Self-Help Has Nothing For Those Who Move Back Home
And they really should.
I’ve said it plenty of times already that self-help isn’t the most adaptable. Many gurus at the top of the industry are focusing on selling pills or diets that don’t work or berating victims of abuse while charging them thousands of dollars a year.
That or grifting on the latest trend.
Because of that, obviously there are going to be people slipping through the cracks. We’re already experiencing that already with people who have been emotionally abused or sexually assaulted having to put up with Tony Robbins “healing methods”.
But there is an entire group of individuals that has been completely overlooked by a lot of self-help gurus. These are people living a particular lifestyle that runs counter to the current self-help dream.
I’m talking about people who move back in with their parents. Particularly those in their 40s and 50s.
While I’m not in that age rage, I can certainly relate to that experience. I was in my mid to late 20s and living with my parents then before moving out. I was 27 when I left the nest officially.
But thinking back to what sort of advice is available for those people in that situation, the self-help industry flounders on what kind of advice to give for these people.
In your 20s it’s pretty straightforward advice since your life is basically only now getting started.
But what about your 40s or 50s?
I can only begin to imagine it at this point.
The Peptalk In Your 20s Doesn’t Work
The culture in the West for advice in your 20s is pretty predictable. Get to school, get a good job, get married, have a nice house (or apartment), and expand on your career into your 30s and 40s.
By your 20s, you’re able to get all of those things started in some way shape or form. You can begin working and going to school. You can start dating a little bit and save up money where you can.
When you’re in your 20s, you’re only now starting to experience life and what it has to offer. You got some idea of it, but not the full scope of it. This is the first time you’re actually out on your own and you have to provide for yourself.
So that kind of advice tends to work. It’s easy to look at someone struggling at that age and offer that generic advice.
Money problems? Get a job.
Have no friends? Get out and mingle.
But that sort of thing changes once you get older. Even by your 30s, as I am, you got a sense of what the world is like or turning into. You get a sense of what is bullshit and what is actually helpful.
And that generic advice doesn’t really work all that well.
Sure, getting a job when you have no money or struggling financially is the right thing to do. But if every job pays you terribly anyway, there’s little point. You’re not getting ahead when your minimum wage job (or slightly elevated wage because your boss decided to give you 10 cent increases every few months over several years) can afford you a micro-studio — effectively a mini home.
It only costs half of your monthly wages by the way, if not more.
And that’s before considering all the utilities, internet, gas and food costs.
With prices increasing in all areas, a minimum wage job isn’t exactly sustainable. And if you haven’t gotten any significant raises at your current job, you can find yourself lagging behind.
By your 30s, 40s, and 50s, you know full well that just getting out and hustling more isn’t always the right answer. Yeah it can help, but opening a new income stream is a slow burn and it can have other costs too. Costs that will make this new venture impractical to pursue right now.
Self-Help Focuses On A Specific Narrative
The reality is that rising house costs, stagnating wages, and the rich getting richer aren’t part of the overall narrative of success and happiness. In the self-help world, we like to think we can push past these flaws.
You have self-help gurus screaming at you to make the abusive partner or rapist imagery disappear from your mind forever. Never minding that those things are very traumatic and that sort of rhetoric can make things much worse rather than improve them.
That sort of logic is applied to these sorts of large social issues too. We have rich self-help gurus offering budget advice. There are gurus who still argue that Warren Buffet is an avid coupon cutter and we should be too.
Yeah sure, one of the world’s richest men who paid 0.10% in taxes between 2014 and 2018 was cutting out coupons on the regular and taking the bus — or walking — to the SaveEasy.
But it doesn’t work that way.
When a small group of people hoard a large portion of the wealth of the world, it’s pretty hard for other people to get ahead and build their own wealth. We know that printing more money out into the world doesn’t exactly stimulate the economy. Spending does.
And there’s a small group of people who aren’t spending a lot while holding a significant amount of wealth.
The point is, self-help doesn’t address this. A lot of it is by design as the top earners are making millions in the current system and want to keep it that way. But if self-help is meant to actually help people, then it’s blatantly disregarding the scenario where people find themselves having to move back home due to how the world systematically functions at this point.
We’ve Also Made It Awkward To Talk About It
Between self-help and just social expectation overall, western culture has deemed that this sort of scenario is awkward. I felt this sort of expectation sink in by my 20s.
When you move out, there is this expectation that you’re going to be able to get out there, do your best, and everything is going to work out. Self-help pushes this narrative by again patching some of the rough patches you experience in your life.
There is no shortage of articles that will talk about boosting confidence, asking for a raise, finding a better job, building a side hustle, and overall becoming more independent and in total control over your life. There is this expectation that you’ll run into some roadblocks, fail, but not be entirely screwed over.
You’re able to bounce back or have something you can at least fall back on.
On one side, that sort of thing is comforting. But on the other hand it creates this fear of going back to your parents and living there for years at a time. We treat it like a step backwards and a point of embarrassment about our lives.
It feels like we’re a failure.
It’s because of this overall narrative that we create that also makes it awkward to talk about. We don’t want people to know we’re living at our childhood home or with our parents. It feels like it’s this sinful thing.
Moving back home, at any age, feels like a step backward and oddly the self-help movement is pretty silent about that sort of stuff beyond just hustle culture, self-reflection, and generic advice. Ever focused on where our life is going is a problem that needs solving.
We need to change it.
There have been moments in my life where I’ve thought of returning back home. Some as early as this past summer. What’s helped me is talking to my parents more and more about it. Not necessarily committing to it, but having discussions of possibly moving back.
When we become more and more aware of the global issues that are faced in the world, traditional tactics don’t really work all that well. Starting up a side hustle through the gig economy is a reasonable idea, but when everything is controlled by a middle man who can control your performance in the industry, it’s hard to have reliability in that.
And getting a second job some place in town will eat into more of your time. Working two full-time jobs or 80 hour work weeks isn’t sustainable for the average person.
What this calls for in the end is to go with some untraditional advice in self-help. The advice that isn’t always mentioned as a possible option. Because so often I find that some of the things that aren’t talked much about or addressed is actually a fantastic opportunity.
And it can be the spark to an exciting and growth-inducing chapter.
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