The Surprising Truth of Why We Are Drawn to Self-Help

And Why it Doesn’t Actually Help

Stepping into my friend’s apartment was like entering a batter of sophistication meets simplicity. High white ceilings, minimalist furniture. However, it was the secondhand bookshelf that got my attention. Stacked with probably over 200 books, meticulously organized by genre. Academic tomes lined one section, reflecting her work interest. And then there was the self-help section, practically daring me to transform myself into my best version right there — just by staring at it. Who knew enlightenment needed so much paper?

The self-help book market has been a huge segment of the publishing industry for many years, with millions of titles sold every year and its market worth billions of dollars annually.

Why is it that we are so interested in self-help? And why is it that we consume vast amounts of it while research shows that overall happiness doesn’t increase? Shouldn’t we all be living our best lives by now?

As with any multi-faceted question, there is no easy answer. But there are better and worse explanations. I have a pretty good one.

The role of outdated philosophies

The way we live our everyday life, how we eat, what we care about, which partner we choose, how we spend time with friends, how we manage people, what good causes we support, what decisions we make in the workplace, but also how we design our technology and infrastructures, such as our streets, all of that depends on the philosophy we live by.

Philosophies shape our lives in ways that we are often oblivious to. They make us into who we are. We don’t consciously choose which philosophy we want to live by. Instead, we adopt it from our parents and our surroundings, the culture we are part of, our friends, movies, and social media.

Sometimes, those adapted philosophies bring us through life just fine. They let us be exactly who we want to be and match our experience of what life is like. If that’s you, you likely have never read a single self-help book. And likely, you wouldn’t be reading this article.

“In one sense philosophy does nothing. It merely satisfies the entirely impractical craving to probe and adjust ideas which have been found adequate each in its special sphere of use. In the same way the ocean tides do nothing. Twice daily they beat upon the cliffs of continents and then retire. But have patience and look deeper; and you find that in the end whole continents of thought have been submerged by philosophic tides, and have been rebuilt in the depths awaiting emergence. The fate of humanity depends upon the ultimate continental faith by which it shapes its action, and this faith is in the end shaped by philosophy.” Alfred North Whitehead

Yet, for many, the philosophies inherited from our upbringing fail to guide us toward where and who we want to be.

The problem is that the dominant philosophy that we have been growing up with is based on a very limited understanding of the world. This philosophy sees the world as a machine, where everything can be broken down into individual components and optimized for efficiency.

This philosophy emerged during the Enlightenment period, or the Age of Reason, during the 18th century and significantly shifted how people conceptualized the world and its workings. This philosophical perspective, heavily influenced by thinkers such as René Descartes, Isaac Newton, and Francis Bacon, viewed the universe as a vast machine governed by fixed laws and principles. This philosophy emphasizes that all natural phenomena can be explained in terms of mechanical causes and effects without the need for supernatural or divine explanations. It brought us technological innovations. It also brought us the idea that only the fittest will survive, as well as the notion that success is the accumulation of money and status and that we are lone and separate individuals.

For many of us, this dominant philosophy is insufficient to live a good life in times of climate change, species extinction, ocean acidification, and social inequality. It neither helps us solve the most pressing challenges of our time nor does it help us to live a good life.

And because of that, we are drawn to self-help. What we are actually looking for is a philosophy to live by. What we mostly get from self-help literature, though, is bits and pieces that don’t seem to work. And that’s why we need to consume more and more self-help, hoping that the next one will fix us. Likely, it won’t.

Pieces of a good life

Classic self-help can’t. Because it is grounded in the very same philosophy that has caused us to even reach for self-help in the first place: a mechanistic philosophy that thinks the world into pieces. And this is how the advice that we find is offered. A piece of information without all the complexities that actually make you you and that make your life what it is. It is always already incomplete. It doesn’t change what lies beneath and what might actually have leverage to change things: your philosophy.

The systems scientist Donella Meadows analyzed the best place to intervene in a system to change it. And as the most significant leverage point, she declared that our paradigms — or philosophies — offer the greatest leverage.

“Every nation and every man instantly surround themselves with a material apparatus which exactly corresponds to … their state of thought. Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man’s mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers. Observe the ideas of the present day … see how timber, brick, lime, and stone have flown into convenient shape, obedient to the master idea reigning in the minds of many persons…. It follows, of course, that the least enlargement of ideas … would cause the most striking changes of external things.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

When we run from one self-help book to the next without challenging our underlying assumptions, beliefs, and values about the world, we will get the same old. Or makes things even worse.

The self-help market, which promotes personal fulfillment and success in the form of monetary and material abundance without consideration for the social and ecological inequality this brings with it, has brought forth more narcissistic behavior than any planet can handle.

We are missing a good philosophy to live by. And we look in all the wrong places to find it.

While having principles is part of a philosophy, and those principles are what we often find in self-help, those principles are also insufficient if they are not grounded in a wholesome philosophy.

A good philosophy

So what makes a philosophy:

• a cosmology: a perspective about the nature of the universe, its origin, structure, and evolution.
• an ontology: a perspective of the nature of being, existence, and reality.
• an epistemology: a perspective on what knowledge is (e.g., are spiritual experiences a valid form of knowing)
• ethics: a perspective on what’s good and bad
• an axiology: a perspective on what is the good life
• an anthropology: a perspective on what it means to be human and human’s role in the universe
• a social imaginary: a perspective about how society should be organized.
• and áskesis: which simply means ‘exercise’ or ‘training’ in ancient Greek.

What you’d want to do then, instead of mindlessly grasping for the next self-help book, is to build your own philosophy. Likely, this philosophy is not going to be mechanistic but — as many recently argue — relational. Relational philosophies emphasize the interconnectedness, interdependence, and relational nature of reality, knowledge, and existence. At their core, relational philosophies challenge traditional philosophical dualisms and reductionist perspectives by highlighting the dynamic relationships and interactions between entities, concepts, and phenomena. They align with many indigenous ways of thinking, knowing, and being, as well as with the latest advancements in quantum mechanics and complex systems. But more about that another time.

You also want your philosophy to be practical. That means that you don’t just want to hold the perspectives and ideas but actually practice living them on a day-to-day basis. Your life becomes a philosophical practice (áskesis).

If all this seems like a lot. It is. It is also the only real way to change yourself and society at large. The dominant mechanistic philosophy — as many wonderful things of comfort and technology as it has brought us — is outdated and doesn’t match our needs anymore. It’s up to us, to consciously choose what we want our following dominant philosophy to be.

If you enjoyed reading this and want to practice living better in the Anthropocene, make sure to grab a copy of my short ebook “From Self to Systems: Understanding Individual Impact in the Anthropocene.”