No excuses!
Do You Buy What Self-Help Is Selling?
There’s a whole industry propping up the neoliberal meritocratic myth
This weekend, I took some time to dive into a world that I’ve done my best to avoid over the forty years: bestselling self-help advice.
As I’ve been working on my book, I’ve been deconstructing the economic, political, and cultural systems that undergird the way we approach goal-setting. I’ve done a lot of research on those systems over the last five years, so I felt pretty confident making the argument I wanted to make. But I also wanted to tie those same systems to the sea of self-help advice we swim in every day. I needed to show that the advice is actually rooted in how power and wealth are distributed at the highest levels.
And I realized that, while I knew most self-help just repackaged the “wisdom” of harmful systems, I didn’t have hard proof!
I started with four bestselling books from various authors and decades: Goals! by Brian Tracy, The Achievement Habit by Bernard Roth, Girl, Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis, and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson. The next day, I added two more for pseudo-spiritual good measure: The Secret by Rhonda Byrne and The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale.
