Frogesay
Snakes, scam artists, and slimeballs the world over.

The Forever Failures of the Cult of Self Improvement

Froge Note: This article is unfinished.

Oh, yeah, real fucking smart Froge. Nice job telling your idiot audience to never read this piece of garbage! No, but seriously, the story is slightly more interesting than that. I wrote the bulk of this unfinished article, over 10,000 words of it, during a few days from March 05, 2021. Like all good projects I immediately procrastinated on writing anything more about it and then kept putting it off while telling myself I would eventualy get around to finishing it — which is how The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was created, albeit over several years rather than several weeks. I picked up writing again on April 25, 2021, which was the point in time where I glanced at the file date of this article and decided that would be a nice, round number with which to pick things up and then finish before I eventually retired my blog on May 20, 2021.

That was a lie. You see, I never realised it at the time… but I was stupid. You would think that after I stopped working on something for a month and a half, I wouldn’t bother to pick it back up, because by that point I would have lost interest in the project. Did I really think I would polish this crap up in a week or two and then ship it out to you fools? Please! I spit some real facts at the end of this article, but what does it matter? It’s unfinished. It’s as if a great composer had a symphony they were working on before they died, and then it was released posthumously, and people enjoyed it despite being some sort of, you know, music thing that was unfinished and stuff. Although instead of permanently contributing to the canon of Western music and being hailed as one of the greatest pieces of popular music ever created, I get to bitch.

So I wrote up 10,000 words in a flurry of determination, then I stopped, then I started up and limped 2,000 more words in at the end, and here I am. It’s published. I think that’s the trouble with the concept of finishing a work; despite how much content is in here, does it matter if it doesn’t reach the conclusion it set out to conclude? Does it matter if the work is read if all our reading is speculative, pining for the further creation of a piece that will never exist? Truth be told, the variety of experiences that we are able to experience with any given piece of art means that even if we get to read a work, that doesn’t mean we’ve truly read it. It’s a known phenomenon where the same piece of art means radically different things to different people, but if our lives are in pursuit of becoming different people over years and decades, then what does it even mean to experience art if our experiences will be different years down the line? What we once enjoyed is now garbage to us. What is garbage to us, we’ll forget why we hate it. That’s the natural law.

If I had infinite time, and more pertinently was locked in a dungeon and not allowed to leave until I either finish this article or else live the end of my days subsisting off the mould spores forming around the concrete corners, I would be happy to finish this. But I can’t. I only have until May 20 to finish this, and though I abused my prior lack-of-time-limit to bring you absolutely massive articles in the past, I can’t pull that off again. I must make do with what I have, and what I have, is this. I could either spend my end of days working on novelties like this, or spend it on my final farewells to all you blokes. I choose to do the latter, mostly because I know you people are all monkeys banging at my doorstep and will threaten to raid my house like fifty Harambes all rushing towards their own personal infants I don’t give you your proper emotional send-off. Yeah, I could go full Rabbit Drop and write up a shitpost finale article formed from the tail end of a dirty crack-pipe smuggled into a schizo ward, but when have I ever shown a disdain for my audience? Oh yeah, you kids get to be disappointed in your “Attack on Titans” and your “Bleaches”. Back in the day we made do with barely-legal little girls getting fucked by the ugly bastard who raised her ever since her illegitimate grandfather’s funeral at six years old and they’re also not related anymore so their relationship is totally legal even though the ugly bastard said he would consider fucking her after she graduated high school and they’re going to have not-incestuous babies now. Yes, this really happened.

So please enjoy what I have created for you here. It’s about The Forever Failures of the Cult of Self Improvement. It’s in the title. Look, here’s the article underneath me. It’s under the header titled “The Forever Failures of the Cult of Self Improvement”. You can read the thing and become educated about the thing.

Fuck NoFap.

The Forever Failures of the Cult of Self Improvement

The worst type of human being to argue with is one who only makes sense sometimes. Bad faith arguments couched in common sense and agreeable rhetoric are the tools of Satan in a suit-and-tie, who uses his charm to implant ideas in your head and allows them to continually absorb your thoughts and headspace. Internet kooks of all persuasions use this rhetorical technique to take otherwise uninterested human beings and force them into a long and drawn-out argument which does nothing to benefit either of them. The attention demanded by these trolls is a minor form of narcissism, where feeding off the goodwill of others gives them the strength to continue to waste the time of dozens of human beings all across the globe. Worst than trolls who are in it for cheap thrills, there exists another form of kook who are even more dangerous: those who are convinced they’re doing good in the world, drunk off their own self-delusion, when they’re merely in it for their own personal profit. As Revolver Ocelot said in The Phantom Pain, the hardest man to break is the type who’s fooling himself.

Self-improvement is masturbation, and the world of self-improvement gurus is a circlejerk of such magnitude it rivals several world religions. The desire to be the best version of yourself is universal across all human history in all cultures everywhere. On a fundamental level, our primal desires for social status constantly demand we improve ourselves, in some unspecified way, in order to achieve respect among our unspecified peers when we are too afraid and immature to bestow it upon ourselves. As Epictetus said, if you need a witness, be your own witness. Yet the allure of glory in the eyes of others whose acknowledgements of our existence are fleeting, temporary, and ultimately meaningless is a captivating force which has been responsible for the destruction of more egos of strong human beings than any other psychological illnesses combined, and the failure to achieve recognition for actions you took for the sole purpose of impressing other people leads to a similarly self-defeating narcissistic worldview as the woo-meisters who promise you quick-and-easy ways to improve yourself take off with your money and pride.

Put bluntly, the ideas of self-improvement gurus are simplistic, naïve, and represent a one-dimensional view of humanity where constant competition with arbitrary other humans is the only legitimate means of living, and where the only way you can justify your existence is one which you can find yourself better than other humans by the social standards of a civilisation you gave no permission to be born into at all. Individually, the ideas of self-improvement gurus are sound. Who, after all, wouldn’t want to find out what they can do with their body and mind before they grow old and waste away, with not even the cognition to regret their inaction? But taken as a collective movement in favour of human flourishing, the good ideas are drowned out by grandstanding egotists who see you as scum until you meet their arbitrary standards, demanding you become as great as they are even as they selectively present to you the best aspects of themselves to the detriment of all their many, many personal failings, promising you that if you merely follow their words, you will become just like them. You’ll have value in the eyes of your friends and family, you’ll become a whole human being, and you’ll finally have the right to be alive.

Grandstanding egotists, for instance, like me.

I gazed in the mirror recently. I saw this YouTube video by a popular woo-meister, a subspecies of human being which RationalWiki describes as “those who try to separate desperate people from their money by peddling false hope”, and I cringed. “Good God”, I thought. “This is the person I’ve become”. It’s titled “The Habit Tier List — 32 Habits (Which one should you build next?)”, by an individual calling themselves “Improvement Pill”. The presenter describes a worldview where human beings are only decent insofar as they exist to gain status among their peers, using personal development and appreciation of self as mere stepping stones on the way to find yourself above and beyond your idiot friends who are only useful for validating your existence. The video crafts constant contests of increasingly specious self-improvement to see who among your peers can become the most self-actualised individual, where personal contentment takes a backseat to impressing the morons you hang around with, who will no doubt look to you for inspiration in their own meaningless lives as opposed to simply ignoring you and dealing with their own uncountable personal problems. Problems, I assume, which will be easily solved by subscribing to the presenter’s YouTube channel and being privy to knowledge that has never been shared by any other source in all the world.

Through this simple video I began to realise the worst aspects of myself, and critising its many, many flaws forms the crux of this article — because through criticising it, I criticise myself, and make bare my own personal failures in reforming the so-called scum who reads my work. My fundamental argument, as detailed through my examination of the 32 habits the presenter uses to provide you with false hope and aspirations of being someone greater than the self you have the arrogance to be, is that while the basic advice given to us by self-improvement gurus will ultimately improve ourselves, the reasons given to us as to why we should follow their advice are cynical, inauthentic, and represents the most selfish desires that human beings are capable of having. It is clear the vast majority of people who claim to be interested in improving you as a human being are instead interested in improving their business and using desperate people as a means to imprint their values onto individuals who they would not have any influence over otherwise, and during this article, it will become clear that any stranger who claims to be interested in your well-being is treating you as a sucker who will soon be parted with their time, money, health, and sanity. That I have displayed these traits, inviting you into my writings as a stranger myself, is a character failure I must make amends with.

Please. Join me in this journey to the death of my ego, as we make our way through the many troubles of the entity, the myth, the legend, the man, the indefinable independent individual currently known as… Improvement Pill.

What the hell is Improvement Pill?

Improvement Pill is a motivational enterprise run by an individual named “Richard”, who founded the brand at the age of 19 and I speculate he is now 24 years old. The entity known as “Improvement Pill” consists of a YouTube channel with 2.38 million subscribers, a barebones website shilling a “Habit Builder Challenge” and a “Storytelling Course” (what a man with no published works has any business selling writing advice is beyond me) with a footer which doesn’t even have the correct copyright date, a Teachable page which sells said Habit Builder Challenge for $497 and an “Accountability Buddy Program” for an ass-shattering $2,000, and a Patreon which claims a whopping 68 patrons, which is exactly 741 less patrons than Dacad, the best damn furry porn artist this stinky fandom has. The reading list he hosts on his website includes a litany of self-help woo-meister classics, including the narcissist’s bible “The 48 Laws of Power”, the hilariously flawed “The 4-Hour Work Week” (which one Goodreads review describes as “being trapped in a room with a manic-depressive during the manic part of his cycle”), and an absence of decent self-help books which actually help you help yourself, such as “Getting Things Done” or “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy” — notwithstanding the excellent “How To Win Friends and Influence People”, which I recommended a long-ass time ago.

His YouTube channel was created on 2015-11-27, with his first video being “Why The People Of NoFap Become Successful, successfully misinforming 4,442,874 viewers about a pseudoscientific broscience movement perpetuated by a small group of anti-porn activists who present pornography and masturbation as the causes of a host of complex psychological problems when their claims are not backed up by any reputable science whatsoever. As one psychology professor put it: “YBOP, TGPE, and nofap are founded on the views of two people who are considered pariahs within the sex and relationship research and clinical communities. They present themselves as experts but aren’t. There’s no empirical research evidence to support any of the claims made by YBOP and TGPE. All the claims about negative effects of internet porn use can be better accounted for by other explanations. Watching internet porn (hopefully ethically produced!) and masturbating are not problematic for the vast majority of people. And for those people who do have a problem with internet porn, it’s almost always a sign of some other underlying problem (shame, anxiety, fear of rejection, relationship problems, boredom, low self-esteem, lack of good sex education, etc.). Addressing those underlying problems should be people’s focus, not abstaining from masturbation to internet porn”.

The original link is a damn good read, and eloquently explains the allure of quack science in assisting individuals in ignoring their real-world problems in favour of looking for a cheap-and-easy solution for problems that have a variety of interlocking causes, attributing difficult-to-solve personality flaws, such as poor impulse control, low confidence in romantic relationships, and procrastination from your personal projects, to a single scapegoat — in this case masturbation. Improvement Pill’s garbage NoFap video contradicts itself in the first 50 seconds by saying porn is bad when it makes you feel good for little effort when it previously cited eating at a restaraunt — an establishment whose business model is making food so you don’t have to — as a pleasurable activity which you somehow “worked for”. The rest of the video is shit and will be cited by future generations as one of the worst instances of bad science stealing influence over otherwise intelligent people, quoted alongside the Paleo fad diet and obsession with soy and boys as instances of our current pervasive stupidity. Christ, Penn & Teller: Bullshit! made an episode denouncing sexual misinformation twenty cunting years ago. That episode contains tits in the first two seconds, the viewing of which will permanently warp your mind and cause you to regress into a single bacterium, because some cranks on the Internet declared it to be true without any clinical evidence whatsoever. That’s how science works!

This is the very first video posted on this channel, and when everything it says within it is complete fucking bullshit, you understand how much misinformation the rest of the channel poisons your mind with, and how they’re designed with the explicit purpose of giving you false hope through soothing non-solutions to the detriment of your intelligent and the benefit of the presenter’s wallet. Again, this video was posted by a nineteen-year-old. I’m not saying teenagers are incapable of well-reasoned thought backed up with objective evidence, but this video contains none of that, and when you’re getting lifestyle advice from someone who hasn’t even lived through one-fourth of the average human lifespan, you get a picture of how little expertise this person has in the topics he chooses to discuss and how easily suckered-in he is by faddish Internet cults. And lest we think this was a one-off bout of stupidity, he’s still shilling NoFap bullshit as late as October 2020 (The BEST NoFap Strategy — is to develop normal human sexuality and stop stunting discovery of your own body because Internet frat bros told you to). At least their YouTube page is honest: “DISCLAIMER: We are not certified health professionals, financial advisors, or therapists. All of the content presented in videos on this channel are for informational purposes ONLY!”. It’s essentially a Quack Miranda Warning telling you the information on this channel was assembled by non-experts linked to spurious sources and poorly-interpreted for the sake of clickbait. And this is the type of content we’re expected to build our lives around?

The rest of the YouTube channel features rehashes of the same productivity fads and omnipresent personal complaints everybody has forever, combined with common-sense advice you already know but lack the motivation to integrate into your life. The format for the first three years of the channel was the presenter pretending to write on a whiteboard as digital text follows his pen, with clipart flanking all sides like a deranged Paper Mario knockoff. As of late, enough people have thrown their money away for the presenter to commission original artwork presented in animatics — a limited form of animation more akin to storyboards in slideshow. Given the inconsistency of the artwork in both the thumbnails and videos, I’m assuming he’s farmed out animation tasks to freelancers with little brand direction, further cementing his content as careless lowest-common-denominator garbage with no genuine intent behind it. If he is drawing some of the artwork himself, I’m happy to know his artistic talents are limited in imagination, personality, and desire to be admired. Despite this, “Richard” narrates the majority of the videos, whose voice is a cross between Microsoft text-to-speech and Borderlands mini-boss. I hope you enjoy hearing the same monotonous fake-enthusiastic implacable New York accent over every single video, because that’s all you’re gonna geeeeet.

Here are some examples of actual video titles the presenter has sought fitting of attaching to his real-world name: “How To Get A Girlfriend — 8 step IDIOT PROOF guide”, “Overcoming Addiction — WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO FINALLY BEAT IT”, “Negativity Sandwich — USE WHENEVER YOU HAVE SOMETHING NEGATIVE TO SAY!”, “💸 8 PROVEN Ways To Make Money Online Fast In 2020 — (Side Hustle Edition)”, “How To WIN At The Game Of Life”, “NoFap VS No Nut November Results — Which Is BETTER?”, “5 LIFE HACKS That Will MOTIVATE You To Do ANYTHING”, “How To Properly Build Your Habit (MOST IMPORTANT Tamed Lesson)”, “You’ll NEVER Expect Why Trump’s Made It THIS Far”, “3 Ways To DEAL With That FEELING Of EMPTINESS”, “Getting Things Done — How to Get MASSIVE Loads of Work Done EVERY DAY”, “How To Become A Millionaire — EASIEST METHOD”, “Law Of Attraction — Is 90% Correct (IT’S COMMON SENSE!!!)”, and the unintentionally hilarious “DO NOT EAT FISH”. If any of these titles seem appealing to you, congratulations. You’re the mark. No, I’m not linking any of the videos. Fuck you.

Look, I get it. I’m smart. I know bullshit when I see it. And as a result of this appreciation for facts and logic, this content isn’t for me. There’s a reason grifters are called confidence men. If you don’t trust the con man, then the confidence trick fails. There are hundreds of thousands of cynical profiteers just like the man behind Improvement Pill — he just happens to be one of the most successful crabs in the bucket he threw himself into to shill anti-porn screeds to other desperate crabs, selling $2,000 crab accountability programs to ensure they obtain their crabby goals, such as financial stability and smart investment decisions. The crab in this retarded analogy is, of course, not in fact a crab, but their natural predator — the octopus, who slithers their slimy tentacles into each and every crevice from above and feels out which ones have the softest and most vulnerable shells. I’m not the target audience for these types of programs because not only do I possess the hardiest and most skeptical shell, I am also not even in the fucking bucket. Because I know I have personal problems, I know what they are, and most pressingly I don’t seek out easy solutions to complicated problems which I know takes years of experience and education to fully come to terms with. I don’t invent problems for myself for the purposes of solving them, and I don’t feel the need to compare myself to anyone else for the sake of an imaginary pissing contest into an ocean of piss off this barely-stable often-sinking rickety sailboat we call life. As Art of Manliness says: stop hacking your life, and put the fucking work in.

The channel is shit and its creator is a fuckboy. Now let’s open up the video which this article is about, and take a massive diarrhea dump over all his terrible ideas.

Section 1: Enter the Blue-Pill (32 Habits)

The video makes a good first impression by being incorrectly rendered, where instead of being rendered at the standard 16:9 format, the video is slightly wider than usual. Because the video was uploaded in 16:9 format to YouTube, this leads to letterboxed black bars on the top and bottom of the screen. Bizarrely, the bars are a dark grey colour instead of the standard black, and they aren’t even centred properly; the top bar is 21 pixels tall and the bottom bar is 32 pixels tall. This leads me to speculate the footage for the video was shot on a monitor with a slightly different aspect ratio from 16:9, but the person editing for Improvement Pill didn’t bother to properly compensate for this difference and just put the footage on top of a grey background without even bothering to put it in the centre of the video. This is such a weird technical issue that I’ve never noticed it on any other YouTube video, and it’s strange to be privy to someone lecturing on my life habits when he couldn’t even demonstrate basic professionalism by fixing the video or apologising for his error.

As the video’s introduction is 35 seconds long there’s little to talk about. The thesis presented at the start of this video is as follows: “Building and sticking to good habits is the only way to actually see progress in life” — no period, because proper punctuation is for suckers. What the presenter defines as “progress in life” will become apparent over the course of the video, but as I expressed before, it has less to do with your own personal contentment more than it does with getting random people to admire you to fuel your own primal ego. Fundamentally, the thesis isn’t stupid. The neurological concepts of habit-building are scientifically-sound and the ability to be aware of your habits in order to develop positive ones and reduce negative ones is the foundation of all psychological conditioning.

Art of Manliness has a decent guide as to how habits work. Pragmatically, habits are guided by a simple loop: Cue, Routine, and Reward. A cue is a trigger which immediately sets off your habit, such as feeling anxious due to personal obligations. The routine is the habit you immediately enact, such as browsing Reddit for several minutes. The reward is the pleasurable feeling you get from performing the routine, such as laughing at stanky dank maymays. Combine these with a belief in the effectiveness of the habit once you’ve identified it, and you have a neurological phenomenon which overtakes a large portion of your life without you even realising it. The most useful aspect of this knowledge is in understanding the trigger and enacting a small amount of willpower into preventing yourself from enacting the routine — pulling yourself away from the computer for a few seconds and saying no to the allure of top kek Reddit moments. Eventually you won’t get your reward off the trigger and it will fade away into irrelevancy. Conversely, if you want to instead institute a positive habit, you need to put in some willpower into forming a trigger, creating an easy-to-follow routine, and then ensuring you get a pleasurable emotional reward by the end of it. This obviously doesn’t work for addictions and other mental conditions where you lack the willpower or mental culpability to do so, but it should help you identify liabilities in your life and give you some perspective on what you would instead rather be doing.

If it works for dogs and pigs, it’ll work for your stupid ass.

Section 2: Tiers were a popular list and still is

This section, and the rest of the video, is footage from a “TierLists.com” tier list template. For some reason this video is filmed at 15 frames-per-second with an ugly yellow glow around the presenter’s mouse cursor, which suggests the content was filmed using obsolete screen recording software. Ever hear of OBS Studio? As with all tier lists the rankings are ultimately unscientific and based on the presenter’s personal opinion, but so are many organisational structures we use in our life such as the “left-right” political dichotomy and the dividing of cultural periods by decade. More bluntly, accepting the usage of a tier list is fundamental for this video to exist — anthropic principle and all — and if large amounts of subject-matter experts create tier lists with similar placements (such as with fighting games), then an aggregate of all placements on those lists ultimately becomes a consensus. It’s funny to think how something unscientific on the face of it can become scientific through collective opinion, but in this instance, the opinions of one single individual is by no means objective.

The presenter divides the four tiers of the list as such: “life-changing keystone habits”, “powerful habits”, “good habits”, and “not really a ‘habit’”. The concept of a “keystone” habit is scientifically less-sound than that of regular habits, appearing to have been created by motivational bloggers, but as an extension of current scientific knowledge it appears inoffensive. Essentially a keystone habit is a habit that triggers other habits, like a function in programming or the first detonation in a chain reaction. For instance, if you don’t have a set wake-up time and sleep in later than usual, you might not shower in the morning, you might not brush your teeth or change out of your pyjamas, you might skip breakfast and be cranky, you might be late to any of your morning obligations, you might put off doing the laundry, and so on and so forth. In this sense one habit kicks off the others, and so understanding your keystone habits gives you better control over the rest of your life. The other tiers are merely less-important habits which are still allegedly useful.

The habits themselves are presented through circular icons drawn in a cartoon style depicting a vaguely-Asian young male who looks unnervingly similar to Vault Boy. The presenter states these habits will contribute to one of his self-described areas of self improvement: health, wealth, relationships, and happiness. One would assume the purpose of health and wealth are to contribute to our happiness, notwithstanding most people’s flawed conception of what “happiness” is, assuming they have a tangible conception at all. I also wonder about the point of building interpersonal relationships for individuals who profess a disdainment for all human beings everywhere, although given we do, in fact, live in a society, understanding how to navigate the draft chaff of life and interact with other people without friction will prevent us from being too miserable. I then wonder why we should strive for happiness in our lives when most people can’t even achieve quiet contentment. Happiness, in my view, is merely stimulation and occasional affection — either of which we can get from porn or memes. As hedonistic as this conception of life is, I must wonder, given the inherent meaninglessness of all life everywhere, if we have any obligation to strive for anything else if these simple pleasures truly make us content with life. As the Stoics teach, life’s purpose is to achieve tranquility through virtue. If we can feel tranquil without virtue, then why work harder?

Of course, such a simple life is sure to eventually bore — hence the concept of hedonic adaptation. What once brought us joy no longer does, and so we move on to greener pastures in pursuit of alternate pleasures. Much as the adolescent music listener finds joy in mediocre pop bands then develops their taste through adulthood to more sophisticated groups in a variety of genres, the man who takes pleasure in simple joys finds less and less joy in his simple emotions, so he moves on to more complex emotions through complex stimulus, such as entertainment, seeking relationships, or through creating works of art which expresses his opinions on life and how best to live it. I speculate, given “Richard”’s biography, the feelings he received through success at such a young age bored him to tears. I speculate he genuinely believes his nonsense is good for the world, and derives great pleasure through his misinformation. I certainly do when I spread my misinformation. But ultimately, we can still find joy in all pursuits, complex or simple, stupid or smart, worthwhile to our lives or otherwise. If we experience joy, and we experience it consistently, and we are healthy enough to live our lives for as many years as we want, what else should we even be alive for?

I then choose to believe the habits presented in this video, supposing they are scientifically-sound, should be used as a means to search out and solve reasons you aren’t personally satisfied with yourself for whatever reason. My original quote about self-improvement being masturbation is true. Personal development for the sake of it is meaningless; personal development for the sake of achieving pleasure is righteous. This idea is communicated poorly throughout the video, but the undercurrent is there, and such lofty desires as health, wealth, relationships, and happiness are ultimately means to some unspecified end. It’s well known my generation is aimless in life due to the circumstances given to them by their idiot parents. Everyone under 30 years old understands the uselessness of working for a world will be destroyed within their lifetime, and pessimism and absence of purpose is higher than it has been in human history. The reasons for this are large and complicated, with a variety of religious, political, philosophical, and technological factors all conspiring to form the persistent restlessness that modern human beings face almost every day of their lives. Just read this 12,000 word article on the subject. Shit, my article up to this point is 5,000 words long, so don’t tell me you ain’t got no time for that.

Will the video I’m currently reviewing solve your existential crises? No.

Section 3: ’cause if I sip, then I’m sippin’.

Improvement Pill bursts out of the gate with the heavy-hitting knowledge bombs, shilling the very first habit he suggests as one which will measurably improve your health, your wealth, your relationships, and your happiness all in one go: drinking a glass of water. More specifically, the presenter asserts that waking up in the morning leaves your body in a mild state of dehydration which is cured by drinking a single glass of water, clarifying that it’s not a life-changing habit but one which alleviates the discomfort of waking up. The definition of “dehydration” in the popular consciousness is varied because the medical condition itself is so varied; according to Wikipedia, “Most people can tolerate a 3-4% decrease in total body water without difficulty or adverse health effects. A 5-8% decrease can cause fatigue and dizziness. Loss of over ten percent of total body water can cause physical and mental deterioration, accompanied by severe thirst. Death occurs at a loss of between fifteen and twenty-five percent of the body water”. So dehydration is anywhere from being perfectly fine to dead.

I find this section’s claims to be puzzling because I haven’t found any reputable sources backing up its exact claims; in fact, this article from Healthline with seven such claims says that the benefits of a morning sip are inconclusive. It seems intuitive that not drinking water for eight hours would make you somewhat thirsty when you wake up, and the benefits of staying hydrated throughout the day are scientifically-sound. But I wonder why Improvement Pill limits his recommendation to only drinking water in the morning when drinking water generally, instead of more controversial alternatives like coffee or tea, creates tangible health benefits in every area of your body. Alright, if it makes you feel better, then do it. But this claim appears to be on here specifically because it’s trendy enough that enough of his viewers recommended it for inclusion, and leading this video with it as the first habit seems to be a way to ease the viewer in through an uncontroversial opinion, to the benefit of his more degenerate ideas regarding human existence.

Shout outs to the HydroHomies subreddit, an offshoot of “/r/waterniggas”, which was banned for the word “nigga”. Because Reddit prohibits certain words from existing in subreddit titles despite its subreddit creation software allowing those subreddits to be created with those words in the first place. Of course it does.

Section 4: I got the dishes (Bitch, Ho)

The presenter extols the virtues of cooking for yourself as a skill which makes you less dependent on spending money on restaurants and more aware of the ingredients you choose to eat. I present Maddox’s associated article, “Learn how to cook, morons”. One of the few human universals is supplying our damaged bodies with nutrients so we live another day without suffering, yet it’s rare to see people who well and truly know how to cook. Gathering basic materials like flour, water, and eggs, and turning them into bases for pasta, pizzas, and pies are a dead art these days due to pre-packaged materials such as dry noodles and cake mixes providing convenient alternatives to the commitment of ruining your countertops with flour and spending a significant amount of time on a hobby where making food from scratch has less obvious benefits compared to cooking up a variety of packaged goods. For those who do well and truly cook, it’s obvious the effort is the point, where pasta isn’t satisfying if you don’t make the sauce yourself. But for people who can’t even bother to follow basic recipes such as stir-fried rice, they relegate themselves to fast food and microwave meals, and as a result their health suffers due to the poor-quality nutritional content included in their contents as requirements of preservation and taste.

The world of food woo is so full of misinformation, speculation presented as fact, and straight-up lies that it’s nearly impossible to discern what, exactly, is good for you. Nutrition is one of the most notorious sciences, where studies are rarely replicated and any number of lifestyle choices can make the results of a study meaningless as a result of these externalities. If health was easy, there wouldn’t be a multi-trillion dollar industry (trillion with a capital T) devoted to making us die less. One of the most fortunate developments in civilised nations is the invention of the nutrition facts label, the obsessive reading over is a hobby for many concerned shoppers, but even this great innovation doesn’t inform you of what’s personally best for you on the basis of your health situation, nor does it make clear what each nutrient actually does and how much you want of each. The Canadian government’s “Food and nutrition” series tries to make bare the benefits of a healthy diet, but even then they’re vague on the health effects of each nutrient because of the difficulties of knowing what those effects are at all. While collecting your own ingredients and understanding their nutritional contents is far more informational than eating in a restaurant, what you can do with this information is limited to basic suggestions like avoiding too much sodium and sugar while keeping a healthy caloric balance.

The impact of fast food on the developed Westerner’s diet is implacable. The single largest contributor to obesity — a health crisis whose effects on both the person and society are one of the most disastrous known — is a failure to expend more calories than you consume over a long period of time. It’s biologically impossible to lose weight when you take in more energy than you use, and the variety of foods you eat determines to what extent you’re more likely to overconsume calories. When fast food is just one of many different caloric sources as part of an otherwise nutrient-dense diet, it’s not particularly harmful considering fast foods suffer primarily from high fat, sugar, and sodium contents — all of which can be consumed in moderation. But when they become part of your regular diet, as with any other unhealthy foods, then you begin to suffer immediate illnesses associated with a low-quality diet, such as digestion problems and complications due to weight. Cooking your own meals and understanding the ingredients you use sidesteps these troubles altogether, and it’s difficult to argue against this consistently useful life skill.

Section 5: I wrote the rhyme that broke the bull’s back

“Wow, Froge”, you’re thinking to yourself, your first independent thought since the 6,000 words you spent reading this article. “This all seems like some good advice, just some common sense stuff you should keep in mind to improve your life a little. How come you ate this dude’s ass when you could be big chilling and taking down far worse Internet kooks?”. Good question. I felt something similar when I first started up this video, and for the three minutes it took for the presenter to get us this far, I thought this might have been an enterprise that wasn’t cynical clickbait cash-ins on other peoples desperations like every single other self-improvement guru out there. As I showcased before, I was dead wrong, but I was happy to believe in a world where people genuinely cared about the health of other human beings, as opposed to simply using them to their own capitalist ends. It was around this section when my optimism faltered and my newfound euphoria for all goodness that has ever existed in this world had leaked out of my soul like a balloon in the shape of a smiley face gets poked by a passing bird and then fucking dies forever. The artist currently known as Improvement Pill turned his focus to the wonders of music and all the beautiful things it brings to your life, listing off all the reasons to learn an instrument and experience the joys it brings:

1. It increases your perceived value in front of other human beings.

2. It makes you slightly more attractive when it comes to dating.

3. It teaches you how to enter a flow state on command. This means you know how to have fun.

That’s it. No mention of the importance of the art to millions of individuals all across the world every single day. No care for the independent artists who use music as a means to express themselves when no other medium will do. No appreciation for the disparate genres you can throw yourself into and become a part of if you so desire. No potential to pay back the musicians and artists who have influenced your view of the world with their lyricism through using their influence and applying it to your own work to give out the same good feelings. All music is, in the eyes of Improvement Pill, is 66% desperation for approval from others and 34% poorly-understood psychological concept. This is one of the most reductive assessments of the purpose of art I’ve ever had the misfortune of hearing. In his joyless mind, music is merely a means to an end, and that end is vanity. As we will see in future sections, he has plenty more bleakness for all the good things in life, and his assessments are just as pitiful.

This section filled me with a combination of confusion and shame. I play the piano. Yes, I’m that prick, who plays the piano and is so much better than you. The piano is an astonishingly good instrument which brings forth the full palette of human emotion all on one keyboard, unlike those plebeian guitar players and their strummy-strums. I play it because I want to appreciate the great composers of old while improvising my own songs for the satisfaction of doing so, and I derive my own satisfaction absent of the company of other humans who don’t give a damn about my hobby outside of ephemeral amusement. I do it because every time I bring it out, I want to cry because of the sheer satisfaction it brings me whenever I learn a new song or come up with something particularly intelligent on the spot. The worst thing about what the presenter is saying when it comes to music isn’t that it’s wrong. It’s that it’s reductive, and trying to bring this hobby into your life without fully appreciating it just because you want to impress some dudes is one of the most soul-crushing reasons I’ve ever heard for doing anything.

And if you want to be like me, if you want to be that prick who plays something heavier than an average infant, you can’t bust out your grandma’s 1987 Yamaha POS and busk on the streets of Vancouver for the adoration of druggies and hobos. And your $6,999 Les Paul is worthless unless you haul ass with an amp. You can’t carry a piano on your back and bust out Wonderwall without looking like a total tool — more than usual — and suggesting I threw myself into this hobby just so I could impress random idiots is the same cynical emotional manipulation which mail-order advertisers were selling to you as early as 1927. Should you learn to play the piano, or any other instrument? Think of it this way: some Mexican dude spent 91 hours learning to play the keyboard because it was part of his NES collection speedrun challenge. He already knew how to play the guitar, but if you’re willing to spend nine hours a day in single-minded devotion to the cause, then go ahead. Do it because you’re curious about some skill you might be interested in having. But if you don’t give a shit? If you don’t really care that much about music? Fuck right off. See also the all-time classic, “Please Don’t Learn to Code”, because if you truly wanted to learn programming, you would have already done it.

The most interesting part of this section is its suggestion about entering a flow state on command, and equating this to having fun. Flow is a complex psychological phenomenon; it also goes by the name “being in the zone”. The thing about flow isn’t that it’s this magical Nirvana-like state which puts you in a perpetual state of bliss. Like most psychological phenomenons, it evolved over time in response to a specific evolutionary need, in this case the need for intense concentration over a short period of time. It’s a state of mind in which single-minded devotion to a particular end is achieved through ignorance of all other external stimuli. This article on the subject illuminates us on its potential benefits in life, being a useful tool for developing skills because of its alluring combination of time dilation and single-mindedness, but it doesn’t directly bring you quality-of-life outside what you specifically do with it. As its original describer stated, “It is the full involvement of flow, rather than happiness, that makes for excellence in life. When we are in flow, we are not happy, because to experience happiness we must focus on our inner states, and that would take away attention from the task at hand. Only after the task is completed do we look back, then we are flooded with gratitude for the excellence of the experience. In retrospect, we are happy”. How very Stoic.

Like all tools, it’s only useful when appropriated for the purposes of a specific end. A hammer without a nail is merely steel, and these two combined are meaningless without a specific construction project. Saying that flow as a concept is universally good for you is like saying that a firearm is universally good because you can point it at a man who spent his last minutes on Earth unaware that you’d watch him die with your cold, dead, eyes. Unless that man is Hitler, your gun isn’t righteous, and unless your flow state is in service of what you personally want to achieve, trying to chase it is meaningless. You need a purpose in life in order to take advantage of the tools available to you, and if one of your purposes is in learning how to make music to create a little bit more beauty in the world, then achieving this state will come naturally to you. But learning music in order to achieve this state is backwards; you use the state to get to where you want to be, whether that takes weeks or months or years, and that level of pleasure and focus only comes once you’re competent enough to get past the beginner stages. Improvement Pill’s recommendations are misguided for this reason, and I recommend chasers of obscure emotions find simple pleasures in what they enjoy doing, then enjoy the fruits of complex pleasures once you’re skilled enough to earn them.

Also, fellas. Please don’t pick up guitar to impress women. Just… just trust me on this. We don’t need another terrible interpretation of Van Halen’s Eruption. Even a ten-year-old can do it.

Section 6: Never scary barely worried bright and early

Improvement Pill recommends the habit of waking up early, an action which is completed at a set time each morning, by saying it isn’t a habit. He then clarifies by saying sleep is a habit, and so the premise obviously follows the conclusion by saying that waking up from a habit is not in fact a habit. He attempts to clarify by saying the habit of sleep was already a habit and so your habit of waking up isn’t a habit because it depends on other habits like the habit of exercise and the habit of exposing yourself to sunlight, which he claims improves the habit of sleep (claims which are surprisingly not bullshit), but not the habit of waking up — which, I remind you, is not a habit.

Fortunately this tortuous logical ouroborous is irrelevant because there’s little scientific evidence there’s anything special about waking up early in the morning. This BBC article states that “waking up at an ungodly hour isn’t some sort of magic productivity hack that will solve your time-management problems. For some, it can even be counterproductive”, and that the best sleep schedule for you is the sleep schedule you’re most biologically inclined to adopt. Believe it or not, everybody’s body is different, and some people are genetically predisposed to waking up early while an opposite group of people are predisposed to waking up late. Trying to rebel against your chronotype — the period when you’re most likely to feel tired — will merely disrupt your biologically-healthy sleep schedule and plummet your energy for the rest of the day. So long as you’re getting a consistent amount of high-quality sleep each morning, it doesn’t matter if you wake up at 05:00 or 15:00. Also, the “Lark (Person)” Wikipedia page currently has a photograph of a North Korean café. Make of that what you will.

Curiously, this is less of a productivity fad more so than it is a piece of advice which has been given out for thousands of years and yet has been wrong the whole time. Benjamin Franklin famously said, “early to bed and early to rise makes a healthy, wealthy, and wise”. Benjamin was a fucking moron. As this Fast Company article states, morning people aren’t inherently healthier than night people, and what differences does exist between the two manifests as slight personality changes which come from the necessity of sleeping at different times. Human chronotypes tend to follow a bell curve where 35% of the population falls asleep before midnight with 50% of them after midnight, with falling asleep at exactly midnight being the average at 15%. In fact, the number of people who fall asleep before 22:00 is less than 1%, so if you wake up at 06:00 and are asleep for eight hours, you are literally part of the global sleep elite through no effort of your own.

So this idea of waking up before 06:00 is biologically infeasible for 99% of the population. Yet productivity gurus still recommend it to 100% of the population. I find it amusing how at no point during this video does the presenter come out and say, “this is a terrible idea, never do this, and don’t fall for random Internet wiseguys telling you how to live your life”. You might think that’s counterproductive given how, again, this dude is a grifter. But it’s actually an effective persuasion technique to rob someone’s money then point at other robbers while saying you can’t be one because no robber would ever tell on their own. No honour among thieves, you say? Maybe he should hold them accountable and enroll them in his $2,000 course.

In summary, stop worrying about what time you feel you should wake up at, and start worrying about what time you want to wake up at. Your shitty meatsack body knows best, and your arrogant brain wants to fool you into adopting a schedule which is unhealthy for you. So does the presenter of this video, but at least he profits off it! Yeah, what type of money are you getting, stupid brain? Brain juice is legal tender in zero jurisdictions across the world — except in Nevada.

Section 7: Life without knowledge is death in disguise

This section is about reading, and since I’ve written about 900,000 words since the start of my five-years stint of screaming into the void while wondering why my impotent rage alienates people, you’d think I would agree with this section. I agree with this section. However, the way the presenter goes about shilling the most important life skill you can have is fucking retarded. The presenter immediately takes a misstep by suggesting audiobooks require the same level of mental acuity as grepping ink with ye olde eyes, and then compares reading nonfiction to reading a strategy guide to a video game, which is the single most cringeworthy comparison I could have come up with. Assuming my life is like a video game, I have to wonder about the epic chicken dinner winners of old who have contributed so heavily to world culture, such as Aristotle who defended slavery as a natural phenomenon, or Sigmund Freud who was wrong about everything. Just because you read nonfiction doesn’t mean what you’re reading is true or that it’s useful to you personally; one of Improvement Pill’s few saving graces is the non-influence of Jordan Peterson, who is one of the worst Canadians to ever live and is a multi-millionaire author because of it. Also, if you read fiction, fuck you. That’s not real reading, that’s just dicking about while your eyeballs absorb irrelevant information about bullshit that doesn’t exist.

Now, look, I’m obviously being sardonic here. Reading is a great thing. Hell, you’re reading right now — checkmate, libtard. Although the presenter claims that reading three books on a subject makes you more knowledgable on that subject than 99% of the population — a statistic he pulled from the scientific journal known as “His Ass” — it stands to reason that merely reading information and memorising it doesn’t give you the skills necessary to make good use of that information. What’s more important for the spread of knowledge is a working understanding of rhetoric, charisma, prose, and politics so that you’re able to effectively divulge your information — or lack thereof in Improvement Pill’s case — to an audience from any background. You can’t just tell objective facts about the reality of our universe and expect people to believe you. The existence of the 6.5 billion people who claim to belong to a religion are evidence of that — or for a low-hanging fruit, 70 million Trump voters. Essentially, you have to manipulate people into understanding truth, because the human condition is such that we, as a species, are begging to be lied to on all levels of our existence. We beg for this because soothing falseness is more comforting than harsh truths, and the lies we tell ourselves of our collective importance are the dreams of man, which can only be undone through wiggling inside their heads and suggesting to them the nature of the world which always existed while they snoozed in bliss. It’s a shitty state of affairs, but remember the jester’s golden rule: “When you tell the truth, make it funny. Or they’ll kill you”.

Furthermore, he seems to believe the only reason somebody should pick up a habit of reading is because, I quote, “it gives you a huge competitive edge over your peers”. Not because you personally care about whatever subject matter you’re reading, and not even for the vain reason of simply enjoying yourself in the worlds created through tales that never existed from authors who understand how boring the world is when we don’t make-believe and write down our imaginations. So fuck you for enjoying yourself and fuck you for wasting your time reading My Little Pony fanfiction even though it brings joy to your little horse heart. Whenever I pick up a book to read, I’m not thinking to myself, “wow, this is going to be really useful to show my fucking moron friends how stupid they are, fuck my friends for getting to know me”. I read because, across all my life, knowledge has been the one constant I can rely on as omnipresently useful in all areas of my life. That’s the real benefit of reading. It gives you knowledge, which gives you comfort, which helps you find out how to make peace with your existence in this unfair world. Not because you can say cat facts to your idiot friends. By the way, cats develop barbs on their penis at six months old.

There is one fleeting moment of insight in this section, where the presenter says that reading can be a difficult habit to get into if all the reading you did in the past was forced upon you in school. Seth Godin wrote this book called “Stop Stealing Dreams”, who is one self-help guru who’s actually bloody interesting. The main thesis of the book is that public schools were designed as part of capitalist propaganda to teach generations of children to be mindlessly obedient for the sake of filling factories as cheap labour, and that the current curriculum in the United States is woefully inadequate for the realities of the modern market in a globalised world, stealing dreams from our children and making them stupid for the sake of a work environment that hasn’t existed in decades. Forcing children to read books they aren’t interested in for the sake of literacy in a genre they don’t care about is an insult to all the bright children out there who legitimately care about learning about the world, and are damaged as a result of a school system which squashes independence and cuts down our tallest flowers before they’ve even had a chance to bloom. English class forced me to read Romeo and Juliet, but when marketing class made me pick a book to write a report on, I chose No Logo. Guess which one had a bigger impact on me?

So kids, read your learning books so you can be just like me! Wait, come back. Please.

Section 8: I can’t talk to my mother so I talk to my diary

Sadly this section isn’t stupid so I can’t mercilessly mock it like usual. Improvement Pill recommends keeping a daily diary for people who have a lot on their mind every day, and who enjoys the process of writing in order to get a big-picture view of what bothers them on a day-to-day basis. He suggests the process as therapeutic as talking to a friend about your personal issues, and also gives you the benefit of being able to look back on your various states of mind in the past and understand the type of person you were back then in an intimate fashion. This advice is unfortunately sane and reasonable, and I have found this technique to be useful on occasion even when I don’t commit to it beyond a scrap piece of paper once every few weeks. I could sell my half-baked ramblings in thirty years when I become famous for hijacking a plane and crashing it into Epstein’s Island to form a civilisation of sex offenders, but given famous modern diaries such as those of Franz Kafka, Anne Frank, and Wimpy Kid, I have been priced out of the market and must instead half-bakedly ramble online.

Curiously, despite being the exact type of person the presenter suggests as benefiting from this activity (HE HAS TRIANGULATED MY EXACT DEMOGRAPHIC, I MUST THROW ALL MY MONEY AT HIM NOW), I don’t actually write anything down in a journal. The line for this section comes from the Scarface song “No Tears”, off his album “The Diary”, which is one of hip-hop’s most tragic gangster rap albums. I think much like Scarface, this whole hobby of airing my grievances in public is merely a way to prevent myself from going crazy, which many sufferers of neuroticism do when they don’t have anything which helps bring them back to Earth. It’s easy to become overwhelmed with the meaninglessness of your life and the clown world you were born into, and your absurdist philosophies don’t matter much in the face of overwhelming emotional turmoil made by causes you don’t understand. I think this whole Web enterprise is an extended therapy session gone on for far too long. Congratulations for discovering it.

By the way, in section 15 he recommends bullet journaling as being better than keeping a diary. That’s bullshit because, uh, bullet journals don’t have lines. Which you write on. See you in seven sections, wankers!

Section 9: A lot of positive vibrations to build from

By the way, for those following along who have yet to commit suicide from listening to this dude’s voice, there’s 26 more minutes left in this video. 26 minutes of your life you are never, ever going to get back. You could have spent it reading my blog! Hell, you’re spending it reading my blog right now. The conspiracy runs deep, I tell you what.

In this section, the presenter suggests you saturate what limited peace and quiet you allow your headspace to have by listening to podcasts so that you can continually “educate” yourself, on vague topics and for vague purposes, rather than spending your worthless life thinking about, I don’t know, some porno you saw last night. Despite considering podcasts as a “very good habit” because of their ability to inform us on specific topics, the presenter condemns them for being “freestyle conversations”, because freestyle conversations have never contributed to human culture. He suggests you’re instead better off listening to audiobooks, perhaps so you can pretend sitting in the car listening to one of Audible’s countless proletariat self-help propaganda pieces is more educational than listening to people who enjoy the company of each other, expressing this joy through conversation. It should be no surprise that personal enjoyment is not a factor in how highly the presenter rates this habit. All existence is in service to the Holy Order of Personal Development, and pleasure is secondary to polluting your mind with other people’s ignorant ideas.

The presenter further states that reading books is more educational than listening to podcasts because an author will spend months of research and effort writing a book before it gets published, which is why we get such educational titles like “Everything is Fucked”, which is to Stoicism what a shit-eating grin is to a pile of shit, and “Blink”, whose central premise is that split-second decisions can be more helpful than critical thinking, except when they’re not, and we should learn to trust our intuition, except when we can’t, and that nobody understands the human brain, except for all the parts we do. In the same way that there are so, so many terrible fiction books littering grocery store shelves and the Amazon fantasy and science-fiction section, there are so, so many terrible nonfiction books passing off wild speculation and anecdotal evidence as a cognitive revolution that you, too, can be privy to for the low cost of a CDN$ 14.95/month + applicable taxes after 30 days (cancel anytime) Audible.ca subscription (use coupon code “FrogeGang” for two free audiobooks!).

The important thing about reading isn’t that you’re mindlessly consuming bullshit information; RationalWiki has a category listing “Books, Great and Terrible” with reviews of all the awful science denialism that publishers infest our consciousness with for the sake of profiting off idiots who genuinely believe in any number of scientifically-illiterate ideas of the world, long-debunked, but still sold cynically for cash. The important lesson with reading is to think about the information you’re consuming, and to develop media analysis skills which enable you to understand the subtle failings of nonfiction works which come to pre-formed conclusions and attempts to convince you of their correctness, rather than presenting objective evidence and them creating nuanced conclusions about the ideas presented. Sure, there’s a place for opinion pieces and rhetorical snark. Hell, this article is one big rhetorical circlejerk shitting all over some self-serving shill. But you must develop skepticism in regards to every piece of information you receive, to understand there’s always a bigger picture than what you are being presented in the moment, and to trust your instincts when you do not believe ideas you are being convinced of.

The crime of the author is not in being wrong, or in believing wrong things. It’s in consistently expressing wrong ideas to the point where their credibility cannot be trusted in any respect. It’s damaging public intelligence for the sake of money. It’s being wrong because it’s more profitable than being right. That’s the real crime. Remember that knowledge is the only good, and money is the root of all evil. If they weren’t, then why would you be familiar with these aphorisms at all?

Section 10: ’Cause the broomstick fit your ass so perfect

Hey. Kids. Do your chores.

Yes, this is really what this section is about. There’s this hip new idea floating around the fringes of disenchanted teenagers, called “Christian conservatism”, where charlatans like Jordan Peterson takes the incredibly complex inner workings of psychology, boils them down to simplistic advice like “clean your room and you’ll feel better”, then spends 409 pages quoting from the Bible and saying postmodernism is literally equivalent to Marxism. Professional ramblers like Jordan are famous for combining poorly-expressed ideas that are fundamentally wrong with very simple ideas that are hard to disagree with (a concept known as “deepity”) and then radicalising groups of vulnerable suckers into believing whatever crank idea they want to propagate, in Jordan’s case a peculiar blend of Christian extremism combined with pseudophilisophical stances on topics he knows nothing about. Also, his books were rated positively by professional Internet troll “PewDiePie”, who is most famous for saying “nigger” in a video game and paying two guys to hold up a sign saying “DEATH TO ALL JEWS”. So that’s how you know it’s a good one. Also, my YouTube recommendations are now populated with several-hour long lectures on Christian theology combined with Minecraft YouTubers, compilations of feminists getting owned, and more videos from the “DEATH TO ALL JEWS” guy.

Shit.

I prior said this channel is free from the influence of alt-right morons, except for this section quoting alt-right moron Jordan Peterson with his alt-right moronicism of “clean your room”. That this is one of his most famous quotes shows how non-infuential he is in any community outside the alt-right. Freedom from the ideas of people who think Jews should be murdered is a basic level of human dignity I shouldn’t have to expect from this shithole species, but seeing this simple idea expressed in such a similar vein reminds me that all woo-promoters are fundamentally the same save for subtle differences in presentation and degree in which they think Jews should be murdered. They target individuals who are unable to obtain a basic degree of competency in their own life, gives these individuals the same basic life advice that they had already heard over and over again by people who aren’t attempting to get them in a cult of other losers, and exploits these losers so the cult leader can build their own reputation and brand around getting other losers to follow their teachings for the sake of money and fame. The severity of the cult’s tenets hardly matter when they’re all structured in power being invested in a small group of individuals, divine knowledge being passed down from on-high, and the disrespect of all other sources of self-help for the sake of this particular source. At no point is the topic suggested that your problems are deeper than what can be solved through a few YouTube videos, a mailing list, and a private Discord channel which further isolates you from other sources of information. All your problems can be solved, if only you throw away your personality in pursuit of being somebody else.

Is it any wonder why the people who so often fall for these idiotic schemes overwhelmingly have pre-existing mental conditions? Think about all the depressed teenagers and ennui-infested young adults who find themselves roped into a YouTube channel like Improvement Pill and then find themselves bombarded with recommendations for increasingly-extreme content which preys on their basic desires to be recognised? How much of our youth has to be radicalised before their peers realise the evil of finding salvation in Internet strangers who are trying to sell you something? Self-improvement is the new religion, and its bishops will be happy to sell you salvation so long as you devote their life to the cause and convert other members of the vulnerable unwashed masses. It doesn’t matter if the religion takes the form of pseudoscientific neo-spiritual soup of nothingness that New-Ageism promotes, the perpetual toxicity of an endless twelve-minutes-hate against women that is inceldom, or the descent into paranoid schizophrenia against all human beings who do not share your birth-given characteristics by joining any number of alt-right chud groups. They’re all the same scumbags, all the same human garbage, and nobody who gives a shit you would ever suggest that they, and they alone, have all the answers which will help you become the person you want to be.

I’ll conclude this section by giving out my own incredibly basic fake-deep truism which I’ll then logically shift into proving the Jewish Question because all self-help rabbit holes somehow conclude into calling for Jewish genocide: I’m wrong, and you’re wrong. Nobody knows anything on this bitch of an Earth, especially not regarding the intimate, infinitely tangled web of personal conundrums you personally have been inflicted with. Now, obviously, taking this advice at face value is incredibly stupid, because we do know some things about the world — a lot, in fact. Some combination of rationality, faith in the scientific method, and trusting your biologically-ingrained gut feelings about groups of people trying to sell you something are all good heuristics for making your way in life without going off the deep end. The point of the truism is this: just because we don’t have all the answers, it doesn’t mean we get to believe in answers that are wrong. We don’t have to believe in a simple answer to complex solutions just because it’s the only answer offered, and we don’t have to believe in false hope just because we don’t have any hope at all. Anybody who says they have all the right answers has no right answers whatsoever. Nobody knows anything. Don’t believe in anyone who tells you they do.

Oh, and clean your fucking room. Bitch. Seriously, check out this subreddit of neckbeard nests. Depression? Drug addiction? Compulsive hoarding disorder? All this can be cured… for sending $2,000 to some guy on the Internet with no medical qualifications whatever. Sixpencee heals, Improvement Pill steals. Biggie Smalls. 1989.