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Our Selves Can Only Improve So Much
The human mind isn’t built to accommodate all the promises of self-help
In a way, watching self-help go mainstream over the past several years — as buzzwords like self-care, mindfulness, and productivity exploded in popularity — felt like my own hipster moment: something I liked before it was cool. I’ve been reading self-help literature since I was a kid, when I first stumbled on my stepdad’s collection of Zig Ziglar and Tony Robbins books.
Even at an age way below those books’ target audience, I was drawn to their optimism, the hopeful message they contained: If I wanted to live a rich, powerful, happy life, I could do it. As a kid, with the whole future stretched out ahead, it was a compelling promise. As I got older, it became even more so — in some ways, growing up is a continual shutting of doors, but here was a whole genre to remind me that getting to my ideal life was fully within my control.
One catch: It’s a promise that the human psyche isn’t built to accommodate.
A few months ago, at the start of Covid-19, we were inundated with advice about how to use our time in quarantine for self-improvement — and then, soon after, with the arguments that a global pandemic was not the time for that kind of effort. But still, baked into the backlash was agreement…
