I was watching this IG reel about reducing the gap between decision and action and immediately felt this instinct to disqualify the advice, thinking about cases where it wouldn't apply. People have any number of reasons they don't act after all... fear, trauma, habits... everyone has their own situation. But was I making excuses? Why?
That's the risk you run consuming this sort of content, I think (particularly as a perfectionist). You miss the whole point: people give you medicine and you refuse because it means admitting that you are sick. But it isn't your fault that you are sick. I don't think the language people use to talk about the "sick" helps either. We blame them for causing their own problems because it helps us believe in a fair world.
We don't need to self-flagellate. The whole point of self-help isn't to feel anguish for not feeling ready or able to follow this advice nor to feel grief about not having done any of it sooner.
It's funny because in this case the very sickness often causes us to refuse the medicine. The content could even be about perfectionism and how it has us keeping up illusions and keeps us from living life etc. but this is a painful pill to swallow for a perfectionist given that this is how they might have lived most of their lives.
If I were to suggest anything, content creators should use more compassionate language in serving content. We should think of it in the same way that we think of medicine. Granted it's more holistic (heuristic?) medicine, but we can easily imagine that when the science catches up the whole "doing life" thing won't seem so much like magic and morality and wisdom, but a matter of fact. Morality creeps in when we don't understand something fully.
Actually this is a lot like the issue of crime. We see criminality as this moral thing and demonize criminals, but as we understand it more scientifically, that it's more like an epidemic, we are somewhat unintentionally realizing that a kind of rational empathy makes far more sense. Even on the individual level we are moved to think of criminals as simply those who are sick and need our care.
I think there will always be that instinct to distance ourselves from the "sick", as we have with lepers and the disabled. Whether it reminds us of our own frailty or it's about guilt, it's uncomfortable.
But I think as we understand more, we will raise up our level of consciousness. So there is reason to hope. Life, as we know it now, will not seem as complicated. Maybe we will look back on our songs and our IG reels as we see leeches and acupuncture and herbs -- some work, some don't, but we did our best with what we knew.
