Hello comrades and welcome to the fourth improvement megathread of May! There is one more week left in May, let's make it count.
As usual, some discussion ideas:
- Do you want to share something you've done in the previous week? Everything counts, nothing is too small.
- Do you have any goals for next week?
- Do you have any streaks? For example, "sober for one day." Feel free to post your streak every day in this thread.
- If you don't have a continuous streak, did you manage to abstain from something for a day or more?
- Did you come across some useful information or resource that might help others?
Poster caption: "No!"
Good luck with your goals! 
This is gonna sound super corny (and kinda sad that I see this as an accomplishment) but I have kept my apartment clean all week. I was truly in cave goblin mode for about eight months, even into my self-improvement quest. For a really long time I was living in a half-step away from total squalor, I resolved myself to pick-up and clean up. It took multiple cleaning sessions to pick-up my place (again it shouldn't have got that bad in the first place but here we are), but I have kept in "good" to "I could have another person in my apartment and they would think I'm a normal person" condition.
I'm proud of that.
Wow that's so inspiring to read! I just came home from a long trip and my place is a mess, as I left it, plus a whole lot of nasty flies because I forgot to take out the compost. I'm working up the courage to start cleaning for real for the first time in months of depressed trash goblin mode, and I want to keep it clean as well.
Good for you!
Oh wow, my update was going to be that I am just getting to the cleaning-of-the-place phase of dry May, throwing out biohazards like last year's oat milk. That's a great accomplishment and I hope to be in your shoes next week!
Hell yeah! It can be so hard to keep on top of and I can only imagine that once it gets past a certain point it feels impossible to deal with so good on you! I'm sure it feels soooo nice to have a cozy clean place. I'm somewhat Obsessive about cleaning, which can be nice but also is at the expense of having energy to literally do anything else besides work lol, but I know my anxiety lifts immensely after a good pick up around the house
I actually managed to finish a book I started this month which is pretty rare for me, feels good! Gotta keep the momentum up. I start work back up this week, my goal is to not shrivel up and die lol
I actually managed to finish a book I started this month which is pretty rare for me, feels good!
Hell yeah, which book?
I start work back up this week, my goal is to not shrivel up and die lol
Relatable
People's Guide to Capitalism by Hadas Thier, which was recommended to me by a few comrades here as an easier to disgest version of Capital. I bought a bunch of Marxist lit that I meant to dive into like a year ago and just started getting into it now lol.
I've been off of work for a month and a half; it's been amazing. We are bargaining a union contract and I'm one of 6 people who have been doing literally everything for the union effort and it makes me wanna cry and throw up to have to get back into it (been going hard since March 2023). Management is a fuck so there's constant new bullshit "restructuring" goin on and I think I should maybe just find another job. Eeeeeh
Also I'm stoked you'll be able to cuddle your pets soon! Always the best medicine
Oh wow what a surprise, a Jacobin writer, didn't see that coming. Do any of you even know that magazine receives money from a major Zionist fund?
I can't tell if the first part of your comment is sarcastic or not, and no I didn't know that about Jacobin nor did I know she was a writer for them prior to purchasing the book
So you're trying to tell me that you're both reading theory AND doing praxis? Folks, we have found the One True Leftist on this website!
Good luck with your union effort, I hope it's successful!
Thank you so much
I'm trying hard, used to be full of piss n vinegar in terms of being real militant/public with our contract but at this point it feels like we need to capture that CBA. Other departments in my agency recently secured their union contracts and got pretty favorable raises so we're hoping we won't need to fight too much longer to get something similar. Gotta remember that it's for the good of everyone and the folks coming in in the future
Getting back into reading after a hiatus of a couple months. What tends to happen is that I pick up a book, read half of it, realize that I'm getting confused, decide to read something more politically/economically fundamental to provide a better foundation, and repeat for like 5 books in a row.
it's like
"blahblahblah, this British politician in 1827 did this... oh god I think I lost the plot like 50 pages ago, I need to have a better overview of the British Empire"
"okay, here's a book on the British Empire that's more general... blahblahblah, they did this policy. oh fuck I just realized that the economics of the policy they're discussing in a big blind spot for me. I need to go find a book which deals with that."
"okay, here's a book on economic policy... blahblahblah, this is how trade duties and tariffs work. shit, I just realized that I'm unsure how this actually all fits together in a Marxist framework, I need to go find a book which deals with that."etc, and then once I get to the bottom of that process, I work my way back up
luckily I take notes so I don't have to reread what I've already read for the most part
it would probably be more productive to get all the foundational stuff done first. like, you know, books tend to gloss over parts by being like "over the 1900s and 1910s, X party rose to power, and then..." as they're working with a larger narrative and then I think you're meant to fill in the very large gap in understanding by reading a book about precisely how they came to power, and so on. but the large foundational stuff also necessarily tends to be more abstract and dense in theory so it's hard to get through it.
Lmao I'm the same way without the follow through
Like I just finished a book about Capital, so now I want to read David Ricardo and some other economists to compare theories. Then of course I want to read some anthropological literature to learn more about commerce and origins of Capitalism. And then Hegel, and then the French revolution and then and then....and then I forget lol.I have horrible memory and have thought about note taking; do you have a form that you follow that works for you?
I've got through a lot of note-taking methods tbh. Even as I went through my university course, it's something that I never really got the hang of and was satisfied by (part of it is that I was usually too busy with the workload to really do a deep dive and perfect any particular one).
I've tried doing it on paper (or devices you can handwrite on) because of all the scientifically-supported benefits it gives you in terms of concentration and memory and so on, and I don't doubt those benefits, but ease of access and searchability and connectivity are just way too important to be flipping through papers as soon as your notes reach a certain size.
So I do it via keyboard, usually on a device that isn't connected to the internet to avoid distractions (with the PDF or epub predownloaded, or the book next to me if I have it physically). There's a lot of note-taking apps out there and they each have their own benefits; I found that I dislike pure memorization/flashcard apps like Anki because I do actually just need a big place with my notes not all separated by flashcards.
I found that I dislike various pure Zettelkasten-y apps like Obsidian. A Zettelkasten, literally "second-brain" is kinda like a massive decentralized mind-map which focuses on connections between pieces of information rather than maintaining a strict set of notes, if you're unaware. I found that I actually quite liked having the ability to have a place for all my notes from a certain book to just read through and not scattered around (and a Zettelkasten is kinda explicitly about not memorizing stuff because, y'know, your second brain is meant to have the information and not the brain in your head, but I quite like just memorizing stuff so I can use it without referencing a giant mindmap).
Notion is pretty good and I still use it for a lot of things. It's a fairly basic app where you can take notes but that also has functionality for to-do lists and tables and so on.
I think I like RemNote the most. There's a lot of complicated stuff you can do with it, but at its heart, it's a notetaking app where you can generate flashcards inside the app and it'll do spaced repetition schedules automatically, which is nice because there's some things that I would like to flashcard but definitely far from everything. I also just like the structure of the thing, it's been good to encourage me to break away from agonizingly long paragraphs and instead break them up into bitesize pieces that are nonetheless connected together.
But at the end of the day, the app used isn't really what's important, because it's very easy to trick yourself into thinking you're being productive by messing with settings and doing youtube tutorials about XYZ or TOP TEN TRICKS FOR PRODUCTIVITY, etc.
As for the strategy while taking notes, there's also a ton of them out there which boast wild success. Again, I don't think any of them are wrong necessarily, but there's a lot of them that feel either needlessly complicated/require a lot of extra thought ("oh gee, what do I colour-code this? is this categorized as a fact, an idea, a concept, or commentary in my elaborate classification highlighting system?") when you should just be thinking about the book and its contents, or they feel like they're designed for specific subjects; what works for literature analysis won't work for medical school, which won't work for mathematics, etc.
I think the best way I've found is to simply read through the book and try and summarize what the author is saying in your own words and add examples. There's really only three guidelines I'd go for:
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Keep your paragraphs relatively short to keep your notes in relatively bitesize chunks of information and explanation
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If you're ever just typing things in from the book verbatim for more than a couple sentences at a time, you've probably lost focus - you might need to take a break for like 5-10 minutes or check you actually understand and aren't just pretending to understand so you can get through the book faster. It's fine to repeat decent stretches because there's only a few concise ways of saying something, but make sure to break it up by at least changing a word or re-ordering a paragraph to make sure your brain is still actually doing stuff.
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If you don't understand something, then don't just repeat it verbatim in your notes because you'll just confuse yourself later. This is where a lack of internet connection can be a real pain, so maybe keep it on if you're dealing with something dense and confusing
Sometimes putting things in your own words is actually longer and less concise but uses less complicated jargon so it's actually easier to understand overall. There's usually a lot of extraneous/unhelpful information or padding that can be removed though, so my edited notes are very often like a quarter/third of the size of the actual book, maximum.
You can edit them from there after you've read the chapter/book. Often, you'll find that the author goes back over ground already covered just to remind you, and you might not catch this while going through it (especially if it takes you a week or two to get through it). Other times, you'll find that information you wrote down just wasn't that relevant. Obviously we aren't studying for a test here, there's no chance it'll be on the "exam", so delete parts at your own discretion.
I think even if you go for more exotic notetaking things, it's better to just get raw sentences down and then go back over the notes afterwards with the colours and referencing and tags and such.
The whole process takes a lot longer than just reading the book without making notes - a frustratingly long time, even - but it means that you'll never have to read it again in your life, if done right, and you'll memorize much more of it (especially if using flashcards in addition), so it's much more efficient and time-saving over a, say, 30 year timespan.
As an example of how I take notes (in Remnote), this is a paragraph from Desai's Geopolitical Economy (2013):
"Part 8 of Capital Volume I, devoted to ‘The so-called primitive accumulation’, famously underlines the state’s critical role in establishing capitalism by separating workers from their subsistence. However, not only does such primitive accumulation continue into capitalism’s maturity (Luxemburg, 1913/2003; Harvey, 2003), it is closely tied to the expansion of the state’s role for combined development through ‘the colonies, the national debt, the modern tax system, and the system of protection’. The national debt permitted the state to ‘meet extraordinary expenses [such as for colonial ventures] without the taxpayers feeling it immediately’ while the resulting taxes and wage goods inflation separated more artisans and peasants from their subsistence. The effectiveness of this system of primitive accumulation was further heightened by the ‘system of protection, which forms one of its integral parts’ (Marx, 1867: 921)."
and these are my unedited notes for that paragraph:
Show
my notes are only like 10% shorter than the actual thing right now (thanks to me adding a brief example/explanation, which is extending it) but I've actually reduced like half the wordcount of the chapter as a whole when accounting for wordier/extraneous paragraphs, while also making it more readable to me, and I haven't even editted it down and glued together sections that are similar yet. You can get some even better compression on less dense books, but this is one of the denser ones.
An added benefit is that as you get more and more books in there, you'll perhaps notice that certain subjects are brought up a lot and so you can, using RemNote at least, create entries/mini-documents/whatever you want to call them, dedicated precisely to that topic, giving a basic overview. Books on many Western countries' recent politics will probably bring up the 2008 financial crisis for example, and that might be explained from scratch in each book, so instead of having like 10 different note sets each with its own distinct set of paragraphs on an overview of the timeline of the financial crisis overall, you can just have a single version and save some words and time.
Oh I forgot to reply to this earlier, but thank you SO MUCH for this super detailed response, it should be an effort post in my opinion lol. I started to use obsidian which I liked well enough but definitely began organizing things in more of a table of contents style as opposed to going full zettelkasten. I'll fiddle around with RemNotes and see how that does me. I like the idea of writing but I could see that being so much more cumbersome....Maybe taking all the rougjt notes and then summarizing them that way could be helpful. Anyway you rule, thanks again!
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What tends to happen is that I pick up a book, read half of it, realize that I'm getting confused, decide to read something more politically/economically fundamental to provide a better foundation, and repeat for like 5 books in a row.
That's just how it be, sometimes. They don't teach us jack shit about the way the world works in school so we've gotta teach ourselves. And it turns out there's a lotta shit to learn about. At least once you finally climb back up your ridiculous chain of books it's incredibly satisfying
I've been taking the L consistently for the past few weeks due to some health issues. I'm working on them but due to that I'm not able to make a lot of progress. It do be like that sometimes. I did manage to do some reading on a few days this week. Next week I'm going back to my hometown for a few days so my goal is to cuddle my doggo and cat
roll call:
@SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net
If anybody else wants to be added to the roll call, just let me know
I'd like to be added! Ironically, one of my goals is to be less terminally online, and to spend less time scrolling hexbear and refreshing to see new threads, but hey, I'll take my accountability from where I can get it.
Welcome aboard comrade, we are happy to have you!
In regards to being terminally online, I think it's a systemic issue. Everybody is so starved for basic human needs (meaning, community, affection, etc) that it's impossible to resist the free dopamine box. It's like being a rat in a cage, of course everybody is gonna get addicted to the only thing that gives you a tiny hit of pleasure.
Hell yeah that's a goal of mine too! It's soooo hard though. I deleted Instagram and Reddit (again) and it's at least helped me to pay more attention during movies 😅 step in the right direction I guess. Now I need to be less of a cave troll and touch more fucking grass. How have you done with it so far?
Realized the unexplained sore throat I had was an STI. Got treated this week and immediately got better. The first doc thought it couldn't be bacterial and didn't prescribe antibiotics. Well, it was bacterial, and that could have saved me a month of annoyances. Ugh. Or maybe not, probably would have prescribed the wrong one anyway without confirmation of what it was.
I had to strong-arm my way into being treated before my lab results came back (and they never did come back, the lab lost it anyways!) Im glad I advocated for myself.
Doing sporadic workouts, and already seeing functional strength results, especially in abs and obliques with weighted crunches, extensions, and leg raises.
Avoiding seeking sex at times that ruin my sleep schedule has been a positive change. Just had sex at noon and it was great.
Having trouble getting gigs for my new group. I'm making my own in my backyard. That seems like the socialist thing to do.
Proud of you for advocating for yourself with the medical system, it's so hard! Like you try to give the benefit of the doubt that they are the knowledgeable ones...
Also working out is hard for me to maintain personally but it is so good! I notice that my lower back pain nearly disappears when I'm the slightest bit active lol. Who would've thought?
My goal right now is to make some type of plan for my future so I can escape my shit deli job but I'm just tearing my hair out. I don't know if I should go back to school or learn a trade or just piss away all my savings and go on a world tour and die. I've been researching various degrees and the pros and cons of each, and I feel overwhelmed. Not trying to be an epic productivity guy, I just want more out of life than this repetitive nightmare. This job has sucked the joy out of literally everything for me at this point. All the little self-improvement things feel like I'm just suppressing the hard truth that I'm wasting my life.
Not everyone can be a programmer, obviously, but if you have a spare laptop, consider following The Odin Project. Free, and focused on getting you employed. Far quicker than a degree, with far less time and energy investment.
It's kinda just been steady going for me recently. Coming up on a month of not drinking which is the longest I've gone since I was like 16. I'm well over a month of not smoking weed. My mouth is still healing so my exercise desires are pretty limited. If my heart rate gets too high I get a throbbing pain in my face so I'm not pushing it.
I really want to buy a motorcycle but whenever I get close to deciding which one to get I end up in a weird depressed state where I realize how pointless it is and a waste of what little money I have it would be. It will bring me happiness but I know that objects don't really ever make me happy for long and the thought of having 2/3/4 years of payments is making me seriously hesitant. I'm not in an area where it's easy to ride year round too (even though I have in the past).
In a general sense I'm just feeling very stuck rn.
Coming up on a month of not drinking which is the longest I've gone since I was like 16. I'm well over a month of not smoking weed.
very proud of you!
I really want to buy a motorcycle but whenever I get close to deciding which one to get I end up in a weird depressed state where I realize how pointless it is and a waste of what little money I have it would be.
not gonna tell you whether to make a financial decision like that but I guess whether it's a good idea or not depends on why exactly you like driving motorcycles, over, say, a car or a regular bike (if the commute is feasible with one where you live).
as in, if it's for the thrill of driving it, if you really wanna save money and not get one then perhaps you can replicate that thrill somewhere else and feel a bit better about not getting one? if any other activity wouldn't be the same then maybe go for it? same process for other factors like cost or easier parking or so on
As it is currently I do bike to work and consider it one of my favorite parts of my day. Rain or shine I always love it. It's so much more mentally stimulating than a car. It's a reason why I did enjoy riding my old motorcycle when it was still running. It was like a part of my brain had become unlocked. It just completely changed how I perceived the world vs driving a car which feels very boxed in and restricted. But I had gotten kicked out of where I was staying and ended up crashing on couches for several months (through a very wet winter) and in that time my motorcycle fell into disrepair and no longer runs. My housing situation is stable now with access to my tools so that wouldn't be an issue anymore.
I've looked into getting my old bike up and running again but it would take significantly more skill than I have since it would require completely rewiring the bike (among other things I'm not even aware of being fucked up) and I... Don't have the time or patience to do that at the moment. It's also super old and I just don't want to bother with a carburator anymore.
A brief glance at how much money I'm saving from not drinking or smoking and I might still be coming out ahead if I buy a new bike lol
I'm in the same boat, waiting to recover fully so that I can continue exercising. It's a bummer, especially because I rely on physical activity to keep me from losing my fucking mind.
Congratulations on your sobriety streak, keep us posted! You might be feeling stuck but keep in mind that you're making great progress.
Started running! Plus continuing to read the major Marxist works, next on the list is Value, Price, and Profit.
I'm still practicing, just been to lazy to do write ups.
It's funny that people do these 100 day practice challenges and it's just normal for me to practice 2-3 hours everyday.
currently working on brushes, doing stone killers on a moon gel practice pad, microtime exercises and transcribing some roy haynes
