When you’re a major player in an industry full of contradictions, a midlife epiphany may not be worth the blog post it’s written on.
As one of the pre-eminent self-help authors of his age, Tim Ferriss’ life is naturally jewelled with epiphanies. There was, for instance, the time he decided he didn’t need to work for “the man”, so quit his sales job to start a nutritional supplements internet business, which he sold for an undisclosed but princely sum to a private equity firm within a decade.
There was the time he realised he was working too many hours for too little reward, so re-engineered his job so it could be done in just four hours per week, allowing him to spend the rest of his time travelling, learning new hobbies, and writing. The result of the latter pursuit was The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich – a self-help book that spent four years on The New York Times Best Seller List, was translated into 40 languages, and sold around 2.1 million copies.
Similar realisations about the ego, health, fitness, and even cooking each spawned another book. Ferriss also made bold decisions as an angel investor in Silicon Valley start-ups, explored the potential of psychedelic treatments for mental health, and pursued countless other ventures and discoveries.
Now, as he approaches the halfway point of his life, Ferriss may be confronting his most profound insight yet. In his latest blog post, The self-help trap: What 20-plus years of ‘optimising’ has taught me, Ferriss, now 48, asks whether his own industry might, with some important caveats, be making desperate people worse rather than better.
“The older I get, the more I think that self-help can be a trap. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. I say this after ~20 years of writing self-help and a lifetime of consuming it,” Ferriss says in the 3000-word post. “What if self-help itself is actually creating or amplifying unhappiness? Modern self-help contains an in-built flaw: To continually improve yourself, you must continually locate the ways you are broken.”
Ferriss begins the post with an anecdote of sitting around a campfire with friends, gazing at the stars and feeling perfectly content. He then moves between industry criticism, chart-heavy popular psychology, and plenty of self-analysis before gracefully returning to that campfire.
By the end, the reader has been served not just a few hard truths but, yes, a little extra self-help as well. The header image shows an illustration of a snake with hairy, external testicles, consuming its own tail.
His fans were impressed. “Tim, bravo. As someone who spent decades working in the self-help world – both behind the scenes and as a teacher, I read this nodding the whole way through,” commented Arielle Ford, another self-help author. “These days I sometimes joke that I’d like a friendly divorce from the industry. The endless hunt for ‘what’s wrong with me now?’ can become its own trap.”
Some saw it as not a wholesale rejection of the self-help industry, but as Ferriss merely ageing and deciding the pursuit of “optimisation” need not be so relentless. The cynical view was that Ferriss was inadvertently re-enacting the Are We the Baddies? meme – a 20-year-old sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look in which two SS officers during the Second World War realise they might actually be the villains.
Ferriss, according to these cynics, pulled back the curtain on the whole pageant of self-help, exposing what they had long suspected: that it preys on people by offering them a path to happiness/health/wealth but in fact delivers little more than an addiction to self-help. Whether he’s merely using that as a method of selling different advice remains to be seen, but the odds must be short.
“Spend enough time in the world of ‘improvement’ and you’ll notice something strange,” he writes. “The people most obsessed with self-help are often the least helped by it. Behind the smiles and motivational quotes, behind closed doors and after a drink or two, the truth is that they’re not able to outsmart their worries.” A sobering thought.
The self-help industry is worth about US$20 billion ($33.8b) worldwide annually – a number expected to grow to US$90b by the early 2030s. Some of those estimations don’t take into account podcasts – from Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO to Jay Shetty’s Modern Wisdom, both of which are wildly popular but constantly pilloried, this is arguably the dominant medium for modern self-help “gurus”. And yes, Ferriss also has a podcast.
Dr Anna Schaffner, an executive coach and author who has written extensively about the history of the self-help industry, pleads for a little nuance when tarring the whole lot with the same brush. To her, Ferriss is showing “signs of a little maturity” in stepping off the treadmill and reflecting on the limitations of his own tribe.
“Self-help is an incredibly broad field. It’s like saying ‘the novel’ is bad, when there are actually good novels and bad novels, it’s a very rich genre and there are good actors in it and bad actors in it,” Schaffner says. There is some very decent and philosophical and profound self-help out there, and then there’s obviously lots of bull****, and lots of unethical stuff that perpetuates problems. It’s important not to see it as a monolithic block.”
Schaffner is also, she happily points out, a self-help author herself. Her most recent book is The Story Solution: Change Your Toxic Self-Story and Thrive, which in a way supports Ferriss’ latest epiphany, in arguing, not unreasonably, that no good self-help starts with self-hate.
And yet it so often does. In 2015, a study by academics at the University of Montreal published in the peer-reviewed journal Neural Plasticity found that people who read personal growth self-help books showed higher cortisol levels – indicating stress – than those who did not, and those who read problem-focused self-help books experienced more pronounced depressive symptoms.
Dr Joe Thomas, a consultant clinical psychologist and an associate professor at University College, London, agrees with Schaffner that self-help contains multitudes, and not all of it is bad, but says that many clinical psychologists “would be a bit wary of the whole industry around self-help and what it’s predicated upon. The basic assumption is that a fair bit of the industry does rely on people who are broken or somehow damaged, or at least have an underlying assumption that they need to be improved.”
An issue, Thomas says, is that the most effective advice is often boring. “It’s hard to get that stuff out in an environment which is very meme-focused. I’m just a psychologist, that’s a bit dry and boring. We don’t have super-exciting things to say like, ‘Hey, have a four-hour working week and that’ll change your life.’ It’s a bit more prosaic than that, unfortunately.”
Saying “Hey, have a four-hour working week and that’ll change your life” is certainly how Ferriss changed his own life. In 2007, aged 29, he attended South by Southwest Interactive, a technology conference held in Austin, Texas, and told a room full of Silicon Valley bros that they ought to work less and travel or learn more. This was the height of the tech boom, when the dominant faith among that audience was overwork.
Hearing the word of the globetrotting Ferriss – who has had stints as a competitive kickboxer and an Argentine tango champion, as well as living in Japan to study yabusame (horseback archery) for the sheer hell of it – the Silicon Valley types weren’t exactly ready to become lapsed overworkers and take a holiday on the spot, but they did respect him.
Ferriss, after all, was proving he too was a disruptor, just like them. And it’s little wonder he found customers: “work less, play more, increase your income, supercharge your happiness” is a hell of a promise. The fact he was working remarkably long hours promoting himself, and his work, as he built his empire was not an irony that concerned him.
But then, the self-help industry is full of contradictions. “Self-improvement is masturbation,” Tyler Durden dismissively says in Fight Club, that paean to nihilism adored by many of the lonely people who voraciously consume self-help. The particular irony of that scene lay in the fact that Durden was played by Brad Pitt, whose impossibly lean and muscular physique in the film was, for two decades after it, the apogee of perfection for sagging men desperate to get fit.
Schaffner argues that self-help, more than many things, reflects what society desires at a particular moment. In the 19th century, she points out, “self-help” manuals were aimed at how to appear gentlemanly when you were not raised upper class. A century later, in the ages of toxic body image and the dot-com boom, it was all about shedding pounds quickly, and getting rich even quicker.
Now, she sees an emphasis put on contentment, happiness, and connection. “It seems that the work, work, work, hustle culture pushed a few years ago maybe only led to a lot of burnout. Now people want something different.”
In this, Ferriss’ epiphany might just reflect the shifting wants of society. A market-driven blog, you might say. One kind of self-help might be dead, but it’s a whack-a-mole situation. And Ferriss does, after all, still very much write self-help. 17 Questions That Changed My Life was his latest e-book. “The Hidden Nerve That Controls Trauma, Mood & Emotional Pain!” ran the YouTube headline on his interview for Diary of a CEO late last year. (Spoiler alert: it’s the vagus nerve.)
Now, his latest path to enlightenment involves ignoring all the previously presented paths. “To be clear,” he writes, “I still love self-help. Ain’t no way Timmy can give up the sauce.”
And so we brace. “He’s laying the groundwork to become the foremost expert on how self help books don’t help,” one Reddit user quipped this week. Probably. Tim Ferriss was blind but now he sees. And the view is remarkably similar to how it looked before.