The Selfish World Of Self Help

“Go where you are celebrated and appreciated”, and other BS like this

I was listening to a local radio show recently about a girl who sent in a letter asking for advice from the radio hosts.

She was in a relationship with a married man who had 2 children with his wife. The man had been very clear about this but she persisted that she was fine being a “side-dish” (the term normally used here) because she loved him.

As with any relationship, their secret relationship hit some trying times and the man had to break it up.

She didn’t want anything to do with the man after that but she also wanted to wreck his marriage by telling his wife about the relationship.

Her request polarised not only the hosts but also many who called in to give her advice. Some were against the idea of whistleblowing while others were for it and both sides had very strong opinions about their stand.

Even in this very tough division, what united them was the belief that their advice would help her mental wellbeing.

Some women said that she needed to do it because girls need to stick together and punish men who do such things to them. They told her that she needed to do it so that she could feel at peace knowing that he is not lying to his wife because she would have left him too.

Most men were obviously against the idea saying that she needed to let it go for her own peace of mind.

Both groups agreed on the fact that this lady needed to get her peace of mind back. They just didn’t agree on what was the suitable course of action to do just that.

This is basically how self-help is.

The foundations of self-help are weakened by the rotten stilts of narcissistic endeavors. All pursuits are about chasing a feeling of some “everlasting good”. The very good we know is unlikely to exist in an absolute sense — at least not in our world of constant opposites.

People flock to the world of self-help in search of answers to selfish desires.

Our pursuit is only worthwhile if there is something in it for us. Selfless pursuits are left for the seekers of self-actualization. The funny bit is that even in selfless pursuits, those too are done for selfish ends albeit in a delusionary enlightened manner.

We always flock to what feels good, hardly caring, if ever, about how these pursuits are hurting other people. The cheating couple was chasing individual pleasure, not considering how those actions were not only hurting the other but also people who were not in on the affair.

It is a version of self-help too in the sense that they are helping themselves to the temporary pleasure that the affair gives them.

In the normal self-help world that has to do with our relationships with other people, people are always helping themselves to pleasures such as mental well-being that they seek often not considering how those pleasures hurt other people.

When two people are interacting with one another, there is no way of guaranteeing that their actions and words mean something universal to everybody — Especially now that the world is more globally linked and we are interacting with so many different cultures and beliefs.

This is why I hate listicles about relationships. It is very hard to know what things mean for sure when two people are in contact with one another.

We all have insecurities that we are constantly dealing with, and some are better managed than others.

There are some people in my life that I deeply appreciate and celebrate yet I rarely talk to them, for some of them, we have never physically met as we are relatively new in each other’s lives, others were once friends that I have spent years without speaking to. And this is not a cry for help but rather one of the countless realities you will not find in a half-arsed listicle.

When people get into relationships with others, they expect them to be defined and follow a script of conventionality. For most people, the relationship must be labeled as either romance or platonic love.

The in-betweens always cause conflict. If I’m your “friend”, it almost always feels like I’ve signed a mental memorandum of understanding that I cannot develop romantic feelings for you later on. Should that happen, then the entire friendship is considered violated and manipulative.

Therefore, instead of people taking time to know each other, we close our eyes, cross our fingers and go on dates with strangers hoping to establish romance from the beginning. We are introduced to all the smiles, and young relationship energy that we think is magical and we force ourselves to believe that it will never die.

When we are introduced to the inevitable normal of both the good and bad, we are often head over heels in love with each other based on a fictitious “good” that we were initially introduced to. The inevitable reality presents the un-rosy bits of dealing with the person we “love”, and we don’t know how to deal with that.

So we flock to self-help, which tells us that we need to go where we are celebrated and appreciated. Since the current relationship is not doing it for us, we break it off and move on, leaving each other with unresolved feelings and traumas.

The very quest for appreciation and validation keeps piling us with trauma after trauma as we get exposed to the dual reality we don’t want to believe.

Falling in love is very easy. Even the hard parts about it are equally as exciting. I know for instance that I have a tough time speaking to people I really like, but when speaking to them, that doesn’t mean I don’t find that exchange really exciting. It always ends living me with a desire for more.

But the true character and nature of a relationship will always be tested during both the good and bad times.

In a very beautiful poem that my friend sent me a while back, there is a line that says…

…No one walks into a storm, even for love….

That line spoke so much truth as to the selfish reality with which we navigate our relationships. In the poem, the writer states that when people ask whether you are ok, they are asking about your body, no one asks after your soul…

And it is true as people are often after shallow desires in relationships with others. No wonder we cannot walk into storms for those we think we love.

Self-help quickly clouds our judgments by prioritizing our well-being, the irony being that this very well-being we try to prioritize is not only selfish but also hurts us even deeper.

There is a reason why “A walk to remember” is my favorite movie of all time.

While some people might find it cheesy, it was the movie that first made an impression on my young mind. It is also the movie that to this day still has a strong message on how prioritizing not just ourselves but the relationships of others as well, is always hard, and can cause us tremendous discomfort in the short term but it ultimately builds our character and makes us have a satisfactory life experience.

These feelings of shallow desires that we chase from other people are fleeting. You can actually delude yourself and get them from just about anyone as an object of your desire. When we prioritize them, they hurt us. They hurt us and send us down a life of regret and unhappiness.

What makes great relationships with people is not the sunset and rose memories alone but also the tribulations that we overcome, the lessons we need to learn, habits we need to unlearn, and so on.

If those North Carolina teens (Landon and Jamie) had not been willing to be patient and tolerate each other's flaws, it would have just been one of the countless fuck boy type situations.

Instead of looking for where you are appreciated and celebrated, appreciate and celebrate someone instead. And let that appreciation and celebration be unconditionally so.

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