7 ms·

The lost hope of self-help

53 points by samclemens 11y ago

mbrock 11y ago
This is becoming a common theme in critique of "self-help." See also the charge against the mindfulness movement that it neglects the allegedly important ethical principles of the religious context of its origins. I think the reason these critiques don't really work is that they aim at symptomatic expressions and look past the difficult cultural problems at the root... which is kind of ironic, it seems to me. Alisdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, the 1981 "revival" of virtue ethics, is quite relevant. He starts by asking why discussions of ethics today end up as mere clashing subjective claim-making and position-taking, and he traces that back to the "failure of the Enlightenment project of justifying morality." Then he goes on to advocate an Aristotelian view of virtue as excellence in the context of life narratives within traditions and societies. So the fact that people don't seek out ethical advice to personal problems might itself be a symptom of deeper cultural changes. For an anecdotal example, I never have an obligation to report to a boss by 10AM, because I work for companies that don't have such structures. I have a hunch that most people who tend to read self-help books about habits work in such unstructured situations.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- themodelplumber 11y ago
  > I have a hunch that most people who tend to read self-help books about habits work in such unstructured situations. Yes. I do this and am self-employed. I developed a measurement spreadsheet for daily/weekly satisfaction and eventually figured out a good way to keep negative outcomes in check. A lot of it involves being very protective of my time and forcing balance into every day. I also used to teach artists and the really high-end artists always laughed and said they were very organized, contrary to society's expectations of them.
ff_ 11y ago
TL;DR: 'habits books' market is huge. Then the author goes through a looong comparison in the recent literature and sums up what every author says. Conclusion: differently from the past, in modern times there isn't basically any moralising tendency when teaching about breaking habits, and this is worrying for the development of society, or maybe not.
- edem 11y ago
  Thanks for not making me read 10 pages of wall of text.
  - talles 11y ago
    Maybe you have your reasons, but I'm glad I did. For me, a long reading about an abstract thing such as habit is all about going philosophical while reading it. To wonder about it in other words. You can't get that with a TLDR. TLDRs are great for filtering what it's worth reading or not (maybe that's your reason), but I would never just stop it there if it's a subject that I hold interest in.
    - edem 11y ago
      I've read a lot about habits lately and I just wanted to know whether this is new information for me or not. It turned out that it is the latter in this case, thus my comment.
  - platz 11y ago
    > wall of text There used to be thing called `literature`. Not everything has to be a 10-second sound-byte #TLDR.
- amykhar 11y ago
  I agree that it is quite long, but if you are interested in these types of books at all, skimming it yields some interesting stuff on habits as virtue. I confess I enjoy seeing how successful people strive to improve themselves.
- 11y ago
nefitty 11y ago
I see a distinct difference between habits like smoking, a choice which doesn't make a person bad or good but affects their life in practical ways, and habits like charitable giving, which do have repercussions in terms of that person's moral character. There is a spectrum of morality that we each inhabit, our place on it not necessarily affecting our effectiveness in life. At the extreme ends, like being a psychopathic killer on the bad end, or being a person who surrenders the entirety of their surplus time and resources toward charitable causes at the good end, does have a major practical effect on an individual's effectiveness in life. This moral spectrum is a bell curve, with most of us falling toward the middle, wherein morality plays almost no significant part in our life. A person can live their whole life without ever flirting with the edges of this curve, and still be a well-adjusted member of Western society. The crux here is that in a rationally-minded, secular culture, those moral habits become idiosyncratic choices, pursued by each individual within the context of their community. When a person steps up into a cosmopolitan, world-citizen mindset, relative morality suddenly seems like a massive failure on humanity's part. Some then don the drapery of the moral absolutist, either searching for or consciously choosing a moral lens with which to view the world. If my comments above mean to convey anything at all, it's mainly that the planet is slowly becoming one community. Habits like being punctual, following traffic laws, eating a healthy diet, don't necessarily need to have a moral aspect. They simply need to help the individual fulfill a functional role in this interconnected world. That individual may also coincidentally discover another dimension to their behavior, the moral axis, but that plane is much more open to interpretation and less easily measured(tracking being an overarching fetish in the self-help world). I can tell you how punctual you are by looking at your timesheet, but I can't objectively tell you how good you are by measuring how many thank-you notes you wrote this year. I think it is disingenuous to expect the self-help industry to tackle the moral aspect of behavior and expect it to succeed in any meaningful way. I would love to see that book written, in a non-alienating, non-judgemental tone, but I suspect it an impossible deed, an idealistic fool's errand even.
- mbrock 11y ago
  I don't know of any other forums to discuss this stuff, other than philosophy seminars that I'm not invited to, so... what do you think about this? The polarity between relativism and absolutism in morality is going to end up totally irrelevant, since it leads to nothing but squabbles and more confusion. It's not a productive way forward to try to decide which of those extremes is best, because they each have irreconcilable stances, and they both ultimately come down to arbitrary decision (either "because I feel this way" or "because the ultimate ineffable authority says so"). Even the new school of quasi-objective morality, á la Sam Harris, seems to fail to be convincing, inspiring, or even as rational as it wants to be. I think a realistic approach to morality should start with the question of what people actually care about. What values exist, in the actual society that I could conceivably influence? How does a person become respected, what motivates people, what appeals are possible? I have no influence over, say, Saudi Arabian Islam, except for maybe through some secular channels... Actually, the recent article about the global appeal of metal music was interesting. If there is any ethical content in the metal community, which I hypothesize that there is, then it could end up being a kind of covert channel for values... I'm reminded of the story of the Velvet Revolution, which ended Communist Party rule in Czechoslovakia without violence... and which was rooted in a story that involves The Plastic People of the Universe, an obscure experimental rock band inspired by the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, and Captain Beefheart. > "The Plastic People were ultimately a major catalyst to the overthrow of communism in Eastern Europe. History would most surely have been very different without them." http://www.furious.com/perfect/pulnoc.html http://www.furious.com/perfect/pulnoc.html Um, I'm heading for work and don't have time to think up a coherent way to end this. But a lot of my thinking is influenced by Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Just one more random speculation: the focus on "habits" subtly inforces a morality of stability. People who emphasize habits probably aren't going to say that the primary ethical injunction is to dismantle the existing structures of oppression. And you could argue that self-help, including mindfulness and much of psychology and psychiatry, has a stabilizing function within the capitalist system of labor.
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
I wanted to like this. I liked the review of the history of habit-improvement thinking. The problem is that I felt we wandered too far afield in historical trivia not supported by the thesis, which although it was repeated at the top and bottom of the essay, could have used a lot of support in the rest of it. It's fun riding around in a bus looking at cool sights. But an essay gives us a destination. The sights we see are part of a journey from where we started to our goal, proceeding in some kind of self-consistent narrative order. This felt more like riding around in a tour bus where the guide calls out one random piece of trivia after another. Having said that -- and I realize it was harsh -- I could see the structure. It was in there. The author just needed to turn up the contrast a bit.
- talles 11y ago
  Yeah, I felt that too. The citations are very interesting but they don't hold up together, the author don't go anywhere. But for me the Principles of Psychology excerpt alone made it worth reading.
blorgle 11y ago
I have been an avid reader since a young age and around the time I turned 15 I discovered and quickly became scornful of self help books. However, one self help book which I recently discovered and completely changed my life is "Rewire your brain" (ISBN: 0470487291) which offers explanations of many things from a neuroscience perspective and includes some practical anecdotes etc. I would recommend it to essentially anyone, and all I could think while reading it was "why is this book not mandatory reading for all humans?". FWIW.
meesterdude 11y ago
It has been a long long time since I felt any article from HN was worth saving for later. The last one was what netflix does to debug a server. Also been a while since I commented. The good: I've never seen habits bathed in the light of morals before. For me at least, it has resonated. It's also an interesting exploration of the history, and how it's changed in tone. The bad: It's a bit lengthy, and some of the more obscure references seemed unnecessary in delivering the message, and only served to quench the thirst of academics. Still, if its at all a topic of interest or relevance, it's by no means garbage or fictionary; and I certainly derived value from it.
jokoon 11y ago
I'm currently doing a Behavioral Cognitive Therapy with a psychiatrist. Usual rule of thumb: let a professional, which holds enough scientific baggage, and a trained eye, help you for this. Psychology is already quite shallow as a science, so I wouldn't use a book.
- mobiuscog 11y ago
  How do you know that the professional is interested in helping you rather than regular money ? Perhaps a cynical question, but perhaps one reason why the less expensive book route may be oft considered ? With everyone advertising to solve your problems, how do you decide who to trust ?
  - jokoon 11y ago
    Well I'd agree to buy a book that is thorough in its science, but how do you really know its science is good enough? Same problem. Should I extensively read scientific literature on the subject, or should I just read books that are close to being mumbo jumbo, since it's aimed to be read by non scientists? A psychiatrist is someone who had extensive education in psychology and medicine, who I can talk to. That's a little easier to sense things when you're face to face with somebody. It's much easier that way, just like it's easier to learn a complicated subject by asking questions instead of reading many books. I guess you're right, I could read a book on the subject, but I'm a little skeptic...

53 points by samclemens 11y ago

This is becoming a common theme in critique of "self-help." See also the charge against the mindfulness movement that it neglects the allegedly important ethical principles of the religious context of its origins. I think the reason these critiques don't really work is that they aim at symptomatic expressions and look past the difficult cultural problems at the root... which is kind of ironic, it seems to me. Alisdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, the 1981 "revival" of virtue ethics, is quite relevant. He starts by asking why discussions of ethics today end up as mere clashing subjective claim-making and position-taking, and he traces that back to the "failure of the Enlightenment project of justifying morality." Then he goes on to advocate an Aristotelian view of virtue as excellence in the context of life narratives within traditions and societies. So the fact that people don't seek out ethical advice to personal problems might itself be a symptom of deeper cultural changes. For an anecdotal example, I never have an obligation to report to a boss by 10AM, because I work for companies that don't have such structures. I have a hunch that most people who tend to read self-help books about habits work in such unstructured situations.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
themodelplumber 11y ago
> I have a hunch that most people who tend to read self-help books about habits work in such unstructured situations. Yes. I do this and am self-employed. I developed a measurement spreadsheet for daily/weekly satisfaction and eventually figured out a good way to keep negative outcomes in check. A lot of it involves being very protective of my time and forcing balance into every day. I also used to teach artists and the really high-end artists always laughed and said they were very organized, contrary to society's expectations of them.

ff_ 11y ago

TL;DR: 'habits books' market is huge. Then the author goes through a looong comparison in the recent literature and sums up what every author says. Conclusion: differently from the past, in modern times there isn't basically any moralising tendency when teaching about breaking habits, and this is worrying for the development of society, or maybe not.

edem 11y ago
Thanks for not making me read 10 pages of wall of text.
- talles 11y ago
  Maybe you have your reasons, but I'm glad I did. For me, a long reading about an abstract thing such as habit is all about going philosophical while reading it. To wonder about it in other words. You can't get that with a TLDR. TLDRs are great for filtering what it's worth reading or not (maybe that's your reason), but I would never just stop it there if it's a subject that I hold interest in.
  - edem 11y ago
    I've read a lot about habits lately and I just wanted to know whether this is new information for me or not. It turned out that it is the latter in this case, thus my comment.
- platz 11y ago
  > wall of text There used to be thing called `literature`. Not everything has to be a 10-second sound-byte #TLDR.
amykhar 11y ago
I agree that it is quite long, but if you are interested in these types of books at all, skimming it yields some interesting stuff on habits as virtue. I confess I enjoy seeing how successful people strive to improve themselves.
11y ago

nefitty 11y ago

I see a distinct difference between habits like smoking, a choice which doesn't make a person bad or good but affects their life in practical ways, and habits like charitable giving, which do have repercussions in terms of that person's moral character. There is a spectrum of morality that we each inhabit, our place on it not necessarily affecting our effectiveness in life. At the extreme ends, like being a psychopathic killer on the bad end, or being a person who surrenders the entirety of their surplus time and resources toward charitable causes at the good end, does have a major practical effect on an individual's effectiveness in life. This moral spectrum is a bell curve, with most of us falling toward the middle, wherein morality plays almost no significant part in our life. A person can live their whole life without ever flirting with the edges of this curve, and still be a well-adjusted member of Western society. The crux here is that in a rationally-minded, secular culture, those moral habits become idiosyncratic choices, pursued by each individual within the context of their community. When a person steps up into a cosmopolitan, world-citizen mindset, relative morality suddenly seems like a massive failure on humanity's part. Some then don the drapery of the moral absolutist, either searching for or consciously choosing a moral lens with which to view the world. If my comments above mean to convey anything at all, it's mainly that the planet is slowly becoming one community. Habits like being punctual, following traffic laws, eating a healthy diet, don't necessarily need to have a moral aspect. They simply need to help the individual fulfill a functional role in this interconnected world. That individual may also coincidentally discover another dimension to their behavior, the moral axis, but that plane is much more open to interpretation and less easily measured(tracking being an overarching fetish in the self-help world). I can tell you how punctual you are by looking at your timesheet, but I can't objectively tell you how good you are by measuring how many thank-you notes you wrote this year. I think it is disingenuous to expect the self-help industry to tackle the moral aspect of behavior and expect it to succeed in any meaningful way. I would love to see that book written, in a non-alienating, non-judgemental tone, but I suspect it an impossible deed, an idealistic fool's errand even.

mbrock 11y ago
I don't know of any other forums to discuss this stuff, other than philosophy seminars that I'm not invited to, so... what do you think about this? The polarity between relativism and absolutism in morality is going to end up totally irrelevant, since it leads to nothing but squabbles and more confusion. It's not a productive way forward to try to decide which of those extremes is best, because they each have irreconcilable stances, and they both ultimately come down to arbitrary decision (either "because I feel this way" or "because the ultimate ineffable authority says so"). Even the new school of quasi-objective morality, á la Sam Harris, seems to fail to be convincing, inspiring, or even as rational as it wants to be. I think a realistic approach to morality should start with the question of what people actually care about. What values exist, in the actual society that I could conceivably influence? How does a person become respected, what motivates people, what appeals are possible? I have no influence over, say, Saudi Arabian Islam, except for maybe through some secular channels... Actually, the recent article about the global appeal of metal music was interesting. If there is any ethical content in the metal community, which I hypothesize that there is, then it could end up being a kind of covert channel for values... I'm reminded of the story of the Velvet Revolution, which ended Communist Party rule in Czechoslovakia without violence... and which was rooted in a story that involves The Plastic People of the Universe, an obscure experimental rock band inspired by the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, and Captain Beefheart. > "The Plastic People were ultimately a major catalyst to the overthrow of communism in Eastern Europe. History would most surely have been very different without them." http://www.furious.com/perfect/pulnoc.html http://www.furious.com/perfect/pulnoc.html Um, I'm heading for work and don't have time to think up a coherent way to end this. But a lot of my thinking is influenced by Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Just one more random speculation: the focus on "habits" subtly inforces a morality of stability. People who emphasize habits probably aren't going to say that the primary ethical injunction is to dismantle the existing structures of oppression. And you could argue that self-help, including mindfulness and much of psychology and psychiatry, has a stabilizing function within the capitalist system of labor.

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

I wanted to like this. I liked the review of the history of habit-improvement thinking. The problem is that I felt we wandered too far afield in historical trivia not supported by the thesis, which although it was repeated at the top and bottom of the essay, could have used a lot of support in the rest of it. It's fun riding around in a bus looking at cool sights. But an essay gives us a destination. The sights we see are part of a journey from where we started to our goal, proceeding in some kind of self-consistent narrative order. This felt more like riding around in a tour bus where the guide calls out one random piece of trivia after another. Having said that -- and I realize it was harsh -- I could see the structure. It was in there. The author just needed to turn up the contrast a bit.

talles 11y ago
Yeah, I felt that too. The citations are very interesting but they don't hold up together, the author don't go anywhere. But for me the Principles of Psychology excerpt alone made it worth reading.

blorgle 11y ago

I have been an avid reader since a young age and around the time I turned 15 I discovered and quickly became scornful of self help books. However, one self help book which I recently discovered and completely changed my life is "Rewire your brain" (ISBN: 0470487291) which offers explanations of many things from a neuroscience perspective and includes some practical anecdotes etc. I would recommend it to essentially anyone, and all I could think while reading it was "why is this book not mandatory reading for all humans?". FWIW.

meesterdude 11y ago

It has been a long long time since I felt any article from HN was worth saving for later. The last one was what netflix does to debug a server. Also been a while since I commented. The good: I've never seen habits bathed in the light of morals before. For me at least, it has resonated. It's also an interesting exploration of the history, and how it's changed in tone. The bad: It's a bit lengthy, and some of the more obscure references seemed unnecessary in delivering the message, and only served to quench the thirst of academics. Still, if its at all a topic of interest or relevance, it's by no means garbage or fictionary; and I certainly derived value from it.

jokoon 11y ago

I'm currently doing a Behavioral Cognitive Therapy with a psychiatrist. Usual rule of thumb: let a professional, which holds enough scientific baggage, and a trained eye, help you for this. Psychology is already quite shallow as a science, so I wouldn't use a book.

mobiuscog 11y ago
How do you know that the professional is interested in helping you rather than regular money ? Perhaps a cynical question, but perhaps one reason why the less expensive book route may be oft considered ? With everyone advertising to solve your problems, how do you decide who to trust ?
- jokoon 11y ago
  Well I'd agree to buy a book that is thorough in its science, but how do you really know its science is good enough? Same problem. Should I extensively read scientific literature on the subject, or should I just read books that are close to being mumbo jumbo, since it's aimed to be read by non scientists? A psychiatrist is someone who had extensive education in psychology and medicine, who I can talk to. That's a little easier to sense things when you're face to face with somebody. It's much easier that way, just like it's easier to learn a complicated subject by asking questions instead of reading many books. I guess you're right, I could read a book on the subject, but I'm a little skeptic...