Possibly, lone wolf self-improvement works better when your life is not full of distracting things. But with distractions, classes work better, because they keep returning your focus to the thing you wanted to learn. They provide you a distraction-free window of time.
If classes work better for most of the population, including students (which seems to be the case), I suspect that an average person is quite distracted even without marriage / kids / job. Probably normies cannot stop thinking about social drama and stuff.
Hey, I am a normie. And college was full of drama and stuff—more so, I think, than the job I now have.
OTOH, I would say drama and stuff easily improve people as well as classes do—many (most?) of us had been sheltered kids before that. My own specialty (botany of vascular plants) just happened to include classes, drama (angry landlords, poachers, etc.), and stuff (expeditions) - a very natural combination...
OTOH, I agree I am simply confused by what ‘self-improvement’ actually means. Do we define it ‘by motive’, ‘by result’ or in any other way (similarly to the recent SSC post on racism)?
Maybe I have just never really tried the lone-wolf style; I like brushing up some things like simple bits of math on my own, but I wouldn’t call it improvement—just upholding the baseline.
Possibly, lone wolf self-improvement works better when your life is not full of distracting things. But with distractions, classes work better, because they keep returning your focus to the thing you wanted to learn. They provide you a distraction-free window of time.
If classes work better for most of the population, including students (which seems to be the case), I suspect that an average person is quite distracted even without marriage / kids / job. Probably normies cannot stop thinking about social drama and stuff.
Hey, I am a normie. And college was full of drama and stuff—more so, I think, than the job I now have.
OTOH, I would say drama and stuff easily improve people as well as classes do—many (most?) of us had been sheltered kids before that. My own specialty (botany of vascular plants) just happened to include classes, drama (angry landlords, poachers, etc.), and stuff (expeditions) - a very natural combination...
OTOH, I agree I am simply confused by what ‘self-improvement’ actually means. Do we define it ‘by motive’, ‘by result’ or in any other way (similarly to the recent SSC post on racism)?
Maybe I have just never really tried the lone-wolf style; I like brushing up some things like simple bits of math on my own, but I wouldn’t call it improvement—just upholding the baseline.