The Limits of Self-Help
Humans are instinctual problem-solvers. Without a purpose in life, we fall into an empty nihilistic void that consumes us. In order to make life worth living, we need to have values that guide us, and a purpose that directs us. Psychotherapist Adam Lane Smith laments that male depression (most commonly occurring in males, but also not exclusive to them) stems from two factors: 1) a life without purpose and 2) an inability to carry out that purpose.
People who don’t feel a purpose to their existence use distractions, such as drugs or social media, to avoid the painful feeling of unrealized potential. Our convenient lives make us suffer, because our natural tendency to innovate, create, and work on meaningful things are being denied by a convenient reversion to the comfort zone.
It’s no wonder that drug use, alcoholism, and various other forms of addiction run rampant in societies like the United States. According to Johann Yari, addiction is a manifestation of a lack of connection to the society at large. By creating a world of convenience, and our insistence on being ‘self-made,’ we are generating a society of depressed individuals who feel more and more out of touch with their communities.
The self-help industry came about to address how someone can use information to address their own suffering. Instead of reaching out to the community at large, we can depend upon books, YouTube videos, and online courses to solve the problems that have been plaguing us for our entire existence.
Over the following paragraphs, I will outline some places where I feel self-help has not only fallen short, but also aggravates the suffering that people feel. This aggravation is rooted in the belief that by further isolating ourselves from others, we create new psychopathologies for ourselves that we didn’t have in the first place.
The Myth of the Self-Made Man
We might not admit it, but a great deal of our success in life is due to chance. We did not choose the parents we had or the genes that we were endowed with. We also didn’t choose to grow up where we did, or the chance run-in at the coffee shop you had with the investor who was willing to take a gamble on your business.
For someone to be truly self-made, they had to have been in control of almost all of the variables that could have been attributed to the success in their life. This isn’t to say that we have no sense of agency whatsoever, however, we are simply reacting to life events that happen to us from moment to moment. Some people react with the type of grit and resilience that makes them ‘self-made,’ yet this behavior is also only a reflection of innate characteristics that weren’t intentionally chosen by them.
My point isn’t to diminish the value of improving your life with self-help or to deny ourselves a sense of agency; my point is that self-control and motivation are finite mental resources that aren’t immediately available to everyone who wants to improve their lives.
Self-help applies to a unique category of people who are not psychologically depressed, yet disillusioned by the fate that life has handed them. A lot of millennials graduating from college believe they are entitled to a great career, just like mom and dad promised them growing up. This creates a distorted perception of career success, something that our society cultivates for aspiring young professionals.
The myth of the self-made man is a 21st-century gold rush that motivates and invigorates people entering the beginning of their careers. This applies mostly to young entrepreneurs with delusional ideas of working for themselves and sipping a cocktail at the beach in the Bahamas.
Self-help is the promise of finding gold and living your life to the fullest potential by removing you from the consequences of decisions. We become addicted to the idea of a future self that has finally reached the pinnacle of existence and lives a life fulfilled in every way possible. We not only release dopamine when we envision ourselves achieving such goals, but we fool our brain into believing that we are getting closer to these goals by constantly thinking about them. In a similar vain, we trick our brains into believing we’re having sex when we watch porn, or that we understand ourselves better when we finish a book on pop psychology.
This may sound like a massive diatribe against the self-help industry, so allow me to explain the core of my argument here:
To learn about helping yourself is different than actually helping yourself.
As I mentioned before, there is a difference between reading a book about how to change your life and actually taking the necessary steps to implement those changes. The problem arises when you become addicted to ideas about how to make your life better, something that consumes a lot of time for intellectual problem-solvers.
There is always going to be a problem to solve, no matter how perfect your life becomes. The absence of misery might be peace, yet it lies in our nature to always look for the next step to improve our lives incrementally.
Alá Nietzsche: If you spend your life looking to stamp out the perceived problems that impede your success, you subsequently become the biggest obstacle to your success. You learn more about thriving in the real world by failing in it rather than by thinking you’re solving it with advice you find in books or online media.