Ego

Mental health and self-development amounts to ineffectual, vulgar, bourgeois fluff. Political action is what makes a real improvement to the lives of the many?Well… not exactly.Anxiety is a contagious oppression. Anxiety is inevitable without individual action. You are no help to your community if you spread anxiety. For the luckiest, anxiety means irritation. For the unluckiest, suicide.But no one is a helpless victim. Not even the one who thinks they're unique, or the worst off. So who can you turn to? A shrink? Maybe you can't afford that. God? Here's a better idea… Private Practice Podcast!Free will may be an illusion but we are aware that our choices have consequences. So we're more than just puppets to external powers, or unchangeable zombies. If you don't have a sense of a purposeful self, however, it's inevitable that you will become a contagious anxious drone. Remember the studies of psychic entropy from the Flow season. But neuroscience has no proof of a physical self, so what even is self development? In this episode we talk about the reality of things that don't literally exist, like the ego, and how the consequence of acknowledging their reality changes your life from helpless to purposeful, your thoughts from anxious to ordered.We look at people who suffer brain damage. At what point are they no longer themselves? How many members of your family do I have to kill before the family no longer exists? If I blow your brains out and they're dripping down the wall, do you live on as gunge?Anxiety is inevitable if you do nothing. We've talked about how mental health is an ongoing action, a form of exercise. But the route out of excessive anxiety is often one of chance, and in this episode James talks a little (surprisingly concise for once) about the sequence of events that have determined his experience since the start of this podcast. But you can change that chance for someone else through self development, and talking about it to anxious friends who haven't stumbled across a way out of their internal oppression.So I guess listen to this episode or people will die. Something like that anyway. Maybe we should imitate the UK government's obsession with repeating three bullet points; BE SELFISH. REDUCE ANXIETY. SAVE LIVES. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.