Why Self-Help Is Better Than Philosophy

I think Self-help is to Philosophy as Engineering is to Physics. Both the engineer and the self-help “practitioner” take what has been developed through careful thought and research and apply that knowledge in a concretely practical way (barring the bad self help books of course). Knowledge is only useful if it is applied.

I will admit I’ve never finished The Five Habits of Highly Effective People, that quintessential self-help book that is apparently the most sold book in California according to Thriftbooks. Personally, “The Five Habits of Highly Effective People” was too boring for me. I gave up reading it after a hundred or so pages. However, I have read self-help books that are worth reading and actually quite useful, so useful, in fact, that I think I wouldn’t be the same person had I not read them.

People let their emotions divide them, and social media seems to have a really clever way of exacerbating this problem.

One night while showering, I was thinking about the media, how everyone over 30 seems like they think the world is ending (is it really though?), and how the world would be a much better place if no one watched the news. It was at this moment that I thought back to an article sent to me by a friend that turned out to be one the of the best I’ve ever read. It was called The Toxoplasma of Rage. The article covers a lot of ground, but mostly what I got out of it is that people let their emotions divide them, and social media – and media in general – seems to have a really clever way of exacerbating this problem.

While reliving the experience of the article in my head, a thought struck me: as good as that article was at analyzing societal problems, it didn’t offer any solutions. What action could I take to change after reading the article? I didn’t know. Upon thinking a bit more it came to me: avoid mass media and when discussing an issue try to be objective and don’t let your emotions get in the way of your logic, but that’s besides the point. The point is that as good as this article was, it didn’t provoke an action. Sure it was entertaining and made me think, but what could I do to fix the problems that it so flawlessly exposed?

While I can enjoy a conversation about existential philosophy, at the end of it, it’s usually no more than that. I can feel good about being smart, intellectually superior, and college educated, and I can congratulate myself for having intelligent friends who I can discuss these things with, but at the end of the night I’m no different than I was at the beginning. Philosophy is often like this, you can read Kant, Nietzsche, or Kierkegaard, and spend hours listening to angry classical music (yes, it does exists), pondering the depths of existence, but you don’t really improve yourself concretely by doing this. Self-help on the other hand, although it has certain ideas attached to it, is focused on achieving real-life, positive change, personal improvement and growth.

That’s the problem with philosophy.

While I’m not implying that philosophical thought doesn’t provide personal growth – I’m sure it does, it just doesn’t provoke action. (I’m aware that I’m generalizing the entire field of philosophy, as many philosophies do provoke action, but perhaps the act of studying them for the sake of it them does not.) This is at least one of the benefits of religion. The ten commandments, the tenants of Buddhism, the Quran, all these give their readers concrete instructions on how to live. While religion has it’s own issues – and some would argue so many that they over-weigh the benefits (a topic for another day), it at least provokes concrete action, concrete change. That’s the problem with philosophy. You can spend all day in thought loops about existentialism, and still be a shitty person to everyone you interact with when it’s all said and done.

And it’s not just philosophy, it’s politics, and the environment too. We’re very good at sitting around and talking about how we hate politicians, how factory farming should be illegal, and how Al Gore was right about global warming, but very few of us take action to change any of these things. Sure a lot of times we feel powerless and unable to make a change, but if everyone felt this way, then America wouldn’t exist, no one would have voted in the election, and we’d still have segregated buses and bathrooms. How many doctors have a terrible diet? How many smokers know that there’s a good chance they’ll get lung cancer? My guess is many, all of them for the latter. Ignorance is bliss. We’re all very good at justifying our actions to ourselves, no matter what those actions are. This is the core of the self-help versus philosophy argument, we’d often rather think our problems away instead of taking action against them. Self-help can provoke that action, while philosophy leads to more of the same, thought-loops, and long, pensive showers.

It’s been my experience that many intelligent people refuse to read self help books. It’s as if they think that by reading them they are admitting they have problems. But the reality is that they do have problems, just as everyone else does. Other people think that their problems are too serious to be solved by a book. Still others, myself included, have a bad taste in their mouths from culty self-help gurus on late night TV. They feel like they may be manipulated like the old lady from Requiem from a Dream to buy some magic pills  – maybe that’s just me.

There is at least one study demonstrating a self-help book was effective at treating depression.

But self-help, as much as many people, like to ignore and dismiss it as “not for them”, actually helps. There is at least one study demonstrating a self-help book was effective at treating depression. To dismiss self-help as “not for me” is to deny yourself the opportunity to improve, hence the mantra, “the first step in solving your problem is acknowledging that you have one.” While certainly there are bad (even deadly) self-help books, and these books can create the same “reading instead of doing trap” as previously discussed, books such as Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” and Brene Brown’s “Daring Greatly” have helped thousands (if not millions) of people.

So keep an open mind, suspend your disbelief – to get past the cheesiness of some of them, and take their advice with a grain of salt, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with self-help books. The stigma attached to them is not so well deserved. Self-help helps, because it provokes action, something we could all use more of. We should always ask ourselves when faced with an issue we wish we could change, “what can I do about this?” And in the spirit of this article, what can you take away from this? Always ask yourself, “what can I do to change?” and “how can I take action?”, and try to read a self-help book every now and again. I think you’ll find they’re not so bad after all, but what do I know, I’m just a strepsirrhine primate endemic to the island of Madagascar.