I can’t put my finger on when the addiction began, or whether it is an addiction. If it is an addiction, then it is an ironic one: I am addicted to self help. Self-help books, self-help articles, self-help podcasts. Sometimes it’s not branded as self-help; it might be a book about management or a podcast about psychology, but they’re under that broad theme of advice and improvement. Partly it is about introspection and thinking about getting better. It is also about analysing and helping others.
My journey through the self help genre has been an evolving one. A recurring theme which has changed my attitude is around accepting certain truths, which to some extent render a lot of other self help advice useless. This theme is at the heart of Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks. I find Burkeman’s own self help journey fascinating, evolving as it did while he was the writer of The Guardian‘s weekly column This Column Could Change Your Life. A lot of self help advice shares the broad focus of trying to squeeze more and more out, without acknowledging that it simply isn’t possible within the fixed parameters of our lives, ultimately in the shape of our own mortality.
Embracing one’s finitude, as Burkeman expresses, means making choices. And in accepting that choices are essential, it also becomes a little easier to accept that you can’t cover anything. With a little discipline, well, actually a lot of discipline, you can start to conquer that sense of FOMO. Missing out isn’t a negative, its just the opportunity cost for doing the stuff we choose to do. We never would have been able to do everything, so as long as we allow the right things to guide our choices – our interests, our values, our positive relationships with others, etc – then it can become quite liberating to realise we have limited time and we can only do so much in that time.
This overall mindset has a trickle down effect. All of our choices have a time dimension. Even down to what we watch and read and what we don’t. Burkeman also has some good advice here: treat your to-read (or watch, listen, etc) pile like a passing river. You can’t consume it all. Burkeman has an uncanny knack of writing about topics which makes it seem like he knows exactly what frustrates and stresses me. For so many years, I have always beat myself up about the ever-growing pile of things to read. Now I just read what I want, when I can. I also don’t feel guilty anymore when I watch that extra episode of the TV boxset. Previously I’d watch another, then beat myself up when I went to bed and was too tired to read. You can’t do it all though and if I’m doing both – watching or reading – to educate, inform or entertain myself, then I’m happy doing either.
On the subject of that flowing river of books, shows, films and podcasts, I’ve also gained some relief from the school of thought around quitting. While there are lots of books about habits and discipline, there is a growing body of thinking that quitting, far from being an undesirable act of failure, is actually an essential and positive action. So next time I’m halfway through a film and I’ve lost interest, it’s getting buttoned. If the book just isn’t grabbing me, then it can go back on the shelf – there are plenty more to take its place!
While becoming a mortal quitter has felt a lot better thanks to this advice I’ve come across, part of me does wonder whether this is just affirmation bias. While I may have seen mention of such mental shortcuts before I came across Thinking Fast and Slow, it was really Daniel Kahneman’s book which made me a lot more conscious about how we think. In particular, I am more consciously aware of my unconscious thinking! I think one of the most powerful and pernicious of these cognitive biases is affirmation bias (or confirmation bias), where we are more likely to welcome and accept things which agree with us, whereas we might ignore, challenge or be suspect towards things which run counter to our current thinking. There is almost certainly a place for quitting, but there is also sometimes much to be gained from perseverance. While we can’t do everything, we can’t just reduce our choices to the hedonistic or the comfortable: sometimes we have to do things which are hard, boring or undesirable; doing so helps ourselves and allows us to avoid selfishness and help others too.
Helping yourself isn’t as straightforward as some gurus would have you think. Treat it like any other topic – be curious, sample widely, consume intelligently and reflect.
Commonplace 