What Is Self-Help, Anyway?

Back on my existential "Can I talk my shit again?" dreck.

Apr 15, 2024

The ongoing online culture war—outside of being a heavyhanded mechanism for policing manners—is essentially two broad groups of Americans desperate to see their values and mannerisms reflected to them in mass entertainment. In this dynamic, there seems to be a widespread presumption that art should be prescriptive rather than simply observational. Seething and hooting audiences tend to ascribe magisterial intention and control to artists and entertainers, condemning or commending certain books or movies or TV shows or stand-up comedians or even shitposts as though their purpose is didactic. This is definitely a thing for canting middlebrows who can’t be bothered to have an original opinion on anything, who consider every consumer choice to be a demonstration of activism.

Though, I suppose people can’t be entirely blamed for this misapprehension. Confident authority has metastasized to online commentary, becoming the default tone of essays and blogs. To admit to ignorance, uncertainty, or ambivalence is to cede your status atop the thinkfluencer masthead and your market share of the attention economy, allowing the coveted eyeballs and engagement to turn to the next hack whoever is eager to affirm them. This smug, omniscient tone has become endemic while the amount of available information is so numbing. It seems to have a deformative effect on our critical thinking and introspection and willingness to engage with discomforting realities. The easier alternative is to read a 1,000-word thinkpiece that attempts to smush the unwieldy mess of the human condition into a neatly shaped conclusion.

I have no pretensions to any special knowledge. I am just a guy on the internet, rubbernecking the daily nonsense and gawking at the hog-people. More and more, the only things I feel are worth writing about are things I don’t understand, a meditative process where I explore my feelings and expunge some internal monologues in a public-facing diary, and hopefully, some of it is of use or interest.

Performative assuredness falls flat when it is confronted with the more unsettling realities that some problems are insoluble, that life is messy and complicated, and that we’re all clueless and screwed up to varying degrees. More recently, I’ve been on my extremes to avoid lecturing people on what they should think or what specific action they should undertake, partially because the older I get, the less life makes sense to me.

Modern self-help advice essentially distills down to two calls to action, neither of which I—or most writers—are equipped to fix:

What you should think or feel about events or certain topics. I share my personal observations, and yet select readers in passing have responded with wounded outrage when my random ideas fail to validate their own experiences and perspectives — as if I proposed my idle speculation as totalitarian law. I don’t feel the need to tell people what to think because my opinions ultimately don’t matter; they contribute to an entertainment simulacrum that is basically a Chinese finger trap for people to shove their heads inside so they can avoid touching grass.
A solution to what you should do with your life. Writing is art, and while art can profoundly and imaginatively express human conflict, it cannot resolve it. And prescribing action is futile because only the people who you’re connected with can understand your specific context and tell you what is important and what should be prioritized. You can find answers, but only through action and reflection, applying your accumulated lived experiences and wisdom to a feeling, and then following that feeling to another feeling until it creates a chain of emotion and dense social bonds. Real life, at least in my experience, is not rife with epiphanies or A-HA moments that reason you toward enlightenment or epiphanies. Whatever lessons we learn tend to arrive after the fact, contradicted by our next blunder, or are immediately forgotten and have to be relearned.

We are trapped in an undeniably and breathtakingly stupid timeline. While I am generally optimistic about my personal prospects, my outlook on the general trajectory of society is more uncertain; our response to COVID-19 and climate change are all the proof I need that capitalism is a glorified death cult eager to toss a cinderblock on the gas pedal while humanity speeds toward a brick wall. This doesn’t mean I think humanity is necessarily doomed—as conditions change, people’s actions and beliefs will adapt, which means there is always hope and nothing is fixed. But there is a more nihilistic part of me that thinks we’ll all sink and disintegrate into the boiling acidic oceans and the last three Exxon execs will blame others around the campfire while the more unfortunate survivors languish in the ruins. Someone had to be the first human and someone has to be the last, except the last won’t get a say in what happens next. Fortunately, we all wake up and go about our daily routines walking around and subconsciously waiting for death, and at the very least, it’s an enjoyable mindset to have as we pass the time.

Some of us are able to live with the knowledge of the contingency and fragility of life without letting it dictate or distort our actions. The understanding of our own smallness and insignificance arrives at first as an unwelcome prickling disillusionment, but it eventually mellows into a kind of comfort. We all learn, one way or another, to live with the inevitability of our individual deaths, that the extinguishment of our personal universe is not the end of the world, but places us on a continuum.

We began as microcells, yanked from oblivion into consciousness without our consent. We’re given facilities and abilities that are also not within our control, and will either be cursed or blessed based on the whim of genes and geography. We are then set loose into a world where we have a brief span of time to love and be loved and to experience and to think before it’s all snuffed out. This is our unifying human experience. I don’t understand how people can look at someone who didn’t choose to be born, did not choose their facilities and abilities, and condemn them to nothing but pain and torment, and say the “deserving” are entitled to riches and greatness and comfort for things they similarly had no choice or influence in. Those who believe this, of course, are people who achieved the extraordinary magnificence of luck and then ascribe this happenstance into the universe as an immutable Truth.

But there is a balance somewhere between radical acceptance of what is and radical action towards what ought to be.

We have the power to break out of this simulation because we can still love and connect to the world around us and the people in it, which means every day presents a chance to experience transcendence. The key to self-help and finding happiness, at least to me, is eradicating the ego and breaking through the submission to the collective material prima that binds all of us. Live as freely as you can with the knowledge that the number of hugs and kisses and laughs you can have and give others is finite, just as the number of mountains and oceans and beautiful animals you can see. Reach out and connect to others. Radiate love in all things. Approach life with an open heart and the world with a child’s curiosity. Be active physically and mentally in an enriching way. Forgive freely and suspend judgment. Live with as much love radiating outwards as you can muster, and life will only grow brighter. Try not to see the apocalypse in every sunset.

All of this is a meandering, long-winded way of saying all that matters in life is:

How you spend your time.
How you take care of your body.
How you show up for other people.

Although it feels like we’re on the rails and there is a physical determination for all our actions, we also have free will and the ability to think ahead of our situation because our mental processes begin at a quantum space where conventional cause and effect breaks down. Most of our decisions are not life and death, but they’re charged with this fear of losing out on pleasure, losing out on distraction from oblivion. If we can not allow past traumas or present terrors to shape our actions, we can take that quantum time within us and move out of love instead, to move ahead of the billiard ball. Once you do, you will have jumped out of our hypercapitalist Skinner Box (and its attendant internet Demiurge) and into a different reality. You’ll operate in the same physical world, but with another dimension to the experience. You’ll find an emotional hum, an isolated feeling, an empty and quiet room containing imminence and a connection to everything around you as one universal being.

There is no real purpose to this, and there will never be a purpose. The meaning of life is finding your meaning. There is no personal enlightenment, there is personal comfort in understanding that we are floating in an ocean of ignorance. We all take on different purposes, passions, niches, drives, motivations, and pursuits as life and the world evolve. Change is inevitable and progress is intentional. Let life shape you without hardening you. In time, we all find out that we’re not in control. We never were and we never will be. But we are not without power. We will always have the freedom to choose how to respond to the vagaries of life afforded to us—to take a great action of insubordination will guide us toward opportunity, change, and renewal. Time is short and you can’t steer a parked car. As long as you keep moving, you can always change direction.