No, Self-Help Won't Make You a Jerk!

Never listen to anyone who thinks that self-improvement is inherently selfish. Cultivating firm boundaries and celebrating your desires will make you more loving and generous, not less.

The Celestial Prison (1963), Jane Graverol

“Is Today’s Self-Help Teaching Everyone To Be a Jerk?” asks this morning’s New York Times. As usual, the article itself is far less extreme than the headline. But people today have a special propensity for weaponizing headlines (and oversimplified takes) and wielding them against each other. So let’s acknowledge the complexity of the subject at hand.

Noticing that you compulsively seek approval and shape yourself based on other people’s needs is not selfish. Understanding that you don’t have to be perfect or serve others perfectly to win their love doesn’t make you self-centered. Feeding your soul and defending your right to acknowledge and pursue your own desires will not make you a jerk.

Respecting and honoring yourself will make you much less of a jerk, not more of one.

If you doubt me, observe the jerks. If they had inner peace, would they be holding forth on the ways that people who aren’t like them should be more like them? If they were happy, if they had firm boundaries, if they weren’t ruled by shame, would they shower blame on others, lash out, insult strangers about their choices, or characterize people who need help and support as weak and pathetic?

There’s nothing selfish about having firm boundaries. There’s nothing self-centered or self-obsessed about cultivating and protecting your own private space where you feel good, understand yourself, and feed yourself. These choices aren’t casual or optional for many of us, no matter how reductive other people’s understanding of them might be. People who grew up in hostile, volatile, benignly negligent, or controlling households require this kind of effort in order to feel happy and secure.

Likewise, people-pleasing isn’t a fleeting or superficial problem that simply means “working too hard to make other people happy.” When we talk about people pleasing, we’re often talking about a habit of replacing your own needs with other people’s needs. This is a compulsion that will keep you anxious, depressed, and stuck in shitty jobs, bad relationships, and desperately unhappy situations.

Even once you understand yourself to be a people-pleaser, it can take years to stop serving others first without feeling guilty about it. And after you finally stop taking whatever shape other people prefer, then you have to discover what your real needs and desires are.

Digging for your buried desires isn’t easy, particularly when you view the process itself as a selfish act. This is how people pleasers are! We are deathly afraid of acknowledging our most passionate wishes. We are embarrassed by them. Our desires, no matter how pure and generous they are, feel dirty and unlovable to us. It takes patience and self-acceptance to do the hard work of unearthing your true needs. You have to attune yourself to your body, your feelings, and even your confusion. You have to be patient with yourself and notice your physical reactions to the world. You have to examine the past in order to remember who you were before you replaced your body’s clues of what you liked with what other people wanted from you.

One of the biggest obstacles to understanding your true desires is shame. Shame can include feeling paranoid that by NOT always serving others first, you’re becoming a selfish jerk. So when the headlines blare “Is Today’s Self-Help Teaching Everyone To Be a Jerk?” and random people who base their opinions on headlines say to you, “Doesn’t that book just teach you to be a jerk?” and “Aren’t people assholes today mostly thanks to self-help?”, it might be tempting to believe that you’re doing it wrong.

Don’t fall for it. Our culture is ruled by shame. Most of the people around you on any given day are controlled by their shame, so they’re ready to spit out any message that’s designed to shame other people. Their true needs are so embarrassing to them that they want to make your needs embarrassing to you, too. This is mostly not their fault. They are filled with shame, so shame blocks their connections to other people. They’re trying to do everything right all the time, and they’re exhausted. When they can’t be what the world wants them to be, they feel like they’re failing miserably.

I write this column in order to help free people from the trap of shame, perfectionism, neuroticism, and anxious self-doubt. So I want youngish people and oldish people and everyone in between to remember that the more they ignore what our culture wants them to be, the more likely it is that they will discover what brings them pure joy in the present.

So many people tolerate living without joy in the present. They think this is normal. They continue to struggle with anxiety, depression, hopelessness, and deep feelings of meaninglessness, and our shame-driven culture has no solutions for them. They don’t like the way the world is shaping up these days and they don’t want to be what the world seems to want them to be, but they don’t know what they can do to feel good or live satisfying lives. They believe that in order to be happy, they need more money, more status, more love, more fun adventures in exotic places. They believe that they must look beautiful in order to feel beautiful. They believe that happiness belongs to everyone else but them.

Moreover, the world outside has never felt more invasive and pushy. People pleasers are uniquely positioned to lose their minds under the current conditions. When we get one message saying, “Can you help me defeat this authoritarian menace?” we feel personally responsible and guilty for not dropping everything to help. These days, most of us get ten of those emails every morning, along with countless alerts about disasters and terrors unfolding around the globe throughout the day. We carry the world in our pockets all day long and learn about more darkness and doom every few hours.

We were not built to live this way. We need relief.

To treat firm boundaries as selfish at this moment in human history isn’t just illogical, it’s unconscionable. I’m not talking about the author of that article or the content of the actual article. I’m talking about the misconceptions spread by the article’s incendiary headline. Let’s not surrender to another wave of stupid common wisdom about mental health and joy and what it means to move through the world as a free-thinking, independent, smart, discerning human.

Knowing yourself well, respecting your own needs and desires, and drawing firm boundaries around what you will and won’t do for the sake of others isn’t just healthy, it’s crucial against a backdrop of invasive and relentless media.

Don’t hesitate to talk back to our shame-driven culture and its shame throwers and blame throwers. The people who stigmatize self-knowledge and assertive, direct, honest communication are the jerks. Don’t let them shame you into a corner. Stand up for your right to your own unique desires, your own path through life, and your own peace.

Those of us who interrogate our needs and desires aren’t just lazily serving ourselves. We’re doing hard work privately in order to be more helpful and productive in our communities. We’re trying to save this world from the ignorant and the hateful, the greedy and the malevolent, who casually destroy the natural world and every living creature in it without a second thought. We are protecting our own peace so we can work together to protect our planet. We embrace the present moment in order to spread joy and love to those around us.

Don’t let jerks who don’t understand who they are or what makes them happy tell you that you’re selfish. Recognize ignorance when you see it or hear it. Question the common wisdom of the moment. Shame makes us all stupider. You don’t have to live that way. You can feel free and happy in your own skin, once you stop anxiously looking for cues from others and start trusting your instincts.

Knowing yourself and respecting yourself is the path to joy. Give yourself a chance to learn what you truly want from this world. Give yourself a chance to grow into someone who can change the world for the better.

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