Oliver Burkeman on Self-Help

Every line of work has its charlatans. But the self-help industry is rare in that such characters have come to define it almost completely. The phrase "self-help guru" conjures maniacal grins, impossible promises, the financial manipulation of people at their lowest ebb — or at best an embarrassing cheesiness. This is strange: nothing's more important than happiness, yet we've ceded much of its territory to the kind of people we'd never trust to do our taxes. The answer, though, isn't to dismiss the hunger for self-help as childish, to scoff at "therapy culture", or to reassert the Stiff Upper Lip. On the contrary, we need to reclaim the noble urge behind self-help from those who would exploit it for cynical gain.

Even much sincerely motivated self-help advice simply doesn't work. A manufacturer of washing-machines that made clothes dirtier wouldn't remain in business long. Yet evidence is accumulating that "positive thinking", for many people, has a negative effect. Such counterproductive advice has persisted for so long surely partly because self-help exists in a ghetto, separated from philosophy, experimental psychology, and psychotherapy. The ancient Greeks and Romans wouldn't have recognised such distinctions. Philosophy was self-help, and vice versa. Why expend so much effort defining the right way to live, then fail to put it into practice?

The boom in books on "happiness studies" is a step in the right direction. So may be David Cameron's plan for measuring Britain's national happiness, notwithstanding its dubious motivations and methodology. But there's much further to go. The self-help industry certainly can encourage self-indulgence; it certainly can embody the politically repugnant idea that individuals, never their socioeconomic circumstances, are always to blame for their problems. But neither is inevitable. We need to reject both the stiff upper lip and the maniacal grin, and win back self-help to the side of sceptical optimism, and the kind of down-to-earth happiness that's actually achievable.

Oliver Burkeman is author of Help! How To Be Slightly Happier and Get A Bit More Done (Canongate, 2011). He will be part of The Self-Help Summit which will take place on 15^th January 2011, for more information click here.

Image: Mike Myers as Pitka in The Love Guru

Comments

[Drew Byrne]

I remember what was once said to me about us all needing a little help at times when the going gets tough(and when even the tough may have to go on the dole); and this saying, of course, is very helpful, once you come to appreciate what it means: “If you need a helping hand, there’s one on the end of your arm.” Which, of course, is quite true, and, of course, cannot really be faulted; only, sometimes, I wish I had come across the neat little philosophical concept sooner.

[Martina Tierney]

I hope you might repeat this day again. I would love to have come, but missed it... I love the artwork!