A new, better, happier you
You don't need a lifestyle guru
Clean Your Room
Read enough self help lifestyle gurus on Twitter or Substack and you’ll start to see an overlapping pattern. Yes they want you to like and subscribe. Yes they will front end some basic tenets of a self help or esoteric program mixed with some light personal anecdotes. They conveniently hide the real life-changing material behind a paywall. Maybe a sob story? Did the guru overcome an addiction? Did they rise from rags to riches? Do they hustle? What is their ‘grindset’? Was there a death in the family? Are they paternalistic? Are they materialistic? Are they spiritual? Are they your peers? Andrew Tate was a lifestyle guru. He was arrested last week. I couldn’t tell you anything about what the man preached and yet we all know his name and his face physiognomy that screams “mall kiosk salesman” -@our_daily_pain.
While it is true that everyone is trying to sell you something, certainly there must be some perennial philosophy though? Somewhere between guys teaching genital sunning, beaf tallow diet advocates, and pixie haired implicitly right-wing gothic-lolita nu-witches on Patreon; there has to be overlapping truth? What are any of these people selling?
In early 2018, like many other casual philosophy interested types I discovered Jordan Peterson. In retrospect his whole story is a thing of absurd myth. No need to recount it all. The humble Canadian clinical psychologist with one very accessible book covering Jungian concepts, Maps of Meaning. He finds himself launched into untold levels of fame and infamy not via his academics but his politics. His audience expands by the millions. He writes a pop psychology book 12 Rules for Life. He becomes a rug salesman. Gets addicted to benzodiazepines, his daughter dates Andrew Tate. But the one thing we all remember is the single mantra, ‘clean your room’, or on 4chan it was, ‘wash your penis’.
It’s hard to articulate now just how revolutionary ‘clean your room’ really was in 2018 for a generation of extremely socially maladapted young men. Why did this work for them? Why was the simple mantra so effective?
The explanation is a lot simpler, and somehow more complex than it appears.
In personal experience, cleaning a whole house changes everything about my motivations. Clear out the clutter, toss out garbage, throw out cursed little memories and a space is not just cleansed it is purified. You’ve performed a lesser banishing ritual with a Dyson Vacuum. Everything smells nice, new, and suddenly that practice session you put off is not just accessible to your intentions, it’s necessary.
What the mantra is actually doing is breaking habit circuits, cause and effect chains of behavior that are anchored into an individual over months, years, even a lifetime.
Consider your morning routine. So much of it is automated at this point you don’t even notice. We fancy ourselves conscious beings, but much of what we do is embedded in learned flow-states. Believe me, you are more mechanistic than you think. Your true agency doesn’t come from being able to freely do whatever you want but rather comes from your ability to change and program your cause and effect flow-states into new behavioral circuits. Map out your morning, what it might be. Alarm clock then bathroom leads into breakfast, leads into watering the plants, leads into shower, leads into commute, leads into work. Some of these subroutines are necessary for living, but map out all the routine processes you perform and try to identify which ones you are satisfied with, which ones are inefficient. Try mapping out which ones are outright toxic and draining to other better pathways.
Take the example of learning an instrument. At first practice is a process of connecting tactile muscle memory to symbolic language. The practicing music student needs to perform each piece learned with intent and conscious activity. After enough time, less and less conscious activity is necessary. With musical pieces or even improvisation matching scale and key models, a musician can perform in less than conscious flow-states. The same applies to sports, dance, arts, industrial work, even your fake email job. It follows too that the same process applies on a meta level to your daily life. It extends to what you do every morning, what you do at work (or not work if you’re a NEET or a NEPO-Baby), following into all your habits. What you eat, what you read, your hobbies, how you use all your time - they’re on a track. One that was programmed a long time ago. That program is flexible but it takes a hell of a lot of change to completely alter it. The two key elements are changing your attention via a focused intention.
This is what Peterson’s mantra does. By introducing a novel practice into your behavioral cause and effect chain, it breaks it. Cleaning your room isn’t inherently positive or negative, even if it makes things more pleasant. What it really does is changes a subroutine in your life opening up new cause and effect chain branches. That’s why our socially maladapted young man practices that instrument after cleaning his room instead of getting high and looking at guro-hentai again.
All the lifestyle gurus, at least the ones that are not complete charlatans preach some form of routine breaking practice via intent attention. Peterson was able to package this basic notion with the grandfatherly vibes of the paternal figure so many guys felt they never had.
Prometheus making lists on post-it notes
Introducing a novel practice into a habitual cause and effect chain is nothing new. It is in fact the foundation of spiritual, religious, and secular ‘self improvement’ routines.
From personal experience these chain braking events take two general forms.
One really traumatic life changing event
Persistent daily routine events and disciplines.
For the first, ONE big traumatic event. This is the story you hear from drug addicts, people with psychedelic or singular religious experiences, accidents, deaths. The list goes on. Saul of Tarsus is on the road to Damascus. He’s blasted down by blinding light off his horse. Christ asks Saul why he so persecutes him. Your buddy has a drinking problem, he mows down a family of armadillos crossing the street, he can never forgive himself. Saul converts to Saint Paul, and your buddy curbs his drinking problem, maybe volunteers at an animal shelter. These major life events are far less common than the latter routine break event. These single events tend to be random, fated, you could call them synchronous (or deserved). They’re not quite in your control aside from the fact you probably led yourself there making the same mistakes in the same subroutines repeatedly. These are a kind of tough love, tough smack moment you get from life. “Cut that shit out”. These are ultimately not that interesting. Sure they can be profound. But they’re better relegated to sad-sack anonymous meetings in public school gymnasiums. There’s not a lot of intention or attention going on here, insofar as they might be part of the traumatic event.
The second category is far more interesting. Peterson’s “Clean your room” falls here. These routines take many forms. Persistent daily routine breaking events are what every guru tries to get you to do. They’re the way you rein in control of yourself and chart an intended life path. Peterson would’ve called this ‘self authoring’. The Human Potential Movement or the Esalen Institute would’ve called this “self actualization”. Plenty of spookier organizations would call this alchemy or magick. These practices are deeply imbued with intention and attention. You need to be aware to perform them, and you need to have an intended goal, an agenda for the attention you focus.
Persistent events don’t have to be persistent daily rituals. They can be single or spaced out change events that are planned around some short term routine. An example is the Catholic rosary. Penitent parishioner attends confession with a priest, confesses her sins. The priest instructs her to say x or y amount of Hail Marys and Our Fathers on several decades of the rosary. This is an explicit ritualistic religious event. The intention of the practice is reinforced in the penitent a routine that may curb whatever behaviors led to the sins they confessed. It’s not unlike slapping a rubber-band against your wrist to remember not to smoke or eat garbage. On a side-note, Byung-Chul Han in Psychopolitics would group your cellphone in with the Catholic rosary. Both serve similar purposes as routine creating devotional objects. Your phone can stir some useful cause and effect routine habits if you use it well, some toxic ones if you use it poorly.
Another weird one we will revisit in future articles is the Chaos Magick sigil. Without getting too deep into it. These rituals involve the creation of a symbol imbued with an intended result. The practitioner then charges this with some practice, some form of attention, either theater, a daily or single routine, or even more exotic practices like a sex act or a sacrifice. The goal is to create an event so strong it anchors the intent imbued in the symbol into the subconscious. Then the practitioner destroys the sigil. The practitioner will then implicitly or by some even more exotic means, follow the steps to actualize the intent in the sigil. We can discuss later whether or not this process has any metaphysical affect on reality. You’ll find that if you perform these acts enough, the results will surprise you, but we will discuss that at another time. For now just know it’s like the rosary - powerful symbolic act, keeps the intention alive in the subconscious - breaks a behavioral cause and effect chain.
If you’re anything like me, your office area is a haze of post-its and reminders. Lists and intentions are a good way to make sense of the possible subroutines your day can turn into. You want to remain conscious of what you’re doing at all times. At least as your start. Once you get, example - a cold shower + meditation + workout + Hermes evocation routine going every morning successfully for MORE than a few weeks, maybe it will get embedded as a cause an effect chain. Be careful though, a good cause and effect chain can be as effective a habit chain as an alternate, LESS intentional routine: bad example - get up + eat nothing + do Adderall + trade crypto during work hours. One of these routines is something you want. The other will probably kill you or make you turn trans.
Another useful practice for tracing the effects of new routine circuits is journaling. I’m a huge advocate of chronicling your life. Keep a planner, write an autobiography, track your life. Be careful though. Not everybody needs to know everything that goes on your head. Don’t worry, I’ll have a future lesson on practical cryptography. I promise.
The point here is that whether your model is religious, devotional, or Tony Robbins on Tom Cruise in Magnolia, the basic system is very similar. There is variation in how deeply you can believe your system affects you and the world around you. There’s a fine line between, ‘this is changing me’, and ‘this is changing the outside world’. We will cover this in a future piece. But it helps to plan out what methods you are going to use before hand. Every model is different. Some are more effective than others, but they all have some core of the same idea. You can call it intention work, or programming the human bio-computer but whatever you call it the foundational method is the same. Clean your room, is to say your rosary, is to charge your sigils, is to crack your rubber-band, is to pray to Mecca, is to meditate in the morning, is to take a cold shower, is to morning pushups, is to eat raw eggs in the morning, is to wash your penis. Online self help gurus are recycling the same rather ancient thing. You don’t need their specific method, you can use any model you want.
Try this exercise:
Identify your weekday morning routines
Make a flowchart, track down all the different subroutine paths you navigate through the day
Identify which ones are valuable and you want to keep
Identify which ones are wasteful and you can cut out.
Optimize for better paths.
Come up with some practice. It can be anything. You can do an interpretive dance, a chant, take a shot of gin, whatever, we’re experimenting here. Just come up with something that will anchor in the new subroutine flowchart every day.
Journal the results.