The health & fitness industry is peripherally linked with multiple other industries. If someone is interested in getting fitter and healthier, it wouldn't be surprising that they would also seek to improve other areas of their life. For that reason, we often see crossover in "fitness" and "self-help" content.

 

How do I define "Self-Help" content?

 

I'm not sure, as it's a pretty broad and heterogenous category. I don't think it's fair to put philosophy in the same category as gurus who charge 10s of thousands to listen to them speak for a weekend, but there is a spectrum there from con artists to academics (who can also be con artists...) to ancient thought leaders.

 

Why am I suggesting that this can be dangerous?

 

Firstly, there are very clear examples of explicit danger, such as remortgaging your house to pay for your guru's services, or, death (listen to this podcast series - Guru: The Dark Side of Enlightenment). However, it's not those explicit dangers I'm here to waste my breath (typing?) on, as I think most of you are clever enough to avoid the lure of such gurus. Rather, I am interested in illuminating the more subtle dangers that slip by as externalities to the consumption of such content.

 

One of the things that happens when you diet for a long time to get very lean (e.g. visible abs, very low body fat) is that you get a shift in your perception of how lean you are. You can think of this like a psychological thermostat. Your threshold for considering yourself "lean" is now much lower, and hence your threshold for considering yourself "fat" is also lower. The result of this is that, as you regain some of that fat you lost, you can be left feeling like you are very out of shape and, as a result, your mood and general sense of wellbeing can be compromised.

 

Similarly, have you ever watched a motivational video and felt like you were on a high? You feel unstoppable, momentarily, and your perception of what it means to feel ready to do something is now elevated. That feeling has given you a new level for your thermostat. But, you can't watch motivational videos all day, and even if you did, that feeling would wear off. As a result, you couple your actions to that "feeling", but as that feeling becomes harder to achieve and more transient, how do you reinforce those actions?

 

This might be a familiar cycle, but it can be even more insidious. You see, when you read books in the "self-help" genre, the vast majority of them are trying to sell you 1) a feeling, or 2) an escape from how you currently feel. I think this is flawed.

 

Life is really fucking hard (it's 2ez really...) and involves guaranteed suffering with the potential that pleasure (or meaning?) might outweigh that suffering. Most self-help books are trying to sell you a reality that doesn't exist, one in which you feel great each day, where you feel happy, where work is bliss, where you are living on that feeling you get while reading the book. With that in mind, I want you to consider an interesting question.

 

 

Dr Jordan B. Peterson rose to fame from 2016 onward. Some people love him, others hate him, but please set those specifics aside for a moment and ask the question "why are millions of people worldwide so fond of the work of someone who would seem so boring?". You would be a fool to just push that aside and not wonder why this seemingly boring, long form content is so interesting to people. Peterson's lectures primarily cover psychological interpretations of religion, psychoanalytic theory, the psychology of evil/totalitarianism, and the relationship between these concepts and how we live our everyday lives (hardly Keeping Up with the Kardashians, is it?). But, what really strikes me is that he never tries to sell happiness. At most, from a "self-help" perspective, what Peterson sells is the idea that life is unbearably awful and you are guaranteed to suffer, so you may as well find a source of meaning in your life to justify the suffering.

 

To add to that, Peterson does not sell his life as one you should try to emulate. He openly expresses his flaws and discusses his history of depression and mental illness. Some of his critics have been foolish enough to ask "why would you take advice from someone who has so much chaos in their own life?". That, for me, is the beautiful thing; people are clearly relieved to no longer have to listen to some smiley influencer pretending their life is perfect. There is something refreshing about someone being honest about the struggle that life brings.

 

Similarly, many of my friends who have this interest in Peterson's work are also interested in the philosophy of Stoicism. Again, Stoicism is not a philosophy designed to sell you happiness or any sort of positive feeling. If anything, it's the opposite. You are once again forced to acknowledge that life is filled with suffering and malevolence, to realise that death is coming for you, and Stoicism is there to help you avoid losing your reason in the presence of either great suffering or great pleasure.

 

The reason I raise these examples is to illustrate an interesting paradox that I believe gets to the core of the self-help conundrum. If you are out there seeking a constant, unremitting feeling of happiness and wellbeing, I believe you are doomed to fail. This is why so many people end up with a list of self-help books on their shelf much longer than the set of tasks they have actually successfully completed in that same timeframe. The feeling one gets is addictive, but doesn't necessarily reflect the reality of life. 

 

I have walked this path and held those perspectives with which I have now come to disagree, but as I have aged to the elderly age of 25 (lol), I see beauty in the acknowledgment of the inevitable suffering that life will bring. It doesn't mean you should wake up each day and be miserable. If anything, I think it makes me a happier or more fulfilled person, as I personally don't expect to feel happy all the time and, as a result, my expectations are aligned with reality. I look at life and see a purpose in pursuing a path that is likely to suck a bit a long the way, and that fulfils me.

 

How else are you going to work hard when you feel like crap? Are you just going to quit your job because it's "hard" and makes you tired? Of course not. Such is life...

 

Anyway, they are just some thoughts that were on my mind this weekend. I could, of course, elaborate a lot more. You could probably fill a book with this discussion, but I think there are at least one or two thoughts in there that you may wish to chew on. 

 

- Gary