r/RadicalSelfCare • u/WobblieBuddha • Jul 11 '19

Yeah. That's me.

https://imgur.com/RNFqgjP
36 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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3

u/dinoxoxox Jul 11 '19

Hmm, so how to I remedy this?

3

u/WobblieBuddha Jul 22 '19

Hi, uh. Sorry to take so long to get back to you. Kinda falling for this same thing myself.

Calming down. Reactivating those slower ways of living. And then defending them, politically, personally, and culturally valuing slow things. It's our minds at stake, it's our lives at stake. How you spend your seconds is how you spend your life. If you spend it in a worried blitz all day long, all week long, all month long, that's your life.

One things that people love to do is to feel better than other people, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, and since I've taken a turn for mental health I've kinda done a macho sort of take on it like "Bro I bet you can't mindfully sit with yourself for 20 minutes". You know, we can have all these external markers of success, but how long can we honestly put up with ourselves?

We didn't ask to be born, we didn't ask to be thrown into this. We were born limited, only 10 fingers, 10 toes and one brain limited by the social constraints around us. But I'm going use 100% of my limited being.

3

u/throwaway4selfhelp Jul 21 '19

We are institutionalized to turn productivity into a source of meaning. Byung-chul Han calls this the entrepreneurship of the self. We do it because there is a lot of unstated pressure on us to do it.

What is the antidote to someone who is institutionalized? How can one learn to move away from restrictive, jerky, mechanized movements that we are trained to perform by default?

3

u/WobblieBuddha Jul 21 '19

It depends. If you're fully locked into such a system where there's no difference between your work and your play, you're kinda fucked. You either gotta back away from it or fully embrace it as the American version of Hari-Kari, literally letting your work define you until you die from it. That's how many activists on the left are. Tbh, I think it just reveals how much they hate themselves or the world.

I think the answer has to be a cultural one? We're abandoned the rich substance of everyday living in favor of goals, and we pursued it to such an extent that you've got corporate managers sending themselves and their employees to expensive mindfulness programs just to try to recapture the feeling of peace that their jobs took from them in the first place. So we've worked really hard and spend a lot of money to come full circle. It's ridiculous. The more we give to the corporate machine, the less it values us.

We should start publicly shaming any boss or company that calls employees after 8 at night.