Self-help is a popular genre for a reason. Nobody knows you better than yourself, so you require some help, why not take ownership over that process? This sounds great on its surface, but there is a pernicious side-effect to this project.
Don’t get me wrong. Good things can come out of good self-help books. I’m grateful for having spent the time and energy to learn from books like Atomic Habits, Time Management for Mortals, and Deep Work, just to name a few. Smart people have smart ideas, who would have thought? In addition to the ideas themselves, reading self-help books can be deeply inspirational! You can have a better life, and here’s a new way to do it! Isn’t it wonderful to imagine? But, as is so often the case, there’s a dark side to this hopeful venture.
Imagine that you’ve just purchased a self-help book at your local bookstore. Before you’ve even flipped open the cover, you’ve already made an implicit assumption: I need help, and this book has answers. With your purchase you have assumed a vulnerable mental stance and allotted the author a certain amount of trust.
This is a mistake. By design the book is written for a general audience – a general recipe for the average reader of the rough demographic the book was meant to target in its inception. The text may speak with authority, but its target audience is a caricature where you are a fully-fleshed human being.
The common strategy these books deploy is to simplify problems and then assert their correctness. In other words, they approach their reader with bravado and conveniently ignore the complexities of individual circumstances, the very complexities that give rise to life’s greatest difficulties and deepest questions.
Remember, the author does not know you, and they are not around to help you integrate all of their impressive ideas into your life. That leaves the job up to you, dear reader, to get yourself into shape! So, how will you manage it? Ask anybody whose great at what they do, and they’ll likely tell you that it can be very difficult to be your own coach.
How can you perform your best when you’re simultaneously looking over your own shoulder judging yourself? Inevitably, we simplify the situation by binarizing outcomes. We reckon that we either succeed or fail, and we forget that we can improve without doing it perfectly, or that sometimes a thing just doesn’t work for us. Instead of accepting these more obvious answers to our struggles, we tunnel vision on success and unintentionally undermine our own self-confidence with misplaced faith and perfectionism.
When you’ve fallen into this trap, it can very quickly turn into a downward spiral. You’ve got your bible, you’ve learned the gospel, and now you’re on a crusade towards perfection! Push harder! Read the book again! Do it exactly the way they wrote it! Because, if you were the kind of person who the author described (i.e., a successful person), then you should be able to do what they say and be happier for it. But… you’re not happier, so it must not be working, which means you must not be doing it right, which means you’re failing… Maybe you should buy a self-help book on self-discipline… or perhaps it was a lack of self-acceptance that led to your failure… Maybe you should buy books on both topics, just to be safe.
The most pernicious challenge of self-help books is that it engenders a mindset of putting off one’s sense of wellbeing to an arbitrary time in the future. Once you get this time management system down, then you’ll be happy. Once you lose 30 pounds and get abs, then you’ll be happy. Once you can run a marathon, then you’ll be happy.
This is a problem. As anybody who has accomplished anything knows: happiness is fleeting. A first kiss lasts but a moment. You return to your seat after collecting your diploma. Eventually you drift off to sleep after the best night of your life. Wellbeing is predicated on contentment, and contentment must happen in the present moment where the content of real life actually exists. We must learn to be happy with what we already have, with who we already are. But the very concept of self-help books is that we can be better, and we should be better, and here’s a simple way to do it, and we should not compromise on our potential!
Consequently, too many self-help books promise more than they can deliver on. They offer grand promises of perfect productivity leading to the top of your career! An absolutely perfect training system that will lead you to smash records and be interviewed by Sports Illustrated. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with having a dream, but to pretend that a book can be a perfect road map to that dream and then conditioning one’s happiness on whether that dream is achieved is a recipe for disappointment and self-loathing. You couldn’t do it, and since you tried to do it by yourself, you have only yourself to blame, you loser.
I don’t want to dismiss the whole project of self-improvement as invalid. However, I think we should rethink our approach to the self-help genre by individually considering the following three points:
First, we must recognize that the authors of these books cannot know our lives in any detail, so the burden falls to us to know what may or may not work for our unique circumstances.
Second, all of the work in interpretation and implementation of any self-help advice falls to us, the reader. Consequently, we must set the criteria for success and failure ourselves, with all their requisite gradients, while also maintaining the knowledge that nothing works for everyone.
Finally, no book (or anything else) is a silver bullet. We will never figure everything out, and any attempt to do so will inevitably breed more problems, which then need to be figured out, and so on. As such, we must remember to find contentment with ourselves now despite our shortcomings, and still strive to improve ourselves.
While many self-help books offer legitimate advice, many others overpromise, underdeliver, repackage common sense, or veer off into something one could only consider obliquely helpful. As long as we recognize the limits of these books and exercise our personal agency, then we can keep what’s good about self-help while avoiding its dark side.