Self-Help’s Two Biggest Problems

I just finished reading Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle Is The Way, a quick read on how to turn obstacles into triumphs, with lessons from the Stoics. I thought it was a great read and brilliantly written, like much of Holiday’s work.

However, I couldn’t shake the feeling: I would have liked this book a lot better three years ago.

Now, I felt like it’s something it was nothing new based on my own experiences with self-help and being exposed to it. Maybe if I had picked up the book in 2014, I would have really enjoyed chapters like “follow the process” and “control your emotions,” but again, it was nothing I hadn’t seen before on the Internet and having self-help continually shoved down my throat. I couldn’t help liking the book, but thinking “real life isn’t that simple” at various points.

That got me thinking about the self-help genre in general. I used to love it, and I hope it doesn’t reflect poorly on me to say that. The first time I heard the rationale behind not comparing yourself to others, it revolutionized my thinking for a couple of days. The first time teachers told me to embrace failure, I fell head over heels with that concept as well.

The first time I heard advice to reject perfectionism and the quote that “perfection is the enemy of good,” it was my mantra to get through some pretty difficult days. And don’t even get me started on how I felt when I first heard of Viktor Frankl’s Man Search for Meaning and the first time I saw this quote:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Every one of my cross country coaches has, to some level, preached some of the same advice to me. It’s not wrong and it’s good advice, so why do I cringe whenever I see an article on the Internet advocating the same thing?

Self-help is a nebulous genre. I inadvertently venture into it because I’m a human being too and I struggle with many of the same things you struggle with. I’ve written pieces on how not to feel like you have something to prove or why you should try to improve one thing every day instead of turning your whole life around, mainly because those are things I think about and try to remedy in my own life.

It’s not that self-help is inherently wrong — most of us want to improve ourselves to some degree. But thinking more about it and reflecting on a tide pushing against self-help’s out of touchness has led me to two conclusions self-help, at least the form it exists in on the Internet.

Overexposure

I love Viktor Frankl’s work, philosophy, and respect his career and experiences during the Holocaust. And so it makes me feel like a terrible person when I see one of his quotes for the billionth time.

The fact is any of us with access to Google and social media have been over inundated with self-help. There’s a list of famous self-help sources I have grown tired of seeing, and that’s Stoics like Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Seneca.

According to Dr. Nancy Sherman, a professor of philosophy, pop Stoicism has become an industry that has turned into “a program of self-improvement” and “athletic training for the soul.” And seeing Stoicism as merely a list of life hacks is a misreading of the role of world citizens the Stoics envisioned, where Stoicism isn’t as focused on the self as much as it is the community.

I respect pieces that approach self-help from original and unique angles.Erik Brown has unique and informative pieces on how the samurai dealt with anxiety and the Japanese concept of Dō. Amardeep Parmar has unique takes on the concept of Ikigai and micro-habits that are actually manageable to implement.

These are takes I hadn’t seen before that I loved reading, but once everyone else starts hopping on the bandwagon of the samurai and micro-habits, they will also become old and cliche.

Billionaire-worship is another brand of self-help that has become massively overdone. My least favorite part of The Obstacle Is The Way is when Holiday glorified Steve Jobs for firing an employee who pushed back on his idea. All of a sudden I felt like I was supposed to celebrate a human being losing their job. There was also an undertone of Jobs disregarding employee well-being and working people to death, which I simply did not see as a good thing.

I’m not saying all billionaires are bad. They’re human beings too and complex figures in real life. But billionaire-worship self-help sees their success as solely a product of mindsets and productivity habits when the fact is a million things broke in their favor, which is simply not true.

Yes, it’s natural to want to for some of us to want to emulate successful people. As much as most of us hate to admit it, a lot of us respect success. But when you see the same exact self-help lessons and advice on Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, it gets really old really fast.

It also doesn’t help that these articles give the same advice. Wake up early, preferably at 5 a.m. Perfect your morning routine and exercise before work. Embrace failure. Avoid social media. Stop watching the news. Cut toxic people out of your life. Mediate. Do yoga.

Again, that shit gets old really fast, and it makes me less likely to stop watching the news if it seems like everyone is preaching it.

You might not be like me in my journey with self-help, and that’s fine. I’m a natural contrarian so be aware of that bias on my end.

But I am convinced the anti-self-help movement is a product of being exposed to way too much oversimplifying self-help that extols the same billionaires and utilizes the same quotes. It also doesn’t help that a lot of self-help articles are written by white guys who advocate dropping out of college (because a Bachelor’s Degree is a prerequisite for a lot of jobs).

This leads me to the next big problem in self-improvement:

Overgeneralization

What works for you doesn’t work for everyone. I repeat, what works for you doesn’t work for everyone.

As an editor of the largest mental health publication on Medium, I have to constantly push back and give feedback to pieces that give mental health advice. Is the advice grounded in research? Or is it grounded in the author’s personal experience?

The fact is what worked for one person managing their depression might not work for someone else. Imagine if someone gave medical advice based on their personal experiences of what worked for them — that advice would be universally shunned not only by medical professionals but by society at large.

Self-help has a similar problem in overgeneralization. I’m perfectly fine with “These 10 Habits Improved My Life” or “This iOS App Made Me More Productive,” but when many of these headlines get re-written in the second person, it extrapolates without knowing someone’s contextual background.

The fact is everyone is their best self-help guru, or a life coach has to be someone who knows the person really well. All my coaches have personalized training for all their athletes, and they do that because different things work for different people. As a runner, I was the kind of person who benefitted from running longer miles, like 80 miles a week, while other runners would benefit from less mileage.

I digress, but the point is those coaches knew us really well. You know nothing about strangers on the Internet, and most of you probably know nothing about me. I don’t know whether you have depression, anxiety, or a chronic illness. I don’t know whether you have a disability. You don’t know those things about me either.

So I can’t sit here and tell you to wake up at 5 a.m. and exercise every day. And I can’t give that unsolicited advice either because I have my own struggles.

Do you know how I get through my days? I procrastinate. I wait until the last minute to get everything done. I work on a task for 10 minutes, get distracted and go on my phone, play a mobile game, move onto something else for a bit. I take naps in the middle of the day if I can — for hours on end. I listen to myself and gauge what can or can’t be done in a given session, and I watch about two hours of TV a day.

All of this is unorthodox. But it works for me and I have gotten all A’s in my Master’s Program for the past year, get my stuff done at work, and get my stuff done with my side hustles, all while having balance in my personal life and work life.

And I can’t give you the same advice because I’m not an expert on your life. Ask your doctor or therapist for advice, or someone you trust as an expert, but not some stranger on the Internet. “Control your emotions” is a very out-of-touch thing to say to someone with an emotional disability.

So I’ll say it again: you’re your best self-help guru. What works for me might not work for you. So trust yourself in finding what works for you.

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I love reading people’s personal testimonies and stories on how their lives improved. I’m not a completely negative person, but I love reading your stories on how you turned your life around or the strategies you adopted to do so. I drink, but I love really love hearing people’s stories on recovery and sobriety as well because I think it’s really important that we support each other as human beings.

However, self-help’s biggest problems aren’t necessarily the people, but trends in the content. Overgeneralization and overexposure are killing the genre. You can probably find something I wrote two years ago and call me a hypocrite, and you’d be right to say so.

Anti-self-help is also becoming a bit overdone, but the fact is we all seek balance in the content we see and the content we read. Yes, if you don’t like self-help, you can just choose not to read it.

But I think the genre as a whole can do with being more original and not re-hashing the same worship of billionaires and using the same Marcus Aurelius quotes all over the place. And I also think the genre can do with less generalizing to people’s unique circumstances and instead focus more on personal testimony.

Self-help is not inherently evil. But some of it is getting really old and cringeworthy really fast — and that can change.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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