cultural perpetuity at the top

      So, becoming/being your best self, enriching your community, and enriching your culture. This is a much less individualist way of looking at things. If you become your best self, you can give yourself to your community. Lib maslow had to add shit like “individual safety” since those aren’t a given in colonizer land, but if everyone focused on community actualization - making it safe for everyone, there would be no need for those individual base needs to even be mentioned.

      The other thing to note is no one actually treated it like a triangle, it’s better expressed as a pie chart of needs