Self-Help for Emo Kids

Do you feel bad that you are not fulfilling your full potential? Are there things you know you can do, but for one reason or another, you are not doing? Perhaps life is too demanding. Perhaps job is too draining. Perhaps love is too consuming. But deep down, you know you can be much more. Right?

So you read self-help books.

So I read self-help books.

So you read productivity blogs.

So I read productivity blogs.

And they are no help. If self-help does help, then you (and I) would stop reading them. We all sense its futility, and we all laugh at the cleverness of the end-all self-help tip: stop reading me, and get to work!

But we can’t get to work. And we keep reading. 13 tips for X. 5 rules for Y. 7 habits for Z. Reading these feel good tripe is a symptom rather than a cure. This we only know too well.

The paradox of the self-help men is this: we take a kind of pride in not being our best. I am such a slacker. I procrastinate endlessly. I just can’t seem to get to work. We are apologetic when we make these confessions. But we are not shamed.

There is a bitter-sweetness in this flaccid incapacity. I know I am not doing much, but with a twinkle in my eyes, and an ironic smile, I know you know I know I can be much more. I am not procrastinating— I am waiting for inspiration. I am a genius, yet.

This is the marketability of self-help. The point is not to get you to do anything. The point is to tell you that you are only using 10% of your brain. You can be much more, and you know it. It is satisfying to know that if I reached for the heaven, the stars would be within my grasp.

It is pornography.

Cheap Optimism

I hate the self-help “literature”. When I am goofing off, how can I possibly resist reading some blog titled “how to wake up early”, or “how to sleep 2 hours a day”. I hate Steve Pavlina and his new age bullshit. But sometimes I can’t help but to read what he writes.

Guilty pleasure, vicarious productivity.

My trouble is, it all seem too easy, and the optimism naive. If you worked hard enough, you can be all that you can be. But the fact is, you can’t work hard enough, and even if you worked hard enough, you might still fail.

Failure is ok, sometimes you pick yourself up, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you learn something, sometimes it’s arbitrary and you can do nothing much except to cry about it.

Life is complicated, and more often than not, out of control. Yet self-help books tells you that if you are more self-aware, self-disciplined, or whatever, you can control your life.

What else do you expect from popular self-help writers? Most people don’t want to be told what they already know: life is hard, unfair, and you can’t do much about it. So self-help writers paint a rosy picture. Cheap optimism sells well, as well as cheap romance sells.

How well? Self-help is worth $8.5 billion in 2003.

My sentiment is like the very first sentence of Camus’s essay, The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” Camus asks, why is life worth living? In parallel, the only truly serious self-help problem is that given the overwhelming probability that I won’t amount to much, why should I put in any effort at all?

We all need some kind of optimism. Optimism is good, but sugar coated sweetened candy makes me sick.

Sartre Writes Self-Help

I don’t mean to be a snob, but Sartre changed my life more than did any amount of Oprah, Dr. Phil, or Steve Pavlina. Nobody expects optimism from this chain smoking French Existentialist. After all, he’s the one who wrote, “hell is others”. What does he care about helping me to help myself?

That said, Sartre’s essay “Existentialism is a Humanism” is probably the best self-help resource for sworn emo kids. Life sucks, then you die. But wait, there’s more! Sartre wrote the essay to show “a doctrine which makes human life possible”. Life sucks, then you die… that’s better than nothing!

This is Sartre’s brand of optimism. And it works for me. What follows is my brand of self-help, with a Sartrean stink.

Two concepts are central to Sartre’s thought on existence. They are Nothingness and Invention. The nature of existence is summed up in the famous phrase, “existence precedes essence”. What Sartre means is that you come into the world without a predefined purpose (Nothingness), and it is only through choosing to act (Invention), that you finally define yourself as something. Furthermore, this process of becoming something is ongoing. Every moment, you must invent yourself, you must choose, you must act.

This is not easy.

God is Dead

To better appreciate what Sartre’s point, let’s consider the converse. One basic existential question is this: rather than not existing, why do I exist? Or made suitable for a Sunday School question, of the hundreds of millions of sperms that invaded mom, why did God pick me? The obvious answer is that God must have had a plan for me, even before I was born.

Here is Isaiah 49:1-3 (NIV),

 1 Listen to me, you islands; 
       hear this, you distant nations: 
       Before I was born the LORD called me; 
       from my birth he has made mention of my name. 
 2 He made my mouth like a sharpened sword, 
       in the shadow of his hand he hid me; 
       he made me into a polished arrow 
       and concealed me in his quiver. 
 3 He said to me, "You are my servant, 
       Israel, in whom I will display my splendor."

That is to say, essence precedes existence.

But to many, this is not a good answer. If my life has a predefined purpose, do I still have free will? Wouldn’t it kinda suck if my purpose of life is to have my foreskin harvested by some God-inspired Israeli general for the LORD’s splendor? Worse, what if there is no God, AND I still get my foreskin harvested, only for some fairytale?

That there is no God is the starting point of Sartre’s optimism. Without God, we are nothing, and from Nothingness, we invent ourselves. This is freedom. But Nothingness, for Sartre, is not a pleasant idea like the Tabla Rosa, upon which you can draw rainbows with your multicolored box of crayons. No. The freedom afforded by Nothingness is, paradoxically, not liberating, but suffocating, with an ever prodding urgency. Sartre says, we are “condemned to be free”.

Sartre’s Nothingness is a miserable, terrible thing. It is not calm and dissolving like Zen’s Mu. It would be so much easier had God existed.

Along the same line is Nietzsche’s “God is Dead” aphorism. It is often popularized as a triumphant declaration of the death of religious nonsense, as it is exposed to the light of rationality. Taken in context, however, “God is Dead”, is more like a despairing, pathetic whimper: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?” And now that God is dead, and “the churches… the tombs and sepulchers of God”, we are left without a purpose, we are Nothing, drifting in the great coldness of space:

What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Wither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder?

Nietzsche – Gay Science (God is Dead aphorism.)

Freedom from God(s) is disorienting. Starting from the denial of God, the plague of Nothingness spreads over and corrupts every other philosophical absolutes. No, you can’t seek comfort in Plato’s Forms, Kant’s Imperatives, Spinoza’s Nature, or Hegel’s Dialectics. The freedom of Nothingness is total, enveloping, and overwhelming. Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols, rubs it in, and denies us of all higher ideal/purpose:

What alone can our teaching be? — That no one gives a human being his qualities: not God, not society, not his parents or ancestors, no be himself ( — the nonsensical idea here last rejected was propounded, as “intelligible freedom”, by Kant, and perhaps also by Plato before him). No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives. The fatality of all that which has been and will be. He is not the result of a special design, a will, a purpose; he is not the subject of an attempt to attain to an “ideal of man” or an “ideal of happiness” or an “ideal of morality” — it is absurd to want to hand over his nature to some purpose or other. We invented the concept of “purpose”: in reality purpose is lacking.

Nietzsche – Twilight of Idols

It is from this philosophical ruin that Sartre builds a philosophy. For thousands of years, philosophers had been quibbling on the essence of man, and what it means to live according to an ideal. Now, with God dead, we have to turn the basic existential question upside down.

Existentialism

I no longer ask why I exist. I take my existence as a trivial fact, of no more moral significance than that my hair is black. The new existential question is this: given that by some fucked up cosmic accident I exist, what do I do?

Sartre says, you have to choose, you have to act. You have to invent yourself from Nothingness. What ever your choosings, and the sum of your actions, is who you are. So your essence is something you have to work on, a work preceded by your existence.

This is brutally common sensical. If you wrote a book, you did, and you are a writer. If you got an A in a class, then you did, and you are a good student.

But there are no “would be”s, or “could’ve been”s. You are not a would be writer if you have not written anything, and you could not have gotten a better grade had you worked harder.

This is not to say that hard work is futile. What it is saying, is that given you didn’t work hard, by the doctrine of Nothingness, you couldn’t have worked hard. It makes no sense to speculate on what potentials there are in you that could’ve been released by hard work, or what essence in you that would fate you to an end.

Without getting results, you are nothing:

There is no genius other than one which is expressed in works of art; the genius of Proust is the sum of Proust’s works; the genius of Racine is his series of tragedies. Outside of that, there is nothing. Why say that Racine could have written another tragedy, when he didn’t write it? A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing. To be sure, this may seem a harsh thought to someone whose life hasn’t been a success. But, on the other hand, it prompts people to understand that reality alone is what counts, that dreams, expectations, and hopes warrant no more than to define a man as a disappointed dream, as miscarried hopes, as vain expectations. In other words, to define him negatively and not positively. However, when we say, “You are nothing else than your life,” that does not imply that the artist will be judged solely on the basis of his works of art; a thousand other things will contribute toward summing him up. What we mean is that a man is nothing else than a series of undertakings, that he is the sum, the organization, the ensemble of the relationships which make up these undertakings.

Sartre- Existentialism is a Humanism

This is a responsible (perhaps despairing) image of the self. There can be no delusional grandeur. We all have to stop kidding ourselves… the fact that we are not working on a life project doesn’t mean we could be working on it. It means no more and no less that these “life” projects are not a part of our lives.

David Letterman once said, “Everyone has a purpose in life. Perhaps yours is watching television.” This is a cynical wisecrack, but has a lot of truth in it. While you are sitting there watching TV, waiting for inspiration to strike, you are a TV watcher, not a creative artist.

Absurdity

But Sartre seems to believe that anyone with enough existential courage and do-it-now gusto can write a Proust-lengthed novel. It’s hard to take seriously Sartre’s argument that because we are nothing, we can invent ourselves to be anything.

There are limits. I cannot do Physics, I cannot dance, and I cannot see through walls or shoot lasers out of my eyes.

Sure, I am not a would be writer. Sure, my dreams are miscarried dreams, false hopes. So? If work takes so much work, and I am so limited by my limitations, why should I bother? I won’t accomplish much anyway, who cares?

This is the true self-help question. You are mundane, you are boring, you are stupid, you are useless to humanity. How do you (and I) live with that? Perhaps life would be so much better if we are all geniuses.

Or, perhaps not.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, we have the image of a man cursed to roll a boulder up a hill, then watch it roll down, then roll it up again. So on to eternity. For Camus, this captures the condition of humanity.

What’s the point? There’s no point. Yet he keeps doing it.

This is Absurdity.

Barney’s song is pointless, and Beethoven’s Symphonies no more pointful. Music goes in and out of fashion. We all die. Civilizations rise and fall. Humanity will go extinct. Universe will… nobody knows what will happen, and nobody will be there to know.

Whether you are genius or not makes no difference. We are all rolling boulders up a hill, and when we die, the boulders roll right back down. Some of us roll bigger boulders than others, but we are all Sisyphuses.

Everyone is meaningless. Even if you can invent yourself out of nothing, your something remains nothing. 0+0=0.

Yet just as we eschewed cheap optimism, cheap nihilism is something we should avoid. Both unchecked optimism and unqualified pessimism are too easy. Life is neither optimistic nor pessimistic.

Life is utterly indifferent. It asks you to live without a higher purpose… or to live with a religion. For those of us disinclined to fairytales, all we have to live on is the advice that we might as well try to enjoy it, whatever “it” is.

Camus writes that it is all absurd, but “the struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

We must imagine ourselves happy, as we roll the biggest boulders we can possibly roll, up a short, all too short, hill.

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