/lit/ - Literature

Books alone can't save you. You will just end up turning books into another zoomer hobby and whiling away the rest of your life. You need to make sincere commitments to things bigger than yourself and then experience the pain and happiness of suffering for those things and eventually mastering them. It's still the beginning of a new year. Get your GED or finish high school via correspondence credits by the end of the year, learn to drive by the end of the year, quit all merely hedonistic drugs (weed/alcohol), and read one literary fiction and one canonical nonfiction book per week (or every two weeks if you're a fag), and start dressing and acting right and taking care of yourself.

If you don't the first two by the end of the year, you are hopeless and will never succeed at anything and might as well accept that you're one of the background characters of life, just trying to work the bare minimum to get a little fast food and junk media to consume. If you haven't managed to stay on the wagon of the other tasks by summer, same thing, you are hopeless. These are all easy tasks. Now that you've had this realization, you will basically decide this year who you're going to be for the rest of your life.

Do something to make it real, swear an oath that you will eat shit and get FAG tattooed on your forehead if you don't succeed. If you want to be a pussy, you can also add in a reward factor, like you're allowed to make some significant vanity purchase if you manage to succeed.

>>22986841
The Unique and Its Property

I was you 5 years ago when I decided to finally start reading some books because why not.
None of them will help. Get your shit together or kill yourself.

>>22986870
>spend 6 hours a day reading
Disregard this fag btw

>>22986870
Also these are my recommendations.

>>22986841
If it makes you feel any better I'm in the same position except I'm in my 30s.

>>22986883
Also this even though it looks like pop psych.

>>22986870
>>22986877
>>22986881
>>22986883
>>22986884
>>22986889
Cringe

>>22986841
>A BLOO BLOO BLOO BLOO WOE IS ME!!!
blogposters need to die

>>22986896
>As today his surroundings do not so force him, the eternal mass-man, true to his character, ceases to appeal to any authority other than himself, and feels himself lord of his own existence. Conversely the select man, the excellent man is urged by interior necessity to appeal to some standard beyond himself, superior to himself, into whose service he freely enters. ... Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, not the common man who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendent. Hence he does not look upon the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline — the noble life.

>Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us — by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige. "To live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man aspires to order and law" (Goethe). The privileges of nobility are not in their origin concessions or favours; on the contrary, they are conquests. And their maintenance supposes, in principle, that the privileged individual is capable of reconquering them, at any moment, if it were necessary, and if anyone were to dispute them. ... It is annoying to see the degeneration suffered in today's speech by a word so inspiring as "nobility." For, by coming to mean for many people hereditary "noble blood," it is changed into something similar to common rights, into a static, passive quality which is received and transmitted, something inert. But the strict sense, the etymon of the word nobility, is essentially dynamic. Noble means the "well known," that is, known by everyone, famous, he who has made himself known by excelling the anonymous mass.

>As one advances in life, one realises more and more that the majority of men — and of women — are incapable of any other effort than that strictly imposed on them as a reaction to external compulsion. And for that reason, those few individuals we come across who are capable of spontaneous and joyous effort stand out isolated, monumentalised, so to speak, in our experience. These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an incessant course of training. Training = askesis. These are the ascetics.

>>22986902
Nigga just close your eyes

>>22986841
I'm a working man with a wife renting a flat with a car at your age and I'm an excellent cook. I wish I could just play videogames and browse 4chan all day for the rest of my life. The grass is always greener, asshole.

I'm 25 and I look back fondly on my years on 4chan, they damaged me in countless ways but they also built me up. I wish I had more time and energy for places like this but I've been wrapped up in real life for quite a while, I feel like a part of me has gone missing.

Things are kinda of fucked right now economically speaking and I don’t know your personal strengths but you need to find some goal. I would have said learn to code but even tech is apparently fubar. Books might help motivate you and be therapeutic with overcoming your emotional blocks but they alone won’t help you. You need to go get a GED and learn to drive at a minimum. Next I would ask you to really think about any strengths you have and consider what kind of trade you could do electrician, plumber, hvac. trucking or get into sales auto or insurance or something like this. You might find your calling is something more spiritual like becoming a monk or something like this. If you apply yourself you might make enough money to secure a good standard of living. I know what it’s like to be in your shoes more or less and a still fixing my life from struggles with mental illness. The only positive thing I can say is that it can get better but only if you pull yourself out with great effort.

>>22986841
Obligatory

>>22987067
>I wish I could just play videogames and browse 4chan all day for the rest of my life
No you don't, be serious

>>22986841
Jason Bryan can give you an easy fix:
>research jobs in small towns
>move to small town with lots of jobs
>work job
>become regular at a pub
>make friends
>date
Okay, do this for 1 year and establish a little foothold in life.
>research jobs in bigger towns
>move
>work job
>become regular at a local pub
>repeat
In 10 years, you'll have a bunch of experience to draw from.

>>22986841
>I'm 25
You need to go through some tough times to gain some roughness and faith in yourself. Go work at a sawmill or something dangerous and difficult for a year.

You could work for the FAA. They recently announced that they have no standards. https://www.faa.gov/pwdp

you don't owe anyone anything, you aren't meant to be annyone. and it wouldn't matter either way.
and just sending a comment on 4chan (sadly) puts you in better circumstances than most people on earth.
take it easy, buddy.

Bibble

>>22986841
Literally just get any job and get a bus pass for the commute. After work, only eat home cooked meals. Start simple with shit like rice and chicken or spaghetti and work your way up slowly with recipes on youtube. The hardest part is always starting and I used to be just like you a bit over a year ago and now live on my own with a career. Don't listen to retards harping about LE STRUGGLE or how you need to do something extreme and upend your life. Take it slow and chill. It's not that serious. All those things you think you're incapable of learning are not hard at all and literal retards can do it without issue simply because they were exposed to it. Just apply for jobs wherever with little to no requirements. If you have money or your parents let you, ask them to finance your studies in an accounting diploma or psych nursing diploma. If you are more out going maybe something in sales would work for you.

>>22988190
Oh yeah, I don't know if you're still here anon but I believe in you. Don't push yourself and just ease into it. I know you can do it so don't let me down, ok?

>>22986841
Get your GED and take driving lessons from your parents or a local driving school. At least you have a job that pays.
>>22987959
Why can't they just give cripples NEETbux?

>>22988214
Bad motivator.

>>22988210
Fuark didn't even read that you already got a job. But it has no upward trajectory. In that case save your money, get your GED and take it from there. Do you have any interest or any latent talent in anything? If you don't, that's ok. Also I'm sure you aren't as bad at your job as you say, we all tend to scrutinize ourselves too much. We're all faking it to an extent and all have that same insecurity of incompetence

>>22988225
I'm not faking it. I'm very good at what I do. I didn't squander my formative years; I took advantage of the time and support to prepare for the rest of my life. So...suck it, Trebek!

>>22986841
Just get your GED and license. Start with only one of them if it’s easier. Maybe the license because it’ll be faster and it’s useful to have a car. After that figure I it what you wanna do as a job. Something you can tolerate and make you money. If you just focus on passion on the expense of money you’ll be broke. If you just focus on money at the expense of passion you’ll be miserable. Whatever higher education you go into should be in state so you can get the state to pay for your schooling. If you go to tech school it’ll basically be almost completely paid off. If you go to college go 2 years community college then the rest real colleges to make it cheaper. 2nd college has to be properly accredited. The first college just has to be able to transfer to the 2nd.
While doing all of this just better yourself in all the basic ways hygiene, eating, maybe working out. Bla bla bla.
Don’t worry about books. Books are good but they won’t change your life action will.

>>22986870
This guy is mostly right but he’s retarded about the books thing. It simply isn’t needed, at least not that much. Just read what you want at your own pace. As long as your consistent. Also he’s being a dick if you don’t do everything by the end of the year that’s fine AS LONG AS YOU WERE ACTUALLY TRYING YOUR BEST. But if you simply didn’t try im sorry but he might be right. There’s no excuse to not even try. Especially not depression. That would get better if you try anyway.
But if you were trying your best and you fail then just keep trying. You might be a bit slow but you’ll at least have a chance. Driving test you should finish easily. GED might be bit harder but I believe in you.
>>22988190
Has the right idea. Slowly but surely bro.

I love you bro. I hope for you the best. I believe in you. WOOHOO YOU CAN DO THIS!!!!

>>22988309
2nd college should be a non profit state or private college. It’s where you get your actual degree from. First college is just getting the credits you need for cheap.

You can try completing at a community college if you want but it has to be accredited. Idk if employers respect community colleges or not as much but if it’s accredited at least some of them have to but you should look more into that to make sure. Also community colleges don’t have as much programs.

If you get into tech school it’s good work and good enough money (even if it’s not as much as what you would make with a college degree) but it’ll fuck up your body almost 100% but make you more practically strong at least.

are multiple people really getting shocked by the idea of reading a book a week

fucking retards

>>22986870
>and read one literary fiction and one canonical nonfiction book per week (or every two weeks if you're a fag)
Youve never seriously read a great work in your life you fucking chowderhead

>>22986870
>>22986909
>"greatness" coper/larper
A lot of work (that this guy is NOT doing btw) for essentially nothing, you're better off spamming a ton of psychedelics and deliriants to induce psychosis on yourself to get the same delusions of grandeur and superiority.
>>22988309
>>22988190
>worker-bee hiver strivers
If you want to become a guy who posts pictures of their gaming setup on reddit listen to these anons

I don't have any advice btw

>>22988309
>Books are good but they won’t change your life action will.
This sentence really sheds light on the rest of your post lmao. You couldve summed it up as “become a wagie”

>>22988396
It all depends on what anon wants...

>1. Anon wants a better life
Basically all he has to do is sign up for some college courses, cooking, mechanical work, whatever, just keep working a shit job, get better at taking care of himself, self-expression, and making friends. Socialize and meditate, really dig into who he is and find a way to pursue things that motivate him.

>2. Anon wants a challenge
Okay, here is where you could seriously consider signing up for something like the French Foreign Legion. Or, for the less extreme, research jobs or locations you can move to that sound like a challenge. Once you get things like your First Aid level 3, even if you're a dumbass, you can get positions in remote camps for like 70k+ a year easy peasy. There are tons of positions for camp cooks that can make great money as well with just your food safe and a little experience in a kitchen. Lots of careers to really challenge yourself.

>3. Anon wants to go crazy and really push life
Take out huge loans, spend your life savings, get a high-paying job and blow it all on trying to find out what your true strengths are and true weaknesses are. This is a very risky path because you can end up homeless and dead really easy. However, living on the edge is the only place where flashes in the pan can really happen. Lots of unsung heros burn out this way, but a lot of truly epic people are only forged in the flames of raw life experience. Does anon have what it takes to push the envelop and survive? Possibly even thrive?

If you play it safe and get a trade or work for a local government doing shit like bylaw or payroll, you can really have a nice boring life pretty easy. I know someone making over $40 an hour and all they have is 2-3 years experience with Sage50. Accounting is slept on hardcore and I know two accountant jobs where they sit around and do basic computer shit and make 100k a year.

>>22988190
>simple with shit like rice and chicken or spaghetti
Soups like chicken noodle, beef vegetable, potato ham chowder, beef stew, beef/venison chili too, very nutritious, very cheap and no skill required. Just cook meat and add broth, then add vegetables (onion, carrot, celery, peas, and usually a starch which is either potato or noodles) to boiling broth soup until they are appropriate texture/firmness. Just be sure to add in this order: onion, carrot, celery, cook for a bit and then all others. Leftovers, no problem, there's dinner/lunch/snack for later this evening or tomorrow. I spend under 3k a year on food just alternating between soups for 90% of my meals and you could get that cheaper by skimping on meat if needed to fit tighter budgets.

Buy beef roasts/chicken/turkey/ground beef in bulk when they are on sale and freeze them with freezer paper in freezer plastic bags. That helped me cut meat costs by around 30-40%.

>>22988503
Soup anon is correct, you can live on next to zero money if you know what to cook.

>>22986883
>Gurdjieff
Lol, lmao even

>>22988427
not op but as someone in a similar place, do you think it'd be worth trying to become a doctor as a poorfag and eventually opening up a private clinic after the debt is paid off? it's the only decent paying job i can see myself in without utterly despising it, don't just wanna be a pill pusher either.

>>22986841
>workout: arms, core, legs, every other day (walking/running alternate); recover as required if it requires skipping
>abjure vegetable & seed oils excepting Coconut, Avocado, Olive
>intermittent fasting, paleo-primal/Keto adjacent diet; don't be too much of a freak, just avoid the bullshit
>buy coffee beans seasonally (some are 'fresh', others aren't) and grind & brew it yourself
>buy produce seasonally
>get a small Jap rice cooker (3 cup minimum) of good quality (the elephant logo); you can leave it for a couple days and just microwave as required
>get a Crock-Pot; easy stew/soup whatever slow cooker
>carbs/sugar/caffeine strips Vitamin B1, which in itself will induce anxiety in excess
>you can buy raw land and put a sub-7k decent prebuilt cabin on it; subdividing it or just selling the lumber can recoup costs if you can handle not being on grid for a time; depending on zoning, Yurts as long term 'camping' can be even cheaper.
>AI self driving vehicles is a long ways off, get a trucker license (not big rig) and look into drone pilot accreditation (every one and their mother wants operators)

If you have the time, getting involved consistent with a church will get you access to people that will have more actionable advice as far as line of work prospects go. Plenty of people in the past became plenty literate with mostly the King James Bible on hand for reading-- and it's a corner stone of Western literature, so you may as well have one on hand.

The main thing is there is no panacea outside of the life of Spirit. That you are asking and wanting more, being alienated from said drudgery, is the beginning of wisdom.

>>22986841
Take up a trade. Electrician for example

>>22986909
Books with this theme? I REALLY need it

same level as you op except in my free time i do research on how to write poetry, also i have taught myself how to make ramen.
therefore i am your superior

>>22986841
I didn't learn to drive until I was 31. It's easier than you think--don't be intimidated. As for high school, start working through free YouTube courses to learn what is needed to earn your GED (you can also use free university courses, like Yale Open Courseware, when you're ready), and then unironically, either join the military, or apply for the FAFSA and go to an entry level school, like a community college, starting with the minimum requirement in order to get your financial aid. Severely limit your "fruitless activity" time--i.e., video games and television, replacing it with practical things which will challenge you. Read about basic automotive maintenance, for instance, once you get yourself a vehicle, play chess, go, or do sudoku instead of vidya, read respectable novels, literary criticism, and philosophy instead of television, and, very importantly, work on your math--even if slowly. You can turn your life around, anon. You're young enough to do so.

>>22986870
This is good advice.

>>22986883
>yoga
This, not so much.

>>22986884
>>22986841
I forgot to mention, to OP, but this can apply to you as well. If you're in the USA you can get a job at Chipotle or Walmart. They are partnered with a company called Guild. Guild will pay for your entire degree, so long as you are employed with a partner of theirs. They limit which options are available to you--depending on what your parent company is willing to support, but you can use it as a way to get out of being on bottom. All you have to do is endure.

>>22988409
I’m giving him realistic standards that he can find happiness in. Not everyone needs to do some crazy shit. More importantly god knows every retard telling him to do some extreme shit hasn’t done anything close to that
If he wants to do some crazy shit that’s fine but he should build a foundation first and see if he would enjoy being normal first. Also if he can’t do the basic normal shit I recommended then he definitely wouldn’t be able to run away to France and join the foreign legion.

Like anon if he can’t get a GED and license do you really think he’s ready to do life changing nonsense?
>>22986841
If you think you can do something crazy and have a realistic plan to do it and actual motivation to keep going to the point it seems actually possible then so be it do it. But no matter what you do you’ll probably at least need a license, GED, and basic skills to help you take care of yourself. So you should probably start on those

>>22988396
>>22988409
>>22986841
Also just because you get a normal job doesn’t mean you’ll be forced to become a boring wagie barely scraping by. You can become a doctor for example, make more then enough money to live and work with Doctors Without Borders and go around the world helping people. You can do similar shit with other professions like engineer. You can do meaningful shit outside your job and If you get a job with enough free time or have your own one man business where you make your own hours you can basically do what you want with more time.
Also I’m right about the books thing. They won’t change his life. It’ll be a waste reading to much instead of working out or socializing or some shit. Again it’s good to read but in the state he’s in he needs to take more time building skills and experiences.

>>22989442
You can find happiness even being relatively normal. It’s definitely better then vegetating.

>>22989442
>>22989442
This is definitely a tangent but I don’t get 4chan and this autistic all or nothing attitude. If your even close to normal your seen as a normie npc and you can’t do anything out the box at all. And there’s bizarre perfectionist attitude on here that everyone knows barely anyone actually upholds. It’s probably why a good amount of guys on here end up hating themselves, stagnate, and almost catatonic. They don’t hold up to their weird standards so they just end up doing nothing
It’s ok to not be perfect but it’s not ok to be a bum and not do shit. I would rather fail at doing something or waste time doing something I learned I actually didn’t like later on making me almost restart then literally do nothing at all.

>>22986841
No matter what you do OP you should at least stop doing nothing. You should just try. The clock is ticking my man

>>22988814
whats wrong with him?

>>22989507
Shit I replied to myself thrice. Sorry

You can really tell in this thread the people who recently "accepted" that they're losers and twisted themselves in knots to believe in the cope that this is some form of wisdom, or realism or whatever it is.

>Like anon if he can’t get a GED and license do you really think he’s ready to do life changing nonsense?
In a fucking year? What sort of sad life have you led? In a year you could work a 9-5 and still have time to get fit, learn a language, enroll in something that will get you a better job eventually, get a girlfriend, clean yourself up, acquire several hobbies, take a trip.

How exactly do you think life happens? Do you think you need a 5 or 10 year plan to learn to drive? Do you think you need 6 months of momentum for every minor life improvement, like not wearing shitstained pants in public? There are baby steps and then there are baby steps. Learning to drive happens by walking into a driving school and saying "I'd like to take lessons." I got into amateur astronomy over the past year and knew if I didn't take a trip to a low light area and see the stars and Milky Way I'd never do it, it'd just become yet another thing I intended to do, like the guitar I never learned to play. So I consciously suppressed my reservations, planned a trip, and went. At the time it seemed like the most gargantuan undertaking in the world, because I hate travelling, but once I broken the hymen it became something I could do in my sleep. I subsequently did it three more times and it has massively enriched my life.

I could cite half a dozen more examples of things like this just in the past year. Each of them is minor but life is made up of things like this, little moments where you either will yourself to go against what is comfortable for you or you don't. In ten years, you will be the sum of these moments. It can be something as small as learning to fucking get out of bed when your alarm goes off rather than hitting snooze five times. You can either live life as the snooze button guy or learn to stop being a piece of shit and then imperceptibly benefit from it forever after.

Life is not this complicated. All you are doing is habituating people to thinking that minor "adulting" tasks should dominate the entire horizon of one's goals, that learning to cook an egg is a month's effort. It's not like people ITT were recommending OP take up rock climbing. They recommended he read regularly and set a few realistic milestones.

>>22989118
Eliade's Yoga book is useful in my opinion because it presents the Indian worldview and general Indian strategies of "deconditioning" without necessarily endorsing any one tradition. He doesn't just present Patanjali's Yoga-Samkhya, in fact he's least interested in it. He also presents Buddhism and Tantrism, and he seems most interested in Tantrism actually. His personal ideal seems to be the jivanmukti, the liberated individual who stays in the world after learning to affirm it at a higher level, rather than negating and transcending it entirely.

It's just a useful way to build up a concept of deconditioning and self-control. You don't necessarily have to do any mainstream practices. Although meditating is actually good, I recommend doing an unofficial form of TM (which is just mantra meditation and thus an easy form to start with, again it's just a technique for deconditioning oneself and learning how to "differentiate" one's inner space and learn to spot the merely conditioned elements or pathways in one's consciousness). There are Christian forms of it (John Main) and totally secular forms (Herbert Benson) as well.

Basically, anything that gets you exploring and disaggregating your impulses and habits is good. Otherwise you live life on autopilot, simply the sum of your environmental influences and innate tendencies.

>>22989550
You've convinced me. It's literally worthless.

>>22989527
what I meant by that comment if he can’t get even begin the attempt of getting a GED then he probably can’t do something crazy like join the FFL

Your right I do think he should take much less then a year to do stuff like that. But if he takes longer out of lack of ability I think he should keep trying and not give up like this guy said >>22986870

>>22989572
Yeah I definitely agree with that. I guess what I'm trying to emphasize here is that if you start out with the mentality "If I fail this year, there's always next year," you will unconsciously take two years (or more). The dominant voice today is already a coddling one, and men need to learn that there are failure conditions in life. If you can't get your shit together in one year, you kind of are a loser. I just think that this should be the normal-sized text, and the subtext or footnote should be "But also, don't actually kill yourself if you fail," rather than the other way around, because people are already getting enough of the latter from mainstream discourse.

>>22989560
Keep us all updated on what you don't read.

>>22989587
Sorry, not interested in wading through a pile of shit to find an acorn. Enjoy wasting your life, however.

>>22986841
Get a bike and work part-time. Live in the library

>>22989612
>Live in the library
Terrible advice. Libraries in rhe modern west are somewhere between an LGBT community centre and a homeless shelter. The amount of time spent in them should be limited to finding and checking out item

>>22986870
>>22987196
>>22988190
>>22988309
>>22988336
>>22988427
>>22988856
>>22989442
>>22989527
>>22989550
Dont waste your time reading these fucking Reddit posts anon
You are going to die someday. The one inevitable truth. In light of that Tolstoy was right when he said nothing matters but the truth and the search for God

>>22989681
If getting fit is reddit and being a decrepit skeleton obsessed with yahweh is 4chan then OP should definitely go to reddit. We all should.

>>22989681
the search for God also requires a great amount of discipline
those posts are not entirely wrong

>>22989727
Nothing wrong with getting fit but telling a NEET just get fit to improooooooooove their life bro is dripping with reddit gold
The virtue of fitness is in and of itself. Its not an ingredient in the recipe to make a happy consooomer. Its not going to make your life or your outlook markedly better

>>22989816
>Its not going to make your life or your outlook markedly better

Wrong

>>22990106
Thanks for the reddit chart frienderino! Time to hit the gym, this year im gonna get r/disciplined!!

>>22990166
It is a reddit-style chart, for sure, but don't underestimate the effect of a consistent fitness routine. It really can help you, but neither will it solve all your problems by itself, obviously. Nta, btw.

>>22989587
Yea I see what I you mean. Your 100% right.

>>22990166
Rejecting essential health information out of hand because it reminds you of bad site. You are internet poisoned.

>>22990168
>>22990229
“Essential health information” with no cited studies that was likely gathered by w*man clinical researchers who couldnt hack real science
The benefits of exercise are strictly physical. Still worth doing but its absolutely reddit to think they are a magic bean. They only help mental pains that are directly chemical. Anyone with a social or existential deficiency, as is 95% of the 4chan poster archetype, will have no issues solved by getting fit. Its the reason the gymcel archetype exists and everyday there are posts on fit of anons asking why they still cant get a gf even though theyve been gyming for 2 years

>>22990325
>strictly physical
No, they aren't. Get off your ass and workout five days a week for a year, and you'll see for yourself. Otherwise, you know, keep coping and being a lazy shit.

>>22990343
I lift 1/2/3/4. My deadlift is almost 500 lbs at 190 lbs bw. If anything I am one of the only reddit anons who can post from the side of experience

>>22989816
>>22989527
Like a cold lake, the best way to get accustomed to it is to jump both feet in. Dipping your toe in is not how you get your life fixed.

I mention this because OP said he's 25 and starting from zero. He needs that momentum of leaving home and facing some difficulty.

>>22986841
from my experience i think at some point you realize that there's not much lower for you to go and you realize that simply experience is one of the points of life, which helps in being fearless pursuing your goals

>>22989681
>christnigger comes out of the woodwork and insists you should deny your life
somethings never change

>>22990325
>cited studies
holy reddit i heckin love science