Get better or Get beaten!!

What a scary marketing slogan to attract customer to pay for a book to help themselves!! Can “self-help” or “self-improvement” be accomplished by reading a book?! As part of summer reading, every year I try to explore a new section of book store but one area I have been avoiding for may years, and for a good reason. This industry is valued at 15 billion dollars/year and there is so much hype that there are many books on “how to write self-help books”!! That’s a lot of books and motivational speeches that still failed to help the 40 million people suffering from anxiety, the 15 million suffering from depression, 8 million plus people suffering from stress disorder.
“If all you ever do is all you’ve ever done, then all you’ll ever get is all you ever got”. Totally true. Whether you call it self-help, personal transformation, growth, or just change, it is a goal everyone aspires. Change is simple. You decide what you want to change, you find a strategy that will facilitate the change, and then you commit yourself to making that change. Change, however, is not easy. In fact, it is downright difficult. That’s why most people don’t change and why the self-help industry is so robust; but the illusion taught by this industry is that happiness is an external object that can be purchased and that happiness is here, now.
We live in a superficial society that values materialism, consumerism, and working way too many hours each week, and trying to buy happiness in one book. We are brainwashed into thinking that reading self-help books can evaporate their problems and help find happiness we so badly desire. It is no wonder that from the first “self-help” book in 1859 by Samuel Smiles which sold over quarter million, to today this process has fostered the belabored self rather than relieving it and causing a placebo effect.
On self-help books have at least one common message. They tell you that you have the power to change yourself!! By implication all of these books are saying, if you are in pain, if you are stuck and can’t seem to change, it’s no one’s fault but your own’. So shouldn’t the section title should read it that way.. SELF HELP — IT IS YOUR OWN FAULT’!!
In case you are wondering whether I bought any books from the section.. no.. I ended up buying a book on “7 Hermetic principles on self mastery”. Pursuit of empirical knowledge pertaining to spiritual mysteries sounds more interesting and may be some day help me to write a self-help book, who knows… :)
