Self-help..

There’s something about self-help that is fundamentally uncool. Being into coin-collecting is an order of magnitude more socially acceptable than having titles like “How to Get People to Like You” and “You Can Be Happy No Matter What!” staring out from your bookshelf. Somehow it isn’t yet obvious that a persistent interest in self-improvement is probably the defining trait of the interesting and accomplished person. Self-help literature, though, is a particular kind of self-improvement. Turning to self-help is admitting you don’t quite know how to drive a regular human life. It’s like designating yourself with a voluntary “special needs” status. I don’t think the need for some intentional re-balancing is special though. None of us are born knowing how to drive. It’s probably not unusual to feel like you’ve never been taught quite how to steer a human life competently, but it may be unusual to admit.

What makes us most suspicious of self-help is that we’ve all seen people who are constantly absorbing it and not changing a thing. There are self-help junkies out there  -people who get high on the feeling that their life is improving simply by reading the book, yet never actually address their habits in everyday life. They get high on the feeling of possibility, and when the feeling fades they buy another. Their mistake is simple: they’re missing the “self” part of self-help. Insights by themselves are useless without action, which is what they think changes lives. The self-help junkie habit is obvious and ugly to everyone else, and so the whole genre is reviled for its empty promises. Consequently, self-help remains uncool. Another reason these books are uncool is that most of them are crap. They tend to be written by psychologists who know a lot about what’s wrong with the reader but don’t have much in the way of charisma or writing chops, which makes the reading experience dry and kind of embarrassing. Their examples are cheesy and long-winded. Aside from being boring and clinical, they’re often just dorks...