I still vaguely remember back in the day when Oprah platformed "the Secret" and brought all this "manifesting" drek in to public view. Oprah has used her massive viewrship to cause incomprehensible damage over the years.
Her story really would be fascisating from a Marxist perspective. The way her platform gave her such an enormous soap box from which to steer and influence culture, and the ways that she and the systems that supported her show chose to use that soap box.
Do you think the half a million children who die of malaria every year simply fail to believe in themselves hard enough? Or are we subject to physical reality?
... but you do not make it just as you please; you do not make it under circumstances chosen by yourself, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.
Yeah, it's kinda like zen philosophy. If this is someone's response when you're sobbing over losing your job it's shitty, but when it's a one off comment in a vacuum, it's well-intentioned and innocuous.
"Hey dad, I have been thinking and I envision a life where my father doesn't send me stupid self help book style lies without having to block him and cut off all contact. You think that's achievable?"
My dad sends pictures of flowers with Bible verses or similar platitudes on them. And he does it to everyone constantly even at weird hours and even if they never respond. Most of us don’t have him blocked. I have him blocked because he crossed some major boundaries and I no longer trust him to make safe decisions around me.
So if this is the worst of it then, no, you probably shouldn’t block him. Without further context, this is annoying at worst. Also, by “block him” do you mean going no/low contact or do you mean literally just blocking his phone number and interacting with him as normal otherwise?
There's a good chance this is the kind of stuff that gives him hope and he just wants to share that. Even if it's annoying.
PS texting is a bad way to have disagreements, I def recommemd having a real convo if you want to push back on what is basically new age karma, which itself leads to victim blaming if one is logical about it.
I hate this sort of thing due to my experiences with depression:
Visualizing your dreams and maintaining positive thinking can really help a suffering individual, but all you hear about is this "The Wish" sort of zealotry and you think "Obviously I cannot achieve literally anything and everything in life" which makes it all feel hopeless - like the only kind of people who benefit from positive thinking are those who already don't have any problems.
For people like me it takes massive amounts of CBT plus lowering my expectations and dreams to things that are realistic in my situation (which sounds awful but has made my life much better), and it causes a lot of dissonance when people act like it should be as easy for me as it is for them.
I don't know what your relationship with your dad is like, but if I was in your shoes and comfortable doing so, I would consider telling him that you appreciate his good intentions and that you will do your best to keep your head up and make your dreams come true, but that there will be failures and setbacks in life and it is not helpful not productive to pretend that anything is possible. That puts the onus for any and all failures entirely on your shoulders which is extremely unfair as well as a self-destructive perspective. And moreover it's not the way the world works - or else some of those would-be world rulers would have actually been successful by this point in time.
Read that as "CBD" first, which, you know, would still be valid
That helps too, but not as much as the THC that comes along with it
But yes CBT is fairly effective imo as long as it isn't being approached like "The Secret" or used to mask negative external stimuli instead of actually dealing with them. I failed to appreciate many beautiful moments in my life because I wasn't ready to embrace them for what they were - it helps with stuff like that.
Turns out Lenin's daily affirmations were only enough to net him a big country, and then his discipline slipped and that's how he had a stroke
It's nice that your dad is encouraging. Lots of people don't have dad's that encourage them. But I agree with other people that following your dreams leads too easily to career based sense of self, which is not healthy and gets even less healthy as late stage capitalism progresses to degrees of lateness we cannot currently imagine. But it is never healthy to derive self esteem from work.