Nobody is going to save you: self-help & the existential undercut

Nobody is going to save you. Nor will the perfect app, the perfect planner, the perfect organisational method, productivity expert, spiritual guru or the latest bestseller.

Fantasising about your own perfection will not save you, denying your flaws and your complexity will not save you. Revelling in your own imperfections will not save you; basking in the mutuality of your very human flaws will not save you.

Ignoring the texture of your own life will not save you, anymore than it saves you to walk around naked in a forest in the dark.

Self-help is a form of positively-directed ignorance. You feel the call of genuine questions and step out on a journey, only to step into a bookshop and buy something that tells you what to do, rather than continuing the journey and addressing your own questions.

Frightened by the search, you call off the search. You return home with a guidebook, promised joy and riches, provided you do not question the belief system of the message you’ve bought into.

In essence, you leave on a journey with burgeoning questions but accept another’s answers long before the questions have become fully conscious to you. You’ve bought a guidebook, and it’s bought you.

The word Self-help presumes many things. It presumes a self. It presumes that you know what this self is; it presumes that you’re here to build up the self and to make it better. It presumes that you are split off from this self in such a way that you can improve it, or address it as a circumspect, impersonal observer.

Accept another’s answers and fleet-footed Hermes is laughing all the way to the bank.

Such metaphysical presumptions are packaged into easily digestible morsels. But when you assume the end at the start of the journey, you deny the potential of the journey to change you. Are you being honest about your search?

Pursuing questions is not self-help. It is instead the journey to accept into consciousness questions that are profound, difficult and enigmatic. It is the journey to the undoing of your current outlook — the razor’s edge. It’s making space for what may undo you, and holding it in tension with your current experience of the world. Such a journey is difficult in the extreme, and it emerges only in concert with conscious attention to life.

Our attempts at self-help are gentle steps in this direction. But like gardeners frightened by the otherness of nature, we cut off the new shoots before the plant can bear fruit. We do so because we cannot stomach uncertainty or ambiguity. We step out onto the road but find we miss the comfort of illusion.

The journey itself is paradoxical, mysterious and ambiguous. And we cannot control paradox or subvert mystery. Ask the liminal to conform and without further ado we are chasing shadows at pace.

Running away from the miasmic and the grey means we fail to confront the abrasion and sharpness of genuine questions. To respond to those questions genuinely, we must also toil genuinely. Accept another’s answers and fleet-footed Hermes is laughing all the way to the bank.

All this is not to deny the transformative potential of the right book for the right person at the right time. And it’s not to dismiss the genuine efforts of others to help us, to condense their own experiences and to convey their heartfelt wisdom. Rather, I’m asking us not to use those stories and lessons as a way to avoid our own.

It is nice to feel we have all of our ducks in a row. The world is complex and decisions are hard. Sometimes there are so many opinions and beliefs swirling around and coursing through us that they threaten to sweep us up. Lost to this maelstrom, it is all too easy to adopt the easy answers — to silence our genuine questions and ignore our own dis-ease.

Genuine enquiry is not self-help, then, but an existential undercut. It is meeting our questions and this shared life with attendant curiosity.

If we enter into this journey truly, it will claim our lives. Misappropriate it by handing off our genuine questions to others though, and — like the rabbit that steps outside the burrow to find a fox — we’ve already caught ourselves. Instead, let’s heed the call and leap out into the journey.