Most of the inaction I bear has been due to fear. Fear of reprimand and fear of violence in particular.
I’m reading a lot of lefty stuff (old posts, old articles, hoping I can make my way to books) and it seems like my biggest hurdle to becoming a proper leftist will be removing myself of these fears, if I ever want to do anything productive.
But fuck, fear is just so prevalent in my life. It could be my trauma, my privilege or literally anything else I’m not aware of. Whatever the cause, I don’t like it, it’s made me a worse person, and I wanna get rid of it.
Seeing as most of you are good about this, I want to hear about how you stopped letting fear and (social/physical) self-preservation control you.
it’s snake oil
Anything that didn’t work for me personally must be fake
stretching works. antibiotics work (until resistance evolves), magical thinking doesn’t. our understanding of the brain is quite poor and some portion of people will be helped by relaxing for a few minutes the same way having some water as a placebo will help some people who happened to be dehydrated.
Meditation is a well documented phenomenon which was independently discovered in various cultures across the world. It absolutely certainly works and is not magical thinking or snake oil.
real things are testable that’s how we figured out that “power pose” crap was bullshit. lumping together all those things from around the world with no rigor when the practices are different is ridiculous.
might as well cast a magic spell or take a nap.