4channers, with their "hypertrophied intuition of damaged man" mix being "absolutely retarded on the personal level with sociological takes from the year 3020". They have keen observation powers, but the wrong theory. Let's discuss the macro in question.

The author discusses the difference between people who 'flow' through life and people who feel the need, and attempt to, explicitly self-improve. He (you know it's a he) is pointing at a real distinction, tracking Heidegger's: that between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand.

Heidegger too was an excellent observer and a fan of unique terminology. Study the following slides. I'll wait.

The idea is this: as you use an object, if everything goes right you forget that "you" are "using" an "object". There is just acting happening. When something fails, maybe because the hammer breaks, you come back to yourself as yourself and to perceiving the object as an object.

That is, the explicit reflective mode is what happens *when something goes wrong*. Read that again: the explicit reflective mode is what happens *when something goes wrong*.

Now, to tie it back to the original image: deliberate self-improvement is def. explicit and def. reflective. So what is going wrong? What is going wrong is that you aren't ready-to-hand to yourself. That is, you are - to yourself - an object, and a broken object at that.

And thus, logically, you try to fix yourself the way you'd fix any object.But the whole problem is that you treat yourself as an object in the first place and explicit self-improvement only reinforces this view!

What happened is that a long time ago something went wrong with your deep models of how to be in the world. You will never “prereflectively do the right things” the way that jocks does that would relatively effortlessly get you the things you wants.

It's unlikely that it's genetics. It also doesn't matter what caused it. That's narcissistic masturbation archeology. What matters is that there is a solution: you must once again become an embodied *being* (not object) among other embodied *beings*.

This is the kind of thing that responds to hundreds of hours of excellent therapy or emotional processing or hardcore meditation.

So, ironically, the great boon of self-improvement communities is *the community itself* as it pushes you to re-embodiment. But you decided to self-improve alone, go alone to go fast, right?

slightly longer version: https://twitter.com/autisticmercury/status/1230288966332698624