Good piece, Charles.

I’ve talked with Maarten van Doorn a lot about this, but, to your first point about modern self-help being ethics agnostic: I think it’s hard to do self-help well with psychology alone; it needs philosophy, too.

Modern self-help is full of techniques (many of which are pretty solid and based on good science in psychology and other fields) but I think that to produce good self-help and consume it effectively, we need a better understanding of our why. Which is where philosophy comes in.

One way to look at what self-help needs is a better appreciation for context. On the consumption side, this could mean that we all need to better undersand ourselves and what’s truly important and meaningful for us. And on the production side, we prodcers of self-help need to be much more aware of and attentive to details of individual differences, especailly specific obstacles people may face.

As someone who writes self-help style stuff pretty regularly, I think one of the difficulties with this is that it’s hard to write compelling, readable content that’s also highly attentive to individual differences and context.

As a therapist, I can spend lots of time and attention on these individual differences because I’m sitting across from one person week after week. But when I’m writing an article, I’ve got one shot to reach thousands of people.

Seems almost discouragingly difficult…