Stand Firm

Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze

Svend Brinkmann, Tam McTurk

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781509514298
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The pace of modern life is accelerating. To keep up, we must keep on moving and adapting – constantly striving for greater happiness and success. Or so we are told. But the demands of life in the fast lane come at a price: stress, fatigue and depression are at an all-time high, while our social interactions have become increasingly self-serving and opportunistic. How can we resist today's obsession with introspection and self-improvement? In this witty and bestselling book, Danish philosopher and psychologist Svend Brinkmann argues that we must not be afraid to reject the self-help mantra and 'stand firm'. The secret to a happier life lies not in finding your inner self but in coming to terms with yourself in order to coexist peacefully with others. By encouraging us to stand firm and get a foothold in life, this vibrant anti-self-help guide offers a compelling alternative to life coaching, positive thinking and the need always to say 'yes!'

1
Cut out the navel-gazing

The more you gaze lovingly at your navel, the worse you will feel. Doctors call it the health paradox – the more help patients receive, the more they self-diagnose, the worse they feel. Most self-help gurus will urge you to base decisions on your gut feelings. Don’t. It’s not a good idea (especially after a vindaloo). Once a year is enough when it comes to self-analysis. Summer holidays are a good time for it. To compound matters, this kind of soul-searching is often seen as a tool for ‘finding yourself’. This will almost always end in disappointment, with you slumped on the sofa, munching Maltesers.

Analysing and finding yourself are two of the most all-pervasive concepts in contemporary culture. Although not identical, they are interconnected. To find out who you really are – not just who you’ve been told you are by your parents, teachers and friends – you need to peel away layer upon layer of false consciousness and learn to listen to what your inner self has to say. If you’ve ever had doubts about anything (and who hasn’t?), you’ve probably turned to somebody else for advice and asked: ‘What do you think I should do?’ And the chances are that you were told to follow your gut feeling. We’ve been telling each other this for decades – at least since the blossoming of youth culture in the 1960s, when social norms and external authorities were cast aside in favour of personal soul-searching. Step One in this guide is to accept that you won’t find answers by looking inside yourself. There is simply no point in attaching so much importance to gut feelings and introspection.

At first, you may think that this sounds counterintuitive, but actually it’s just common sense. If somebody is in trouble and needs help, there’s no point basing your reaction on how helping them would make you feel. What you need to think about is the other person. You need to base your reaction on the idea that it’s important to help others per se whenever possible – regardless of how it makes you feel. Whenever aficionados of science, art or philosophy insist that knowledge of Einstein, Mozart or Wittgenstein enriches the human experience, you don’t ask yourself ‘Yes, but how does it make me feel?’ before deciding whether they are of any interest to you. What you need to do is take an interest in what these people actually say, rather than how their utterances make you feel. You need to learn to look outwards, not inwards; to be open to other people, cultures and nature. You need to accept that the self does not hold the key to how to live your life. The self is merely an idea, a construct, a by-product of cultural history. As such, it is by its very nature more external than internal.

This turning inwards to the self that emerged from the anti-authoritarian spirit of the 1960s has subsequently been institutionalised in schools and workplaces in many countries. School students are expected to find answers not just in textbooks or in nature, but inside themselves as well. They are expected to classify themselves as visual, aural, tactile or active learners, and tailor their personal development accordingly. Psychological journeys of self-discovery and introspection are lauded as means of learning more effectively. Employers send us on personal development courses, and managers coach us to identify and explore our inner selves and our core competencies. ‘The manual is inside you’, says the slogan for Otto Scharmer’s mystical Theory U (to which I will return later). But perhaps the time has come to ask whether four decades of navel-gazing have really done us much good. Have we found ourselves? Is it even possible? Is it worth even bothering to try? My answer to all of these questions would be no.

Gut feelings

It has become commonplace to say we make decisions based on our gut feelings. Even senior executives in big multinationals readily spout the phrase. In 2014, an article in The Telegraph announced that ‘the gut feeling is still king in business decisions’. According to a survey, only 10 per cent of executives said that if the available data contradicted their intuition, they would follow the data rather than their gut. The remainder would either reanalyse the data, ignore it or collate more information.¹ Some of them might even consult magazines or self-help books to find out how to identify their gut feelings.² The made-up guide below is typical of the advice given in lifestyle magazines:

1. Find a comfortable position. Close your eyes and turn your attention inwards. Take a deep breath, hold it for a moment and exhale. Repeat three times, then note the effect that the breathing exercise has had on your body.
2. Now become aware of your body, and relax it bit by bit. Start with the tip of your toes. As you relax, you will sense a more authentic form of contact with yourself, with your needs and your inner voice.
3. Observe what is going on inside you. When you start to feel something, don’t try to change it in any way. Don’t run away from it, even if it feels uncomfortable at first. This is where you make contact with your soul – or core, if you prefer.
4. Ask questions. All of the answers are already within you. So whenever you sense something you don’t fully understand, ask yourself why. Ask yourself what you can learn from it, and trust that a response will be forthcoming. The answer may take the form of a thought, an image, a physical sensation or an intuitive realisation.
5. Use it. Begin to act on what you feel. Use your gut feelings to navigate through life. Once you dare to be open and vulnerable, you will start to grow. You will no longer have to adapt to the rest of the world. New opportunities will begin to open up.

This guide may well parody the frivolous end of the market, but the content isn’t a million miles from what is recommended by all sorts of gurus and consultants in the mindfulness and personal-development industries. First you have to relax – something most of us would agree is nice once in a while. Next, it’s time to ‘feel your needs’ by listening to your ‘inner voice’. And this where it all starts to get a bit airy-fairy. Be on your guard whenever you encounter phrases like this. Is your inner voice actually worth listening to? What if it tells you the good-looking colleague beside you at the staff party is worth a snog, even though he or she has a partner? The authors of this type of guide would no doubt contend that at a staff party you aren’t truly in contact with your inner core. Well, that’s as may be. But how would you know? Only by delving ever deeper inside yourself, and ending up trapped in a vacuous circle that will ultimately leave you completely numb. Philip Cushman once posited that the depression epidemic in the West is explained by the fact that if you look inwards long enough – if you dwell on how you feel, and use therapy to find yourself – then depression will descend the moment you realise that there is, in fact, nothing there.³ If, as is constantly asserted, the meaning of life is to be found inside you, then finding nothing there renders it all pointless. By spending inordinate amounts of time on navel-gazing you risk ending up disappointed.

You also run the risk of finding answers that are just plain wrong. The guide above says ‘All of the answers are already within you.’ Just think how absurd that actually is. What should we do about climate change? How do you make scones? What’s the Chinese for ‘horse’? Do I have what it takes to be a good engineer? To the best of my knowledge, the answers to these questions are not lurking somewhere within me or you – not even the answer to the last one. Society sets objective standards for what constitutes a good engineer (technical skills, mathematical understanding, etc.), and they have nothing to do with how you feel inside. These are abilities that other people are capable of assessing. The last step of the guide tells you to navigate by gut feeling: ‘You will no longer have to adapt to the rest of the world.’ As if! Only dictators enjoy the ‘privilege’ of not having to fit in. And it may ultimately may be more of a curse than a privilege. Emperor Nero – ‘before whom a whole world bowed, who was perpetually surrounded by a countless host of the accommodating messengers of desire’, as Kierkegaard put it⁴ – had to set Rome ablaze just to encounter any resistance and to experience a reality that did more than just bow and scrape at his feet. Nero felt no compulsion to adapt to his surroundings. His whole world was but an expression of his needs and wants. However, we are human beings, not gods. People have to adapt to the world around them.

As mentioned at the start of this chapter, excessive self-analysis brings with it a genuine risk of feeling something that is actually meaningless, but that assumes meaning through the very process of feeling it. Since the 1980s, doctors have been referring to this as the health paradox.⁵ More and better methods of diagnosis and treatment have led to people becoming trapped in a cycle of perpetual self-diagnosis, resulting in widespread discomfort and even hypochondria. In short: the more advanced medical science becomes, the sicker people think they are. Surely this alone is reason enough to cut down on all of the self-analysis? Something may well feel right, but to act on it instantly is to forget that it’s perfectly possible you’ll feel differently a moment or two later. The point is that gut feelings aren’t sensible by nature. If you really feel like eating a biscuit but have a serious nut allergy, you’d end up cursing your gut feeling if you scoffed one with almonds in it.

Find yourself or learn to live with yourself?

The constant exhortations to think about how you feel are usually a precursor to ‘finding yourself’. Pop psychology and contemporary culture propagate the notion that the real self – the ego, the core, or whatever you want to call it – lies within us, and that the processes of socialisation and the demands placed on us by other people create a manufactured self that must be overcome. In the 1960s and ’70s, self-realisation emerged as the term for the process of stripping away this faux self, of listening to your inner voice, reflecting on how you feel inside and, therefore, being authentic.

You have already read above that the idea of the inner voice deserves to be treated with a dose of healthy scepticism. You might also ask why it is assumed that it is inside ourselves that we are most truly ‘ourselves’. Why is the self not reflected in our actions, our lives and our relationships with others, i.e. in all that is external to us? The philosopher Slavoj Žižek put it like this:

What interests me is […] how there can be more truth in the mask that you adopt than in your real, inner self. I’ve always believed in masks, never in the emancipatory pote...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Life in the Fast Lane
• 1 Cut out the navel-gazing
• 2 Focus on the negative in your life
• 3 Put on your No hat
• 4 Suppress your feelings
• 5 Sack your coach
• 6 Read a novel – not a self-help book or biography
• 7 Dwell on the past
• Appendix: Stoicism
• End User License Agreement