Through no plan or design of my own—though still by a fair amount of choice—I spent the first two weeks of April drowning in self-help books. I would consider even one of this type enough to drown in, but in this case there were four. Why I would do that to myself is a question I have neither the ability nor the desire to answer. But for all my avoidance of the genre, it really wasn’t bad. And it helps that, while I would describe them all as being somewhere on the self-help spectrum, they were each a very different book.
First was Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. I passed by this book no less than a hundred times in dozens of bookstores over the years and finally picked it up. Though it can be difficult at times to get past the self-help language, that “now we know” kind of rhetoric, I did enjoy it, and I found many points insightful. In particular, the history Cain traces in the early chapters is instructive. A history she calls “the rise of the Extroverted Ideal”:
America had shifted from what the influential cultural historian Warren Susman called A Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality—and opened up a Pandora’s box of personal anxieties from which we would never quite recover.
From advertisements for Serentil to Lux detergent to “the ever onward” IBM, “the pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves, and never be visibly anxious keeps ratcheting up.” None of which, however, is limited to advertising or marketing. In fact, the pressure to “sell ourselves” seems inherently and terrifyingly limitless.
Describing the similarities between a Tony Robbins seminar and a Rick Warren church service, Cain finds that she would ultimately write them both off for the same reasons.
Events like this don’t give me the sense of oneness others seem to enjoy; it’s always been private occasions that make me feel connected to the joys and the sorrows of the world, often in the form of communion with writers and musicians I’ll never meet in person.
A woman after my own heart. (As I’m writing this, I’m surrounded by the four books I’m talking about, plus two books I’ve since moved on to, plus four books of poetry for added company.) The fact is, I have not just felt the exact same way but also in very similar situations. You couldn’t pay me to attend a modern nondenominational church service today, and I feel eight thousand times more connection to a dead person by simply holding a book he or she wrote. I remember James K. A. Smith offering a similar message in You Are What You Love, to the effect that the average nondenominational church almost certainly confuses genuine Christian faith with something like being “extraverts for Jesus.”
(In the same vein, I remember hearing Dr. John Patrick of Ottowa’s Augustine College , who I once saw give a lecture in Louisville, describe one of the reasons he says he attends a “liturgical” church. “When you sing first,” he said, “you are practicing pop psychology.” Alternatively, when you enter church quietly and begin with something from the Book of Common Prayer— “We have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep, we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts . . . There is no health in us”—you reflect a humbler and therefore truer reality. After a reflection on the forgiveness we are all granted and the life we get to live, then we rejoice. “Now I am ready for communion and for song,” he said.)
Early in the book, Cain struck me as having a similar vibe as Oliver Burkeman in his 4,000 Weeks, in that they both seemed to be writing anti-self-help self-help books (though Cain much less so). If Burkeman wants us to stop fretting about our productivity and accept finitude, Cain is aiming to downplay the more obvious, outward signs of intelligence and friendliness that we as a culture have come to take for granted and instead to appreciate the quieter, more subtle ones. In other words, both Burkeman and Cain are in the business of self-help myth-busting and in favor of reality-embracing.
Whether or not the introvert-extravert scale is the best place to have the entire conversation—that seems less clear to me. I can’t help thinking that the best advice and the best qualities encouraged throughout the book boil down to good advice for all personality types: slow down and be more thoughtful.
Very often you can find yourself a ways down some path in a chapter talking about “sensitive people” without ever realizing that this has become implicitly synonymous with introverted people. Qualifying sentences abound, but the assumption littered throughout the book is that only introverts want to talk about values or morality, and that extraverts are happier with chatting about the weather and holiday vacations. A potentially more blunt and problematic assumption might be that only introverts are interested in “thinking in more complicated ways.” The fact is, no matter how many disclaimers a writer offers, the focused message of a book can ultimately ignore—if not completely undo—those disclaimers.
Quiet is filled with great stories, good advice, and thoughtful commentaries, and I do highly recommend it. If you call yourself an introvert or if you know someone who is and want a better understanding, this book will help. But while it’s a book on a broad topic that very often applies to a personality type we call “introversion,” much of it ultimately speaks to a cultural and moral problem for anyone, anywhere. This, in my mind, gives the book an even broader (potential) appeal than it aims to have. However, periodic disclaimers notwithstanding, one would be forgiven for coming away from Cain’s book with the thought that only “introverts” are capable of reading and responding to the Question that readers are encouraged to ask and to face in Miroslav Volf’s new book.
Which brings me to the next book: Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most, by Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz. The book is named after the undergraduate course the authors teach at Yale Divinity. If I had to boil the message of the book down to a sentence, it would be this: Ask the Question and be ready for potential answers to change your life. You might say that the Question is essentially the subtitle: What matters most? But, as the authors put it, no matter how you try to phrase it, the Question being articulated always exceeds the phrasing.
It always escapes full definition. . . . Hard as it is to pin down, it is the Question of our lives. The Question is about worth, value, good, and bad and evil, meaning, purpose, final aims and ends, beauty, truth, justice, what we owe one another, what the world is and who we are and how we live. It is about the success of our lives and their failure.
And when the Question is asked, faced, answered, “it threatens (or promises?) to reshape everything.” What’s more, asking the Question is not just about defining “how one ought to live” but about realizing that we are unavoidably living an answer to the Question whether we know it (or like it) or not: “We live answers to the deep questions of life even if we couldn’t give those same answers if we were asked for them point-blank.”
In other words, the authors seek to elicit a moral articulation and consistency in their students’ lives. Rather than simply living answers implicitly, Volf et al. seek to encourage a deeper living-out, a challenged knowledge of life and goodness that goes beyond knowledge per se:
There’s an attunement of the self with what Confucius takes to be worth living for and living within: the Way, the Dao, the will of Heaven.
This is why Confucius affirms, “One who knows it is not the equal of one who loves it, and one who loves it is not the equal of one who takes joy in it.” Knowing is only half the battle. Our lives inevitably follow what we love and what brings us joy. If we can fall in love with the good we have found, and if we can tune our inner self to rejoice in the Way to flourishing life, we will find ourselves naturally drawn to the good we want to do and be. And that sort of alignment can sustain us for decades.
That’s not a bad quote from the book to describe what the authors are aiming for. And as you can see, to galvanize the Question, the book draws from numerous thinkers (Immanuel Kant, Peter Singer, James Baldwin, E. O. Wilson, Friedrich Nietzsche) across numerous philosophies, religions, disciplines (Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, atheism, stoicism), and the result is a lot of ground covered in a very short amount of time. This is both a strength and weakness.
I love the For the Life of the World podcast, which regularly features all three of the authors, and I’ve been a regular listener since it started three years ago. If I’m being honest, however, whatever it is I often find in their podcasts, I don’t think I found it in their book. My guess is that in their effort to reflect on broader answers to the Question, there was less of any substance to find. Given that their point in the book is to get the reader to ask these questions for themselves, that may be more than okay. I just wasn’t very profoundly motivated by the book to do this for myself. And that may be for another reason which kept me from enjoying book the way I thought I would: I felt too old for it. Given that their book is a product of their undergraduate class, and despite having finished my own undergraduate a few years ago at the age of 34, I suspect that if I had read this book fifteen years ago, I would have found it more inspiring.
That said, I don’t not recommend the book, especially if you are in your early twenties. But my preferred advice would be to dig into the archives of conversations on their For the Life of the World podcast, hosted by Evan Rosa. I have found that to be a much richer source of inspiration for, as they put it in each episode, “seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.”
Next up was Alan Noble’s On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living, which was more of a long essay than a book. While I’ve seen Noble’s name pop up here and there, I had not read any of his work. But after listening to an interview with Noble about the book, I was excited to pick it up.
I should point out that Noble does say his book is not meant to be a self-help book. Maybe I’m using the term a little loosely, but it certainly felt to me like one, albeit in the more spiritual genre. And I’m not meaning to use the term in a derogatory way. I just don’t know what else to call it.
Noble is writing to encourage any and all who experience mental suffering. He does use the term “mental suffering” in a broad way, which should give the book maximum appeal. No one should start reading the book and think, “I’ve got a diagnosed mental health issue, so this book isn’t for me.” And, no one should pick it up and think, “I don’t have any diagnosed mental health issue, so this book isn’t for me.” As Noble makes very clear, sometimes we can put a finger on the cause of suffering, and sometimes we cannot.
“We put unrealistic expectations on [scientific and medical fields] when we demand objective answers for something so deeply subjective and personal, something that can have genetic, biological, interpersonal, spiritual, economic, and circumstantial causes all at the same time.”
This echoes something in Cain’s Quiet that I had hoped would get more attention from her: the infinitely multitudinous ways that life can begin and unfold for each of us.
Here’s Cain:
Remember that heritability statistics derived from twin studies show that introversion-extroversion is only 40 to 50 percent heritable. This means that, in a group of people, on average half of the variability in introversion-extroversion is caused by genetic factors. To make things even more complex, there are probably many genes at work, and [Jerome] Kagan’s framework of high reactivity is likely one of many physiological routes to introversion. Also, averages are tricky. A heritability rate of 50 percent doesn’t necessarily mean that my introversion is 50 percent inherited from my parents, or that half of the difference in extroversion between my best friend and me is genetic. One hundred percent of my introversion might come from genes, or none at all—or more likely some unfathomable combination of genes and experience. To ask whether it’s nature or nurture, says Kagan, is like asking whether a blizzard is caused by temperature or humidity. It’s the intricate interaction between the two that makes us who we are.
Each and everyone one of us has an “unfathomable combination of genes and experience” at play in our lives. I think Noble has a deep appreciation for this fact of life. And when it comes to the suffering that inevitably and sometimes horrifyingly results, Noble understands how deep and dark things can get, not just in those experiences, but in our memories of those experiences.
Remarkably, we can even struggle to communicate an episode of mental illness to ourselves once we are past it. The memory remains but not the experience of it. How can something so intensely intimate and vivid become so alien to us? How can your mind be completely consumed by a thought, a fear, an oppressive weight, and yet years or even months later you can remember that period only in glimpses, shadows, the odd mood in the afternoon? But it is never quite the same unless it consumes you again. And then it is all too real.
My one critique of the book is that, in the opposite direction from Volf’s book, I was surprised by how narrow Noble wrote his. He seems to have written it with the nearly explicit assumption that his readers will be dedicated Christians and active church-goers, and for that reason, it felt like the book carried its own unintended sort of alienation. It’s not that the encouragement or advice is bad. I’m glad I read it and I appreciated everything he had to say. But in my reading I felt like Noble has the capacity (the heart, the mind) for broader guidance for the increasing number of people who are further and further from any sort of healthy church community.
That said, these are some quotes from Noble that I think are worth sharing:
- “There are diseases and disorders and burdens you have never imagined, carried like boulders on the backs of the same people who smile and tell you that they are doing ‘good.'” (9)
- “Human existence inescapably involves suffering. For all of human history we have known this to be true. But it’s hard to recall this truth when we are surrounded by forces that promise us greater and greater explanations, control, and strategies of happiness. So, remember this: tremendous suffering is the normal experience of being in this world. Beauty and love and joy are normal, too, but so is suffering.” (27)
- “You need to know that your being in the world is a witness, and it ‘counts for something.’ Your existence testifies. There is no mitigating this fact. There is nowhere you can hide where your life will not speak something to the world.” (33)
- “And don’t think that you can control who witnesses your life, like a celebrity carefully curating their public image—as if you could contain your life, hiding the shameful parts so that they only affect you. That’s not how life works. You are not your own and neither is your suffering.” (51)
- “No, you can’t bear the weight of the world on your shoulders, but neither can you deny the efficacy of your paltry offering of love.” (73)
Finally, I’ve had one on the shelf for a while and I figured, since I was already neck-deep in the genre, I might as well get it over with. So I finished my self-help reading binge with the most unapologetically self-helpy of them all, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, by James Clear. Much like Cal Newport’s Deep Work, I was pleasantly surprised by this one. In fact—and I can’t believe I’m about to say this—I liked this one better than any of the others. Maybe because it felt like it had less to hide, or maybe because the advice it offered was, from front to back, very practical. But, out of all the books I’m talking about, Clear’s is the only one that I intend to reread.
For starters, I am fairly certain that no significant piece of the advice in Clear’s book is unique to Clear, and that is a good thing. It’s simply a helpful compilation of good habits.
Building better habits isn’t about littering your day with life hacks. It’s not about flossing one tooth each night or taking a cold shower each morning or wearing the same outfit each day. It’s not about achieving external measures of success like earning more money, losing weight, or reducing stress. Habits can help you achieve all of these things, but fundamentally they are not about having something. They are about becoming someone.
Ultimately, your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be. They are the channel through which you develop your deepest beliefs about yourself. Quite literally, you become your habits.
I mentioned James K. A. Smith’s You Are What You Love earlier. Though Clear’s books has no intended spiritual dimensions, with a few tweaks, that quote could channel Smith’s book perfectly.
Atomic Habits is not without its flaws. Like all self-help books of this unapologetic type, it’s not soul-craft, so it lacks some of the advice that any of the previous three books abound in. Simply put, the best habits and the best practices are no guarantee that life will go well for you. More importantly, those habits cannot teach you the deep and enduring answers to life’s questions—about its goodness and its suffering.
Also on the list of flaws in Clear’s book: he confuses “imitating the admirable” with “imitating the powerful”; he can miss quality for the sake of “effectiveness”; in his focus on increasing friction for bad habits and decreasing friction for good ones, he seems to miss the idea that friction can have other (good) uses than the ones associated with intentional habit formation; he can display a (shockingly) naïve appreciation for technology; in focusing on the “outsized impact” of “decisive moments,” he fails to appreciate the space for surprises—both good and bad, but usually unavoidable.
That said, each chapter in Atomic Habits is now well marked. And I’ve already started writing out notes on how to implement those habits in new ways. As I said, they aren’t new or groundbreaking. But they are certainly valuable insights and needed reminders for good habits that, while not central, are part and parcel of a healthy life.
There’s one thing from Clear’s book that I want to end on. In one of the last chapters, Clear describes a conversation with someone he calls “an elite coach.” He asks the coach about what separates the best from the rest. “What do the really successful people do that most don’t?”
He mentioned factors you might expect: genetics, luck, talent. But then he said something I wasn’t expecting: “At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over.”
. . . People talk about getting “amped up” to work on their goals. Whether it’s business or sports or art, you hear people say things like, “It all comes down to passion.” Or, “You have to really want it.” As a result, many of us get depressed when we lose focus or motivation because we think that successful people have some bottomless reserve of passion. But his coach was saying that really successful people feel the same lack of motivation as everyone else. The difference is that they still find a way to show up despite the feelings of boredom. […]
[N]o habit will stay interesting forever. At some point, everyone faces the same challenge on the journey to self-improvement: you have to fall in love with boredom.
My last thought is this: most of the topics and the problems dealt with in each of these books can be aided by that last bit of advice. Whether you are an introvert or an extravert, seeking meaning and answers to the deeper questions of life, struggling to get out of bed in the morning, to face fears describable and indescribable, or simply looking to for-once-in-your-goddamn-life stick to a good habit and make a real change—learning to, if not fall in love with, at least be comfortable with boredom is pretty good advice. To me, learning to bear the boredom sounds a lot like learning to bear the pain, the misery, the unappreciated, the exhausting. It’s learning to bear with those parts of you that don’t seem to offer any immediate benefit to yourself or to others.
This is most explicit in Cain’s book, which emphasizes qualities of thoughtfulness and inaction that are not often encouraged in day-to-day life but that are desperately needed in the world. That will mean both attempting to practice and bear with these things in ourselves, and it will mean listening to those around us in whom we notice those qualities or temperaments.
One of my favorite quotes in the world I took from a chapter heading in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography of Hannah Arendt, For Love of the World. And it seems like a good place to end.
The truly real takes place almost unnoticed, and is, to begin with, lonely and dispersed. . . . Those among our young people who, thirty years hence, will do the things that matter are, in all probability, now quietly biding their time; and yet, unseen by others, they are already establishing their existences by means of an unrestricted spiritual discipline.
– Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age (1931)