Lessons from Natural Selection: Stepping back from Browser to Brain.
Part two of “Advice to the self”, or When your feet don’t itch.
Self-help books are trash — well, most of them are — and this article might be so as well.
The problem with self-help books is that they make us feel good and betray us with superficial correlations: “Successful entrepreneurs read books,” they claim, and some hormones surge in our bloodstream and make us confirm, “yeah, I am on the way to be one.” Such premature correlations direct us, unaware of several conditions needed, to achieve something and might make us prone to faulty conclusions. All bits of advice that you garner from self-help books are either completely not applicable to your context, or your grandparents and your close friends can enlighten you enough. Well, see, self-help books are occupying your time and human skills to open up and have uncomfortable discourses with your immediate circles.
One of the catastrophic disservices mainstream self-help books do to their readers is merely granting narrow views on human psychology and philosophy. We feel alone, hurt, misunderstood, depressed, sad, or other indelible human conditions. Often, self-help books pursue a capitalistic approach to motivate one to be happy, productive, or anything that might be good for the economy or fabricated narratives. Some such books make us envy, or at least imitate, successful people, diverting us from focusing on ourselves. The more appropriate pathway will be to understand our psyche, inspect our surroundings, and develop a philosophy that might aid us to grow in the ever-changing world.
Most self-help books just reiterate what your mother had been screaming to you since your childhood, “Get out of bed, exercise, sanitize your room…” But they don’t make you feel horrible or embarrassed as much as your parents do. Congrats. The simple heuristic here is “don’t read books that make you comfortable”. Don’t read self-help books that make you flip pages while you still are staying under your cozy blanket, rather read those books that make your feet itch.
No books will shield yourself from the cruelties of the world, however — your hands will get dirty and bruised. Natural Selection is a powerful tool that nature adopts and employs to evaluate the commodities which can sustain their existence — even if unforeseen threats befall them. Nature has learned this technique for millennia, but nature is not biased enough to certify a certain creature resilient while another vulnerable. It tests every creature instead, letting them struggle for their fate. Humans have to endure the changes in “temperature, pressure, habitat” around them where knowledge will assist but application alone will let you rule. The lesson can be extended to one’s life: when you’re working on yourself, first of all, access your insecurities, weakest aspects of your mindsets, and be comfortable enough to confront and improve those weak spots because if you don’t, such frailties will stack together and be the prime reason for your downfall when exposed to a powerful threat. [1]
Okay, let me try to be more vivid: instead of focusing on what habits you should introduce in your life, you should concentrate on your current habits that you want to avoid or eliminate. Self-help books often enable and reinforce the biases that we can move on, focus on a new thing that we yearn to incorporate into our life, and we will excel on it, but that’s not the way life usually unfolds. If we don’t address our ‘baseline’ — that are encoded on our subconscious, genes, or whatever for years — there is always a good chance that we will topple back to our previous tendencies, so the strong focus must be on recognizing our foundations and obliterating existing loopholes that will not only provide space for newer habits/perspectives but also will reduce friction while transitioning to new habits. How will you do that? Idk. Neither do most of the self-help books.
But wait! “Natural” selection, dude? Now, we don’t spend our time around bushes but on browsers. The purposes of our survival are far greater than to forage food, forge weapons, reproduce, build shelters, and evade wild predators. We rather have to impress our Facebook friends, Twitter audience, read 42 self-help books, and count the time taken by our friends to get back to our messages. Whoa, such a calamity has befallen us.
The relentless pursuit of amassing materials, being around people, seeking validations, filling lots of bureaucratic paperwork/forms, and consuming online has modeled our brain to consume commodities that don’t serve us much besides triggering some addictive hormones, distorting our worldview, and forbidding us from knowing the self. Yeah, local or global collectivism is more about fitting-in than standing-out, and it serves to maintain some needed homogeneity. But the internet stretches our tendencies of fitting-in to forgetting ourselves, unhealthy competition, unrealistic/unexamined expectations, distorted sense of reality, and whatnot.
Advertisements, rhetoric, status quo, and 42 modern things overwhelm and distort our judgments, but the point is to freeze your tabs, exit your browser, and listen to your mind — or shut your mind down from its eternal chatter. Don’t sleepwalk throughout your whole life defending the image that you derived through the careless consumption of your culture, social media, or newspaper. But how? Either you know it, or even self-help books won’t be of much help.
The world/nature is oblivious of you, maybe not, but the truth is the world can function well with or without you. We live inside a bubble our mind creates to make us compatible to our perceived space-time: community, past, future, workplace… The conscious effort to remind ourselves that that tiny, somewhat illusory, petty bubble will burst and won’t create much disturbance in the universe might help sometimes.
Don’t try to defend your current-self — who might be a patient of “severe browser brainwashing” — as if the world expects or begs you to be a certain way, a certain thing. And don’t do anything that will embarrass you grandma — reading self-help books is one of such things.
[1] Inspired by N.N. Taleb’s Antifragile.
