Nikki Reimer ---blog

Catching up with 3 “Self Help” genre books (or anti-Self Help genre, as the case may be):

I’d been chronically disheartened for, oh, about a lifetime, but in particular over the summer, as I tried to deal with my lengthy unemployment and various other small little upsets and foibles; such is life. However, I was growing increasingly, paralyzingly anxiety-ridden to the point of immobility in the daytime and insomnia in the nighttime. Also I’ve spent a lifetime battling depression and my own, inborn & learned, impossibly high standards, along with the pervasive feelings of worthlessness and despair when I inevitable don’t measure up.

I’m smart, I’ve done the therapy, I’ve done (and want to get off) the pills, but at some point a person just has to solve their own shit for themselves.

Ergo, on FrackBook, I posted that I was looking for motivational books to read, and received many good suggestions, some of which I’m still waiting on at the library.

Mixed in between the lines amongst the first three of these books lies the prescription for a happy, healthy, balanced life, at least according to Reimer.

68. Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth by Steve Pavlina

I found this book useful in terms of daily focus and goal setting. Thinking about Pavlina’s “Fundamental Principles” (Truth, Love, Power, Oneness, Authority, Courage, Intelligence) did actually help me to live smarter, for a time. His “triage” theory for scheduling your time was particularly useful: Projects can be divided into 1) Projects that will fail to have a significant impact, whether you do them or not, 2) Projects that will succeed anyway, whether you do them or not, 3) Projects that will have a significant impact only if you complete them in a timely manner.

Some of Pavlina’s ideas may seem simplistic or reductionist to folks who already have discipline and good study habits; I was so bright that I never even had to try till mid-way through high school, at which point I’d developed an attititude and didn’t think I should have to make an effort. I never learned study habits, organizational skills, or realistic goal setting. It hurts to admit this at the relatively advanced age of 30, but I cannot change without admitting my faults. I winged everything, and it worked for some things, and for all things for a short time, but it’s not a tenable way to live. So some of the ideas and strategies in this book were incredibly useful for me.

Other of Pavlina’s suggestions are too far into Kool-Aid territory, however. He values productivity above all else, which is merely the application of capitalism to an individual life, and with which I don’t agree. He mentions at one point that he managed to live for 5 months by sleeping for 20 minute stretches every few hours, and that he was his most productive ever during this time. Well, bully for him, so what?  

He values enterpreneurship, and seems to think that everyone can, or should, or has the resources to, start their own business, and that such endeavors will necessarly lead to satisfaction and financial success, which I think is simplistic. In the Money and Career section he defines a “Contributor Mind Set”, as opposed to a “Moocher Mind Set,” and suggests that we’d all be better off developing careers as people who “Contribute Social Value,” rather than mooch. Than he maligns artists by suggesting, “When you attempt to satisfy your personal values without providing any real social value, you get the starving-artist syndrome: you may be inspired by the work you love doing, but it won’t pay the bills.”

Well, that’s easy for a former gaming industry, current coaching industry enterpreneur to say, now isn’t it?

Also: “Be sure that your self-education is practical. It’s entirely possible to build skills that are of great interest to you but that no one will pay for. There’s nothing wrong with acquiring interesting knowledge that has little or no financial value – just don’t whine and complain when no one will open their wallets for you.”

Poets, I believe he’s talking to us.

My problem was that a few weeks after reading the book, the “new attitudes” gradually faded and I went back to regular immobile anxiety-land. Guess I’ll need to sign up for the long-term program.

69. How To Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson

The Anti-Personal Development for Smart People, and I’m glad I read it next. Hodgkinson reminds us that “busy-ness” as a worthwhile social value was a fabrication of the industrial age, and was taken up as a tool of the factory owners and upper classes (who often didn’t engage in the same hours of work) to coerce their new employees into longer toil in order to direct profits back to themselves. (Pavlina, are you listening?) He provides a good socio-historical context for the value of work vs. the value of idleness. And I found it immensely gratifying to learn of the many learned and important thinkers throughout history who also: 1) found it near impossible to get out of bed in the morning, and 2) preferred to work in bed. Me too, dudes, me too.

Emphasis on dudes, though. This book has previously been criticized, and rightly so, for not taking the male privelege into account. Also white privilege, able-bodied privilege, etc. Only certain categories of persons are able to choose idleness, and my working-class female friends with small children are not among them.

That said, Hodgkinson walks us through history, quotes writers, poets and artists with great relish, and reminds us that the joy of living is to be found in the joy of living. I sure felt glee and delight, and laughed out loud while reading Hodgkinson’s book, for whatever that’s “worth.”

70. Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich

No-nonsense, critical, erudite as always, Ehrenreich brings balance and thoughtful research to her investigation into the scourge of magical thinking. Though the sub-title of the book references “America,” and she refers to specific to the United States examples throughout, I actually think she’s discussing a more global phenomenon. Certainly we’ve suffered the same cultural attitudes in Canada, as anyone who’s been told to cheer up, chin up, and refrain from expressing disappointment or frustration can attest.

She points out that the world of positive thinking, which seeks to banish all “negativity” and “negative people,” necessarily by virtue of its values suffers from a “massive empathy deficit, which people respond to by withdrawing their own. No one has the time or patience for anyone else’s problems.” Yeah, no kidding. And this is a widespread problem.

Whereas Pavlina and Hodgkinson both suggest their readers should stop reading the newspaper, Pavlina because it will bring you down, and it’s all corporate advertising anyway and Hodgkinson because it’s just depressing tragedy all the time, Ehrenreich believes, as do I, that one needs to remain informed in order to be a responsible citizen. Y’know, voting based on information. Trying to bring about small changes in the world. Shopping ethically. Stuff like that.

The Motivation Industry and ideas like “transcendent oneness” are dangerous because they require converts to withdraw into themselves, to think and behave selfishly, and conversely to blame themselves, and be blamed by others, when larger forces bring tragedy into their lives. They just weren’t thinking hard enough to manifest that miracle!

Ehrenreich calls bullshit, again and again, in a reasoned and analytically sound way that is impossible to dispute. She also reminds us that “in the hands of employers, positive thinking has been transformed into something its nineteenth-century proponents probably never imagined—not as an exhortation to get up and get going but as a means of social control in the workplace, a goad to perform at ever-higher levels.” (For ever-lower salaries and levels of job security.)

Finally, she articulates how and why critical thinking became a dirty term, and one reason why academics and the university have become so disrespected in much of society:

“The best students—and in good colleges, also the most successful—are the ones who raise sharp questions, even at the risk of making a professor momentarily uncomfortable. Whether the subject is literature or engineer, graduates should be capable of challenging authority figures, going against the views of their classmates, and defending novel points of view. This is not because academics value contrarianism for its own sake but because they recognize that a society needs people who will do exactly what the gurus of positive thinking warn us to avoid—“overintellectualize” and ask hard questions.”

Ehrenreich also reminds us that success is not guaranteed in life, nor is happiness, but that in endeavoring to solve the hard problems (and the little problems) we can always have fun trying.

Well, call me contrarian, but I think I’ll throw my hat in with realism.

-Nikki