Tim Ferriss is a well-known name in the world of self-help. He is the author of books like The 4 Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich, as well as The 4 Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Weight-Loss, Incredible Sex and Becoming Superhuman. Judging from the titles, the guy cannot be accused of the soft-sell.
But recently Ferriss wrote an interesting article in which he shares some second thoughts about the self-help genre. It is titled “The Self-Help Trap: What 20 Years of ‘Optimizing’ Has Taught Me.”
Ferriss is not the first to re-think youthful devotions, certainties and enthusiasms, so let’s be gracious as we hear what he has to say:
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 20 years of writing self-help and a lifetime of consuming it. Spend enough time in the world of ‘improvement,’ and you’ll notice something strange: The people most obsessed with self-help are often the least helped by it. Behind the smiles and motivational quotes, behind closed doors and after a drink or two, the truth is that they’re not able to outsmart their worries.
“On one hand, perhaps this unhappiness is precisely what lands one in self-development in the first place, right? I long assumed this about myself, and it’s partially true. On the other hand, what if self-help itself is actually creating or amplifying unhappiness?
It comes as a surprise to many to learn that the oft-quoted aphorism, “God helps those who help themselves” is actually not in the Bible. There we find something different. God helps the broken, the desperate, those who are at the end of their rope, at the end of their own efforts to save themselves.
Which is not to say that every form of putting forth effort or making wiser choices — a.k.a. “self-help” — is foolish. Of course not. At the moment I am dealing with a bit of sciatica in my left-leg, a result of walking a lot on a recent hiking trip. I’ve taken to the self-help of twice-a-day stretches that loosen the grip of my ham-string muscle on my sciatic nerve. Beyond that I’m a pretty devoted gym rat. There’s a place for self-help, in moderation. But as a cultural obsession? As the route to the good life or path to salvation? Maybe not.
Most of us who try really, really hard to get it totally right do at some point bump up against what St. Paul ran into, i.e. our good intentions and attempts at self-help aren’t enough. Our motives are mixed, our follow-through flawed. We undermine ourselves.
As Paul put it, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Rom 7:15) This was, for Paul, the plight of life lived under the Law, under the attempt to achieve perfection or salvation by one’s own efforts, a.k.a. “self-help.” God knows, it’s enticing. How could a title like The 4 Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Weight-Loss, Incredible Sex and Becoming Superhuman not grab you and entice you to grab it off the shelf at the bookstore, as apparently hundreds of thousands have. But as Paul discovered what the Law promises it can never deliver, now self-help guru Tim Ferriss has discovered this about his own variety of law, the religion of self-help.
Writes Paul, “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand … wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death! Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ!” (Rom 7:21, 24). At some point we discover we aren’t totally in charge. We are all in fact in bondage of one sort or another. We need rescue. We need a Savior.
Ferriss doesn’t go quite so far as Paul, either in his despair or his remedy. He does turn, however, to the famous work of Abraham Maslow and his “Hierarchy of Human Needs.” You remember Maslow’s Pyramid? The pinnacle of Maslow’s pyramid is “self-actualization,” self-help’s mountaintop. How often has “self-actualization” been trumpeted as the be all and end all for the enlightened classes and that for which we all ought to aim?
But as Ferriss points out in his article Maslow’s work and his pyramid does not actually end with “self-realization.” There was something more for Maslow, something that somehow ended up on the cutting-room floor. That “something more” is self-transcendence. Ferriss writes:
A critical footnote got lost in the shuffle. In his later writings, especially notes compiled in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1971), Maslow added a sixth level above self-actualization: Self-transcendence.
Self-transcendence means going beyond the self — seeking connection with something greater, such as service to others, nature, art, or the divine […]
Once again, the fundamental assumption behind self-help is often this: Something is not OK. Something is wrong. Something is not enough. Something needs fixing. If I can’t find it, I’ll create it. We’ve established this. But there is a follow-on assumption that matters a lot. If I fix the things that aren’t OK, all will be well. If I improve myself enough, if I only work hard enough, I can finally eliminate my suffering.
“I hate to inform you,” concludes a repentant Ferriss, “but this doesn’t work. I’m also thrilled to inform you that this doesn’t work.”
There is cross-over here with what some have come to call “therapeutic culture.” I’m not saying therapy has no place or can’t be helpful. It can. But as therapeutic language has become the go-to moral language of a culture that has given up on others, it risks making my feelings, my happiness and whether or not something “works for me” our primary, even sole, basis of judgment. But as with self-help, in Ferriss’s assessment, the risk here is becoming terminally self-preoccupied. Which calls to mind Luther’s definition of sin, “the self curved in upon itself.”
Christianity, on the other hand, has as a goal what might be called “self-forgetfulness.” So touched, awed, carried by God’s grace in Jesus Christ, that we lose our selves, forget ourselves, in the glory and beauty of God, in the mercy of God’s Son, in the surprise of the Spirit’s movements. “Self-transcendence.” “Lost,” as Charles Wesley writes in a hymn, “in wonder, love and praise.” That is to say worship of the true God, who — surprise! — turns out not to be you or me.
I remember once spotting a teenager with a t-shirt that had the word “LOSER” emblazoned across his chest. “Golly, I thought that’s sad.” As he passed me I turned around to look again at him and caught the back of his shirt which said, “He who loses himself for my sake will find himself. — Jesus.”
