I have a bone to pick with self-help books, maybe even an entire skeleton. Their Machiavellian authors sing like sirens and sell their promises of self-improvement, preying on the weak and lost. They are dopamine dealers masquerading as saviors, offering a facade of hope to grow their own wealth.
I must admit, I have read these books. I read a handful of them during a deeply depressive period when I was in university. I was failing university and had a substance dependence, all at 18. There were days when I imprisoned myself in the confinement of my bed, letting my arms and emotions sink through the mattress until there was less than a silhouette left. Naturally, I decided to pick up some self-help books. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but some of them had ridiculously explicit titles; Think and Grow Rich, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Best Self, among others. Although I didn’t take note at the time, in hindsight, these titles are puzzlingly direct. I truly can’t remember anything from them, but I do remember them not doing much for me. I know, I know, their alleged purpose is to give you the tools for success, and you just have to apply them. Maybe I did not apply the secret techniques correctly.
They continue to sweep the United States; with unit sales that grew at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11% from 2013-2019 and are projected to grow at a CAGR of 5.7% through 2025. Simple economics can be used to draw a link between declining mental health and an increase in books that market themselves as the elixir of improvement. But why choose self-help books? Why not some other source of wisdom or power?
There are a few good theories, one of them being that people tend to choose the easiest mode of improvement. This is a decent theory, but lazy. Rather, the reason that people gravitate towards such books is more at the hands of our robotic education system. For most, high school consists of diligently studying to get into college. Then college consists of performing the same style of “learning” in order to get a good job — and then that’s it. Driven by the examination system that delivers dopamine to students in the form of good grades by rewarding memorization.
The source of reward and achievement that we teach to our children from a young age is extremely mechanical, instilling such methods of growth into us. Yet, all schools do not fit this, and I have personally had English teachers/professors that I owe almost all of my personal growth. But I often felt that their efforts fell upon deaf ears to those around me as English did not provide quantitative utility. Often, I even felt discouraged to pursue these interests due to their unpopularity and perceived lack of utility by others. While this is probably my own fault, it is indicative of the general opinion.
We are raised to learn in a computer-like manner, inputting what we are told, and receiving the expected output. It should come as no surprise that we expect to be able to mentally download a software upgrade by reading a self-help book.
In a recent essay, Erik Hoel highlights the importance of art as a defense against the phenomenon of overfitting. He describes overfitting as when a neural network becomes over-specified and unable to learn new information. It is reasonable to assume that the encouraged mechanical style of learning can produce overfit young adults. This is because the education system fails at teaching how to solve problems with the information memorized, confining us to repetitively use the same process to learn. Making us weak to combat abstract problems that require creative and intrinsic thought.
Trying to heal depression using overfitted techniques —reading a book that explicitly tells us how to fix ourselves— only serves to put a Band-Aid on a burst pipe. Such an issue requires a deep understanding of ourselves, an improvement of our self-image, and a strong belief that we can pick ourselves up. The solution is and has been for thousands of years, fiction.
Consuming high-quality fictional works through mediums such as music, literature, movies, and even television is integral to growing emotional intelligence. Characters such as Tony Soprano from The Sopranos can help us understand our own depression and its sources. Religious texts can teach us empathy and explain our motivations. Bruce Springsteen’s characters from Born to Run can show us despair, heartbreak, and loneliness. The Great Gatsby reveals to us the difficult relationship our past has with our future. I could go on forever. Fiction opens a door to see inside people, enabling us to look inside ourselves with more accuracy.
There is an array of other studies that correlate higher emotional intelligence to lower rates of depression in adolescents, university students, and the elderly. These studies create strong, but high-level links, excluding a control for neurally overfit individuals.
Medical students are put under immense stress and are some of the most vulnerable to becoming overfit due to the sheer volume of specified learning and time required to succeed. This study of medical students at Suez Canal University examines the relationship between emotional intelligence and depression. The study concludes by drawing a clear link:
[The] stressful lifestyle of medical students and lack of extracurricular activities and skill training programs lead to lowered emotional intelligence levels and depression.
If we accept that medical students are neurally overfitted, then this study in tandem with the ones listed prior reveals the dangers of lowering our emotional intelligence through overfitting. Unfortunately, there is no proof that growing emotional intelligence can alleviate depression in real time. This is for good reason. Emotional intelligence is not enough on its own. Although it may be preventative, it is not enough to heal. It does not require us to directly grow our own perspective and self-image. Thankfully, fiction covers this base too.
Fiction enables us to gain worldly perspectives to which we would not be otherwise exposed. We are so often victims of our environment, and this can be a problem of visibility, not physical entrapment. Those who we spend the most time with directly influence our self-belief and aspirations, as their reflection of us builds our self-image. These self-images can potentially be helpful, but this is frequently not the case. The way we view ourselves can be our greatest hindrance to improving our happiness, or it can be our greatest asset.
Fiction allows us to transcend our direct environment. It places us somewhere far from where we are, yet it remains to feel so close. We are able to interpret humans and ourselves in an environment that removes us from the chains of our own environment. We are able to do so through a theory mentioned in my last article. This theory is briefly described as humans’ ability to channel emotions shown to them on screen, as they are adequately distanced from the root of the emotion. This theory is used to explain benign masochism, a reversal of a negative feeling into a pleasurable one. For example, it is the reason why we cry at sad movies, even though all the consequences of what causes the sadness will remain on screen and not affect our lives.
But this theory does not need to be limited to negative feelings, rather, it can be used to explain the powers we gain from inserting ourselves into the consciousness of the characters we consume. It’s that feeling of nervousness you have for the protagonist, or that feeling of accomplishment you share with them when they reach their goal. Through distance, we are brought closer to our characters’ emotions, and our own as a byproduct. This is because good fiction does not rely on a realistic environment or style of life. Instead, it relies on crafting human experiences that feel so real within an unreal world. Granting us exposure to stimuli we don’t experience in our own environment can let us think about how we would react in such situations. Doing so without considering our self-image and the consequences that would come in our own lives.
Through traveling with another on their journey, our own journey becomes more tangible. Full journeys can be completed in hours, exposing us to more steps to growth than we would ever be exposed to in our own lives. We experience more highs and lows and we relate these to our own journey. Their journey feels real and our own becomes more clear as a result. Eventually, a roadmap for growth is made.
We are no longer so overfitted to our direct habitat and our worldview is no longer confined to what is directly around us. As we continue to consume, we start to challenge what we are capable of. Slowly, we begin to pick ourselves up and move forward, growing and cherishing each step in our story. Only something fictional can drive us toward a happier reality.
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