Self-Help Promises Self-Mastery When What the World Needs Most Is Self -Transcendence
Since I started reading Medium articles, it’s been impossible to overlook the predominance of a few high-performing niches, including a distinct brand of self-help.
As someone who believes that improving oneself is a moral imperative, I clicked on these articles for a while. But within the space of about a dozen articles, I had seen enough.
The self-help that seems to be on offer the most is not the kind the world really needs.
Setting aside all the repackaging and repurposing of the same advice and the brash tone of much of it, underlying all of what I read was the same…
… narrow notion of a worthy life.
“Better is personally happier.”
“Better is having more free time for yourself.”
But above all…
“Better is personally wealthier.”
Notice a pattern? The emphasis is overwhelmingly on individual gains. My happiness, my wealth, my success. This seems to be the prevailing self-help ideology summarized.
This is not to say that personal happiness, time to pursue what matters to you, and sufficient financial means are unimportant! They are vital for personal well being, but not at the expense of other values. Not at the expense of seeing only impoverished versions of life and the world.
The problem with this sort of self-help is that it worships in…
… the Church of the Self.
Self-help authors peddle individualism as though we aren’t all sharing a planet. Let yourself slip over the edge and tumble into the reality-distorting world of mainstream self-help, and you enter a wonderland in which the Self takes up an hallucinatory amount of space, where things like wealth , prestige, and some amorphous thing called “happiness” stand like monoliths, beckoning and just out of reach of most of us. Except for those other individuals whose love and admiration the Self seeks, most everything else is a blurry otherness that only ever comes into focus when it serves the goals of the Self.
Forgive the hyperbole because I think it’s useful for getting at the truth of the experience of being pulled in by this kind of self-help material.
I don’t blame the self-help industry for the construction of the Church of the Self. It was erected a long time ago by British Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, perhaps further shaped by modern libertarianism. Either way, the self-help business is doing what every other industry does: it’s capitalizing on a demand.
However, though there may be a real unmet need resulting in a “demand”, what exactly is needed may not be well understood by the consumer, or even the culture at large.
In our hurry to be free of our own discomfort, we are liable to be convinced by vague promises from those who claim to know the nature of our challenges and how to conquer them.
There are such things as self-reliance and competence, and the quantities in which you possess these will likely affect your life. You can put a foot wrong or play the game successfully. These statements are indisputable.
But I’d be an ideologue if I believed it ended there. Reality has shades of grey.
It’s also true that there is no one-size-fits-all formula for success. When we see the self-help author embodying the results of the methods they preach and believe they’re evidence of the value of the method, we are succumbing to survivorship bias (for every warship firing guns triumphant, there are countless shipwrecks who sailed by the same methods).
Life is complex, and outcomes have multiple — seen and unseen — causes. There are not just agents, their choices, and the outcomes of those choices floating about in the void.
What so much self-help literature disregards is this: you cannot separate the individual from the wider community. Each is influenced by the other. And a culture that holds that “man is an island” will end badly for everyone.
Self-help divorced from the wider world results in net zero gains.
We are facing unprecedented challenges, some of which are existential threats to humans as well as a large proportion of life on Earth. I hope this isn’t news to anyone.
But I do want to illustrate how a modus operandi that blinkers your vision so that you only see your actions’ goal-relevant consequences, not the externalities, can be detrimental to the community on which you ultimately rely.
- Individualistic people are more likely to act in ways that hurt the entire group. The more individualistic a society, the less likely people were to abide by COVID-19 containment measures, and the more severe was the society’s situation during the pandemic.
- Fossil fuel companies refuse to account for the negative externalities of their actions. They have worked doggedly to maintain our dependence on fossil fuels and continue to do so. Meanwhile, we have increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by 50%, higher than at any time since the Pliocene 3–5 million years ago. Our lifestyle choices, our political choices, our economic activities, and our consumption patterns support the fossil fuel industry.
- The richest 10% of the globe own 76% of the wealth, while the bottom half own 2%. But the wealthiest people also benefitted from 38% of the total wealth growth between 1995 and 2021. The funnelling of wealth from the bottom to the top results in greater inequality, which eventually leads to depressed economic growth for everyone, higher crime rates, and other societal ills.
- Cultures that score higher on individualistic traits generally have citizens with smaller and less satisfying social support networks, worse emotional intelligence, fewer inclinations to seek help for their personal and suicidal problems, and higher levels of hopelessness and suicide ideation.
This list just skims the surface.
By prioritising our own success exclusively, we shirk our responsibilities to the community we have the privilege of sharing. This results in a net loss for us all.
Individualism and collectivism each have their pros and cons, and either ideology taken to the extreme ends in pathologies. A balance must be struck.
There is an alternative, where the individual is neither lost to the whole nor the whole sacrificed for the short-term good of the individual. This alternative requires a shift of perspective, a more complete view of one’s own identity and place in the world, but it simultaneously allows for self-development and dedication to something greater than the self — something far more rewarding than any inward-looking self-help.
The rewards of self-efficacy within the context of a global community.
I will repeat my conviction: for most of us, self-improvement is a moral responsibility.
I find fault with the bulk of self-help I see today for this: in making the self everything, it risks making minds parochial.
It narrows our vision down to the microcosm of the self and promotes self-oriented behavior in a world that desperately needs outward-looking global citizens who…
- keep themselves up-to-date on global affairs and challenges,
- have a broad sense of their potential and functioning in the world and through time, including the consequences of their actions or inaction,
- have a holistic understanding of their personal well-being, such that they understand how their own well-being and the well-being of the wider community (i.e., the biosphere) are inextricable,
- appreciate that the life-affirming peak experience of self-transcendence — attained best through an outward-looking, other-focused approach to life — is incomparably more rewarding than focusing your efforts on self-improvement. (This is true even when our efforts to do good come at the cost of personal distress or sacrifices.)
Imagine a world in which everyone’s conception of self-improvement factored in the inescapable impact that each of us has on the world.
Self-oriented self-help cultivates a culture of me-to-the-exclusion-of-all-of-you. In so doing, it waste human potential.
In contrast, a form of self-help that encourages you to live for more than yourself better captures your human potential because it draws the focus away from how you alone can benefit from your actions and extends your power out to the society at large.
I encourage everyone to dedicate themselves to something greater than the self can ever be. I challenge you to go beyond the self. Life is short, and what you have to offer is too great to waste. Do you really want to limit your potential to helping only you?
