Reading Skills:
How Self-Help Poisons Your Reading
Self-help books come with an ugly side effect; one veiled with good intentions, but that will inevitably sabotage your reading when you choose to spread out from this swollen genre.
The fact that self-help is where many of us start out with literature makes it an even bigger cause for alarm.
In that saturated corner of the library, there’s a risk that you read book after book after book, only to absorb the same handful of points about time-management, productivity, or whatever corporate résumé-filler trait you want next. It never ends. The pleasure you find in each book is enough to make you hunt the next, like you’re working through the skill tree of an MMO, and yet . . . nothing changes. You forget the ‘self-‘ part of ‘self-help,’ and the illusion of growth steals your attention away from actual growth.
Thankfully, some people in the self-help community looked in the mirror and found self-awareness. They discovered ‘mental masturbation,’ or in less vulgar terms, plain old ‘procrastination,’ the repeated binge of content without using it for any good in the real world. The answer to this endless loop was to APPLY what you learned.
This means you scour through a book’s pages for ‘lessons’ or ‘practical steps.’ These will break you free. These are your last hope, to beat the other suckers and claw your way out of the procrastination pit.
And it works. You become healthy, wealthy, and happy—how can you not after reading so much? However, it only works until you stop reading self-help. If you graduate to new forms of writing, like plays, novels, and epics, your natural instinct is to slap on the same rigid mindset: ‘books are useless unless you “use” them in real life.’
And so you keep looking for practical carry-overs, whether it’s Homer, Shakespeare, or George Orwell.
Though it feels productive, all you have done is reduce literature to its lowest denominator. What was once a grand epic that explored the danger of pride and wrath is now . . . advice on how not to get angry. Macbeth’s tragic fall becomes a lesson on how “ambition drives you towards your goals, but it can also be your downfall :D”
Worst of all, you completely miss the point; if all that Animal Farm taught us was that ‘power corrupts,’ we’d be bored out of our minds—a hundred other books carry the same message, but Animal Farm is unique because it’s a more precise critique of Stalinism and the betrayal of socialist values.
One book in particular slapped some sense into me when I was knee-deep in this way of thinking, and with just a few pages, I saw how short-sighted this “practical lessons” obsession was. In a bookshop in Greece, I saw Machiavelli’s The Prince nestled between The 48 Laws of Power and some other trendy hustle-porn. Weird . . . it felt out of place.
I flick through, and realise this was no ordinary copy. Every so often, there was a blank page for you to take notes in—thank you, finally—it’s a pain to squeeze annotations into the margins. More space is always welcome.
That wasn’t the issue though. Each of these blank sections came with a writing prompt: in majestic red script, they asked you how you could use Machiavelli’s tenets in a corporate office setting—how to lead, how to manage conflicts, and how to butter your manager up for a raise- stuff like that -the so called ‘dark psychology’ and ‘power plays’ that edgy teenagers get excited over.
I cringed.
Really? Is this what we’re reducing it to?
Practical advice is always useful. Every book, no matter how high in the literature ladder, no matter how ‘deep’ in its thought, has something to offer for how we carry ourselves in life. The problem is not that we seek it out—we should. The trouble starts when we throw every kind of book into the same basket and treat them no differently to one another.
A raw utilitarian approach to a practical book makes total sense—that’s what it exists for, to help you do something beyond the last page.
A toned-down version of that approach still works in other books, like the ones mentioned above. If Achilles inspires you to check your pride and deal with anger in a healthier way, that’s fantastic; it is a moral of the story, after all.
What we should avoid is a purely practical approach, where we’re left skimming the surface of the book while blinding ourselves to the depth it has to offer.
Many of literature’s masterpieces have no practical advice at all, and yet capture a part of the human condition better than any guidebook ever could: Albert Camus’ The Stranger leaves you clueless on your next step, and yet gives us one of the best studies of meaning and existentialism out there.
Other books share a philosophy far too broad for any practical bullet points to sum up; Nietzsche, Kafka, McCarthy, many of their cornerstone works cannot be confined to the idea of a ‘practical point.’ Some books exist purely as art, to make you reflect over an idea without necessarily declaring what is right or wrong, or what you’re supposed to do next—poetry comes to mind.
Embrace practical points when they come, but do not be limited by them: reflect, imagine, get immersed, because for most genres, that is where the magic awaits you. That is where the pulse of the book will touch you. That is where you will be changed.
Yours,
Odysseas
P.S
It might be schizophrenic to say this now, but self-help gets too much hate as a genre. Seriously, I mean it.
Sure, we shit on it all the time, and rightfully so—it's a fraction of what literature has to offer, and those self-gratifying infinite loops are very real. Still, it's where many of us began, and if gets people to pick up a book in the first place, then it has a valuable place in the bookstore. Barely anybody reads in the modern age, so if it acts like a gateway for entry, then we should celebrate it.
Catch me on an sympathetic day, and I'll say the same about booktok. Just not today . . .
P.S.S
A new mini-essay video will be out soon. You liked the original, and it was in heeeeavy need of a remastering, so here we are. I hope you enjoy!
