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Exercise holds a weird place in my life. Every time I finish a workout, I’m usually mad at myself. “What do you mean I feel better after doing it?”
The same goes for “I can’t believe science worked!” “I can’t believe this silly self-help book did change my life”, and the bane of all twenty-somethings: “I can’t believe my parents were right!”
In a recent video, I explored these suspicious attitudes commonly found in younger people like us. Platitudes don’t work in our generation. We see hidden intentions everywhere and believe capitalism is coming to get us. This translates to poo-pooing a field that consists of 70% platitude and 30% money advice: self-help.
Though recent data indicated that 60% of Gen-Zs have reported that they started reading self-help books when they were 10, around 81% are convinced that they could write a better one than the ones they’re reading. The conclusion? Us Gen-Zs tend to believe that we’re able to see past the BS boomers and millennials believe in. We believe we have a better and more critical perspective because times are different now, Dad.
My journey roughly followed this trajectory. I started stealing from my dad’s shelf full of business/self-help books when I was 13 and stopped reading them when I turned 19 and went to university.
With a liberal arts education, I was convinced that the entire self-help space was a giant scam with books filled with nothing but dramatized common sense. In other words, I believed that self-help wouldn’t help me.
As my readings got more and more obscure in university, I started judging people who were reading the latest Ryan Holiday on the train. And eventually, this turned into judging anyone who cared about all the practical shit. Then all of this changed, however, when I graduated in 2023.
During my six months off before honours year, I planned a trip to France and quickly realized that Spinoza didn’t land me the cheapest plane tickets and Derrida left me in the dark when I tried to renew my passport. Where did I find the solutions to these problems? All the travel blogs I poo-pooed just a few years ago.
After France, I swallowed my pride and returned to all the personal development books I thought I had mastered when I was 13. This time, everything changed.
What used to be thought experiments for a 13-year-old me turned into solutions I desperately needed as a twenty-something. Unlike university, action was everything and I kept getting mad at myself: what do you mean self-help works?
Here’s my conclusion: as young people, we live in abstractions because we don’t have life experience. So, when we demand the abstract from something designed to be practical, of course, self-help sounds like dramatized common sense.
But later on, when life gets in the way (I’m snacking too much at 2 am, I need to save money, I need to exercise regularly), self-help is then contextualized under specific circumstances, giving you a playbook for action. Intellectualizing these action steps is usually counterproductive since life experience usually fills in our early abstractions.
On the other hand, if you find yourself craving for a deeper understanding, do go beyond self-help to the original research in philosophy, psychology and economics. Just remember that action/theory are both valuable, and you’re not at all above either. Realizing this saved me a lot of time and agony.
I'm more of a practical person as i tend to understand the abstract through concrete examples.
Self-help books can help to express the abstract in a more concrete manner. It can inspire to go deeper. It can also give the vocabluary to express oneself better to others, thus increasing the chance that the other understand what one is saying/expressing and thus might help facilitating connections.
And sometimes we think that the problem is so deep and complex that we don't even fathom to look at it simplistically. Like feeling constantly on the edge and annoyed by everything, we might think because the world is going downhill, but it might be caused by the quality of your sleep.
Sometimes we focus so much on complexity/deepness that we forget common sense. It's a bit of a "you can't see the forest for the trees". And the self-help books can help you to remind yourself about the full picture that you have lost track of.
Since we're on this subject, I recommend that you read Jordan Peterson's books. I think of him as my idol, my hero, my savor. He was sent from God to save my life. I am not excessively pround when I say that he turned me into a person that I am proud of. Everyone loves me; I love me; and life is beautiful, and I credit a lot of that to him.