Most self-help books make exhausting demands of their readers. The endless list-making and inventorying. The frequent deployment of the encomium “Yay, you!” The tacit assertion that “journey” has not been overexposed as a result of the “Don’t Stop Believin’” glut. It’s easy to conclude, why can’t someone just write a self-improvement book called “Canceling Lunch” and be done with it?
Cynics, take heart. A new literary genre, which might be called anti-self-help or anti-improvement, is upon us.
Granted, reading a book that coaches you on how to reject self-help is like downing a shot of Patrón to get the nerve to stop drinking. But it appears to be working. Both “A Counterintuitive Guide to Living a Good Life,” by Mark Manson, and Sarah Knight’s “How to Stop Spending Time You Don’t Have With People You Don’t Like Doing Things You Don’t Want to Do” were best sellers. (Those are the subtitles. The titles use a pointedly vulgar phrase synonymous with “not caring one bit.”)
Now comes one of the better-written entries in the genre, “Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze,” which made its author, Svend Brinkmann, a psychology professor in Denmark, a media star there.
More here – The New York Times
The motivation of those writing (and reading) self-help books should be applauded.
Unfortunately , executing self-change takes much more effort than just reading.
And the books themselves provide little in the way of technology to undertake such change.
Pascal once said that man’s greatest problem is not being able to sit alone in a room quietly by himself.
And there I think lies the key.
Thanks for this post Chris.
Ok that was probably the most confusing article I have read for a while. On one hand the author denounced self-help and applauded the “anti-self help” yet ended up lambasting the books that were quoted as such (or did I completely miss the point in the article). Ironically I see the “anti-self help” (of which I have read a couple of them including Sarah Knight’s) are in fact another self help by simply putting “drop the rubbish out of your life and you can actually breathe!” In any case it was nice to see a different point of view on the genre.
Thanks again Chis for the posts. Most enlightening and at times challenging concepts to stretch the grey matter.
Damian