[PragmaticPulp]

Trying to cargo cult your way into being just like someone else is destined to fail.

However, there's nothing wrong with genuinely following in the footsteps of someone who has achieved what you want to achieve.

A good example is fitness: If you see a fit person, you can't simply capture the benefits of being fit by drinking the same brand of protein shakes they drink. You have to also do the work, going to the gym regularly and making fitness a priority in your life. Seeing that person as an inspiration can be a healthy way to pave the way to better habits, but it's still up to you to do the work and earn it.

[0_____0]

In sports especially, I've found that the people I admire within that discipline will readily dispense gear advice, and not knowing any better myself, I take their advice full and whole. I got into mountain biking this way. A couple years in, I now have formed opinions about components, know what kind of riding style I have etc. but it's helpful at first to substitute someone else's preferences for your own so that you don't get caught up on details when you're starting out.

[PragmaticPulp]

Advice is great, but you can’t become a great mountain biker just by buying the right gear. Great riders on $500 Craigslist specials will run circles around amateurs on a $10,000 top of the line bike.

The point is that you can follow in someone’s footsteps, but you have to do the work. You can’t simply pretend to imitate people or their mannerisms or their gear and expect the same results.

[tylerhou]

But the point you are missing is that if you focus on doing everything "correctly" at first, you're not gonna get anywhere (and may do the wrong thing).

Imitating other people's gear isn't "correct," but shipping matters more. You will do the work eventually, and it's better to get a little experience so you know the right work to do.

[PragmaticPulp]

My original point was that cargo culting is a trap, but following in the footsteps of someone else is not. I don't think that disagrees with what you're saying.

[ineedasername]

Most professionals in sports are paid by gear manufacturers to have a specific opinion.

There's a much better path here: Don't develop preferences until you have enough experience to make informed decisions.

[0_____0]

I think we're saying the same thing. I meant taking advice on where to enter gear-wise from not professionals, but personal friends who ride at a level that's maybe 95-98% in the sport (but still far from pro)

[ImprovedSilence]

Haha. Ive never met a cyclist in any discipline who gave advice for improvement based on buying more gear unless I was in a bike shop and they were selling something. The “real” advise is always along the lines of “it never gets easier, you just go faster”, etc.. (Although the tongue in cheek joke about triathlons are its the one sport you can get better at by spending tons of money on gear..)

[0_____0]

I can be more specific. I was looking for an entry point into MTB. My experience with bikes was things that cost 100-200$ on craigslist, and initially I set a budget that would have netted me a bike-shaped object, or at least something that I would have traded up from by now. I trusted them enough to substitute their knowledge for my own, and the result is that I'm 2 years into a sport and am just now coming across aspects of my equipment that I want to change.

[runawaybottle]

It’s a start though. The article failed to articulate inspiration.

Most Instagram people start by following the template of showing off foods they like, then nice pictures of landscapes. What inspires them is the want to share their appreciation of the world.

Fetishization is when it mutates into the template manifesting into vanity. That your appreciation of the world just turned into mostly selfies of you. Or clinically, that these things are ‘extensions’ of you, which is the laughable clinical explanation of narcissism. It’s standard self absorption. The shrinks that came up with the clinical explanations should honestly be put in jail (DSM) for creating the language of demonization of an evolving personality.

Iterative process for sure.

The analogue in tech is ‘behold me demonstrating this technical how-to in a blog’. Vanity is a real problem in the modern world.

So it brings me to that weird old saying, paraphrasing, ‘the unexamined mind ...’, as in, most of us have tremendous amount of self reflection left to make sense of all that we are absorbing.

Did we really digest it into a good source of nutrients, with a solid chunk of shit pushed out at the end. It’s almost like being a traffic controller in your own digestive system. The curse of consciousness.

The longing to just be a dog, but burdened with the responsibility of humanity (where nothing is every thrown away, and nothing is ever lost on you, and that you accumulated it all into the faintest white tone as not to be noticed, but still incorporated on the white background of the picture).

[ineedasername]

>Most Instagram people start by following the template of showing off foods they like, then nice pictures of landscapes. What inspires them is the want to share their appreciation of the world

Maybe I'm too cynical, but my take on it is that most people are already at the vanity/self-absorption phase, the appreciation is lacking, and what's desired most is to be perceived as someone who really appreciates food/beauty/life in general. Or alternatively that they are in some way vaguely unhappy, had expectations of life fed to them by society but they don't quite fit and aren't self-aware or introspective enough to realize it and choose for themselves. And their response is to project back into society the appearance that things fit, both to convince others and to convince themselves. It's especially sad considering that if you found a better fit, modern society is mostly large enough to have a place for it.

[runawaybottle]

Yeah, I hate to say the shrinks have a point, but I’ll reference America Psycho (or rather, the artists have a point):

https://youtu.be/MxOScWMZdwI

[tbalsam]

Narcissism is caused, among other things, and to my best understanding, by the equivalent of an emotional autoimmune disorder to self love.

The DSM has many flaws, notably being a categorical tautological discretization of some stateful, high-dimensional networked process.

But one thing they do get right is the constancy of causes in the different families of personality disorders. NPD, for example, is not an 'evolving personality', it's only classified as NPD if it's rigid, generally unchanging, and pervasive by its very nature.

Misunderstanding some group of people then claiming action like 'throwing the shrinks in jail' based on that misunderstanding is quite frustrating to me. In addition, the DSM was never meant to be an official manual, just a lingua franca, at least in the early days. You can blame the prevalence of needing discrete billing codes and the stubbornness of the APA to change in more difficult parts of it for its prevalence today.

Please understand the difference between temporary self-absorption and clinically significant chronic self-displacement into secondary, superficial images of self. The first one is growth and struggle, the second is a supremely painful disorder (arguably all of the lack-of-self-love/Cluster B/reactive disorders are, I'd contend).

Right with you on destigmatizing. But that being said, people with narcissistic traits are generally not safe at all, in the least, to be around with any kind of emotional proximity, to be honest as I can with my personal experiences in and around the world. Not that you, or I, or anyone else should stigmatize or hurt anyone on the NPD spectrum 'just because', but I feel very strong that it's basically impossible for anyone on that spectrum to not involve you past a certain point due to the deep desire and need for others for self to feel safe -- that's where I'd argue with the crossover of BPD is with narcissism, although hyperempathetic as opposed to low to literally no empathy at all.

Just my 2 cents, hope this helps clear things up a bit.

[runawaybottle]

I don’t condone any of the personality traits of the narcissist (in fact I am admitting they exist). What I admonish is the labeling and judgement of it as an innate trait (as in, this is you, born a demon), and the cartoonish clinical description (almost as laughable as how Borat described Jews as having ‘claws’). I encourage anyone to read the wiki articles on it.

Your post is a good example of how deep the language of demonization is. The language is used freely by anyone that has a problem with someone in their life and immediately resort to the language and label that person ‘the worst person ever, dangerous to be around’. Your own post might as well have described a boogey man.

If I had to be clever, and cleverly make a point at how stupid the label is, I’d point to the fact its very name is based on a Greek mythological character that is self obsessed. The ‘narcissistic mirror’, or literally the pond Narcissus stared into.

It is one of the most childish clinical explanations I’ve ever read.

[reader_mode]

>If you see a fit person, you can't simply capture the benefits of being fit by drinking the same brand of protein shakes they drink

Your perception of what makes them fit is incomplete and doesn't translate unless you're at a similar fitness level and are built similarly. There are better ways to get fit than to copy someone you think looks good.