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Brady Hill's avatar

It's a tricky conversation, isn't it?

I too am a writer of self-help material. I am also a reader of self-help material from time to time. And I struggle because my interpretation of self-help is always different from the interpretation offered by people who criticise the genre. And I guess, like a person, self-help has its positive and negative qualities. I'm mostly removed from other people's work, just focused on doing my own, so I'm not really tapped into the broader self-help conversation, as in what's out there.

So naturally I assume that my work is the good stuff, not sure everyone would agree haha, but it's certainly a bias. However, despite my ignorance of the broader self-help conversation, I think you've brought up some legitimate concerns.

One way I get around some of these issues is to speak about my experiences. The assumption being that this is what I lived and believed, and any claim I make as to the legitimacy of my work is really just based on a "trust me bro." But what's good about this is that it's not claiming to be truth and nothing but the truth, but rather a human story. Something which is enmeshed in context, subjectivity, and nuance. Clear answers aren't common in the human experience, and I agree with your criticism that people shouldn't exactly be given solutions to problems. Such a black and white approach isn't natural. Life isn't problems and solutions. Life is all grey, and we draw the black and white out of it, making the problems and solutions as we go. And somewhere in the self-help conversation there needs to an acknowledgment of the grey, something that is often missing in the material.

It's easy to sell a solution. It's hard to sell an opinion (unless people trust you). It may just be that our little friend money has gone and corrupted education once again, leaning people toward selling problems and solutions as simple self-help advice rather than addressing the much more complicated mess that life can be.

I guess this is why the self-help community is despised by a good chuck of the philosophy community. Simple solution to life with none of the nuance.

Ah well, maybe we can be the change brother. Not just selling people solutions to problems, but rather furthering the dialogue on the complicated question of life, giving people new perspectives to deal with this thing we all share called life.

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