self help for the rest of us
Feb. 8th, 2019 06:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scrubjayspeaksSo this has been bugging me for...a couple months now. It's not a complete thought by any means. At this point, I just need a space to brain dump on the subject(s). Consider this the start of an incoherent and inchoate series in Very Bad Essay Writing.
I've been reading several books lately that fall under the broad category of self-help. It was a rec that recced something else and so on. It's been meditation, productivity, happiness. A mix. And there's been a grain of sand in all of them irritating the fuck out of me.
They are all so goddamn concerned with making us more effective in our jobs. Careers. Whatever they want to call it. Making us better, happier, more efficient workers. For our own sake, they insist.
And I just--I can't tell if I just don't give a toss about being a better worker, or if I'm not the right audience for these, or what.
I mean, all of them--MY GOD, ALL OF THEM--seem to presume that you are working a white-collar job that gives you a middle class or better lifestyle. I mean, they don't say those words explicitly. But when they talk about offices and cubicles and the perils of off-hours work emails, they paint a certain picture.
Self-help books, or the subset of which I have been partaking, have an expectation of who their audience is. Which is fair in and of itself, but us poor folk would rather like to help our damn selves too.
I work in a slightly better than minimum wage, food service job. I have no office or cubicle. While I do sometimes check the store email account in my off hours, that's just because my coworkers are incompetent and not because anyone is emailing me specifically. I sure as shit don't need to worry about making time to get up from my computer and take a walk, because I spend 100% of my 8-hour shifts on my feet and don't really ever get my breaks.
I would like to have a better job--better pay, better conditions, better coworkers, better benefits. But even with the job I have, I still also have:
In theory, these self-help books should offer tools and tactics to assist in those things. And they do! Sort of... If you translate a lot of things, tilt them on their side, shake all the loose change out of them. In practice, they mostly just make me feel like I am even further behind than I realized. Because they don't ever seem to be written from a perspective I can share or by people who have spent any meaningful time in my circumstances.
If these authors have worked jobs like mine, it was when they were young(er), just getting started, finding their footing in or just after high school or college. It's all just prologue to their real story: they were working in a good but demanding job (probably in either tech or media), possibly with a young family of their own, and looked up one day to discover they weren't feeling particularly fulfilled by their life. Or they didn't really know their spouse or children anymore. Or they were approaching some milestone birthday and still hadn't made any progress on Dream Goal X.
Maybe my real question here is: are there self-help books for people who haven't achieved a level of success that has a downside yet? For people who are trying to find a way up to the surface for a single breath, rather than a path to transcendence? For people who are still trying to figure out survival?
Because the advice for people like me always seems to be "get a better job" (usually with a side dish of "here's why you're a big ol' failure"). Which seems questionable when the next stage is "here are all the tools you need to save your quality of life once that job takes over your entire existence."
I'm sick and tired of waiting for life and happiness to start once I land that mythical Good Job that will fix everything. I'd like that Good Job very much, please and thank. But I'd quite like some advice that comes from a place of believing my life has worth outside of making myself a better employee for that Good Job I magically landed.
I've been reading several books lately that fall under the broad category of self-help. It was a rec that recced something else and so on. It's been meditation, productivity, happiness. A mix. And there's been a grain of sand in all of them irritating the fuck out of me.
They are all so goddamn concerned with making us more effective in our jobs. Careers. Whatever they want to call it. Making us better, happier, more efficient workers. For our own sake, they insist.
And I just--I can't tell if I just don't give a toss about being a better worker, or if I'm not the right audience for these, or what.
I mean, all of them--MY GOD, ALL OF THEM--seem to presume that you are working a white-collar job that gives you a middle class or better lifestyle. I mean, they don't say those words explicitly. But when they talk about offices and cubicles and the perils of off-hours work emails, they paint a certain picture.
Self-help books, or the subset of which I have been partaking, have an expectation of who their audience is. Which is fair in and of itself, but us poor folk would rather like to help our damn selves too.
I work in a slightly better than minimum wage, food service job. I have no office or cubicle. While I do sometimes check the store email account in my off hours, that's just because my coworkers are incompetent and not because anyone is emailing me specifically. I sure as shit don't need to worry about making time to get up from my computer and take a walk, because I spend 100% of my 8-hour shifts on my feet and don't really ever get my breaks.
I would like to have a better job--better pay, better conditions, better coworkers, better benefits. But even with the job I have, I still also have:
- goals I need to achieve;
- mental health I need to support;
- connections to family and friends I need to sustain;
- and hobbies I need to explore.
In theory, these self-help books should offer tools and tactics to assist in those things. And they do! Sort of... If you translate a lot of things, tilt them on their side, shake all the loose change out of them. In practice, they mostly just make me feel like I am even further behind than I realized. Because they don't ever seem to be written from a perspective I can share or by people who have spent any meaningful time in my circumstances.
If these authors have worked jobs like mine, it was when they were young(er), just getting started, finding their footing in or just after high school or college. It's all just prologue to their real story: they were working in a good but demanding job (probably in either tech or media), possibly with a young family of their own, and looked up one day to discover they weren't feeling particularly fulfilled by their life. Or they didn't really know their spouse or children anymore. Or they were approaching some milestone birthday and still hadn't made any progress on Dream Goal X.
Maybe my real question here is: are there self-help books for people who haven't achieved a level of success that has a downside yet? For people who are trying to find a way up to the surface for a single breath, rather than a path to transcendence? For people who are still trying to figure out survival?
Because the advice for people like me always seems to be "get a better job" (usually with a side dish of "here's why you're a big ol' failure"). Which seems questionable when the next stage is "here are all the tools you need to save your quality of life once that job takes over your entire existence."
I'm sick and tired of waiting for life and happiness to start once I land that mythical Good Job that will fix everything. I'd like that Good Job very much, please and thank. But I'd quite like some advice that comes from a place of believing my life has worth outside of making myself a better employee for that Good Job I magically landed.
