We all need a Personal Philosophy

on the death of the online morning routine, hatred for self help books and finding small rituals aka going internet philosopher mode

SELF-HELP BOOKS SUCK

I’m famously not a fan of self-help books. Not a hater, because to be a hater you need to actually digest whatever you’re hating on, just not a fan. 

I don’t think I have ever read or successfully finished reading a self-help book. That might be because I am forever a fiction girl. That might be because self-help books have titles like A subtle art of not giving a f*ck (If books could kill did a phenomenal podcast episode on this one, made me chuckle a few times). Or it might be because anytime I see someone posting a page with an underlined paragraph (yellow neon, which I find repulsive in itself, there are other colors for markers!) from a self-help book it feels like the books are always telling the same thing. But I think the true reason why I can never bother to purchase a self-help book is because I would rather find out for myself. 

That is obviously some skewed logic. Some might say (and they would be right) that the other person finding out & telling us is the essence of self-help books. Someone was really low in their life and found a quick and easy fix (again, I am sure that most of self-help books are not that simplistic) and is nice enough now to tell us how they did it. Great! But again, the thing is, I would rather find out for myself. 

I was thinking so much about self-help books because I am now at this very specific phase in my life where I am done with uni and venturing into a gap year. There is obviously nothing extraordinary about taking a gap year, every second brought-up-in-the-middle-class-family 20-something will take one or two. But it is the first time in a while that I am in control of this amount of time. And as my friend Lauren said the other day there is a moment when you realize That’s actually how I spend my life now, and not Oh what to do today? I am on a break. 

A lot of my days are spent thinking about what to do with my time. A lot of the time I do not know what to do in between the big things of the day, like laundry or work. I often struggle with just existing in between things and very often it feels like I constantly need to consume content, like music or podcasts to feel like I am doing something productive. For the first time in a while, I am in charge of my routine and it feels like all I need is a personal philosophy. 

PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY?

My personal philosophy agenda started with this TikTok. I saw this TikTok on Reels, which feels like the worst crime in the online world, but I am a grown-up who has realized that TikTok = bad for my brain, so now I am scrolling Reels and …. sometimes YouTube Shorts which really is the downfall of my life.

Said TikTok, @signedpluto

And that TikTok made me realize that I am not doing enough things in my day that work just for me. Enough silly little things that 1) make me feel me, 2) make my days smooth and nice and fun. And that’s how I coined the term personal philosophy and if someone already made that term please don’t tell me, it’s simply none of my business. 

I would define personal philosophy as things that work for you and only you. I would go as far as to say it would be good if your personal philosophy does not work for others. Personal philosophy is very far from actual philosophy - we’re not playing Plato or Socrates. Personal philosophy is about small things that make days not just bearable but happy, yet require some mental restraint. (Take a shot every time I write personal philosophy).

WE HAVE LOST THE MORNING ROUTINE

This is where the self-help book thing comes back. I think another part of my resentment comes from the uniformity of self-help books. It does not make sense (in my mind) that one thing can work for me, my friend, and also that guy in the supermarket. That’s against the laws of the universe. We’re too nuanced to agree with the book in the same way. We’re very different but that’s what’s fun about the world. 

And even though I am a self-help book anti-enjoyer, I am an avid YouTube user and that’s the place where I grew up. And that’s also a place where I would watch endless my morning routine videos. 

I never had issues watching my morning routine videos. Alisha Marie, Claudia Sulewski, and others just showed me their mornings (granted they were edited because no one wakes up in full-beat makeup), but they felt somewhat sincere. 

PEAK internet and you won’t convince me otherwise

Unfortunately what used to be a long video with a voiceover explaining how the morning worked for Alisha and Claudia (we love subjectivity!) turned into short videos that are centered around fast-paced cuts and ASMR-like sounds. 

The longer I think about it the more sure I am that we have lost the sincerity and realness of the old-school morning routine. And there surely are creators who still lead the voiceover/talking style but what gives you more exposure is a click, aesthetic videos that give us… nothing, or again a uniform experience. Everyone makes coffee in the morning and yes it is good to stretch, but what makes a day is the other things that make us feel good about ourselves. 

This of course could go into the whole discussion of long-form content (YouTube) vs short-form content (TikTok), and how this change is led by profit and algorithms… could even connect it to the whole our attention span is growing smaller and smaller discourse, but this is a slightly different discussion here. Sure you can connect the dots yourself tho!

MAKING MY FRIENDS TELL ME THEIR PERSONAL PHILOSOPHIES

And to not do what self-help books do (I swear I will try reading one and maybe change my opinion) I asked some of my friends about their weird rituals that keep them going. We’ll start with me because I am my best friend and because it is my Substack. Here goes:

Not opening Instagram before 12. 

More silence (I have realized that I abuse my headphones and treat music as a dopamine hit, which I do not think is the real purpose of music)

Trying to not do anything when I am unsure what to do. Just sit!

And here go my friend’s personal philosophies:

Driving a bike around uni to tire myself down before studying, because otherwise I can’t focus (weird and on the verge of toxic, but whatever works!)

Going on a run when sad or angry (gym bro behavior, but we will let that slide)

Planning your day earlier to avoid the stress of choosing.

Mint tea before bed (possibly increasing the risk of wetting the bed perhaps?)

And while all these things are good I have realized that 1) we tend to think about doing these “tiny things“ when they act as a fix (like the running bit),  2) rarely do we have tiny rituals that are just that… rituals.

Even with my personal philosophy, I focused on counteracting rather than working on something that makes me happy during the day. When I thought about it more I realized I might actually have no rituals at all. I might be lacking a Personal Philosophy.

HISTORY OF RITUALS

Rituals have always been with us. They are tightly connected with religion or spirituality and now with the decline of both, it seems that we are losing them or they are becoming more sparse.

And as this BBC article explains… that’s bad. Rituals have a number of benefits. They lower anxiety, help us focus, or even make grieving easier.

Ritualistic practices can help to bring a degree of predictability to an uncertain future. They convince our brains of constancy and predictability as "ritual buffers against uncertainty and anxiety", according to scientists. (The surprising power of daily rituals, Karan Johnson, BBC)

But to be quite honest I always thought that rituals have to be a bit complicated, or challenging to work, like pushing yourself to read for 10 minutes in the morning or changing the water to cold at the end of the shower. Maybe that’s why my friends and I have seemed to stop doing those things. But as research shows it does not matter what the ritual actually is. As long as we repeat it and treat it as one (set an intention) it can work in our favor.

In the research by Brooks et al. participants were asked to sing Don’t Stop Believing in front of strangers. The participants were split into two groups; one was asked to perform a ritual beforehand - sprinkling salt onto a drawing they had created, and the second one was just given instructions on the performance. "Participants who completed the ritual sang better, had significantly lower heart rates, and reported feeling less anxious than participants who had not performed the ritual".

FINAL THOUGHTS // INVITATION TO FIND YOUR PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY

his topic has been on my mind for a while now. And the more I thought about it the more I realized that I am writing on something that I don’t even do myself. Which did make me feel like a bit of a fraud, but there’s definitely a lesson to it. 

It’s hard to find your own Personal Philosophy. It is so because we are fed content that does not invite us to do so. It is so because we are fueled by making our days productive, making us more efficient. We are no longer shown the individual differences in people’s lives/routines. But we need that. It really is a bummer that we do not anymore showcase doing things for the sake of doing them. That’s what makes us who we are. 

But somehow the more uniform the content gets the more I want to escape it. The more I want to create something that makes sense only for me. And now with this new knowledge about rituals and their effectiveness, and also their simplicity I am even more sure of Personal Philosophy.

So to others and myself, I advertise: let’s find something that really serves us no purpose other than making us excited about the day. The smaller and trivial it gets the better.

Personal philosophy is all about tiny rituals. It’s something like sitting down on the curb of the tub when you brush your teeth or having your first sip of the water outside (like I did today and it made me feel like I lived in the middle of nowhere with a rocking chair on the porch!). 

And I know it may be hard to think about these things because (again) we are shown content that completely disregards that. And I know it would be easier to pick up a self-help book and not give a fuck (you should probably give a fuck!) and have a recipe for life that works… but isn’t it fun to just find out for yourself? 

Maybe all we need to do is get up on that third alarm and allow ourselves to sit on the counter when we fry some eggs in the morning.