You Are Self-Helpless

I’m a big believer in the New Year’s Resolution, the art and craft of creating, tracking, and pursuing goals. So as I went over my resolutions for 2020, I spent a lot of time on YouTube watching self-help gurus explain the path to self-mastery.

Dopamine detox, intermittent fasting, time boxing, neurochemical hacking, morning pages, routines of the masters, olympic weight lifting schedules, speed reading techniques, daily meditation and mindfulness, etc. etc.

Through all the confessionals, bullet points, trademarked systems, and personality platforms, one thing holds across it all. There is a persistent internalization of an ideology. To be fair, it is the reigning, defending, undisputed ideology of our time: individualism.

William Blake’s Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils (1826)

What They Don’t Want You to Know!

Let us take for our first example a consistent platitude of the self-help universe. It is at the same time meant to shame and call to action. It focuses the reader/viewer/listener on their life as it is and masterfully contrasts it with the dreams unrealized, the life unlived.

You choose what to do with your life.

To a certain degree this is true. You are choosing to read this post right now (thank you, by the way). Similarly, when you sit in bed and scroll through Instagram for a half hour before bed, you are choosing to do that with your time. What’s supposed to go through the mind of the reader/viewer/listener are images of climbing mountains, travelling to Italy, building a business. It’s supposed to make you feel like, starting now, you can change your life. 

But that isn’t really true.

The self-help space is dominated by a fiction: you are an individual. But you aren’t. You are a node embedded in a network of many other nodes. You are bound by social influences. You are not working the job you want. You are working a job that was available to you, that you must work at to survive. Someone has to do it. That someone is you. You speak a language you were taught or that you learned through necessity. Your entire universe is built out of concepts and historical legacies completely out of your control (it’s out of anyone’s control, which is both encouraging and somehow also unspeakably terrifying).

There are choices you can make, but you are not the sole decider, in many cases not even the primary decider. Your life is built inside of concentric circles of communities. These collective realities circumscribe everything you can ever be, so much so that it is doubtful you can even imagine a state of being outside of these constraints — which helps, as a prison is much nicer when you can’t see the bars.

But self-help can never broach this topic because the entire racket runs on the illusion that your dissatisfaction in life is a result of (to some determining degree) your personal choices. Thus, if you change your choices, you can change your life. But the self-help racket goes even further. It doesn’t just propose that your choices can change your life. It also claims that if you make some set of specific choices, you can reliably conjure the life you want. And what are those specific choices? Why, the ones hiding behind the paywall of course.

That last bit, about the paywall, is the traditional model. With the rise of free content delivered through sponcon and Patreon accounts, an even more perverse model has arisen. Communities of eager strivers now gather around gurus and pay money to support the guru, the discussions around whom focus on how this content has helped the lives of the strivers. These strivers, however, never seem to “solve” their life. They continue to support the guru and consume their content, sure that at some point it will all click. They see other strivers post glowing reviews, and so this striver is assured they will experience these breakthroughs themselves. In the meantime they send money and write their own gushing reports of self-transformation — the only kind allowed in such a community of strivers. Optimism! Optimism! Optimism! The ferocity of these strivers belies, at least to the Freud reading dinosaurs among us, a deep insecurity about the whole thing. So why do they continue their striving? Their monthly tributes? Because their lives are so miserable that this project of turning it around must work. So they white knuckle it. When they see their own suspicions of the program written by others, it must be stamped out. It is the interior battle exteriorized.

It is for this reason I suspect that at this point, no one embedded in the self-help universe is still reading. And so, knowing that only the nihilists are among us, let us speak freely.

William Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with Sun (1805)

The Truth!

It is not true to say that you can’t do anything to improve your own life. That is the cultish commitment of the nihilist, the person who has lost too many times to allow themselves to believe in hope.

But, to reiterate, you can change your life. You can quit drinking, helping you wake up happier, better rested, and with fewer apologies to text out while sitting on the toilet for an hour spraying lava into the sewage system. You can read more, educating and entertaining yourself in a way that detaches you from the dopamine zapping, self-esteem shredding hamster wheel of the social media scroll. You can workout and eat healthy, increasing your energy, lifespan, and sex appeal.

Even so, no guru will tell you something you don’t already know about achieving these goals. Yes, you want to get sober, you want to read more and scroll less, you want to get healthier. Yes, you know how to do these things, more or less, and if you don’t already, you are a few bullet-point lists away from knowing the bulk of what there is we know about accomplishing it. And yet, it never happens, at least not permanently. Maybe for a month. Maybe for a year. But after that? You quit drinking and notice your mind is clearer, your belly is slimmer, your wallet is fatter, and your relationships are stronger — but what trips across the mind from time to time? What whispers to you in the midst of work stress or after a fight with your spouse? Drink. And eventually, you do. And when you do, then comes the return of all the problems. And if you don’t? What do you notice? Yes, things are better, but things still aren’t good. If things were going so great all the time, that little word wouldn’t come across the transom.

That is the problem with eliminating problems: they reveal there is no end, that the problem eliminated masked an unending line of problems. Health freaks who hit their goal weight wouldn’t “choose” to go back to their previous state, but they still feel dissatisfaction with life. It is the person who never stops feeling fat who keeps eating salad and showing up for spin class — but that requires still feeling fat. That’s because the problem wasn’t being fat, overeating was a symptom. “Feeling fat” is a socially taught shame that they could use to label that feeling that life isn’t quite what they’d hoped for, that they aren’t as happy as they want to be.

A personal example: I quit smoking for four years. My lung capacity improved. My skin improved. I didn’t reek of tobacco smoke. I saved tons of money. But do you know what never improved? The actual happiness level of my life. I didn’t want to return to the bad parts of smoking, but when I eliminated the bad parts of smoking I never scraped the surface of the real machinery of happiness.

So how do you become happier?

William Blake’s Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing (1786)

How to Become Happier!

Well, I’m going to share the secret with you right now. And the secret is…

You can’t.

You can’t become happier. You can live a more meaningful life. You can quit all your bad habits. You can reach goals. You can go to bed with more partners. You can lose weight and build muscle. You can cut out on needless expenses. You can build a perfect morning routine. You can work through past trauma. And all of this will make your life better than it is now. But you can not become happier.

That’s what makes self-help a scam, whether the purveyor knows they are running a scam or not. There is simply no way to marshal motivation, discipline, and popified cognitive behavioral therapy to become happier. If there was, we’d all know about it. There’d be happy people walking around who used to be miserable who also didn’t seem like they were recently addicted to a new drug or locked in the performative joy indicative of cult membership (though, on second thought, maybe drugs and cults are the secret to eternal happiness).

There is good evidence to suggest that major life events, both negative and positive, don’t adjust happiness long term (although it appears trauma might be able to negatively affect happiness long term). But this unchanging happiness state is what we can all observe in our own lives. We have all had major events in life and find that, sooner or later, we return to our home position, more or less.

But there is good news, and it relates to something we talked about earlier. The good news is that your personal, individual happiness is not that important. In the end, the world does not really need you to be happier than you are. And, in a way, that makes it okay to be a person who isn’t very happy. For one, it means you are already there where you’re going to be. You are already achieving the full happiness potential you have. Don’t worry so much about it — there’s no need.

So what do you do with all that desire to act, to break free from the chains of your life? You can call a friend you haven’t talked to in a long time. You can join social and political organizations to help others. You can take your dog on more walks. In other words, you can stop acting like your happiness is the most important thing in the world.

And when you aren’t focused on how well you are feeling, feeling bad doesn’t matter quite as much.

William Blake’s Frontispiece to the Song of Los (1795)