I hate this self empowerment bullshit. Do people have any idea what this sounds like to people with actual, real problems? Your life can't be solved by positive thinking and being impulsive. In fact, I can make a very good case that that kind of attitude will create far more problems than it solves. Hell, I'm sure I could come up with _two_ anecdotes, which is already twice the evidence given by this blog post.
Yeah, same here. I mean, it's absurd to think that we have any control whatsoever over our fate. We clearly don't have agency or free will when you get right down to it. We are just particles in motion, deterministically following a path that was laid down by forces outside of our control, far before we were even born.
It would be the height of hubris to think that we can wrest control of our lives from the unseen, unknowable, mysterious forces of fate, and use conscious choice to drive ourselves towards any sort of "goal" or anything.
Just typing this, I realize how stupid I've been all these years, thinking that all this "hard work" and "sacrifice" and "effort" and "action" could actually lead to anything. Thanks for the enlightenment, I'm going to go take a bath with my toaster now...
You are only able to make a conscious choice about things in your control. There are also a lot of things outside of your control.
Blaming the victims of poverty and disease for their lack of success and positive thinking is a real downside of this empowerment movement. It's also used to exploit people and make them act against their own interests. All this american dream stuff and poor people protesting against public healthcare.
It's the perfect excuse to individualize all kind of problems. You just did not work enough and put not effort into it. It just does not help to actually solve these problems.
Empowerment is great and courage and confidence are great to have. But there _is_ a lot of bullshit in this space.
You are only able to make a conscious choice about things in your control. There are also a lot of things outside of your control.
Of course there are things outside of our control. But since you can't control those things, there isn't a whole lot of point worrying about them, is there? (From the point of view of the individual).
I agree that there are systemic issues with "the system" as it exists today, and I have my ideas about how we should address some of those issues in terms of public policy, etc. But, at the end of the day, you can only play the cards you're dealt (so to speak).
What you can control, though, is your reaction to things, regardless of whether or not you can control those things. If something bad happens (you get dealt a bad hand) you can quit (fold), and jump in the bathtub with a toaster and end it all. Or you can soldier on and make the best of things, and maybe, just maybe, improve your lot.
I'm reminded of a couple of old sayings / parables I heard once. One goes like this:
A master was living in a house in the woods. One night, a storm came through and tore the roof off of his house. He said "I am happy, for now I can see the stars shining in the night sky more clearly".
The other is:
A man was running from a lion, when he came to the edge of a cliff, with a sheer plunge 1000 feet down to jagged rocks. With no where else to go, he went over the edge and started climbing down some vines. Now he's trapped, with rocks below him, and the lion above him. Then a mouse appears and starts chewing on the vine. He notices some strawberries growing on the cliff face and plucks a handful and eats them. They were the most delicious strawberries he ever had".
It's the perfect excuse to individualize all kind of problems. You just did not work enough and put not effort into it.
I guess it depends on your perspective, but - in my mind - this isn't about "blaming the victim" or anything. Life does suck sometimes, and some people certainly are dealt shitty hands. I just think that you can only take the hand you start from, and then make the best of it through conscious choice and effort.
And as somebody who grew up dirt poor in rural southeast NC, living below the poverty line for large swathes of time in my life, I've literally been through this. I could have accepted my lot in life as a poor, uneducated, country bumpkin, but I refused to do it. I couldn't control that my parents weren't wealthy, or that our public schools weren't great, or that my dad never graduated high-school and was basically illiterate. But I could control my actions, by choosing to spend my time in the library studying instead of hanging out behind the school playing handball and smoking weed... After high-school I could control choosing to work 3rd shift, buffing and waxing floors at a grocery story, then getting off work at 7am to drive 35 miles to be in class at 8:00. Believe me, Discrete Math at 8:00am when you've been up all night is no fun. And then going and sleeping on a couch in the library for an hour or two before your afternoon classes, that's no fun either. But I made a choice that I didn't want to be a poor, uneducated country bumpkin, so I made the sacrifices I had to make.
I could have gone out on dates, went bowling with my friends, gone to football games, and thousands of other things... but night after night after night I sat home alone with a stack of C and C++ books, downloading code from BBS's (and later, the Internet), learning to code and honing my skills.
It wasn't easy and there were tradeoffs (there is a reason I never got married and had kids, for example), but I got out of redneckville and have gone on to have a pretty decent career, and now I am the founder of a startup that has some real potential.
So, yeah, put me in the camp of people who do put a lot of stock in the idea of "individual empowerment", because I've experienced it firsthand.
They've done studies that show if you force yourself to smile, even if you're in a bad mood, it'll make you happier. Even if it's forced, it still helps.
This same idea can be applied to self-empowerment and it works for people. Just because it's cheesy doesn't mean it doesn't work. I mean, even knowing you're taking a placebo can still lead to positive outcomes.
I agree with pkulak that a lot of self-empowerment stuff is bullshit. And some of it is dangerous bullshit. But a lot of it is effective bullshit because it works to counter the ineffective bullshit that lives in our heads.
It's crazy. But, then, we're made out of meat. The whole thing's crazy.
OK, smiling is a behavior that is typically evocative of happiness, and it turns out that smiling actually induces a small level of happiness even if you weren't happy before. I follow you so far.
Therefore, you can... act self-empowered, which can make you feel self-empowered, even if you're not actually self-empowered? You're starting to lose me here. How are these ideas related at all?
edit: I see; you mean that if people BELIEVE that acting as though they are successful will help them become successful, then it actually might help them become successful as their expectations influence their actions. Fake it 'till you make it.
Erm. OK. So what do you want to do? Sit and whine about your real world problems? Cause I have done that tons and tons of times; it is useless as shit. The "self empowerment bullshit" is simple: figure out what you can do to solve your real world problem. Say for example getting fit. Then go solve it. If you can't, STFU and go on with your life.
P.S: You come off as patronizing as fuck to point that someone getting a job is not an actual real world problem.
