You’re Doing Just Fine
Stop, breathe, and step away from the clickbait.
The Internet has a self-help problem. You’ve probably noticed this. We’ve talked about it here it before. Now, we talked about what self-help gets wrong about you — you don’t need more motivation or better strategies, you’re probably scared and/or systematically oppressed, and we’ll get to that again— but what we haven’t done is skewer the myriad ways in which this style of column like [plugs words into random self-help clickbait headline generator] “How To 10x Your Success If You Only Do These Nine Things Daily” is privileged, predatory, myopic, dishonest, low-quality, irrational, unnatural, tautological, bewildering and almost impossible. Let’s do so here.
Now, before we begin, I must admit … I am part of the problem. I often write headlines tailored to get you to click. Why? Because I’m not a big enough deal to rest on my “personal brand.” I don’t have a “personal brand.” I write about things like hypochondria, alcoholism, near-future sci-fi dystopia, anxious attachment disorder, and seafaring allegories featuring talking swordfish that are somehow also about anxious attachment disorder. I need to write snappy headlines to get even 800 views. That’s probably how you found me. To wit:
Hell, there’s even a free stock photo — shoutout to Unsplash! — of an attractive young woman thrown in for good measure. That’s probably my most egregious example of trolling for views, but you don’t have to read very far into the listicle to reveal its true intent. Here’s how it begins:
Look. I’m like you. I abhor lists like this. They’re all the fucking same. A minion sits down at a keyboard after having just had a birthday, or just gotten married, or just secured their first round of seed funding, or — even worse — just after they’ve read a self-help book, distills their “expertise” into clickbait, and preaches to you that if you just do somewhere between 3 and 100 tasks all the time that you will unlock a blissful utopia within the inner recess of your soul, find everlasting love, live in a perpetual state of abundance, and radiate a cosmic energy that people will find irresistible.
That’s how it starts. Now, there’s some saccharine within the content of the list itself to wash down the ghost pepper intro, but that opening beat-drop bops and lets you know what time it is: This is the clickbait-and-switch. This is a flag in the sand against the Internet Self-Help Industrial Complex. (Yes, I fully realize the irony of submitting this column for publication in a place called Personal Growth.) The clickbait is killing you. Here’s why.
Reason #1: Clickbait is Almost Always Written By “That Guy”
You know that guy. Or, more accurately, you know this guy: He bootstrapped and scrapped his way from a semester abroad into a startup, and now he’s sipping Soylent in his Silicon Valley starter castle with his smoking hot significant other. He wakes at 5 a.m. He takes time out for “mindfulness.” He’s 10x’d his income, 100x’d his engagement, 1000x’d his productivity with 10,000 hacks they never taught you in school. And he has a fucking newsletter. (They all have newsletters!) You know what else he is?
He’s white. Probably rich. Usually straight. Frankly, he’s not all that much different from a 1980s investment banker— he just went into tech instead of finance. It’s the hotter industry. The suits may have changed, but the stripes haven’t. He thinks he’s figured out the key to success without recognizing the amount of luck and/or advantages he had on his way to wherever it was he got to, and he’s therefore extrapolating this path toward his narrow definition of achievement into a universal tautology for everyone who wants to achieve anything. Sure, he may have voted a bit more Democratic in 2016 under the guise of “woke”-ness, but — make no mistake — he’s another blind-eye, free-market libertarian who never addresses the elephant in the room. I will.
I’m a straight white American male. (You’ve probably noticed.) I have graciously been handed all the cheat codes. Poke around your garden-variety growth-hacking listicle: See how many of the startup bros peddling success will say even that. When we tell you things like “write down what you want to do with your tomorrow today,” or “eat more kale,” we’re not coming to you with the kind of lived-in experience and empathy that comes with being profiled by police, catcalled by brogrammers, or terrorized by school shooters. No. We are the police, the brogrammers and the school shooters.
Rather than penning a success blog, the modern white American male would better serve society by addressing our tacit approval of the status quo — a status quo that’s brutalizing society, upsetting the world order, and unleashing waves of despair and anxiety on marginalized people. We should be addressing egalitarian concerns of fundamental worth, human decency, social and economic equality, and of not creating societies that don’t produce goods that benefit anyone outside the privileged class. That’s the kind of help that people need: Less lip service about “7 Ways Women Can Persevere in STEM Fields” and more policy change facilitating an inclusive culture for the women being systematically passed over and individually driven out.
We’re commanding people how to compete better instead of leveling the playing field, and — frankly — we’re only really talking to ourselves. We’ll gladly take your page-views, though.
Reason #2: They Treat People Like Lifestyle Brands, And Not Like Humans
Not everyone is hurting because they don’t have a million-dollar app in development. Not everyone is hurting because they’re not crushing their morning interval training. Not everyone is hurting because they haven’t lived as an ex-pat for a year and had their “Eat, Pray, Love” moment. Some people just want to keep the electricity on one more month. Some people want to find a job with affordable health insurance. Some people want to see a deescalation of an oppressive system of mass incarceration. We’re hurting, society’s hurting, because we’re fractured and broken, less secure and well-off than generations before us, feeling betrayed by a country that got our hopes up as youths and then burned those hopes to the ground under a cloud of authoritarian kleptocracy, spearheaded by a guy who — up until recently — was also writing best-selling self-help books. Some role model.
They’re projecting success, and communicating about it in a vacuum — absent of warmth or humanity, devoid of art and love, over-compensating for a lack of empathy or compassion. They’re dispensing cold, calculated words engineered via algorithm to be maximally clickable and readable. They often bookend their columns with pictures of themselves, seemingly successful and at peace. These pieces are branded to death, buried amidst an abyss of banalities — all #Blessed and #FOMO, signifying nothing.
Reason #3: They’re not telling stories. They’re giving answers.
How many self-help listicles have you read? 10? 100? 1,000? How many of them do you truly, honestly, deeply remember? How many pearls of wisdom assimilated themselves into the doctrine that guides your life toward your north star? How many of those do you remember without an enrapturing story enveloping it? Tell me that final number is not zero. I dare you.
Answers are nice, but they’re nothing without a compelling story. Answers are facts. Sure, the human brain can hold as much as 2.5 Petabytes of data at any given time. Recall, however, requires a little something extra — a little juice. A little dopamine. A little serotonin. Something that gets the synapses firing. The emotive hook that comes from an expertly-crafted, elliptical series of phrases turned just-so can do that for you. That’s where storytelling comes in.
A lot of people describe my writing as “anti-motivational” or “de-motivational,” which I didn’t fully understand was a sub-genre, but after rehashing my titles, I began to notice a pattern. Here’s a swath from this year alone:
- I Only Suck When I Try Not To
- 10 Things I Wish I Knew Earlier In Life
- Happiness Is Overrated
- Stop Setting Goals
- Success Is A Myth
- Nothing Turns Out How You Think It Will
- The Lost Art of Shutting The F**k Up
- You’ll Never Make Up For Your Past
Wow. Cheer the fuck up, Sylvia Plath. Alright, friends. You got me: These aren’t motivational posts at all. These are stories. Stories about — in order of appearance: self-sabotage, regret, feeling nothing in a world of peace, feeling nothing after finishing a marathon, feeling nothing after achieving financial stability, regret mixed with meaninglessness, a time I nearly napalmed my career, and some thoughts I had after my probation finally ended. I’ve been fired, arrested, addicted, miserable, anxious, dumped, beaten, sick, really sick, pretend sick, and sick from addiction. You do not want my success. I’m not selling it to you. I’m not a self-help guru. I’m a writer and a thinker. I’m telling you stories. You can still learn from stories, and you’ve been quite vocal when you feel that you have learned something from them, or felt something reading them, and—if I can drop the flaming hot BBQ candor of this post for just one second — for that I am truly grateful.
But I am just one humble word-wrangler in a sea of scribes. Really, if you’d like to read something, learn something, and feel something, there are plenty of other writers on this website doing it much better than I am, who I strongly urge you to explore:
Reading these people will make you better humans. And you’ll hear some fantastic stories. And you won’t have to suffer through listicles. Promise.
Reason #4: The advice is either over-simplistic, mind-numbing, vapid in its cliche, or bewilderingly complex, obtuse, contradictory or impossible to adhere to.
Tim Ferris (bless him, he seems like a dope dude)’s morning routine isn’t workable for mere mortals. I’m sorry. I’ve tried it. It’s not. You’re not going to work at 11 a.m. and taking a leisurely meeting in a hoodie. And that tea’s not cheap.
You’re not sleeping four hours per night like Gary Vee at the height of his hustle. (Again, seems like a super dope dude, and I like his “content” because it’s presented with a sense of context and urgency.)
Additionally, there’s this, which is a goddamned homework assignment that flies at five different altitudes and reads like it was written by a chat-bot:
Finally, there’s this absolute mind-melt— a Kafkaesque labyrinth hundreds of thousands of pages deep that’s as tautological as it is impenetrable.
There might be some quality content in there. If you can find it. It’s the “Drudge Report” of mindfulness.
There’s so. much. advice — and no one can seem to agree! We can’t even find common ground on if red meat is good or bad for you anymore, and that’s just one piece of a 400,000-piece self-help puzzle that, when you finally put it together, looks like an Escher drawing.
So do you really want a solid instructional on how to hashtag live your best life? Check out these two books:
The first book examines seven cultures where people live unusually long, happy, healthy lives. In the end, after enrapturing you in many engaging stories from colorful characters, the text instructs you to emulate these cultures — if you want to — by developing these behaviors:
- Spend time with your family
- Smoke less
- Eat more plants
- Engage in moderate physical and social activity
- Have a life purpose
- Reduce your stress
- Be a bit spiritual
- Drink wine if you want to
Frankly, I don’t think life advice gets more general or high-ROI than that. (There’s actionable drill-downs in each of those categories, btw, so don’t think of it as just a couple platitudes tacked on at the end of a travelogue.)
The second book, quite honestly, is the single greatest, purest, most beautiful manifesto on how to live a complete, compassionate, empathetic life I’ve ever read. It’s one of the holiest of holy texts in the world and — even if you don’t believe in god (I don’t) — is as endlessly re-readable as it is profound.
It explores the nature of god, life, earth and the self. It outlines knowledge, devotion, action and meditation as noble, spiritual pursuits. It’s a call to action, a post-graduate course in how to treat other humans, and it’s the skeleton key to peace, love and understanding.
Finally, if I could add one more thought, what I want you to know is this: You’re probably doing just fine. Most of our problems are either societal — caused by institutional corruption, greed, or bias, aspirational — caused by comparing our game film too hardly relative to our peers’ highlights, or medical — actual mental or physical health issues that are blocking us from becoming our best selves.
If you’re experiencing a societal problem, I need to work harder to keep telling my people to cut that shit out. (I understand that you don’t have a lot of time, and I can’t get to all of them all at once — I’m slow, and I’m not a big enough deal to have a “personal brand” that they’ll all listen to … yet.)
If you’re experiencing an aspirational problem, don’t worry. Other people don’t have it as great as you think they do, and you probably can’t control how successful they are, anyway.
If you’re experiencing a medical problem, it’s okay to get help. Do what you can to take care of yourself — you only get one you!
You are probably doing the best you can, given your circumstances, given the information available to you, and given our current political and economic climate. Take disciplined, measured action to protect yourself and others, reach out to our most vulnerable, aid in our communities, work hard, stay healthy and stay true to your destination.
Y’all got this. Stop. Breathe. Step away from the clickbait. The world is out there and it’s waiting for you — well beyond the four walls encircling the screen of whatever device you no doubt just read this on. Don’t click on the “related content” — even if it’s mine. Go live your life the way that you want to. You are enough, and the world needs more of you.
