One Big Waste
I don’t get “liberal arts 2.0” or Zen Habits or productivity blogs or the rest of these self-improvement sites.
It’s completely detached from reality. Look at these awesome subway maps. Or check out some study about how the brain thinks about difference kinds of cereal. Scientists have discovered a secret way to reduce traffic congestion.
Excuse me if I don’t cum in my pants. In fact, my eyes glaze over. It’s all so pointless.
Am I really supposed to believe that they do anything with this information? I don’t even think they really read it. Does the headline make me seem smart? Are the words “psychology” “rationality” “DNA” “happiness” or “The New Yorker” anywhere in the article? Well then goddamn, I better summarize it and tell other people.
Who gets smarter from this? Where is the discussion? Where is the reality?
Ok, so now my email inbox is 20% more efficient. I’ve examined a sweet tagcloud of words from all the items in Google Reader. I’m firmly convinced that I need to believe in myself. I memorized a list of cognitive biases. Now the fuck what?
We’re not dandies. You don’t get anything for fine-tuning your body and mind like it’s a car modification kit. The question to ask is: What are you working towards? And I think you’d see that you could spend every second of every day reading that crap and it wouldn’t get you anything closer to being there. Unless, of course, your goal is to be one of those writers yourself and pass the buck of actually deriving value from the work to some other hypothetical reader.
You don’t get anything for fine-tuning your body and mind like it’s a car modification kit.
Perhaps you can clarify your meaning here. You say yourself that you run too much and have a litany of books that you feel have improved your ability to think, reason, process, digest…fine tuning, in other words. Is this not what your comment was implying?
@Skyler
Yes, but there’s diminishing returns
Well, there is a big difference between building towards something – say an education because you didn’t get one – and turning your Honda Civic into a rice rocket. I would say that blogging constantly about whatever lame article on psychology appeared in The Atlantic is closer to the latter.
I wish Daily Routines hadn’t gone MIA. It had none of the Forer effect trash that most of the sites you mentioned publish–just details, actions, and stories.
Forer effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect
word holiday, that was a really good post! i think skyler totally missed the point. maximizing your study habits or whatever so you can bag groceries more efficiently is a waste of time. maybe it’s the goal that is the problem, as opposed to one’s set of tools with which they approach it.
i will say though that i’m a huge fan of the new yorker, somewhat less so of the atlantic.
What is the use in constantly bitching about bad blogs? I know that 95% of tv is boring ass shit, with almost no redeeming value. I could rant about that to anyone who would listen – but why? My time is much better spent working toward getting what I want out of life.
Self improvement literature gets a pretty bad reputation from most intellectuals, but it has significantly improved my life. I just read Spark by John Ratey, a book about the recent psychological research on exercise and the brain, and I’ve noticed a significant difference in my life after 2 months of daily exercise. I thought of something you wrote, about how you run five miles a day, and that encouraged me to follow through with it as well.
While I’m sure most self-improvement blogs are worthless, don’t offer anything significant, that doesn’t delegitimatize self-help writing.
@ J
Of course there are diminishing returns, but that happens as your near your potential in anything. The path is never linear.
One could decide to specialize or, through some event, realize their interpersonal skills are sub-par and focus on improving communication skills. Diminishing returns? Yet. Mastery of every level/line of development? Only if you’re Tony Robbins. Maybe.
What, exactly are you complaining about here? That people talk endlessly about pap? People have always talked endlessly about pap. This isn’t even a new kind of pap they’re talking endlessly about. The only difference here is that they’re using the tools of the **NEW WEB** to be completely useless with.
Ignore everything that doesn’t matter. This doesn’t matter, therefore, ignore the fuck out of it. Complaining about something that doesn’t matter doesn’t make you any better off than you were before. Complain about something that does.
Damn, someone got out of bed on the wrong side and wants to share their grumpiness with the world.
If you don’t like, just don’t read it. Since when is throwing a tantrum productive.
Are you really saying anything else besides “people should be more like me” with this post?
No, you are all failing to see the point. This falls right next to the commentary on Stoicism and how it compares to other schools of thought.
Back then Ryan commented on how most schools of philosophy are a waste of time in most regards, and how stoicism was centered on actually making a difference. When most philosophy seems preachy and falsely profound, Stoicism is written as personal meditation, not to impress anyone but to actually induce change.
And this is what happens with this kind of blogs. It’s not about tuning your skills, is about being flashy, looking cool, pretending you are better instead of actually improving yourself, just as a riced out Honda is not really better but rather tries to look more impressive (and even if it does reach higher speeds, it’s still useless improvement).
Honestly, I read the piece and all i can think about is stuffwhitepeoplelike.com.
Culturally, we seem to totally lack the ability to see the big picture. Generally speaking, most people are unable to see the forest, all they see are the trees. I see this in politics (with both politicians and voters), I see this in the business world, and I see this in the way people go about their lives.
By the way, Ryan, your posts have been really good over the past couple of months. Your blog has gone from being merely interesting, to something I look forward to. Thanks for the good reads.
Thank you Kevin. I think I am starting to find my voice a little bit.
For someone whose favorite book is Meditations, you sure do complain a lot. I feel like you and Philalawyer write about the same stuff- about things in American society that are a farce, superficial, or whatever, but you do it with the same contempt and condescending disdain (it’s getting old), whereas PL has much more wit and humor.
I read this post three times. The first time I unthinkingly disagreed with you. There are quite a few productivity porn and self-help sites in my bookmarks and I like reading them.
The second time I could see your point but thought that maybe you’d created a straw man. A lot of these sites offer useful information and ways to change things.
By the third time you had me. You’re right. When I look back at the sites I’ve bookmarked I can’t find more than a very small handful that offer practical and important ways of moving towards a better life. If you ask yourself “how will reading this move me closer towards an important personal goal?” the answer is nearly always “it won’t”.
You’ve highlighted a real danger – how many minutes/hours have I spent reading nebulous nonsense in the false belief that it might make me a better person? Far too many.
Interesting as always Ryan – thanks.
Andrew
But I do it in fewer words right? That’s something
Perhaps I just don’t “get it” yet. The whole “efficiency” vs “effectiveness” deal, since i’m young and haven’t come up with a concrete goal yet. I spend my time trying to get better at critical skills like writing, reading, and learning to wait out this job market. Maybe along the way, I will have a moment of clarity. If not, well, at least I know “how to optimize windows” and “ten essential firefox addons”
Again, no. The danger doesn’t lie in knowing useless stuff, but in the pretention and self-deceit that often comes with it.
It’s stuff that doesn’t make you smarter, and there’s no harm there, but it’s destructive when you pretend you are smarter because you can quote the “10 benefits of eating chocolate”.
It’s not about knowing random crap, it’s not about the fact that often those articles are misinformative or misquoten, and it’s not even about the opportunity costs of the wasted time.
Have none of you seen pretentious douchebags that like to quote any pseudocientific study, that wait for weeks for a chance to slip some obscure word in conversation and that show genuine glee when they see a chance to prove someone wrong?
I think the danger lies there. In becoming fucking Steve Pavlina.
Ryan,
I don’t get this post. To me this comes off as classic hipster “so like over it” pessimism which is itself now somewhat cliche.
If you had simply made the point that pop psychology is in vogue, I would understand. But you instead tick off all the popular ideas and then say abstractly label it “one big waste,” instead of offering specifics. Want to challenge the Atlantic’s piece on happiness? Do so. Challenge it. Get specific.
Also, one gets smarter in bits and chunks and fits and starts. A tip there, a tip here, an idea there — this approach is not entirely worthless.
Not everything one does needs to be in pursuit of some overarching goal. Not everything needs to be aligned with some deep philosophy. Sometimes reading random, interesting shit is FUN. Sometimes it’s stimulating.
Ok but try this: look at what you, Kottke, the Lone Gunman, and about twenty other sites all wrote about that Atlantic piece on happiness. Maybe you see people excerpting, mulling or discussing it and I might buy that if I was in an idealistic mood. But cross your eyes though, and I think you’ll see that from my perspective it was really all a big circle jerk.
In other words, I’m not challenging the article because the article is not the problem.
I’m still confused what the complaint is. What is a “big circle jerk”?
Look, there was an interesting article that came out, it emphasized one really big point (relationships matter more than anything for happiness), a bunch of people noticed it and found it interesting, so they linked to it or excerpted it. Yeah, there wasn’t a clinical analysis of the merits of the study or a critique of the author’s prose style. But who cares. Not every post — nor every blog — needs to be profound or in pursuit of some specific larger philosophy.
Maybe your complaint is groupthink? Like, everyone links to it because everyone else is linking to it, but no one actually discusses it? That might be fair. But say so if this what you’re saying.
In any event, happiness, rationality, psychology: these are HUGE topics, and hugely IMPORTANT topics. Not trivial bullshit. I say the more people who are thinking and linking to this stuff, the better. And sometimes the best way to think about these things is through accumulating the topic in bits and pieces.
The words that come out of your mouth make you seem like a 21 year old who has gone through all of life and seen all the justices and injustices of the world. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Ben,
If anything, the self-indulgent, oblivious way that people chatter about these pieces – as though they’ve forgotten how they had the same reaction to the last Gladwell or Lewis article – is what turns them into ‘trivial bullshit’.
Look, no one is saying that everything everyone writes should have some deeper purpose. What I am saying though, and what you unintentionally admitted, is that the “amen” excerpting from these stories certainly doesn’t have one and neither does the false-narrative of “oh, this is so interesting, I can’t wait to share it with my readers who eagerly await each word”. The reason it’s so masturbatory is that the subject matter deluded people into thinking what they’re saying is important. It calls to mind that line in Fight Club about sticking feathers up your butt and calling yourself a chicken.
Ryan
Ryan, long time reader, first time writer.
“Posted by: hegemonicon at May 20, 2009 04:23 AM
…
And this is what happens with this kind of blogs. It’s not about tuning your skills, is about being flashy, looking cool, pretending you are better instead of actually improving yourself, just as a riced out Honda is not really better but rather tries to look more impressive (and even if it does reach higher speeds, it’s still useless improvement).
…”
The first thing I thought of when I read this* was Tim Ferriss’ blog. Today he taught me how to impress people by balancing a fork and spoon. Last week it was memorizing four German phrases so I could pass myself off as speaking fluent German. Yay for self improvement!
*This comment, not blog post.
Strangely enough I agree with you to a large degree (though not fully). Allow me to speak purely from personal experience:
My site is exclusively an educational tool for myself; everything I post, I post because I did, to some extent, find it useful. That is, reading it made me question a preconception or consider a viewpoint I hadn’t previously. That, or I actually used the tool/idea for something. ‘Summation and linking’ may seem superfluous for this purpose, but I’ve experimented with Delicious and Tumblr… and failed–this was the best solution for me. The fact that others read and/or find what I post interesting is completely inconsequential to me and the direction I take my site in. It’s a nice bonus, but it’s unimportant.
I’m an optimist and hope that the majority of ‘similar’ sites (Zen habits, ‘liberal arts 2.0’ and lifehack sites) link to articles and tools for somewhat similar reasons. The ‘discussion’ was internal.
I don’t pretend to be a producer/creator of content (like you and other writers) and am purely a consumer/participant. I really do hope that Kottke, Babauta, et al. have similar viewpoints.
Christ, I–like any other self-respecting consumer of information–hate sites that link to interesting yet pointless information purely for the fact. I’ll freely admit that I have occasional transgressions, but if I ever do that I would want someone to punch me in the face and pull the plug on my site for me. I don’t want to join the group masturbation session that goes on everywhere you look.
The problem I think you’re getting at is the reason why I now avoid Gladwell like the plague, unsubscribed from BoingBoing and Lifehacker years ago, and generally have a fleeting moment of introspection every time I press the Publish button:
Is what I’m about to ‘publish’ actually useful?
If you want the real deal, go read LessWrong.com
It will make your frontal lobes shoot jizz.
Here’s the only productivity blog you need: http://productiveblog.tumblr.com/
Pff. Sure efficiency is subordinate to effectiveness (as in: do the few important things properly instead of more things faster). Randomly reading productivity blogs won’t help, but if you have a big goal, then optimizing your routines and processes will get you there faster.