[etripe]

Aside from the usual Guardian dalliance with identity politics, this article comes across as either nihilistic, or making the case for contentment with what we've got rather than to strive to improve oneself. The latter is perhaps what we collectively need to hear as an alternative to the productivity porn, but it's a depressingly low bar to me.

All of these can be true at the same time:

* holding yourself to a standard

* striving to better yourself

* caring about your own mental health

* giving yourself time to rest/recover

* being kind to yourself when it comes to past failures

The article goes a bit too far with lowering expectations.

[iovrthoughtthis]

our discourse often seems to lack the nuance, that two opposing ideas can (and should) be held in our heads at the same time.

that we should hold ourselves in unconditional positive regard and that we can strive for more

imo, this article is attempting to push the pendulum back towards the positive regard as, and i would agree, the author feels that were too far into striving

[bobthechef]

> the usual Guardian dalliance with identity politics

I especially liked the "people who live in bodies" bit (or "black bodies"!). Your body is not a house that some "real you" inhabits. You are your body. You are bodily. That's part of what it means to be human is a bodily creature. There is more to you than the bodily (pace materialists whose view of the bodily itself is deficient and mechanistic even as strictly bodily), but it is a part of you.

I don't know where this strange, almost dualistic "othering" of one's body (to borrow their term) comes from, but it does square with the gnostic hatred of the body and the physical world that is in vogue. Perhaps a combination of envy and an overreaction to the cult of the body.