That tweet won’t save you, and neither will this blog post

the perils of excessive self-help consumption

art by dall-e

Many of us spend our entire day feeling mildly disgruntled and out of place, and this leads to a desperation for some Idea out there (a meditation practice, a supplement, a new habit) that if you just started doing it, all your misery would end. It doesn’t help that a lot of content on the internet makes the implicit promise that “if you listen to me, I am going to save you.” Sometimes it's a literal promise made by the author (e.g. This Book Will Change Your Life), but more often it’s a mix of implicit gestures from the author and a projection by your distraction-addicted brain that wants you to keep scrolling. Your brain wants you to keep looking for a solution out there instead of dealing with whatever’s going on in here.

Who wouldn’t want instant transformation from reading an insightful blog post? Insights can change lives, after all: people will say things like “this book turned things around for me”, or “this tweet saved my life” (jk, does anyone actually say this about a tweet?). But this is rarely what actually happened. In the background of your life all the seeds of change had already been planted—the tinder had been laid, and all that the book, tweet, or blog post provided was the spark. But we like having simple cause-effect descriptions of our life because it gives us a greater sense of narrative control—not to mention, likes on social media—so we tell everyone “guys this new meditation technique I learned three days ago has changed my life.”¹

Instant transformation requires the right set of conditions. But what sorts of background conditions help? We can take a hint from the sudden awakening-type experiences that people have in meditation, like when Sasha Chapin’s experience inverted instantly, or when he discarded his mental tension. He had these pleasant and sudden shifts in his experience of the world that persisted for months, and they occurred after extensive meditation practice (and much other internal work). The Buddha found the same thing: cultivate your powers of concentration and equanimity for a long time, and then you will have these moments of sudden change. There are endless variations on this same theme: transformative change occurs after having achieved states of intense mental clarity, sharp attention, and deep-rooted emotional processing. A far cry from frantically scrolling twitter at 2am.

When you’re desperately craving transformation in your twitter feed, you’re only adding to your own stuckness. Even if you happen to be exposed to an unsurpassably sublime expression of a life-changing truth, crafted specifically to be most resonant with your current mode of thinking, it would still not result in lasting change, because your background state is not ripe for a deep-rooted upheaval. Your nervous system is activated, your mind is closed off, and your brain is unwilling to restructure your mental scaffolding. The sublime truth will pass you right by, tossed into the accumulating mountain of stimuli you've consumed and instantly forgotten.

Underneath our desire for instant transformation is the unrelenting obsession with productivity that we forget we’ve bought into. “No but not me – I'm not a mindless workaholic, you see, I'm optimizing for a healthful and mindful approach to producti—” but you're still optimizing, you’re still orienting your whole life around this One Thing, you’re still treating every waking moment (whether you're working, journaling, reading, meditating, exercising) purely as an instrument for the betterment of your Self. Everything is subservient to your identity, your future, your sense of personal accomplishment. You go on a “restful aimless walk” because, you know, a restful aimless walk helps with your blood glucose levels, which will make your neurotransmitters more vigorous or something, according to Andrew Huberman (or was it Peter Attia?).

It's unfortunate because too much of a good thing (and it is a good thing – shrewd and well-intentioned people sharing the things that have helped them), when consumed in a frantic haze, becomes a bad thing (a cacophony of voices shoving advice down your throat, bolstering your belief that there's something you're doing wrong and if you just fixed that one thing you’d finally be happy and in flow).

Still, I will continue to consume and enjoy the introspective, self-help-y (or should I say “help-self-y”) kind of writing that people like Sasha, Visa, Ava et al share, and which has added value to my life. I think of them as sweet caramels: delightfully tasty and uplifting when consumed from an expansive, relaxed state, but has the potential to induce an insatiable craving when treated carelessly. If the only thing your self-help diet is doing is installing a nagging voice in your head that goes “ah I should be more mindful! ah I should be more ambitious! ah I should be more diligent!” then consider that it may be having a neutral or negative influence on your life rather than helping. In such states I recognize that what I need most is not the increasingly elaborate and witty presentations of the same basic advice that my favorite writers provide, but deeper embodied practice of said advice in my actual life. So I just ask everyone to stfu for a second (unsubscribe or ignore) and I spend time away from all concept-oriented distractions (touch grass). Self-help is of no help to a sleepwalking zombie.

1. I will acknowledge that sometimes a really good book, when consumed very, very attentively, can contain both the background tinder and the igniting spark for lasting change; but in the case of most books and especially tweets or blog posts, this is impossible.