[nonrandomstring]

Improvement towards what? To what end?

There are a million "self improvement" cults out there all of which are dangerous rabbit holes to fall down. If it's got a website, a newsletter, a charismatic leader, and a few million outspoken supporters that's probably a sign to steer clear.

In my opinion there's some practices that help:

Seek out and talk to people you respect. Better if you can do this face to face, in real life. Having respected mentors should not stop where parents and school teachers leave off. If you're really stuck socially at this (as so many young people are today), try paying someone like a therapist of coach to get you unstuck.

Read old books. Actual paper books from before 2000 at least. Build up a good knowledge of human psychology, philosophy, politics, the arts and classic literature. Philosophy of human values is a good place to start.

[antwerp1]

It’s kind of amazing to think people were writing 2,000 years ago and that their work was preserved and we actually have access to to their ideas.

Especially when you consider that 21st century writing is pretty much text messages and AI..

Do we just not stuff to write about anymore? Have all the good theories been taken?

[muzani]

"Have all the good theories been taken?"

Philosophically, I'd say yes. We don't quite have the philosophical manpower to work on these much. We haven't even seen any new social or economic ideas, despite things like software coming in and wreaking havoc on Adam Smith. Everyone knows what Marxism is, yet nobody has read Marx.

The past was quite different. Before paper, books were memorized, fully. People had to travel to libraries. They met the people who owned the books and studied under the past owner, directly, without any cliffnotes to distort the meaning. Muslim scholars not only memorized the entire Quran, they'd memorize every thing done by the Prophet Muhammad as well and build on top of that.

I always recommend people read Al-Ghazali, because he had access to the entire depth of Islamic knowledge from the prophet's time, the neo Islamic stuff that was built to deal with situations not covered by those laws, and was also totally familiar with Greek philosophers enough.

Technically, we could do stuff like that but at further depth, but personally, I'd rather be debating the virtues of SQL vs NoSQL. I did have a teacher who went in really deep into the philosophy, and I end up with whole pages of notes each time, even from one hour sessions.