Self-help manuals

A couple of years ago a phenomenon that would have been more or less impossible before the age of the Internet hit the wires and poor, lonely, desperate geeks sat up, took notice, downloaded the teasers and spent gigabucks on a buzzword-compliant product that promised to change their life forever.

I refer, of course, to Ross Jeffries's Speed Seduction. In 1998, "neuro-linguistic programming," which sounds an awful lot like an attempt to put the Bene Gesserit practices from Dune into real life, was hot. Very hot. NLP seminars and books were hitting the airwaves, people were getting mesmerized in a way that hasn't happened since Mesmer, and Mr. Jeffries was (and is) selling a collection of NLP-buzzword-compliant techniques for getting and keeping a woman's attention. Mostly, it's about pickup lines. Sometimes weird pickup lines.

While I was reading through Ross's literature (at the time, he and his cronies were bombarding the sex newsgroups and forums with spam), I figured out what his customers were buying. And I thought about those purchases today when I read Nick Gillespie's review of SHAM, a book by Steve Salerno about how self-help books are ruining America. The reviewer gives a pass to Franklin, Carnegie, and Hill, but that with "I'm OK, You're OK," an entire generation of doubts and fears has been cultivated for which only the Self-Help Actualization Movement (SHAM) can help.

A buyer of How To Pick Up Girls for $6.95 or Ross Jeffries' Speed Seduction for significantly more are buying courage. An excuse to be brave. "I spent so much time and money studying these techniques-- which I didn't know before-- that I can only justify that expense to myself if I practice them!" is the thought pattern that goes into those purchases.

The same thought process goes into purchases of Organizing from the Inside Out, Eating Well For Better Health or, yes, Getting Things Done. Sometimes the book isn't even read; we know what they're going to say, but now we have purchased a totem towards our desire and we will honor that totem, and the cost we paid.

At least for a little while. Consumerized totems wear out; that's the nature of a consumer economy. Even more, ours is an attention economy, where the great draft of cash is made by holding the attention of others, and these books only hold our attention for a little while. The totem must be renewed, a fresh sacrifice made upon the altar of our intentions, usually committed with green slips of paper.

Salerno worked in the publishing industry and learned to appreciate just how much recycling went on. The same things were said over and over, usually just with different cover art. Salerno blames the self-help industry for creating the anxiety in the first place, but I don't believe that. We were always anxious. We've just really come to believe that happiness, or at least the waysigns to it, can be bought. And when the shine wears off, we buy it again. That's not the self-helper's fault; that's just consumerism.

One of the nicer aspects to Lifehacks is that much of what they teach is free (or cheap, like a pack of 3x5 index cards), but the daily drumbeat of "things you can do to make your life better" does help feed the attention beast. It's a shame that Covey never understood the attention economy and its need for constant repetition as well as others; without that cynical realization, they've lost a lot of marketshare. (Most of the earnest SHAMmers have never really understood the repetition aspect, which is why they fall well behind the Ross Jefferies, Deepak Chopra, and Chicken Soup for the Brain-Eating Zombie Soul crowd.)

A Century of Difference

Someone recently pointed me to a collection of statisics about what life was like in 1905, and one set struck me as interesting. The only valid comparison of prices between eras is the time-to-earn: how long does it take someone to earn the money to buy any given comparable product?

I started with this statistic, provided by the American Sociological Association: "a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year and worked an average of 57.7 hours/week." This translates to a figure of $1.67 per hour in 1905. You can go look up the current going rates yourself.

Here's what I discovered:

• It took him 86 seconds for a mechanical engineer to earn a pound of sugar. In 2005, it takes him 53 seconds.
• In 1905, it took him 5 minutes to earn a dozen eggs. In 2005, it takes him 70 seconds.
• It took 5 minutes, 25 seconds to earn a pound of coffee. In 2005, for a product of similar quality, it only takes 4 minutes, 33 seconds. For a gourmet coffee that simply was not available in 1905, 8 minutes and 15 seconds.
  
  And the most dramatic: In 1905, a three-minute phone call from New York to Denver: 6 hours, 35 minutes. Today, 34 seconds.

Chatting...

So, anyway, I haven't been personal-blogging much, but then afer last weekend I've kinda been running on autopilot. Finished Kushiel's Chosen, the second of the Kushiel series, and I enjoyed it much more than the first book; it really seems that Ms. Carey got her feet underneath her and wrote a rip-roaring good adventure story, and if the coincidences seem unlikely we're meant to believe that we're watching a battle between competing gods with our heroine and her unmerry band as pawns-- they know they're pawns, but they don't know the game.

I saw the saddest thing the other day. Omaha and I were too tired to cook after the weekend, so Tuesday evening we ordered take-out, and on the way to the restaurant I saw that some poor schmuck had overturned his ice-cream truck. It was a little thing, an extended authentic jeep, 1950s vintage and a beat-up dark green, the kind where the guy can only reach over his shoulder for the coolers in the back, and he had rolled it onto its side while attempting to take a corner onto a hill at high speed. He was sitting there, on the ground, knees drawn to his chest and his head in his hands. A cop stood above him, shaking his head sadly.

Yesterday, I ran into Cadaver Girl (I really have to stop calling her that; I see her two to three times a week on the bus, she's really friendly and very pretty, but I don't know her name and she works in a morgue, so...) and she mentioned that I looked tired. I mentioned that I hadn't recovered from the weekend and she agreed that she hadn't either. She didn't think she would until next weekend.

I haven't been writing much. Dunno why. Although I've been doing it steadily, I don't feel like I'm making progress. Part of it's just that I'm a bit on automatic, and a bit out of my depth with the vampire stories. Not my forte' at all. But I'm determined to finish them. Plumbing for the brain and all that.

Kouryou-chan has proven to be a poor source of dialogue for children. I was trying to get her into bed the other night, and she was ignoring me. So I poked her. She ignored me. I poked her again. She ignored me. I poked her again and said, "Is that annoying?"

She said, "If you continue poking me, it will become annoying." What five-year-old talks like that?

But she went to a friend's birthday party last night and had a good time. It was at the Chuck E Cheese place over in Kent, and she learned to appreciate Whack-A-Mole. Good times.