Last year I was employed at a decent paying job with good benefits, doing work that mattered. Now I’m seven months unemployed, out of benefits and still getting ghosted by employers. Most everything else has remained the same (no friends, uncertainty with my gender and how I want to live my life, stuck living with my mom) except that I started seeing a therapist ~10 months ago who I really like.
It just feels really, really bad. I’m assuming other people have had this experience in their life already (I am both fairly young and a late bloomer in most respects), so I guess I’m asking how you dealt with it and how things got better, assuming they did :aware:
you can also commiserate with me if you like
thanks gamers
Sorry. I started exercising from a self-help book and learned to cook and do house repairs from books.
That’s fine, and it’s good that you developed healthy habits.
Self help books are, though, a thoroughly atomized liberal response to what are social ills. It takes something that is a collective problem, and places the onus entirely on an individual to solve it for themselves. That’s fine or whatever, but so long as collective problems are met with individual solutions the problem never goes away, discrete individuals just get acclimated to the problem. This is not socially healthy.
I hope that explains the response a bit
No, it doesn’t. Not everyone has a family/social network in place to help them achieve their goals. Moreover, creating a united front depends on having people with the skills/willingness to attempt new things with new people. If you want collective action you need people who are secure enough to try new things. Back in the day the IWW promoted ‘self help’ programs like teaching kids to paint, sing, or orate. They offered adult classes, too.
You’re telling people not to use the books, and don’t offer any alternative.
A “learn to cook” book isn’t a self help book. It’s a cook book.
A “house-repairs” book isn’t a self help book. It’s a DIY book.
You are either misunderstanding the topic, or are being deliberately obtuse. Self help books transpose problems caused by capitalism into a problem with the individual and then tell the individual they need to change who they are and take part in hustle culture and understand that their motivational problems to grind grind grind caused by worker-alienation are actually problems with them as a human being that they need to change. Self help diverts attention away from the source of problems that capitalism is causing, aiming to treat the symptoms of these problems as a diversion away from recognising the cause.
No, I was giving some context as to why someone might react to the suggestion of self-help books with hostility, and why a comment recommending a self help book in the thread might be removed by mods for “cringe.”
