From In These Times: http://inthesetimes.com/article/14714/no_self_help_wanted/
You are not the only thing holding you back.
BY Richard Greenwald
March 20, 2013
Harvard Business School professor and psychologist Francesca Gino wants to fill that gaping hole in many Americans’ souls. More and more we are anxious, worried and searching. Searching for what? We often do not know, so we search for whatever we are told we should be searching for. In Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan, Gino tells us that no matter what we are searching for, our best-laid plans often fail because we allow ourselves to get sidetracked.
Search for “self help” books on Amazon, and you’ll find nearly 300,000 titles. Self-help books are an $11 billion industry. We read these books because they proffer neat solutions for complex problems. Most are a mix of leadership advice, management science and pop psychology applied to the individual—the business of one, you might say. We hope they offer the magic bullet to make us successful, fix our finances, remedy family dysfunctions, find balance, get healthy or deal with our children. Many follow Malcolm Gladwell’s recipe: a pinch of common sense, a crisp measure of entertaining storytelling and just enough social science to sound plausible.
We seek out such advice because we live in an increasingly narcissistic world that is increasingly complicated by second-guessing, notions of perfectibility and our quest for enlightenment—not religion or spirituality, but rather the quest for a more rationalized, improved self. Some self-help books teach us how to live more simply, but most, at their core, preach a path toward happiness through consumption. Rule number one: If you are unhappy with your life, buy a book. If you are really unhappy: Buy many.
From at least the mid-20th century, Americans have been told that they are what they buy, that they can refashion themselves in any image they desire as many times as they want. The historian Lizabeth Cohen called this America a “consumers’ republic,” in which each citizen is required to do their civic duty and buy, buy, buy. This is a regime where our purchasing not only makes America what it is, but gives us that uniquely American ability to continually reinvent ourselves. Through consumption, we signaled our middle classness, our hipness (as in Boboism, à la David Brooks), and our status in America. And America is all about status, isn’t it?
But a funny thing has happened on this journey: This cult of consumption has obscured not just a class divide in America, but a divide within the middle class, as well.
Continue reading at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/14714/no_self_help_wanted/
