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Years back, I'm afraid I can't find the study anymore, it was determined that people trying to build new habits would often fall back to old behaviors when exposed to situations that caused them produce adrenaline (fear) and cortisol (stress) together. So, in today's world, i think it's pretty safe to say we're all facing an uphill battle when trying to change, regardless of our individual challenges. But, no, I don't think it's hopeless; It's about understanding that you're a little fish in a big ocean and sometimes the currents are going to pull you in a direction you don't want to go and you've basically gotta find a story to tell yourself that works for you to help stay focused on where you want to go.
I have seen people volitionally change themselves and their behavior. This is not an ideology but an empirical fact about the world.
Reading is a skill. It's developed thru practice. A person with ADHD might have a harder time developing that skill, but (as someone who works in higher education) I've seen folks with ADHD develop it.
Reading will open passageways in your mind like the connections between Chicago skyscrapers' old coal basements. Without reading you can only lead a single life. If reading has no fans I am dead.
Audiobooks can be hard to focus on if you have to cross the street and stuff, works best for me when cleaning, working out, or running on a path
It's nice keeps your hands free
I can basically change myself if I just had the motivation
I think that this is an idealistic way to view it. Try this instead:
I can change my environment, which can lead to changes within myself
I know that I have changed a lot, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, over my life - but if I look back on it every major shift in my perspective or behavior was precipitated by a change in my environment. I think it's useful to think of myself dialectically, where environment is the base and attitude is the superstructure, and approach self improvement from that angle.
But of course the limiting factor here is that you don't have total control over the environment that you're in. The hard part of self help is identifying the things you can change and separating them from the things that you can't, which is part of the reason why I think a lot of advice boils down to really unhelpful "mindset" stuff. There are concrete steps you can take that will result in an improved mindset, which might be the first step to taking concrete steps to improving other things, but you can't just brute force your mindset with willpower because as soon as you hit a challenge you'll revert to ingrained habits and might double down on them in a really unhelpful way (think binge eating).
yeah people can definitely change but it's not easy. Not sure about the ADHD point though
People can definitely change, it just requires a lot of everything. I have changed a lot in the last year in terms of physical health, for the better for instance. Its not a bad thing to want to improve certain areas of your life. It only becomes bad when you set unrealistic standards or refuse assistance
I have changed a lot in the last year in terms of physical health, for the better for instance.
what has changed? and how old are you?
Mid 20s, no longer very underweight. Gained 11kg/25lbs over a year. BMI is now 20. It was 16.5. Involved eating right + exercise to encourage muscle growth. All at home, haven't been to a gym. Calisthenics only. I feel a lot better, though there is still lots that I want to accomplish there. Bit hard on a limited budget for food, working a job, plus no gym, but there always is a way.
I just can’t imagine maintaining the will to live without some hope that I can change
I can't speak for anyone else, but I agree. Whenever I'm at a low point this fatalism creeps in, and it's something you see in a lot of online communities where mental unwellness is a factor. From seemingly benign places like r/suicidewatch to cesspools like incel forums.
But I'd also say that what people generally want is to be happy. In the case of your friend, forcing themselves to read in public might not be worth the effort if it's not something they really want to do.
I think that most people ultimately can't change until they're either forced to change or hit rock bottom.
I'm living proof that people can change in the sense that its theoretically possible. But I hit rock bottom 3-4 times and was given a sobering "You won't live another 5 years if you continue like this." Even then, I only made serious progress after 3-4 LSD trips. But for everyone like me there's 9 more people who fall through despite getting the same warnings. For everyone that keeps the change up long term, there's 9 more who return to their old pattern of behavior.
I don't think major self-improvement is comparable to learning a skill. If you were the kind of person who could change themselves then you would already have done so. It's closer to changing the very core of your soul and becoming a completely different person. I look back at the person I was and realize I probably did die. Whatever was left in my body became who I am today because I can't identify with who I was before now.
we don't need to improve (outside of like, specific skill development) , society needs to change
Hate to break it to you bud but some people are responsible for the problems they have in life.
Some people have shitty circumstances and put forth effort to overcome them. Some people have a hiccup and use it as an excuse to beat themselves down and the people around them. An alcoholic that beats their kids may have had a shitty life but we don't pull the "society needs to change" card for them.
we don’t need to improve
No, everyone should be improving. That's the point of life if there ever was one. You get sucker-punched, you fall, try to get up, you fail, you slide backwards for months on ends, but you still try to improve.
society needs to change
For things like ASD and ADHD this is true but ultimately meaningless because it implies that society can change without individuals doing something. Workers get fucked over by their bosses and that needs to change. We don't sit around waiting for some magical force to intervene, we unionize and organize. Do you think that one day NT folk will suddenly change and understand us? Or are you content to accept that we'll be misunderstood for all of human history?
It's fine if you do think so. I'm not here to impose my will. But we live in the world we do for better or worse. Cope with it, fight against it, or resign yourself to it. But ultimately you do make a choice.
fuck you, you don't know me or my situation. I'm certainly not a group of workers that has leverage and just need to apply it.
It is better to create systems that produce situations in which people function in the way they would like to function than try to optimize people into behaving like that in any situation.
You of course have agency and can do quite a bit, but what works better than trying to generate a habit out of will is to create structures and support systems which enable that behavior as default.
If you notice that you are having trouble with your partner when you work 40 hours a week in the evening when you are exhausted then the best way to deal with it is systemic change and change of the structures, sure working on yourself is part of it, but having less hours (if you can manage surviving) and more chill time might be good for it.
If the two of you have often trouble in a specific situation since you got your ADHD i.e. that stuff isn't clean then it is good to reframe the situation and not demand of a person that doesn't have good executive function to fulfill tasks which demand a lot of good executive function. A friend of mine pays his software engineer hourly wage now for a person who does some amount of cleaning and that relationship stress level got reduced hard. Capitalist solution? Sure in a sense, but it is also accepting that you are not alone and in a relationship there is still a whole society out there. We are better together than individualist.
Recognizing what you can and cannot change is basically what I'm fathoming adulthood is
That's what I'm calling it yeah, but there's a lot of nuance to that.
On the question of labeling the ideology:
It's kind of a continuum. There are grand philosophies and psychologies about how the present state of things or people arises from past conditions, and yes that includes Marxism. There is truth to it. It can be as complex as explaining history itself, or why one seems to start spouting the ideas in the last book you read or video you saw, even if you didn't believe it all 10 min ago.
The problem is the continuum itself. I definitely fall into the camp of "yes, things are an effect of past causes" myself. But where you, I, and maybe also your friend differ from the "just do it" self-help types is that we recognize at certain levels, there are systemic blockers to just doing it: capitalism at the societal level, ADHD at the individual, etc. Some people get confused or choose to ignore this.
I think that having a mind for these unique situations is deeply connected to this cause-and-effect view of nature. I won't get too deep into things, but some philosophical jargon is "haecceity" and "anaptyxis" (I made up that last one, might be hard to look up). Basically, if things aren't categorized by rigid top-down classifications but rather evolve and arise situationally and individually (eg. how the family trees of species in biology might lead one to believe the opposite of the actual nature of evolution as messy and gradual) then you don't have much choice but to understand each thing as unique.
TL;DR generally yeah cause and effect works as a worldview but by itself is too simplistic
I've always taken the stance that people can change on most things, if they truly want it and are willing to push through the costs. Wanting it isn't enough of course, but it's a pretty necessary part. Also I mean obviously of course depending on the topic and physical possibility, no amount of wanting is going to fix a blind persons eyesight or other things like that.
But one of my favorite ideas is that a brave person is not someone who does without fear, but who does despite fear. And taking this stance has helped me a lot with confronting my anxiety. It's not a perfect cure-all, nothing is but I'm better at trying new foods and meeting new people than I used to be.
I think where this stance gets problematic is when people are just straight up lying about it. A domestic abuser who says "I'll try to do better" is very rarely wanting to actually do better, it's a ploy. We get the idea that they can't change not because they truly can't (a lot of domestic abusers know how to behave, they do it in their work life and social life all the time), but rather because they truly don't want to to begin with. That's why it's important to understand that while others can change, you're never going to be the one to change them. Only at best, a support network for them to make their own change with.
