I find the """man up""" school of thought generally works for me when faced w a tough situation but 97% of the time it's presented as an obnoxious show of bravado. What are better ways to phrase this?
like, if i’m feeling bad but force myself to do something, i usually feel better. how to maintain the usefulness of this advice without presenting it as ‘fuck your feelings’, in that usual arrogant right wing sort of way
These are all nongendered ways of saying your mental health is your own responsibility. Or, simply repeat to yourself your own observation, “If I’m feeling bad but force myself to do something, I usually feel better.” You were already on the right track friend. Just realize gender has absolutely nothing to do with the concept and counter thoughts that tell you otherwise.
I don’t know that there’s anything quite as punchy, succinct, and general-purpose as “man-up” that doesn’t have the sort of macho bullshit connotations, and if there is, it’s probably some sort of psychobabble that wouldn’t mean much to most people who need to hear it.
I’m also not a fan of the phrase itself, but the general sentiment represented by it has gotten me pretty far in life.
I’m not a religious person at all, but in certain contexts the “Prayer for Serenity” can kind of get you to a similar place.
For the SciFi nerds, there’s Dune’s Litany against Fear, or Yoda’s “Do or do not, there is no ‘try’”
There’s also “mind over matter,” you can’t necessarily help what all the synapses and hormones and such in your body are making you feel, but you can sure as hell help what you do about it.
And of course from the advertising world there’s Nike’s “Just do it”
There’s also some echoes of it in things like “be the change you want to see,” or “if you want something done right you have to do it yourself,” or “fake it til you make it”
Something else that has stuck with me is something one of my instructors said a lot when I was training to be a 911 dispatcher “don’t do nothing.” Make sure that whatever the problem is, you’re taking positive steps to address it. You can’t count on things resolving themselves, and you can’t count on someone else fixing it either, you have to be the one to make things happen.
Again drawing from my own life experiences, I was a boy scout and the scout motto is to “be prepared” which I find pairs nicely with the saying that “people don’t rise to the occasion, they fall to their level of training.” Do what you can to prepare yourself beforehand, and everything will fall into place a lot easier when the time comes. That can mean physical or mental training and practice, or it could be something like getting your clothing, gear, tools, meal prep, cleaning materials together the night before and setting up alarms, reminders, notes, etc. to keep yourself on track.
For people inclined to read up on some philosophy, ancient Greek stoicism had a lot to say about things like self control and virtuous living, and daoism/taoism which has concepts like “Wu Wei” which is tricky to translate and keep the meaning intact, but it means something like “effortless action” it’s kind of a mix of just doing what is needed as it comes up without having to think about it too much, and a bit of, like God said to Bender in Futurama “When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”
A stoic though that helps me more than “man up” is asking myself “what harm will come to me?” In stoic thought we’re the only ones who can harm ourselves through the misuse of our impressions. We often know how we should act in a situation, but we don’t want to because of some perceived harm or discomfort. But since the stoics believed the only real harm was moral, we’re only hurting ourselves by not acting virtuously.
Will I hurt myself more by action or inaction? Through inaction what kind of person will I be? What will I lose through inaction?
“You’ll feel better once you go through” IMO fits rather well what OP is asking for. Specially for self-advice.
[mini-rant] People, stop assuming random orthogonal shit into the left-right axis. Seriously.
I can get why “man up” would be typically right-winger due to the sex-based stereotypes. (“Rather curiously” not mentioned by anyone here, right?) However, doing it directly with the “fuck your feelings” is stupid. [/mini-rant]
I’m confused what you mean by your mini-rant. Are you asserting that “fuck your feelings” and “man up” are not right wing coded, but equally likely to come from a leftist? I think theoretically that’s maybe true but anecdotally that language does tend to be used by the right and not so much by the left, in my experience
I’m confused what you mean by your mini-rant. Are you asserting that “fuck your feelings” and “man up” are not right wing coded, but equally likely to come from a leftist?
That’s an excellent example of what I said just yesterday about sealioning in Reddit: "in Reddit for example your typical sea lion says “I don’t understand, [insert question making a straw man of your proposition]? I’m so confused…”
Drop off the sealion if you feel entitled to a serious answer.
I’ve seen a lot of discussion about sealioning on Lemmy and reddit over the years, and it’s never made much sense to me. If I were a right winger trying to discredit your point, it doesn’t seem like a good tactic to ask (misleading) clarifying questions. Any decent debater would use those questions to further educate potential readers on the specifics of their argument/ideology.
That being said, I would still appreciate a clarification.
Time to shine? There’s always old mate at work who has a good one-liner. “The shit jobs are the good jobs” (everyone knows it’s a rubbish job so they’ll cut you some slack) “Sometimes your the fuckor & sometime your the fuckee” “Weeeel, that’s a shitter” “Maybe kick this one back to the brains trust” And so on
If it’s for yourself, and you know what it actually means to you, just use it. While it’s often derided, from both sides, if it works for you, use it.
While I’m generally quite egalitarian, I do have some old school feelings about what being a man means. I’m the proverbial tip of the spear. I’m the one who steps up and deals with the problems. It’s also my responsibility to remain capable of that. If that means getting physical or mental health treatment, so be it. “Manning up” is me stepping into that role and mindset. I take on the strain, so that those I care about don’t have to.
The poem “If”, while dated is a good baseline for what manliness should mean.
I try to think about how happy and content Future-me will be once the job is done. I confirm the accuracy of this thought to myself by thinking back to how it was in the past when I completed some task that was difficult for me. So I think of an experience where I realized in hindsight that it wasn’t actually that bad and that I was worrying for nothing that I might somehow fail. And even with things that ultimately didn’t go well, I can still reassure future-me that there was no need to make a big deal out of it, because even my failures have lost their horror over time; for example, embarrassing moments at school, awkward dates or bad presentations at work. All these things are just water under the bridge or at best even funny when I think back on them today - and that’s how it will be in the future: as soon as the job is done, I’ll be alright, regardless of whether I succeed or not.
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