Demythifying Self-Improvement: Reflecting on the religion of the future
After people have abandoned their self-education in favor of consuming mindless entertainment, many “gurus” and “professors” have started to show up with flawed interpretations of thoughts, philosophies, and religious dogmas.
What was once known as an “adult”, became a distorted concept. People who had no standard to guide themselves by began to incorporate ideas into their personality without properly digesting everything, making their synapses resemble a sick colon.
One of the authors who have been brutally abused, particularly in the last decade, is Friedrich Nietzsche. Without even taking into account the background of Nietzsche’s philosophy, many have started to throw passages and aphorisms left and right, appropriating labels such as “nihilist” or phrases like “God is Dead”, completely overlooking all the facts which Nietzsche tried to portray as causes of modern man’s suffering.
People have forgotten that humbleness is the gateway towards wisdom and they began to think of themselves in high regard for simply frantically moving their eyes on a piece of text for which, in reality, they needed years of study and reflections combined with personal experience to absorb the teaching or message.
While trying to milk dollars from society’s lack of attention span and curiosity, these new types of “intellectuals” left behind massive damage to everyone who clicked on their youtube video or listened to their podcast.
Insert a random quote because people can’t read for too long.- Lobster Peterson
The first place we need to look for us to find just how bad our world has gotten is the so-called “self-improvement” industry (I use the word industry since there is nothing natural about it).
I had tried to pinpoint when this cancer started to develop, but I couldn’t find a fixed date. While books about how to increase your performance in whatever your domain is have existed since the Roman Empire, the internet made it so that something as simple as advising someone turned into entertainment.
Twenty-minute-long videos about waking up early and not “tap out”, quotes splattered on the screen while someone covered in sweat is jumping up and down in the background set the bar for what one needs to do to be “successful”.
When simple “motivation” hacks were not enough, the big “self-improvement” machine switched to another buzzword: habits.
If you take a look back at the last five years or so, all of a sudden, habits started to become “everything”. Instagram pages with photos of random animals and one-liners written on them got out of fashion, the modern consumer, the educated zombie of today, needed more.
An amalgam of rich people started to scream out at the top of their lungs about productivity and why you suck at life. The only cure being, obviously, more of them and less of you. You started to look more like this:
These ideas manifested rapidly in people’s perspectives. Now they were productive, they were happy, they were surrounded by “like-minded” persons and everyone else was a loser. All of this, of course, while confined with their eyes on the screen for 8-hours plus “bettering” and “educating” themselves.
Propelling millions of egos into the sky and not backing them up with real, factual, tangible, and hands-on truths left many victims wondering what went wrong in their day, why there are a string of days and months, and years of nothing but content consumption.
Where is their improvement?
When the 2020 pandemic came about, many flaunted their strong mental health and resilience towards struggle and adversity only to find themselves more depressed and anxious regarding the future.
Internet abuse and drug consumption, primarily sugar and junk food, sky-rocketed and turned into a routine, and STILL, amid all that pain and regret, nobody stopped to reflect on what is going on inside their head. Nobody took a day off from the digital plantation, nobody started to actually work from home or do something which can translate into real life.
Everyone did what they were conditioned to do: claimed everyone else is causing their grief and kept consuming. They watched videos about cognitive dissonance while acting in opposition to their desired results and still not taking action, they took in information about nutrition while driving to the store for Oreos, they made playlists stacked with workout tutorials and music while never doing a single push up.
Today, as the new prophets of “productivity” preach their gospels with parables about lobsters and alpha-beta distribution of resources, one is left with a big gap inside.
Our growth needs to be mind, body, and soul. We cannot ignore or focus on one more than the other. So, what hope is out there for the people who have seen through the matrix?
