The following is an edited transcript excerpt from The Michael Knowles Show.
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Self-help guru Tim Ferriss, one of the biggest names in the modern “optimize your life” universe, has apparently just arrived at a conclusion I’ve been yelling about for years: self-help is very, very bad for you. Self-help is self-harm.
Now, I have to admit something up front: I don’t know much about Tim Ferriss. I’ve heard the name before. But I avoid all self-help. It should be clear to you by now that I don’t like self-help literature. It smells like a scam from 100 miles away.
I want to improve myself, yes. I want to improve. But the self-help stuff? No.
When I was a teenager, I read a little bit of it like “The 48 Laws of Power” by Robert Greene. Or the really famous one by Dale Carnegie, “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” That’s the classic of the self-help category.
And, as I remember it, all it boils down to this: be nice to people and remember their names.
That’s it. I just saved you ten bucks on Amazon.
And I guess that’s good advice.
But a lot of the self-help stuff is pretty noxious. I’ve thought this for years. And apparently Tim Ferriss agrees — at least partially.
Ferriss’ “Road To Damascus” Moment
Ferriss seems to have had a Road to Damascus moment — not necessarily with a religious conversion, but with a recognition that what he’s been doing might be wrong.
According to an article in The Telegraph titled, “The self-help guru who decided he might be doing more harm than good,” Ferriss is confronting his most profound insight yet in his latest blog post, “The Self-Help Trap.” The piece is about 3,000 words. It’s got all the usual “optimization” language — optimizing is one of the words they all use.
Ferriss, now 48, asks whether his own industry might, with some important caveats, be making desperate people worse rather than better.
And then he says, quote:
“The older I get, the more I think that self-help can be a trap. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. I say this after around 20 years of writing self-help, and a lifetime of consuming it … What if self-help itself is actually creating or amplifying unhappiness?”
Ferriss says modern self-help contains a “built-in flaw: to continually improve yourself, you must continually locate the ways you are broken.”
He gets so close. I love so much of what he’s saying — and then he totally misses the point. The point just goes right over his head. But he gets very close, and so I give him credit for the introspection.
Some people are reading this cynically: is he just doing a new kind of self-help? Has Self-help ruined your life? Read my new book: “Ten Easy Steps to Get Over Self-Help,” by Tim Ferriss!
No. That’s not what he’s doing here. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. I think maybe he’s being sincere. He’s in the middle of his life’s journey, and he’s had this realization.
Self-Help Is A Trap And You Can See It In The People Who Buy It
Ferriss says, “I think self-help can be a trap.” That’s true.
The people who are most obsessed with self-help, in my experience, are the most messed up, depressed people.
And you might say, well, yeah — they’re messed up. They’re trying to get help.
Well, it ain’t working.
It’s like your friend or relative who’s been going to the therapist — usually just means drug dealer, but, you know, the psychiatrist — for 30 years. They never get any better. And maybe they get more dope, but they don’t ever get any better.
And you say, hey, have you thought about trying something different?
And they say, oh, I couldn’t, I’m so messed up—could you imagine if I lost my psychiatrist?
Hold on. Maybe you’re going that backwards. Maybe your psychiatrist is actually not helping but even compounding the problem.
I think that’s what happens with self-help, but not for the reason Tim Ferriss gives.
The Problem Isn’t “Finding What’s Broken.” It’s Denying What’s Broken.
Ferriss says self-help has this in-built flaw: to continually improve yourself, you must continually look at the ways you are broken.
That’s not the problem.
You know what else impels you to continually reflect on the ways in which you’re broken? Christianity does that, when you examine your conscience, and especially when you go and confess your sins to a priest. You have to sit down and think of the number and kind of all the ways that you are broken.
The problem with self-help is that it doesn’t do that.
The whole premise of self-help, actually, is a denial of the fundamental ways in which we are broken, because self-help, at its root, I think, denies original sin.
The whole point is that you really can help yourself. And not just help yourself a little bit. You can save yourself. You can optimize your life.
And ultimately you can’t.
You can exercise. You can work-out. You can practice certain habits of virtue. But ultimately, you can’t save yourself.
This is what the Church formally declared when it condemned the heresy of Pelagius. The problem with self-help is it misses out on the best way you can help yourself, which is looking to Someone beyond yourself.
Not looking to Tim Ferriss. Not looking to Dale Carnegie. Not looking to whatever other guru is trending on the internet this week. But looking to Someone who is greater than you — who is so far beyond humanity and yet mysteriously takes on humanity, and so understands us intimately. Not only who created us, but who has lived as one of us — who is like us in all respects, except sin.
That’s what it’s about.
A Christian Offshoot With All The Fun Parts And None Of The Obligations
Just as liberalism is a perversion — it’s kind of a spin-off of Christianity that tries to keep all the fun parts of Christianity without any of the obligations and the duties and the limits — this is the same thing with self-help.
The self-help literature I’ve read, some of it, it spins out of Christianity, and it takes away all the limits and all the essential stuff. It takes away the parts that acknowledge that not only are you broken, but you’re so broken that there is essentially nothing you can do without grace.
So, if you want to read some self-help literature, a good writer on this would be Saint Thomas Aquinas, who points out that without grace, every human being will fall into mortal sin. And even if you’re in a state of grace, you’ll still fall into venial sin.
That’s how broken we are.
The Ferriss Moment We Should All Root For
Ferriss is close. He’s very close.
We’ve got to help Tim Ferriss be great.
Wouldn’t it be great if one of the big proponents of self-help actually turned people on to real help?
Because the trap isn’t noticing your flaws. The trap is believing you can fix the deepest ones alone — believing that the answer is always inside you, always one more habit, one more hack, one more optimization away.
And that’s not liberation.
That’s just a nicer-looking cage.