Self-help manuals
Jul. 8th, 2005 12:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsA 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.)
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.)
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no subject
Date: 2005-07-10 06:27 pm (UTC)Although right now, I'd recommend "When I say No, I Feel Guilty" which has techniques for learning to be nice and polite, while still asserting your rights... and "Ready for Anything" which I'm using to get my stuff organized... Oh, no, I'm a victim of a consumer mentality! Ok, no, I checked them out from the library. :)
no subject
Date: 2005-07-14 06:05 pm (UTC)