2026-03-20 07:20:00
I've reached a turning point in my journey to save my soul. I recently stepped back from a meaningful commitment and now see it as a start to something more thematic. This post is the first of two to describe that change.
Here, I want to address Nikhil's call to stop loving oneself—found by way of angrybunnyman's response to it. Although I'm usually fond of the former's writing, I took several issues with the post.
For the rest of this post, I'll refer to Nikhil in second-person perspective; this also allows me to speak to those I intend to reach.
The pop psychology of today has conditioned us to believe that we should always love ourselves. But what if we are mediocre? If we keep celebrating ourselves without confronting that mediocrity — loving ourselves unconditionally regardless — we will never improve.
The initial premise is fair, but the counterpoint that self-love perpetuates mediocrity and thus prevents self-improvement is flawed. Is love for ourselves conditional—and conditioned upon achieving a level of 'good enough'? That seems to be the case for you, who posits some level of self-loathing as necessary.
You acknowledge that the term "self-loathing" is triggering, but you don't mean one should hate oneself. Sorry, but what is self-loathing if not that? If the key argument is to develop self-awareness of one's mediocrity in order to address it, why does one need to stop loving oneself and replace it with disgust? It's a toxic attitude to promote.
All meaningful transformation originates from a place of disgust. You despise the status quo to such an extent that you are driven to disrupt it. This notion of loving yourself regardless of who you are or what you bring to the table is crippling — and, frankly, annoying.
That's a bold claim to say all meaningful change stems from disgust. Discontentment and dissatisfaction with the status quo, sure, but there's an embedded sense of rugged individualism at the heart of this paragraph that overlooks how change is produced by systems. And to tie efforts of transformation to one's self-worth and what one can contribute? That's the real annoyance, because it's the idea behind hustle and grind culture.
You are not supposed to love yourself endlessly. You are not supposed to love anybody endlessly. Don't hate people for who they are, forgive them wherever possible — but loving them unconditionally is its own form of stupidity.
Where's the rulebook that stipulates these suppositions? This sounds like an arrogant imposition of one's worldview, and at this point I'm surprised by how much this messaging is in contrast to your [Nikhil's] usual temperament. What are you arguing for, anyways? Why should how another person chooses to live their life bring so much grief to you?
How can you improve if you are deeply in love with yourself? How will you enrich someone's life unless you master the art of accepting flaws — beginning with your own? You cannot genuinely accept someone else's flaws until you have identified and reckoned with yours first.
I suspect you may be surrounded by narcissists if what's quoted is construed as an argument. For one thing, loving oneself does not prevent self-improvement; it encourages it because it's a recognition that one deserves what's good. If you've ever gone through a depressive episode, then you know that lack of self-love (or self-respect) creates a cycle—the very one you believe that self-loathing can overcome. As for accepting flaws in oneself and others, and enriching another person's life, let's not tangle them up here. Humility is a virtue, yes, but there are some prideful people who, by virtue of wanting to be impressive, do impressive things. They're not mutually exclusive; why conflate the two?
We can only tolerate other people's idiosyncrasies when we can see beyond our own. That is precisely why this endless self-love doesn't work. It turns your gaze inward, away from the ways you might be an inconvenience to someone else. Accepting that you could be a problem to someone requires a clear-eyed awareness of your own shortcomings.
Counterpoint: I respect my time and energy enough to not let what others say or do bother me. (Present case excluded because I'm choosing to fight on this hill to prevent the spread of toxic ideas.) Introspection is what helps one recognize how they might be an inconvenience to another; it's because I am a level of self-absorbed and have a degree of fondness towards myself that I am mindful of how I relate to others. I think you mistake self-love for narcissism, in which case I suggest evaluating who you're around before making sweeping declarations about the human condition.
So cultivate disgust for the parts of yourself that fall short. I cannot stomach someone who casually announces, "Oh, I'm just not good with maths" or "Sorry, I'm bad at reading signs." What exactly am I supposed to do with that? Why should I be expected to absorb it?
Well, you're not "supposed" to do anything. But as a practice of decency, consider taking such statements at face value. Because we live in a society that's preoccupied with appearances, so when others display the humility of admitting their shortcomings, it might be an opportunity to normalize acceptance. Unless you're telling me that all shortcomings are equal and that we ought to devote our time and energy to mitigating each and every one? I'd rather hang out with someone who put in the effort to be a good listener or a good friend or a good collaborator than someone who was constantly berating and preoccupying themselves for sucking at trivial things like maths or reading signs. The real irony of your arguments is that you expect others to pursue a state of perfectionism, without regarding what it would mean to judge and be judged constantly.
It is only once you fix something that you realise it was fixable. Then you can decide whether to distance yourself from people who won't, or try to help them become better.
Counterpoint: forethought about what's worth fixing/addressing in the first place is wisdom. For instance, fixing/addressing the shortcomings in another person's life. Not sure where the savior complex (i.e., the idea that your role is to help others become better) comes from, but I'm more concerned about the near-dehumanizing approach to that salvation (i.e., distance yourself from those who won't help themselves).
Too much of anything is corrosive. Being excessively self-critical is equally damaging, because then you are viewing yourself purely through an external lens — as a subject to be judged rather than a person to be developed. The goal is to cultivate enough awareness that self-improvement becomes a continuous, natural instinct.
You reveal your biases here. You spend much of your post denigrating self-love and promoting self-loathing and self-disgust as pathways to change, but now you caution against being overly self-critical. You speak of judgment, but do not see how judgmental you've been throughout your whole post. So, this last bit reads as a preemptive defensive statement but it lacks conviction.
So, regardless of what Instagram psychology preaches, be harder on yourself when the occasion demands it. God knows the world is starved of good people.
I agree that the world is deprived of good people. Lord knows it has enough people who judge others without an appreciation that everyone fights their own battles, often invisible and silent.
My advice (if you'll receive it): Go all in on self-improvement, but keep it contained to your own affairs. It takes a lifetime to know oneself; why presume you can generalize how others ought to live without knowledge of what constitutes their lives?
Part 2 also addresses self-love, but is less argumentative and more introspective.
2026-03-19 23:38:00
Sometimes, I think of the countless days I was certain I wouldn't survive. Someone once shared, from their notes app, a method for the unsurvivable periods: write them down. The idea is that, when the next hard period arrives (and it does arrive) you'll have evidence, a list of things you were sure were going to kill you but didn't. Mine looks something like this:
A forced gap year from attending university due to financial struggles
A fallout with a dear friend
Second year of engineering school
That one severe depressive episode from early 2024
Living in a foreign country with an expired visa
I'm currently tackling unemployment as a recent graduate, and it's been feeling like the end of the world. Everyday, I panic I'm never surviving this! I've never experienced something so bad! - But I did. I have a list with proof that, every single time, I made it to the other side of something I was convinced was going to be the end of me. So, think of all the times you thought you wouldn't survive, and think of all the times you will.
2026-03-19 23:37:00
From Nikhil Stop loving yourself:
The pop psychology of today has conditioned us to believe that we should always love ourselves. But what if we are mediocre? If we keep celebrating ourselves without confronting that mediocrity — loving ourselves unconditionally regardless — we will never improve.
So you need a measure of self-loathing.
Echoes of my past self. Pop psychology, they argue — correctly — has assembled a self-esteem industrial complex that mistakes stillness for peace. Affirm yourself. Celebrate yourself. Accept yourself exactly as you are, in this chair, with this coffee, in this mediocrity you've been marinating in since the third time you told yourself you'd start on Monday.
They're not wrong about the rot. They're wrong about the antidote.
The voice that tells you you're mediocre doesn't arrive in thunder. It doesn't announce itself. It speaks in should — that small, damp, load-bearing word that props up every unfinished project and unstarted morning.
You should be further along
You should weigh less
You should earn more
You should want the correct things
You should with greater efficiency
Let us name it: "should" is an endless hallway in a house filled with termites.
Self-loathing speaks exclusively in should. It is the should-generation engine, running constantly in the background, consuming whatever fuel is nearest — your ambitions, your afternoons, your capacity to sit still without flinching. Self-loathing would have kept me on the couch in the precise posture of a man explaining, at length, why starting tomorrow made more structural sense. What moved me was something quieter and stranger. Closer to curiosity. What, exactly, can this thing do?
That's the unnamed third option.
Loving something does not require unconditional surrender to its current form. This is the thing the pop psychologists and the self-flagellants are both missing, from opposite directions. I love this body and I have spent twenty years making it do increasingly unreasonable things. I love this mind and I quarrel with it constantly, the way you quarrel with someone whose judgment you respect and whose blind spots you can map from memory. I love the people closest to me and I want tremendous, specific, almost embarrassing things for them — not because they are lacking but because I can see the shape of what they're becoming and I want to be present for more of it.
That wanting — toward something, not away from something — is the gear that slips in both halves of this argument. Self-loathing is motion powered by lack.
It burns dirty, and it burns the operator, and eventually you look up and realize the destination was just a different room in the same building where you started hating yourself.
2026-03-19 23:31:00
Preface: This text was written more as a note than an article. It's closer to a rant than a thought out and planned text, and should be read as such.
I've never lived in the US, yet I somehow feel as if my life has been shaped by them. Both through export of technology, and globalisation and export of culture. I also come from a NATO country1 which to this day continues to repeat the mantra "the US are our main guarantee for our security", regardless of if we're under threat or not and regardless of to what degree the US respects international law2.
My peers used to with make jokes about Alabamas incest (they still do), or say that things are from Ohio when they are bad3. Discuss local state-level laws in the US, talk about US state-level politicians, or "dig deep" into the people campaigning to become US mayoral or presidential candidates. Talk as if they understand the difference between US citizens preference between Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders. In a vacuum, none of this is bad. What irritates me is that it's always the US, and pretty much never outside 'the West'4.
Today I've been diging for more good sites to read. I want to read more of the American point of view - not just the US, the entire continent. I want to hear more from African scholars and journalists - in just 3 hours, Tshepo Madlingozi almost flipped my understanding of human rights on it's head and vastly expanded my world view on racism and decoloniality. Nkhata Murungi did the same. I want to read perspectives from people in Asia, in Eastern Europe, wherever they may be.
I want to discover more independent blogs from other places. Quickly running through the trending page (archived), it took me opening 8 pages to find someone who states that they live outside of the West (2 US, 3 EU-West, 2 w/o statement, 1 East Asia). A total of 3 blogs stated that they live outside the West5 Naturally, this is a very surface level excercise and shouldn't be read too much into. It oversimplifies someones experience down to where they live, and doesn't account for immigration and multiculturalism6. It's also anecdoctic and based on a single sample. Regardless, I think there is some value to pointing this pattern out.
I'm tired of only reading about Western of different wars and injustices far away from these areas - how are you supposed to actually know about a conflict that you physically cannot experience? How are you supposed to be 'intelligent' and 'reflected' on 'Middle-Eastern culture' (as if that's just one thing) if you've never visited the place, never spoken any of the languages, let alone visited an emmigrants house in your own country? 7
I enjoy reading from the EFF. I enjoy the Norwegian newspaper Morgenbladet. I used to love 404media and still enjoy poking my head in there every now and then8. I like noyb, I like the videos of Tantacrul and Hazel Thayes, I dig ava's blog, and an unfathomable amount of other authors, creators, and publications I'd love to name. But it's all western, every, single, time. It's not a criticism of any of these creators. It's an observation of a pattern that I hope will change.
There are so many great voices and creators out there who we rarely get to see. Creators not in need of the representation we always talk about, but of the presentation they deserve - they don't need us to repeat what they're saying, they should get to say it themselves; I'm not looking for yet another US-owned newspaper reporting on Iran.
Going forward, I hope to discover more creators from all over the world. This is my rant about currently not doing so.910
PS: Do let me know if you have any recommendations for what to read and where to find things.
Footnotes
I'm from Norway, but on exchange in Brazil↩
Zero.↩
Thankful that this stopped a few years ago↩
Which includes Australia for some reason, even though it's typically drawn furthest to the east? Anyways, US, Western Europe & Scandinavia, sometimes Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. For the record, the US is always dominant here, with specific cases of Norwegian Instagram-stories going "if you don't think [highly regressive law change wrt womens rights] in [state in US] is the most important thing in the world right now, you should unfollow this profile" (I don't remember the specifics). It's good to see international solidarity across borders, and I'm happy see attention being brought to this. I just wish even as little as 10% of the same attention was brought elsewhere as well.↩
The full tally from the 20 posts on the front page is 7 living in US, 4 in Western Europe, 5 unstated, and 3 outside of US&W-E for a total of 19 blogs. 2 of the posts were by Robert Birming in Sweden.↩
Even the descriptor "white" is an oversimplification. It does not account from where in the world, for socio-economic status, for level of education, nor for other aspects of your background (ie. the rapper Logic). White people are born in Brazil, South-Africa, Canada, Germany, Ukraine, New-Zealand and more.↩
A quick note on why background is important: Even just the concept of human rights are somewhat western, and it's a fallacy to think that this was something agreed upon by all countries in an equal manner - it's based on a western individualistic thought-pattern (I think therefore I am - we are defined as individuals. this also implies you don't think, therefore you are not, very much used to justify white mans burden etc). in opposition to ie. ubuntu (I am because you are. you are, therefore I am. This points to the understanding of the human as a whole and part of a society. "You" is also not limited to humans; it can also mean a cat, a grasshopper, a tree, a house, or the environment as a whole. We are defined by co-existence with eachother). Having a right to a good environment assumes a separation between the right-holder and the environment.↩
It gets tiring to read all the time...↩
A final note: This rant has only been made possible by being so lucky that I got to experience it through aforementioned doctors Tshepo Madlingozi and Nkhata Murungi. I'm thankful for this. As I improve my language skills here in Brazil more, I will also start reading more Brazilian newspapers.↩
A second final note: Make friends from other countries, from other continents, and from completely different parts of the world. Talk politics with them. If you live in NATO, get a perspective from outside and vice-versa. Seek to understand. Be critical of not only other governments and thought-patterns, but also your own.↩
2026-03-19 21:59:10
I just want to take a quick moment to celebrate my completion of moving my blog over from Stomod to Bear.
While I also really enjoyed Stomod, it looks like the project is no longer quite up to date. After a little bit of research, I found Bear and decided to go all in.
I've officially moved all my previous posts, created the About, Now and Projects pages and added my custom domain (never seen such a fast DNS record update btw, it usually takes way longer to be reflected).
Ready to blog again whenever I feel like it ❤️
I might write more short-form content especially since I have recently deleted my Bluesky account, yet still find myself wanting to share quick thoughts. We'll see.
Alright, gotta go for now - have a great week!
2026-03-19 20:40:00
From 15th February to 17th March, we hosted the first Grizzly Gazette Creation Festival! People were free to create anything for the platform and its users, like code snippets, themes, buttons, banners, other art, fiction, poetry and more.
We got 13 people's submissions (that we know of!), and some even submitted multiple things; so let's look at them!
We had a lot of cool art entries!
Sylvia made amazing Pixel Bears for the users of the platform, and it even led to others creating some for each other via her template!
Other than that, we got a variety of buttons and other things to put on your blog. We got very cool ones by Vick that are very high quality and cover a wide variety of topics, like using no JavaScript, using no cookies, having used no AI/not supporting bots, Mastodon, LibreWolf and support for EU purchases, and another post that also features pixel art icons.
At last, we also got Ava with some Bearblog buttons and a banner/forum signature!
Futureperfect graced us with a nice song called Bear-ly Awake that's calm and optimistic.
Thoughtspiral wrote us a poem about oversharing!
We got quite a few code-based submissions. Robert Birming submitted a lot, like his way to display your blog age, and the Grizzly Theme! Angrybunnyman made a stamp/seal code snippet that you can set at the end of each of your posts to sign them.
We got also got a theme from Usamainsights and Loreleice provided code on how to make hoverable table rows! Pseudosingleton adjusted some of Robert Birming's Bearhug theme features to use Markdown instead of HTML in case that's more your drift.
Suliman kindly shared his theme code as well, and Kami made a bookmarklet that lets you edit your blog posts as you visit them.
Ready for a word search? Dabi made one about blogging. Can you spot all the words? If you're up for more games, why don't you try the Solo Journaling Adventures, which is, as the name says, a solo journaling RPG?
Thank you all for participating, and we hope to do this again some time!