Why is there so much self-help featured on Hacker News?
It feels like at least a third of the content is something about "how to learn", "how to think", etc.
A lot of people who have "high achiever" aspirations who are concerned about aspects of their lifestyle in a world where they feel they have lost connection to family and peer group or fear the consequences of opening up.
Possibly a return to more balanced male/female participation? I say this with some trepidation, it might be seen as objectifying.
Technology has progressed in an unthinkable pace. Society, economics have changed to keep up.
Human brain did not have the time to evolve to the changed scenario.
Human brain is fantastic but it never evolved for what most of us in HN do- knowledge work.
Agriculture, and even industry after the first revolution did not demand human beings to be changed by much.
That is not true with knowledge work. You need effective, designed methods to learn, store knowledge, apply them to different scenarios, be focused for longer hours, and so on.
At the same time you want to be happy. You need to find balance. Society changed very rapidly. It does not give you learned frameworks for the new scenario.
You need to actively, vigilantly, deliberately learn how to manage yourself, your knowledge, your relationships, your business.
Most HNers have their basics solved, and they want to grow further into the area for which evolution or even society has not prepared us.
It makes me happy to see that people realize this one way or the other- and try to solve this problem. We acknowledge that a gap exists, we only try to fill that by any amount we can. I applaud those who do this.
I think that is debatable, at least from the Western standpoint. Much of Western society and its economics produce tremendous amounts of depression and anxiety (rooted mostly in fear).
I agree. They have kept up as much they absolutely had to.
Very little amount of thoughtful, apt changes.
I think one complaint can assume the opposite: that it's trite, snake-oil, or vacuous content, usually chased compulsively one-after-another, by people far from actually improving (or, in lieu of improving).
I think it can become detrimental procrastination content quite quickly because it gives the illusion of "doing something about a problem", without really doing anything. I also find it can keep you from moving on from things, if you don't yet know "how to think" why are you thinking? Therefore you should stop and read the article. lol. Bit abstract there, but there is an assumption that you don't already know pretty well how to think that's being thrown at you, and this bugs me.
It's still useful to have all the comments around to judge the pros and cons of a technique, but HN leans cynical, so it's often not that useful either.
Erm, not really.
1. Deep Work by Cal Newport has made a long-lasting effect in my life. My life is significantly better because I read it.
2. I got to know about The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa through HN. Literally changed my life.
Self-help is too broad. There are master marketers with shallow content like Robin Sharma, blog-post-inflaters like Mark Manson, and genuinely helpful content like Prsgmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt.
Like novels, movies, and anything else, there are many kinds of self-help.
I think its also because the HN crowd is more curious, introspective and career driven than a lot of other forums.
It can be exhausting for sure. It’s a mutation of self-pity, which is a mutation of self-absorption, if we had to root cause analyze this.
To put it simply, we have a very vain and narcissistic society at this point. We can’t clearly pin point if this is a modern advent or truly an everlasting dynamic of humanity (has it always been here, and will it always be here?). In the contemporaneous, all we can do is contemplate if it’s particularly worse right now, but, that in itself is … also self-absorption.
I think people who have energy for conspiracy ideas should find a healthy outlet like fiction. Similarly, those who are in the higher end of the self-absorption spectrum (most everyone I’ve met), should find a healthy place to put that like Philosophy. Contemplate existence and Cogito, ergo sum. The low level “how do I, me, and past me and future me, continue being me and finding meaning in me, myself and I, and feel good about it”.
Overall, it’s a form of egotism to recommend such people seek therapy. That’s putting one of the most common human traits on a pedestal. As in, your vanity is soooo serious that you need clinical professional help - lol. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen that ridiculous recommendation for run of the mill stuff. Half the reason these things become compulsive pattern thoughts is because we validate it.
Take a Philosophy 101 Couesera course over a glass of wine, and laugh about it. I promise you the “I find no meaning at work” questions will become hilarious soon enough.
And there it is, the grand hypocrisy. I just ultimately gave some self-help advice.
I think that's just you. I'd be surprised if it's 5%, although the % of AskHNs that could be called "self-help" is, I'd guess, usually higher than on the main page.
"So much" compared to what, anyway? You assume it would/should be 0%, or what? It sounds like you don't want any, or at least think there's too much.
Personally, in my life I've gotten an enormous amount from self-help, psychology, spirituality, philosophy-of-life books of all kinds, but 95% of the time on HN the subject comes up in comments, I read that self-help-type books are nonsense, worse than useless, full of filler when they could be a list of points, etc. I get the impression people don't know where to find the good books, or don't believe they exist, so they ask on here.
the solution is there, to say no to a lot of this, but this requires a collaborative effort.
Do you really not know this or are you saying popularity if such posts bothers you?
A nice introduction to this perspective is Christina Dunbar-Hester ’s talk on "Hacking Diversity": https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-11569-hacking_diversity_the_polit...
As for why such articles are commo, I'd guess the following:
1) these articles get more engagement from the broader HN community because they're more general than the niche topics that are often posted.
2) we're about 10-15 years into the era of hustle culture. Regardless of where you are on the career ladder, there's pressure to do more, make more.
3) we're 15 years into the smartphone era, and our collective attention and focus have taken a beating, and people want to address that.
4) Tim Ferris, the erstwhile Tony Robbins of Silicon Valley has been pushing the idea of shortcuts and 'hacks' for life issues for a decade, and has been pretty influential.
As already mentioned but worth it repeating, most self-help advice, in posts or books, are without ground.
Only experimental psychology can provide such a ground, but this is yet another academic field were the reproducibility crisis is high.
I read several times in academic sources that around 60% of psychological experiments' results can not be reproduced.
Many scandals revealed that very famous experiments had been willingly falsified, such as the "Stanford experiment". Stockholm syndrome is also a myth. The Hearst heiress has not been the "victim" of it, since just absolutely no academic psychologist investigated the case. It has not been proved since either.
I consider experimental psychology, and History as well, as Science. But the publish or perish system has killed probity in most academic fields. Biology, medicine, nutrition and even astrophysics are gangrened.
When you poll the general population, honest is a value important to the lower economic classes. "Do not steal" is an important moral rule since the temptation is high in our society of abundance (not for everybody) and constant call to consume through pervasive advertisements.
But the curve is linear: the more you go up in the social ladder, the lower honesty is ranked as a major value. White collars and capitalists escape taxes by fraud all the time, but very few end in jail. As recently shown, the IRS is more devoted to track the poor's fraud. It's the same in Europe. Luxemburg lives thanks to fiscal fraud of EU's firms.
Success ranks very high in the upper classes. Hence the self-help. People feel they are failure if they are not at least millionaires at 30. So they make do by picking up "methods" or set of tricks to get there. Or they get depressed.
Note also how often psychedelic products are mentioned as the panacea for depression. It is a very promising field (I can tell by experience and more and more scientific papers confirm it).
But it's often the immediate result that is researched. Gob some mushrooms, feel better, go back to the billionaire game... and back to depression a few weeks or months afterwards.
One need therapy to really get out if depression (or burn-out). If you feel the constant urge to be always more productive, maybe it's that surge that needs to be interrogated.
It doesn't mean to never try a method that you read about to be more this or that. Why not? Improving oneself is good. Just keep the whole picture in mind, eg be mindful of what you are looking for. Basic common sense that I myself forgot many times.