/hobby/ - Hobby

Clean your room lad

Midnight gospel

I was watching Midnight Gospel earlier today, it was about a guy that did Magick (an occult religion made by Alister Crowley), nothing groundbreaking, but it reminded me of my new age/spiritual past and how it relates to my leftist present. It led to the idea that the left is missing something that people have a dire need for (because current year neoliberal capitalism sucks balls).

I'm sure a lot of people feel the need for some type of ritual in their daily lives, like praying before food, saying magic words when washing their hands. Many people lose those things when they lose their religion. I was never truly religious, but I know a lot of people that seem to derive comfort from repeating small rituals in their daily lives. Of course, mandated rituals for the left is ridiculous and should be rejected. The lack of this ritualistic experience I think derives more from a need to produce something with intent. A type of mindful exercise.

Another thing that is truly in dire need in our society is self-help/spirituality. I've written before that I was looking into writing something about self-help/spiritualism for the left, but I haven't really thought about what direction to take it and I'm not really that awesome in my personal life (I am probably in a better position than Jordan Wash Your Penison was when he wrote the lobster book, but alas). There's several points here, I'll try to summarize them.

>Understanding of nature/society
Chaos and uncertainty are terrible, especially for people who struggle financially or live in unsafe environments. When there is an overarching model that encompasses reality, it makes it much less scary and makes it feel less chaotic. For example, christian good vs evil, Karma.

For the left, we have marxism as something that bring clarity to the motion of politics and society. It is incredibly holistic, much more than a lot of religions. With a marxist understanding of society, you can explain the existence of a variety of cultural phenomena.

A (perhaps dangerous) middle ground is to use marxism as the foundations to build a quasi-religious mythos. A type of animistic phantasm that is both real, but also "a social construct". I quote an anonymous author,

>Matt Christman for instance seems to have adopted a gnostic, syncretic philosophy. Capital is basically the same thing as the gnostic idea of the demiurge: a blind, malevolent idiot god that created and directs this fallen realm. It's an emergent phenomenon created from the collective activity and decisions of millions of people, but taking on an agency of its own that is apart from the desires of the owners of capital, and subordinating them to it its own will. But there is no "it." It's a nothing, just an outline of a thing. It isn't the numbers in the computers on Wall Street. It isn't even the collective will of the bourgeoisie. It's a metaphysical non-being brought into "being" by the market system, which nevertheless controls the world as though it were an actually existing dark god. We are all slaves to this terrible, dark god. This also means that if capital is the demiurge, and the capitalists the high priests and servants, that implies there must be an opposite. As Moloch was created from the sum of the will of the bourgeoisie, a blind drive towards accumulation at all costs, perhaps the true God is the collective manifestation of mankind's better nature. Where Moloch is the will to dominate, to treat other people as tools to be used, then God is our drive to cooperate, the hatred of injustice, the will to liberate ourselves and our fellow humans. Thus, the class struggle is not just physical, but spiritual. A holy crusade, and we communists are the faithful. Thus, Karl Marx was God's prophet, sent to light the way to liberation and to the fulfillment of mankind's promise. But even if we are to fail, and the dialectic is broken once and for all, we can say at least that while our bodies were slaves to capital, our minds and souls remain free and we remain faithful to the true God, the god of love and fairness, of cooperation and justice, while the minds and souls of the capitalists are in the thrall of Moloch. I think you could call that a kind of spiritual salvation.

Basically capitalism is an evil AI god that we must help defeat and bring about the "oppressed" god of socialism, via the writing of prophets like Marx and Lenin. Of course pushing this religion is borderline impossible, but if it succeeded, I wonder if it could have any effects on the support of class struggle. I am not really educated on the subject, but I've heard that there are secular rabbis that are also jewish scholars. The parallel there would be secular socialist scholars who read "the word" and further the study of socialism.

>Mindfulness, gratitude, meditative praying/meditation
Especially in this mad world we live in, where it's becoming increasingly rare to not be diagnosed with a mental issue, where even children are joining the ranks of pill-poppers, something that stops the world for a second, that gives a little rest and clarity to the mind is almost a luxury. Almost all of these practices are attached to religious or new age ideas. There was a "secular Buddhist" movement that was unfortunately tied to charlatans like Sam Harris.

Some might criticize that the practice of gratitude might remove your revolutionary potential, making you satisfied with mediocrity. But, the practice of gratitude can be really fulfilling and can make you enjoy your day to day life more. Is your anger, your hate the only thing that motivates your revolutionary desire? If you were happy, you would accept the state of affairs, Bangladeshi slavery and all? If so, your conviction to the socialist cause is more flimsy than you thought, because it is based merely on your emotions and the hand that life has handed you out.

Meditation or meditative praying is the act of easing your mind and slowing thought if only for a moment. It is a training that you do with your brain as with any other muscle. Some just take the breaks they have while waiting for the coffee to brew, just like some only do the exercise it takes to get from their bed to their desk and back. Meditation helps in reducing the incidence of these terrible mental afflictions, including media-induced ADD that compels us to grab our cellphones or do *anything* when we feel bored for more than 30 seconds. This also helps with other revolutionary habits, such as reading boring and dry theory. It helps in developing more complex thoughts because it develops the patience to construct them and inspect them.

1/

>>6487

Mindfulness helps bring clarity to the day to day activities. We're always telling ourselves stories in our heads, sometimes it 's fantastical stories of a world where our dogs could suddenly talk, sometimes it's about a conflict with another person, a stressing meeting scheduled for next week, a difficult problem that is not easy to solve. All of these narratives that are clouding are heads all day are also clouding our judgement. If we are to experience the world as it is, we must also clear the clutter that impedes our vision. For leftist, the obvious obstacle for clarity is ideology, but it is also the clutter of our personal lives that makes us see things differently. If you are hungry and tired, you will more likely misinterpret someone's tone. This is where mindfulness helps, apart from the benefits of general meditation mentioned above.

>Self-actualization/realization
This is the hardest to come to terms with. Not all religions have "enlightenment" as a core goal. New age spirituality and (my western understanding of) buddhist religion do, and it's practitioners seek to further their overarching goal of reaching it, because that's the reason they came into this world.

Capitalist ideology plays a very cruel game in terms of self realization. First it speaks about everything in terms of productivity, and of course, makes labor power a commodity, which further gets internalized as making humans a commodity that is owned by the individual. It promotes reaching self-actualization by having large quantities of money. It promotes the idea of entrepreneurship as a viable way to get out of poverty. It figuratively and literally says that your "worth" is tied to your personal assets value. Of course, people lose meaning and purpose all the time, modern capitalism is so alienating that it is very hard to see one's "value" in the chain of production, many modern workplaces have evolved to have easily replaceable human resources too. If one has pursued money accumulation their whole life, they might doubt the goal, what type of self-actualization is "having a lot of money" after all?

I see at least 3 ways that people seek self-realization through capitalism: climbing the corporate ladder (or selling better in the employee market), starting their own business, maximizing cash/asset value. I see 3 other ways that people seek self-realization outside work: hobbies, children, religion/spirituality.

As a leftist, seeing past capitalist ideology can be very depressing and demotivating. If you don't particularly enjoy your work, it can be even more alienating than it was originally.

Where is the non-ideological self-realization for leftists? There are no catch all, be all, self-realization for leftists, instead, if one looks to Marx for inspiration, creation and non-alienated work is the cure of one's ailments. I once heard someone make the remark that our hobbies are what we used to do as work before industrialization. It is true that a lot of hobbies bring us satisfaction because they are productive unalienated work, but not all hobbies are work or productive. Many hobbies have a strong component of growth (skill or knowledge), that require a lot of patience to get going, but after some time start reaping large rewards. Many hobbies also have a component of community even when the activity of the hobby is individual (watchmaking individually, but also going to watchmakers conventions for example), which contribute greatly to fulfill the need of belonging. Is it possible to make leftist activism an attractive hobby? If so, should we?

I see two core leftist related activity that act as a tool for personal self-realization. Organizing politcally is working towards a common goal, with a team, and putting in productive work. Depending on how tight the ship is run and how involved you are, people might depend on you to get things going. When you organize, ideally you bring your skills, knowledge, etc to help out. Likewise, others bring their experience to the table, which means that organizing will expose you to a myriad of different industry practices, teach you how people solve problems, how to interact with and organize people effectively, and potentially teach you useful skills that you can put into practice elsewhere (such as work or life). The learning, the unalienated work, the community, and the wider purpose makes political organizing a source of fulfillment of self-realization. My local org hosts cookouts, which makes organization much more relaxed and fun (and delicious). Perhaps the question is better phrased, should we work towards making political organizing more enjoyable? If so, how?

Another leftist activity is reading and writing. Besides the activity being enjoyable itself, there's also a sense of progress either in a book's page number or a tackling of a field of study, there are always more books to read, more nuances to write about, and new cultural phenomenon to be analyzed. It definitely helps if you don't have media-induced ADD, depressive hedonia, etc. which can be mitigated by the mediation discussed above. These are thoughtful activities that can't be passively experienced, like watching TV or appreciating bourgeois art. And it also has that component of delayed gratification, where the more one reads/writes, the more gratifying the experience becomes. Reading circles and book clubs add the sense of community that makes the sessions more enjoyable, plus it is a good experience that deepens the understanding of the read material.

>Personal development/self-help
Personal development is always rife with charlatans, and the books are always windy, self-important, and conclude boring platitudes. That said, there are books which are salvageable, one of those being 'How to Win Friends and Influence People'. It is a classic in Sleazy Salesman school, but it also contains advice that is actually helpful for building relationships. I'm sure there are more, even when they are written by and for liberals, and are riddled with liberal ideology, there are some good points in self help books that can potentially improve our lives. The need for self-help is evidenced in the ridiculous success that even second rate charlatans have had in this area.

Living under capitalism, being bombarded constantly by psychic attacks, is no easy ordeal. It is bound to leave scars and trauma, and it is also bound to leave some ideological biases we might not be aware of. For this we have the practice colloquially known as "deconstruction" of the self, self-criticism, and we have psychoanalysis/psychotherapy and other therapeutic for-pay mediums that should not be immediately discarded (if one can afford it).

The goal is to uncover traumas you might be hiding from yourself. To do this, you want to analyze deeply what discomforts you, angers you, etc. The goal is to analyze as detailed as possible why you think, do, or feel certain things, with which you might uncover unwanted traumas, ideological biases, habits, and do your best to remove them from your life.

2/3

>>6488

Of course, this is not an easy process, and we do have a tendency to ascribe bogus reasons to things when the real reason might be "I'm angry because I'm hungry and tired". Note that you do not want to victimize yourself or create pitiful narratives about why you have the traumas. This protagonism is poisonous and is also something that is best being exorcised.

In fact uncovering the reasons of your traumas is almost useless, except for potentially uncovering more traumas. We are animals of habit, what we want to uncover is not why we have traumas but what traumas we have and how to get rid of them. For example, a gay person will probably have internalized homophobia, it is good for him to do the exercise of being on the lookout and constantly try to spot himself being homophobic. The reason of the internalized homophobia here might look obvious, but don't get fooled, this hypothetical gay person might have grown up in a very supportive household or might have grown up in a backwards anti-homo city; the trauma is there, the only thing that matters is to identify it and to overcome it. I will repeat this because self-victimization is very common and counter-productive: the reason why the trauma exists is almost useless, it is a mistake to get hung up on it.

Identifying traumas is the first step, the second step is to solve it. Sometimes being constantly aware of it is enough (relevant: mindfulness), but sometimes it requires a material change in the external world to help fix trotted out thought patterns or normal habits. The change might be small, like deactivating social networks, or might need to be large, such as avoiding friends that could eventually lead to a relapse. As Zizek says, ideology is identified by putting the anti-ideology glasses ON, there are no ideology glasses to take off. In the same way, this exercise is an active process, you need to put the critical lens ON.

There is a pitfall with criticism in general that must be stated. Criticism is useless if there is no concrete action attached to it to fix or mitigate it in the future. Just knowing you have a trauma is not enough to fix it. Find the root cause that triggers the trauma (note: this is different than the reason of WHY you have the trauma), and take actions to eliminate or mitigate the root cause.

>Media-induced ADD/Depressive hedonia
To tie this back to the mindfulness and the fulfilling hobbies mentioned above, consider your patterns that might be taking your capacity to concentrate or might be leading you towards a spiral of depressive hedonia. Mark Fisher writes,

>Depression is usually characterised in terms of anhedonia, but the state I'm referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that 'something is missing' - but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle.

In simple terms, this is occupying your time playing candy crush, refreshing social media feeds, having constant doses of dopamine, but never actually feeling satisfied or particularly happy. I argue that this is in great part caused by our constant access to media, such as games, social media, news, etc. Especially on our phones. This depressive state of constant pleasure, destroys our ability to engage more deeply with the activities we do. Even gaming can be reduced to a laborious process that derives little pleasure.

>Conclusions
All of the points described above are very case dependent. Not everyone has the same ailments, not everyone has the luxury to be able to do something in their lives to solve them. The intent of this essay is to begin the conversation of finding non-ideological, non-bullshit ways to better our lives as individuals. Self-help as it exists now is a field of landmines, where there is more mines than land! It is evident that self-help/religion/spirituality fills a void that many of us need desperately to alleviate the alienating and isolating experience of living in modern capitalism and it might be a good ground to develop theory in.

3/3

My advice it to find a productive hobby and try your best to get good at it.My hobby is drawing. Everyday I try my best to get better and better. You'll probably be dogshit at whatever you do at first but conjuring up the will to continue on will make you stronger. I keep my old sketchbooks as a reminder of the progress I made.
It may sound like I'm telling you to "just do x" but building up your discipline and willpower goes a long way trust me.What you learn from trying your best at getting good you should spread to everything else in your life.It won't be easy but its worth it.

>>6485
I hope something in the long ass article I posted helps you. What has helped me is just giving in to not doing anything, but also severely limiting the "easy" habits (social media, bunkerchan, etc). Also drinking enough water (sounds weird, but knowing I get depressed when not hydrated has helped me tons). Also small amounts of modafinil in the morning, like 50 mg. Waking up in the morning sometimes helps. Taking a 1 hour walk without electronics lets me cool down a little too. I've heard exercise helps, I don't like doing it though.

My advice is, change your daily habits until something clicks. Try doing something that makes you progress. In the article I wrote I think I hint at more solutions.

FYI We already have a Self-Improvement thread m8s

>>6493
That one is a bit messed up with weird puritan nofap type junk though.

>>6491
Hey. Your article was pretty insightful, I am impressed. To be honest I read it while I was super depressed and promptly forgot about it, but I should read it again now since I'm still feeling sad I guess.

>>6490
I guess… I've sort of tried some shit like that but I can't muster up the energy to do anything creative because it upsets and angers me too much when I'm bad at it or not perfect. It upsets me when I fail at stuff so I just don't try stuff.

I want to try to 'be better every day' but usually I'll just have one good day and then be back to the usual shit the next day and end up asleep during the day and awake at night again.

I dunno, bros. I'm just sick of feeling sad all the time but it's been a decade like this basically. I just don't feel like there's really any hope in life for me.

>>6657
>It upsets me when I fail at stuff so I just don't try stuff.
I understand that feeling and I apologize if my advice read as nothing but "try harder" or whatever.

I started drawing cause I thought it was fun no matter the quality. It wasn't til much later actually that I started to care. However, despite that it is the process of drawing and not the result that i love so much. Learning how to cope with failure I think is important. Learning from your mistakes and succeeding next time is encouraging.
Failure isn't exclusive to art of course. Whatever skill you pick up will come from lots and lots of failure. I sorry to say but to improve yourself you must try. You can read all the self-help advice in the world and it would mean nothing if you don't put it into practice. Think of it in terms such as theory and praxis. Theory is useless if not put into practice. Try and think hard to yourself what it takes to be happy then put that into practice. However small a step it may be at least you took a step.

>>6485
>I don't have a job either
You can get a year of the Headspace mindfulness app free.
https://www.headspace.com/unemployed
These type of apps have been criticised as the McDonald's of Buddhism. Personally, being a junk food junkie, I like it for that reason. Headspace doesn't take too long and it is satisfying.
The "Prioritisation" course in the app is good if you want to get your life together.
If you just want to feel good, choose one of the courses with "visualisation" techniques.
Select "female voice" if you haven't got a GF! It's better than listening to e-thots or cam whores.

>>6487
Reminder that Damien Echols unironically killed, raped and genitally mutilated children and was never exonerated for it, merely got out of death row via a technical loophole by literal Hollywood satanists

Oh fugg, I forgot to self improve and now I feel shitty :^DDDD

I really need to like, change my life or some shit. I randomly slept like 13 hours last night and felt awful and still tired when I got up. I set an alarm too and it was just blaring when I got up, probably was for hours.

Sigh.

> So any steps forward would be helpful.
Do you have a destination in mind?

>>6869
I guess I'd like to have a career and stable income and my own place to live. Little things I know.

>>6882
>a career and stable living
&ltlittle things
Not so little in this day and age

>>6883
I was kidding.

>>6884
…I wasn't

>>6882
What kind of career do you want and what are you missing to get it?

I want to help this anon

>>6887
Idk… Anything that feels like a 'real job'. But realistically I don't think I want to do anything. Any job I get I'll just be exploited by parasites at the top, what difference does it make? I have no real ambitions in a concrete sense, just an overriding sense of failure and lack of hope.

>>6969
Thank you anon, that's kind of you.

Anyway… I was laying in bed being sad and googling shit like "failure at life" "I want to die", "depression wasted life" et cetera like I do sometimes, but I couldn't take the con artists and grifters that popped up. What do they know about it? What does anyone know about it if they have a career and a successful life? How the fuck could they give me advice about anything? Fuck them! Fuck I hate everything. I really feel like shit tonight, so often I do. I don't think I can deal with how things are…

I wish I had the strength to do anything other than just sleep and play video games and try not to think about anything… I wish I could just not wake up. I can't bear it…

I'm sorry. I wanted to make this topic to help myself but I'm never going to do anything to help myself. Any kind of adversity or something I don't want to do and I just won't do it. I just can't…

>>6885
I meant that I know they're not little things. I'm sorry if you are struggling as well.

Sigh. I feel the urge to vent more even though it doesn't achieve anything. I just want to die.

>>7752
Anon you will have to set some goals yourself otherwise you will forever rot in your current state. If you want a stable income and your own place to live, getting a job will help you with that.

>>7752
Get some postick notes, each morning write down what you got to do that day. Literally as basic as 'empty bin' or 'tidy room'. Start small. Gamify your life. Once I started doing this my tasks became bigger as I was able to win small victories for my self. I was a down beat student with a drinking problem. I still have a drinking problem and occasionaly the black dog comes to visit, but I have pushed my self much further with this and I can actually see the light. Start small to win big.

>>7754
I feel helpless and like I can't look for a job. I get halfway through the morale-sapping job application to the bits where you have to write bullshit like 'why do you want this job, what did you learn at your previous job, what are your life goals' etc and I can't deal with them and I just give up. I can't imagine trying to explain my 3-year unemployment/mental health crisis to anyone. Plus, there's no job I really want to do anyway.

>>7828
I tried downloading Habatica on my phone a few days ago. I've only looked at it like once or twice though. I guess you're right that I should just try to focus on some small stuff though. I guess I could clean my room and so on. But I just don't feel the motivation to do it, or anything.

I don't know. I just feel worthless…

Why not try getting a part time job and stick with it for a couple of months? I feel like it would be easier than jumping from neetdom to full time right away. If this doesn't work maybe try working for some fake contractor apps like uber or food delivery.
For self help stuff there was this reddit stuff about "non zero days" where you basically strive to achieve one thing a day, however insignificant it may be, like going for a run, cleaning your room or cooking something. Basically do something productive every day to gain confidence.

>>8741
I don't really know how to get a part time job either, and I can't drive or anything like that so I can't really do 'gig' shit. I don't wanna work in a supermarket again cause it was genuinely the worst, and those are the easiest jobs to get so eh.

I guess you're right I should just try to do stuff, it's not easy though…

>>8740
What kind of jobs are these? Chances are they won't even read your answers, so just write some generic bullshit. Don't mention the gap and if they ask about it just say that it's family issues that you don't feel comfortable talking about with strangers.

I'm currently listening to 'The Compassionate Mind'. He's spent the last two hours lecturing me about how our society is anti-human and is making us sick. But I already know that, what's the solution exactly?

>>9211
>what's the solution exactly
Until a socialist revolution occurs and finishes there is no universal solution. We can only do our best as individuals and improve ourselves
See the posts in >>3525

I wonder how OP is doing.

>>6485
self-help is bougie crap and as such has basically no leftist proponents except like, stirner i guess

>>9337
i'm a leftist proponent of self-help. it's just the practice of applying psychology to yourself without involvement from professional therapists, which is a very leftist concept. sure, it's vulnerable to grifters and rife with individualist propaganda as it is, but that's only because everything is shit under capitalism, plus it's been completely disregarded by the left and/or the left has been basically dead for decades.

if you could clean out the parts that don't belong there anyway, and do self-help socially, it could be a hugely effective form of mutual aid. it's basically the thing that people crave more than anything, the most direct response to alienation that is possible short of abolishing the commodity form, and by the very nature of the process creates social bonds and radicalizes people.

>>9329
Not so great, not the worst, I'm playing a new videogame and being distracted. When I'm not thinking about my problems or trying to solve them, things aren't so bad.

Strive to become the overman
read and lift weights
denounce comforts
don't destroy your dick 10 times a day
don't be a cringe nofap cultist either
clean your room
realize that 99% of other leftists are cringe soy bugmen, including this board and resent them and yourself.

>>9350
also becoming a christcuck helps, ignore the rituals and beliefs and dig deeper into the religions philosophical and moral meaning. It will help, all enlightenment ideas have their roots in christian humanism.

Why the fuck hasn't anyone denounced "self-help" as part of neoliberal ideology yet?

Fuck you OP

>>9354
self help is cringe, but being happy with medicority or worse is even more cringe and the left is full of it.

>>9354
Limpdick asceticism can genuinely help you maintain some semblance of discipline in an environment that constantly insists on you giving into your impulses and wasting your life away wageslaving and then consuming services. It's obviously not at all the magic pill to making you happy and complacent that shitty grifters make you believe it is, and self-help ideology is constantly used to basically shame people for not being rich, but i think the fair thing to do here is to just scavenge what can be useful to you instead of just decrying it. Self-hatred is just another spook after all

>>9354
because it's moronic to let libs keep everything they touch to themselves. they touch a lot of good things too.

>>9374
if you can't be happy with mediocrity, then you can't be happy. most people are thoroughly ordinary and there's nothing wrong with that.

>>9412
>most people are thoroughly ordinary and there's nothing wrong with that.

Cringe. This disgusting bourgeois complacency is everything wrong with the left. Even if you are average you should not be content with being so.

>>9435
Based. People should strive to do more than to just be average.

>>9346
Did you give up?