The lost hope of self-help
aeon.co
aeon.co
I think the reason these critiques don't really work is that they aim at symptomatic expressions and look past the difficult cultural problems at the root... which is kind of ironic, it seems to me.
Alisdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, the 1981 "revival" of virtue ethics, is quite relevant. He starts by asking why discussions of ethics today end up as mere clashing subjective claim-making and position-taking, and he traces that back to the "failure of the Enlightenment project of justifying morality." Then he goes on to advocate an Aristotelian view of virtue as excellence in the context of life narratives within traditions and societies.
So the fact that people don't seek out ethical advice to personal problems might itself be a symptom of deeper cultural changes. For an anecdotal example, I never have an obligation to report to a boss by 10AM, because I work for companies that don't have such structures. I have a hunch that most people who tend to read self-help books about habits work in such unstructured situations.
Yes. I do this and am self-employed. I developed a measurement spreadsheet for daily/weekly satisfaction and eventually figured out a good way to keep negative outcomes in check. A lot of it involves being very protective of my time and forcing balance into every day.
I also used to teach artists and the really high-end artists always laughed and said they were very organized, contrary to society's expectations of them.
The good: I've never seen habits bathed in the light of morals before. For me at least, it has resonated. It's also an interesting exploration of the history, and how it's changed in tone.
The bad: It's a bit lengthy, and some of the more obscure references seemed unnecessary in delivering the message, and only served to quench the thirst of academics.
Still, if its at all a topic of interest or relevance, it's by no means garbage or fictionary; and I certainly derived value from it.
I liked the review of the history of habit-improvement thinking. The problem is that I felt we wandered too far afield in historical trivia not supported by the thesis, which although it was repeated at the top and bottom of the essay, could have used a lot of support in the rest of it.
It's fun riding around in a bus looking at cool sights. But an essay gives us a destination. The sights we see are part of a journey from where we started to our goal, proceeding in some kind of self-consistent narrative order. This felt more like riding around in a tour bus where the guide calls out one random piece of trivia after another.
Having said that -- and I realize it was harsh -- I could see the structure. It was in there. The author just needed to turn up the contrast a bit.
But for me the Principles of Psychology excerpt alone made it worth reading.
The crux here is that in a rationally-minded, secular culture, those moral habits become idiosyncratic choices, pursued by each individual within the context of their community. When a person steps up into a cosmopolitan, world-citizen mindset, relative morality suddenly seems like a massive failure on humanity's part. Some then don the drapery of the moral absolutist, either searching for or consciously choosing a moral lens with which to view the world.
If my comments above mean to convey anything at all, it's mainly that the planet is slowly becoming one community. Habits like being punctual, following traffic laws, eating a healthy diet, don't necessarily need to have a moral aspect. They simply need to help the individual fulfill a functional role in this interconnected world. That individual may also coincidentally discover another dimension to their behavior, the moral axis, but that plane is much more open to interpretation and less easily measured(tracking being an overarching fetish in the self-help world). I can tell you how punctual you are by looking at your timesheet, but I can't objectively tell you how good you are by measuring how many thank-you notes you wrote this year. I think it is disingenuous to expect the self-help industry to tackle the moral aspect of behavior and expect it to succeed in any meaningful way. I would love to see that book written, in a non-alienating, non-judgemental tone, but I suspect it an impossible deed, an idealistic fool's errand even.
The polarity between relativism and absolutism in morality is going to end up totally irrelevant, since it leads to nothing but squabbles and more confusion. It's not a productive way forward to try to decide which of those extremes is best, because they each have irreconcilable stances, and they both ultimately come down to arbitrary decision (either "because I feel this way" or "because the ultimate ineffable authority says so").
Even the new school of quasi-objective morality, á la Sam Harris, seems to fail to be convincing, inspiring, or even as rational as it wants to be.
I think a realistic approach to morality should start with the question of what people actually care about. What values exist, in the actual society that I could conceivably influence? How does a person become respected, what motivates people, what appeals are possible?
I have no influence over, say, Saudi Arabian Islam, except for maybe through some secular channels... Actually, the recent article about the global appeal of metal music was interesting. If there is any ethical content in the metal community, which I hypothesize that there is, then it could end up being a kind of covert channel for values...
I'm reminded of the story of the Velvet Revolution, which ended Communist Party rule in Czechoslovakia without violence... and which was rooted in a story that involves The Plastic People of the Universe, an obscure experimental rock band inspired by the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, and Captain Beefheart.
> "The Plastic People were ultimately a major catalyst to the overthrow of communism in Eastern Europe. History would most surely have been very different without them."
http://www.furious.com/perfect/pulnoc.html
Um, I'm heading for work and don't have time to think up a coherent way to end this. But a lot of my thinking is influenced by Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.
Just one more random speculation: the focus on "habits" subtly inforces a morality of stability. People who emphasize habits probably aren't going to say that the primary ethical injunction is to dismantle the existing structures of oppression. And you could argue that self-help, including mindfulness and much of psychology and psychiatry, has a stabilizing function within the capitalist system of labor.
You may like https://www.reddit.com/r/debateanatheist or http://www.reddit.com/r/debatereligion.
That's because we're not conditioned to debate for the sake of debate anymore. We debate for as long as it takes for the other side to get mad enough to stop talking to us or use personal insults or violence.
Probably one of the most enjoyable experiences in the past 10 years of my life was staying up in a Waffle House until 4 or 5 in the morning debating whether or not an afterlife, any afterlife, exists, with a friend of mine from college that I hadn't seen in years. Neither of us "won" the debate or changed our minds, but we sat there (with our cell phones off) just coming up with ideas to try to sway the other person.
We had only two real rules. One: listen to each other and exchange viewpoints respectfully, so no (or only minimal) discussion centered around arguing or convincing the other of your viewpoint especially when the topics are sensitive (religion, for example). And two: keep things somewhat personal, and avoid purely abstract philosophical talk.
In regards to the second (often contested) rule: the personal exchange makes the conversation relevant, promotes friendship and group bonding. On top of that it makes the meetup accessible to shy people or people who are not too into abstract debates (and who, interestingly, often occupied the crucial roles of creating group cohesion and continuity!). It also avoids getting into arguments because a supposed abstract viewpoint turns out to be more personal than the parties involved thought. Those kinds of arguments happened surprisingly often when we broke the rule. Furthermore, the abstract / philosophical debates would inevitably happen after the meetup with the people who enjoyed that kind of thing, and the personal conversation greatly enriched even the abstract stuff that would come later.
I can highly recommend anyone who likes 'deep conversations' to join such a meetup or even organize one. Everyone involved in my meetup expressed how much they enjoyed, even needed this meetup in a sea of superficial social meetups and bar talk (which is also nice, just not enough for many of us).
If you happen to live in The Netherlands, hit me up!
Usual rule of thumb: let a professional, which holds enough scientific baggage, and a trained eye, help you for this. Psychology is already quite shallow as a science, so I wouldn't use a book.
Perhaps a cynical question, but perhaps one reason why the less expensive book route may be oft considered ? With everyone advertising to solve your problems, how do you decide who to trust ?
A psychiatrist is someone who had extensive education in psychology and medicine, who I can talk to. That's a little easier to sense things when you're face to face with somebody. It's much easier that way, just like it's easier to learn a complicated subject by asking questions instead of reading many books.
I guess you're right, I could read a book on the subject, but I'm a little skeptic...
However, one self help book which I recently discovered and completely changed my life is "Rewire your brain" (ISBN: 0470487291) which offers explanations of many things from a neuroscience perspective and includes some practical anecdotes etc.
I would recommend it to essentially anyone, and all I could think while reading it was "why is this book not mandatory reading for all humans?".
FWIW.
I'll keep saying it: HN should have a short abstract (aka tl;dr) attached to each article, written and updated by user submission like comments. Maybe minimal GitHub-like version control with pull requests accepted by vote.
The abstract would be more valuable than comments, so accepted modifications could get extra karma.
https://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/3yh1ll/introdu...
https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/1p4gqg/new_poli...
Note that there is no support by the reddit software, so this just shows up as regular comment and can't be edited by the crowd. I'm still impressed that enough folks have recognized the value of the general idea. (Too often, asking for a tl;dr is considered ADD/low-class/impatient/etc.) And it also emphasizes that this could be useful not just to save time, but also to keep article quality higher, if submitters are required to justify the intellectual value of the submission.
For me, a long reading about an abstract thing such as habit is all about going philosophical while reading it. To wonder about it in other words. You can't get that with a TLDR.
TLDRs are great for filtering what it's worth reading or not (maybe that's your reason), but I would never just stop it there if it's a subject that I hold interest in.
There used to be thing called `literature`. Not everything has to be a 10-second sound-byte #TLDR.