self-help: the cancer eating america alive

American culture praises self-reliance, resilience, and independence. But it also elevates a brand of toxic positivity that eats away at individuals and society.

Please stop me if you’ve heard this one before. John James Moneybags was born in a dark alley, never to know his parents. He learned to read by digging through the trash for newspapers to recycle so he could afford a few crumbs of bread every other day. By eight years old he shoveled manure and swept chimneys while moonlighting as an attraction at the local freak show. Eventually, he managed to survive a cage match to the death to win a temp mailroom job at the Monopoly Corporation. Working 22 hours a day, he rose through the ranks and became the Executive Vice President of Tactical Nuclear Finance, and eventually, a billionaire. And if he can do it, you can too!

Tales like this are ubiquitous since the 19th century, when the Anglophone world took the Protestant saying that “idle hands are the Devil’s playthings” and turned it into the foundation for hustle culture, or work for the sake of work, as well as a consensus that poverty is a moral failure. You’re not poor, or sick, or burnt out, you’re lazy. You’re not stuck, you’re not working hard enough. You’re not having a streak of bad luck, you’re making excuses. You’re not encountering systemic obstacles, you’re blaming others. There are no problems in life, only opportunities, and it’s your choice to either seize them and prosper, or fumble them and remain poor.

See, you need to be happy, motivated, and ready to put in whatever hours are needed and only then will you be guaranteed to succeed in life. When you stop being positive and seeing everything as a challenge to overcome, that’s when problems compound, and when you attract negativity, which just breeds more negativity and failure. This is the correct, proper American way. Just look at John James Moneybags above. Do you think that he became a billionaire author paid five figure sums to give speeches about the value of positive thinking by crying “woe is me” in his filthy street urchin days? Of course not! He hustled until he dropped and was rewarded for his efforts.

And this, dear reader, is what we call toxic positivity: a fixation on optimism and happy thoughts being one’s default state despite your brain not being wired to be capable of that in the first place. Hustle culture and the self-help industry also added a uniquely absurd twist on toxic positivity by linking it to success through New Age concepts like “the law of attraction,” which states that you can physically manifest the things you’re most diligent about visualizing. And since American culture emphasizes individualism to an extreme degree, this sort of self-help became deeply ingrained because if we’re sure no one is coming to help us, we can at least try to help ourselves.

a one way ticket to the nonstop rat race

Unfortunately, the idea that positivity and hard work will always result in success while failure means you just didn’t want it enough is based on the just world fallacy. Those who ascribe to it believe that we fundamentally get what we deserve and the world is always fair in doling out rewards and punishments. In religious versions of it, you have God as the arbiter of this justice and your piety, positivity, obedience to authority, and tithing is how you get financial windfalls or cured of a disease. In hustle culture, which is effectively just the secular version of the Prosperity Gospel, that arbiter is known as the market, and it rewards you for much the same things.

Hold on a minute though, you may disagree. Is the world really fair? Absolutely not, as five minutes of looking around will show you. Hard workers get stuck in dead end jobs or fall into financial ruin thanks to a serious illness and a predatory healthcare system all the time. People who don’t look or sound like the boss will often miss out on raises, promotions, and new opportunities regardless of talent. In fact, meritocracy is more or less statistically impossible as shown by research. People born into poverty are likely to remain in poverty and struggle their entire lives. On top of all that, no matter how many times we hear otherwise, bigotry is still a festering global problem.

Even worse, as Millennials and Gen Z keep re-discovering every day, you can follow all the instructions you’re given, get good grades, get a college education, work until you drop, and still end up falling farther and farther behind every day as the system keeps not only refusing to reward your efforts with incomes that keep pace with inflation but will unceremoniously lay you off to bolster the coffers of obscenely wealthy investors and hedge funds demanding outsize returns with zero risk. To borrow from a certain famous character in science fiction, it is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose because that’s just life, and younger generations just keep on losing.

So, what the self-help industry, with its $13.4 billion worth of toxic positivity, magical thinking, and fallacious victim-blaming does is tell you that the only thing wrong with the world is that your attitude stinks and you just need a little more grit and optimism despite what your lying eyes keep telling you. All you need to do is buy another book, attend another seminar, go to another convention, join another course, sign up to get advice from a life coach, and above all else, don’t worry about the system around you and structural problems of post-industrial society struggling to adjust to a world that isn’t just a giant factory. Remember, no problems, only opportunities.

how self-help myths broke the social contract

Now, it’s one thing when people participate in a never-ending rat race and turn to self-help as a salve in hard times. It’s another when politicians either buy it hook, line, and sinker, and use the just world fallacy to run the nation, or know it’s bullshit but keep on lying to the public that the world is fair and anyone who fell behind is just a lazy good-for-nothing who deserves to be treated as such. It’s incredibly convenient for those in power to keep that fallacy going because it lets them off the hook when they refuse to provide any of the basics needed to maintain modern society and improve the typical person’s quality of life. Don’t look at us, they say, you just need to want it more.

Let’s remember that self-help is so popular in America because help from others isn’t guaranteed to come when we need it. We’re supposed to figure everything out on our own and solve all of our problems with “hard work” and “toughing it out.” How are we? Great, thanks for asking. Everything is terrific. We’re grinding that grind, getting that bread, and would you look at that, the latest round of layoffs at our company is just a fun new opportunity to explore other careers and six rounds of interviews before we get ghosted by people demanding our undying loyalty for minimum wage. Isn’t life in the best country to ever exist just the greatest?

No wonder we’re plummeting in happiness rankings while self-help gurus shill for the latest get rich quick scam they own, or berate us for not magically cutting expenses and paying off debt despite stagnant wages and runaway greedflation, or declare a holy war against valuable financial tools like credit cards and leveraging debt, even if done wisely. No amount of individual self-help, motivation, life coaching, or hustling, or grinding will solve systematic societal and economic problems, or change math so too little minus a pittance equals life-changing sums. In fact, toxic positivity manuals only make you feel worse when you realize all you got was an empty pep talk.

If Americans want a working social contract, actual solutions to real problems, and a nation where they feel happy, safe, and optimistic, we need to work together and be okay with not being okay, to borrow another catchphrase. Yes, sometimes people are just in need of an attitude adjustment and have to do some hard work for a change to get what they want. And sometimes, the reason why it seems like things really suck is because they really do suck and we’re being told to blame ourselves instead of those responsible, and we should demand that the people we elect and pay to fix problems do their jobs instead of acting like WWE heels at best, or tinpot tyrants at worst.