Self Improvement Is Masturbation: Tyler Durden Was Right

Why self help books and hustle culture is destroying you, and the only way out is to self destruct.

Greetings dear reader, today’s article would be something for you to think about. Hope you enjoy your Wednesday!

Way back in 1999 when the cult classic Fight Club first premiered, Tyler Durden, has spoken the truth which would be discovered later in the age of the internet and social media. ‘Self-improvement is masturbation. Now, Self Destruction….’

Fight Club by David Fincher

Some Common Mental Masturbation

Most of the time we think of self-help as a gateway to a better self. Yes, if I read 7 Habits of Highly Effective People I would become a high performer in my job next week, my boss would absolutely love me. Yes, if I read Rich Dad Poor Dad, I will be free of my poor self, and tomorrow I will be walking into Bill Gates’ office asking him to invest in my automatic butter passing machine.

For some, it would be going to motivational talks, with an experienced ‘life coach’ to talk sense into you, to make you feel so good you could go out there and grab 5 clients from the street, and to plan out your future 5 years into routines like a living automaton.

Or even more relevant to the context of widespread social media use, the emergence of many ‘hustle mindset’ accounts that pops up in the wild on our feed. For example, this is my Instagram feed this morning.

Just the usual…

They are literally everywhere. Hustle culture asks you to stop being a lame, lazy and poor fuck, and instead asks you to become someone like Bill Gates or Dan Bilzerian.

Wake up at 5, they told you. Give up video games, they urged you. Are you improving yourself by 0.1% today? they asked you. You coudln’t be a man if you don’t retire rich by 40, they shame you.

Let’s face it, this is all bullshit. In a more extreme sense, these are all mental masturbation. You feel good, for a little moment, and you feel empty for the most part after the dopamine rush.

Self Improvement Materials Blind Us

Bart Simpson walking around blind, I guess.

The self-help genre isn’t entirely useless, worthless, or serves no purpose. Just like autotune, auto-tune wasn’t entirely that great, but it created a multi-million pop music industry with mumble rappers that sing about parties and hookers. Self-help too is a multi-million industry as freedom of information drives us to ‘help’ ourselves through the use of the internet.

The major criticism of the genre is that it blocks us from acknowledging who we really are. As the ancient Greeks would demand you to ‘know thyself’, we should be able to realize who we really are, and the pursuit of improvement would only be useful to our journey in searching for meaning in life.

Self-help books are there to make you feel better about yourself, no matter how good or bad you are in a particular situation. It’s about the perception of I am going to do better. After reading another self-help book, you think, by doing this or doing that, by experimenting on waking up at 5 or eating a vegan diet, you will perhaps lead a better life? Or becoming a better person?

And so this gives you a temporary period of blinding yourself with new routines, new habits that we’re all meant to build up to a feeling of ultimate improvement, the climax of our mental masturbation.

Unfortunately, most of the time people would complain that they lost track of their goals, their habits. Like masturbation, after the short period of climax, the emptiness that comes consumes you, and thus the cycle repeats when we fall back into a slum.

Now Self Destruct… Your Ego

Repeat after this: you can’t be better just because someone said you could. You can’t be rich just by reading self help finance books, and you definitely can’t be Elon Musk 2.0 just by following all the finance gurus on Instagram.

However, you can be true to yourself and live a fulfilling life, just by, pressing that self-destruction button in your head.

In Buddhist teachings, the self is not the center of the universe, and the true way to nirvana is to forget about the self and to be free of attachments in the world. Not to become a Buddhist monk, and certainly an atheist myself, but I insist that one should really think hard about the true self, and crash down the walls of our ego, hence completing philosophical self-destruction.

We are all ‘conditioned’ in the environment we’re in. Remember when we were young, as a child, free from any conditioning and attachments, everything we do seemed to provide us with happiness. Daddy, Mommy, and other adults who were busy attending to ‘jobs’ just seem absurd to us when we’re children.

When we self destructs, it doesn’t mean we kill ourselves, or indulge in drugs, sex, and alcohol (which works like self-help books anyway to blind you). We destroy who we think we are, who we think we could have been and should have been.

In Search For The Real Purpose In Life

So, by this point you were probably waiting for the big reveal, right? Well, there is no reveal. I am not here to provide you answers, or a 10 step routine to make you highly effective. In fact, I am only here to show you a perspective.

So stop reading self-help books and following hustle accounts, and think clearly for yourself what you want in life. Destroy who you are and forget about your ego. From then, search for your own meaning in life. Seek the truth that is your own truth.

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Hey reader, I’ve been trying to define Racun-ed, and what we want our readers to get from reading our content. This article marks the first of its kind of the type of content we are trying to publish, with perspectives that would work similarly to a ‘Poison’ for your soul, just like our tagline does. We would try to reduce numbers and facts or statistics, and instead, publish opinions and thoughts that make an impact. Feel free to leave a comment below to tell us what you think, and be sure to subscribe for more articles like this!