The Self Help Black Hole

For the past few years I’ve been sucked into the self help black hole.  The vacuum of never ending material that’s either selling you on a premise that something is wrong with you and this is how you fix it or giving you a ton of information on why you feel a certain way, without a clear explanation of how to correct it.  The later is more commonplace, as there’s more money to be made in selling the “why” rather than selling the “cure.”  Like a doctor who only knows how to manage and rearrange symptoms rather than help you correct the underlying problem (this is true of ALL doctors; there exists no “good” doctors who actually know what’s going on; “good” is usually a function of how we perceive they care about our health, on an individual level, which is referred to a bed-side manner).

If any of the shit that’s pawned upon us actually was effective, the self help business would simply go away.  If there was such a thing as a “cure” for whatever ails you, then why has the genre thrived for so long?

The easy explanation is because all of it, even the stuff that you think is true, is absolute horse shit.  It’s interesting, no doubt, as most psychological analysis are.  But effective, actionable?  Think about this, if your doctor, whom you believe is all knowing, all seeing, all righteous, like a proxy Jesus, gives you a sugar pill and tells you it “cures” whatever disease he says you have, then what is the likelihood that that sugar pill will actually be effective in treating your ailment?

Self help works a lot in the same way.  You adopt a new philosophy for a while, think you’ve found the answer to your shitty life, praise the method for turning your life around, then, over time, fade back in to your old ways.  Much like the placebo effect becomes much less effective when you realize you’re taking a sugar pill.

Magicians use the same trickery.  Sleight of hand is nothing more than playing into our desire, or more powerfully, our belief, that there’s something at work larger than ourselves, guiding us, watching out for us.  The trick works because we want it to work, so therefore we shut out the deception and tend to not notice what’s really going on.  It’s way more entertaining that way.

Self help works in the same vein.  A charlatan discovers an area he/she can exploit, exploits it, receives instant praise, then washes his/her hands clean, claiming “cure.”  Where “cure” is nothing more than our belief in such; our desire to desperately want there to be such a thing that exists in the world.

But it doesn’t.  It never will.  ”Cure” is magic, and there will always be a magician who can exploit our burning desire for such.  And there will always exist suckers like me who want to find the “cure,” and fix the shitty life that we’ve whittled out for ourselves.

But we can’t fix the shitty life unless we address the actual cause, and not simply rearrange the symptoms, as self help does.

So what is the real cause of a shitty life?  The answer usually lies in your perception, the difference between what you think your life should be like and what it actually is:

Quality of Life = what I think my life should look like – what my life actually looks like

Self help takes advantage of this equation, but focusing on defining the what I think my life should look like variable, defining to meet their needs, not yours.  Then in order to balance the equation, you have to do the work the raise what your actual life is to the level of what it should look like.  And the magic of it all is that some people’s equation is almost balanced.  A few tweaks here and there and a shitty life become an OK life.  Those are the people you hear about.  The ones in the magazines and getting interviewed by Oprah and writing the book about how they turned their life around.

They fail to mention that it only took a little tweaking to raise their level of living, and perhaps a little luck and good timing along the way.

For the rest of us, it’s simply a matter of lowering, or better yet, eliminating altogether what we think our lives should look like, and just accept how it actually looks.  What looks and feels like a shitty life to one person looks and feels like the life of a rock star to another.