The End of Self-Help

There’s a moment in each of our childhoods when we become clearly aware, if only briefly, of what we lack in life and what we want most. I, for example, knew from an early age that I was insecure; but I also knew that if other people liked me and said I was cool, it would be like Round-Up to my insecurities. The good opinions of others would cause my low self-esteem to whither.

These are the two truths I have lived most of my life with, and they reached a fever pitch in high school. I was a new student in a small private school my freshman year. It was a fresh chance at becoming popular. I did somehow manage to befriend most of my class and make a favorable name for myself. But two years into this private project, awareness of my insecurities deepened. I still didn’t like myself.

A friend of mine at the time, upon me confessing all of this to her, told me her secret remedy: Look yourself in the mirror everyday and say whatever it is you wish you were. Say “I am smart,” or “I am good-looking,” until you believe it.

She was being a good friend, trying to pull me out of myself. Even still, her advice didn’t help. Rather, I felt worse, for the reflection I saw in the mirror, after I had told it how popular and good-looking it was, seemed even more pitiful for not believing what it heard.

I think our culture would applaud my friend’s advice. Indeed, we seem to treat any personal problems as things we can speak or think out of existence. We live in the age of self-help, after all, where the industry is worth billions and its most cherished denizens— Tony Robbins, Deepak Chopra and the like — are legitimate celebrities.  

Looking back, I see that my friend made an assumption about my low self-esteem, which is to say she made an assumption about the nature of the self as well. She thought my self-esteem was separate from me, and thus could be overcome by me through willpower. This is the main assumption of all forms of self-help or self-improvement. Our problems are like zits we can pop.

There are two problems with this logic. The first is this: The self cannot help itself because it is the problem. Laziness, depression and anger are, in my view, not like the weather, which happens to us without our say so. Rather, they are the fruits of the self, which is to say that they are the clearest indicators of our inherently imperfect natures.

If this is truly the case, then self-help is doomed from the start. Though we, as people, can overcome many problems by our own volition, we cannot overcome ourselves, and thus our self-improvement is an eternal game of Whack-A-Mole. You have to pull the roots out of the soil if you want to kill a weed. Self-help, however, only trims, it does not uproot.  

The second problem with the self-help logic is that it assumes it knows what the self is and how to fix it. A couple years ago, I read a spectacular book entitled “Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book” by Walker Percy, which highlights this problem. Percy’s main premise is this: Though we know plenty of the world we live in, we know nothing about ourselves. Why is it, he asks, that we can look up into the night sky with our telescopes, find the planet Jupiter, skim through our Encyclopedia to the letter J and, in a matter of minutes, learn all there is to know about Jupiter and its 79 moons, but cannot mimic this process with ourselves? Why can we not be known in the same way?

The fact is that we are the most mysterious beings in the cosmos. Think of how many self-help books there are, how many gurus, each of which constructs a different ladder out of your problems. Nobody really understands what the self is. How then can we say what it needs?

To Percy, this is the saving realization. And I fully agree with him. St. Paul once said that if anyone should become wise, he must first become a fool. If we, then, are to truly help ourselves, I think we must first concede that we cannot be helped.

Scott Stinson is a UF English senior. His column appears on Mondays.