If self-help books are a scam, what else is?
That’s easy to see. REALLY easy, actually.
Ez just declared on Substack that the Self-Help book industry is a delusional scam. Too many (not all!) of those books, the post argues,
- are adjacent to the world of personal branding
- by making vast assumptions about what things a person can actually change in their life, are “the actual start point of an echo chamber”
- [are] focused on the premise that you are merely one good idea away from the future.
- teach an idealized version of the world combined with a quasi-sociopathic suggestion that you must make changes to who you are to succeed. Including stuff like “remember people’s names” and “make them feel important”
- offer people a chance to change their lives just by reading one more thing
- lead people to share that they’ve read these books [to show] that they’re thinking very deeply about stuff
- promote the “delusional and naive” idea that “following the life and times of the rich and famous and trying to learn from their lives is a way to view the world”
Heck, this is not about self-help book
Read the whole post to form your own opinion about self-help books. Here, all I want you to realize is that
if self-help books are a scam for those reasons, then even social media is a scam, for the SAME reasons.
That list of quotes about self-help books applies word by word to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and most if not all social media of today. Think seriously about it. After sharing this post on all your social media, of course!
Image source: Self-Help page at MemeBase
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
I do it because YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software is used AROUND you.
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