RE: Is Self-Help and the Quest for Self-Actualization Ultimately Another Addictive Trap?
I've spent a major chunk of my adult life at least peripherally involved in the self-help, personal development, "consciousness" and enlightenment fields.
Me too @denmarkguy and an awful lot of money until one day I realised that all this seeking was making me more unhappy rather than happier.
I was constantly seeking something better and not noticing what I already had. I was was living in a state of going to be happy when . . .
But the worst thing for me, which I now feel contributed to years of depressions, was I was always coming from a place of needing to fix myself.
I was stuck in a place of trying to fix, what I now feel, was never broken.
The day I gave up "personal development" was the most liberating day of my life although I didn't know that at the time and it wasn't a specific day.
A lot of the "Seekers" I encountered along the way had suffered all manners of difficulties in their lives and were ultimately out there looking for some indication that there was an easier way to handle life. That somehow, their lives had been so hard because they were doing it wrong and if they could just find the right "method," somehow life would get easier.
Of course, it doesn't. Life is simply hard... it's what you choose to do about that hardness and how you choose to view and approach it that's changeable.
Which is not to say that different people don't have different "hardship thresholds," what drives one over the edge is easy-peasy to another.
I was never that much into "fixing myself" as into finding tools I thought might help me fix what I perceived to be a profoundly "broken" world. That was, of course, doomed as well...
Interesting @denmarkguy. I've never been one to save the world so much as saving ourselves. Start at home and the world will get taken care of kind of thing. 😁