Pretension: Core of Self-Help Contents

Tips and Tricks: Imitating Others 

Self-help books on almost any topic you can think of, from personal growth, productivity, relationships, and emotional well-being, approach it from a very external point of view. They often write about tips and tricks for managing situations. It involves strategies, techniques or step-by-step methods designed to help and manage a particular area of life. Most of them offer you ideas, on how you should present yourself or adjust your behaviour and personality to achieve specific results. It always involves external changes to your personality to act a certain way. At the core, most self-help books come from the viewpoint that, if you can maintain an appearance or behave in a different way, you could grow in life. The whole philosophy is about “Fake it till you make it.”

For example, if you search for guidance on how to be more disciplined in life, you will find a pre-defined set of actions, habits, routines, and rigid practices that you should enforce upon yourself.

Such enforcement is a pretension, an attempt to mimic others and become someone you are not.

Self-Consciousness: Waste of Energy 

Consuming self-help content can make you very self-conscious of yourself. You will find yourself always evaluating, whether you are “doing it right”, and whether you are acting in a way that aligns with what you have read. This could go on in your mind all the time, self-judging yourself, being self-conscious of yourself, your actions, and your behaviours. 

For example, imagine you struggle with setting healthy boundaries in life. If you focus on solving this problem of yours, you will be hyper-aware about everything you read about it, in all of your interactions. You will see that, you are always assessing each conversation, and each interaction with others if you are doing it right or not. 

Over time, in the long run, you will find that this self-consciousness is very very energy-draining to you.  It is because self-consciousness creates a constant fight within yourself, continuously analyzing your thoughts, emotions, and actions, trying to correct yourself and change yourself, in the name of self-improvement. If you follow self-help based on tips, tricks, behavioural changes, and forced adjustments to your personality, you will end up at war with yourself.  And in a war with yourself, you always lose—there is no winning side.  Eventually, this internal conflict will drain so much of your energy that you’ll feel exhausted. Suddenly, you’ll find yourself slipping back into your old personality, old patterns, and behaviours that you had worked so hard to overcome. This will leave you feeling deeply disappointed in yourself.

This process of following self-help content and mimicking others, and then getting exhausted after a while, creates a repeating cycle in your whole life. First, you enforce certain behaviours on yourself and pretend to be something you are not. After doing this for some time, you start to become exhausted. Then, you go back to your original personality, disappointed in yourself. You feel rested, as you are not pretending anymore. Then, after resting for a while, you again start pretending. This cycle repeats.

Hate-Oriented Self-Help Content

A few years ago,   I searched and read a few books on social anxiety. In my search, the books I found were mostly about tips on talking to others, strategies to manage anxiety, and step-by-step methods to overcome it. Rarely do you find a book that genuinely tries to understand what someone is afraid of in social settings and what people are actually experiencing. Yes, some books will attempt to understand, but only as a means to help the person “overcome” it. And that isn’t enough. To “overcome” something implies that there is something wrong with the person experiencing social anxiety as if their fear of interacting with people needs to be defeated. This very idea of overcoming comes from a place of rejection or hate. You will rarely find a book that approaches social anxiety with utter curiosity, one that seeks to understand the person without trying to change them, but simply to understand.

This is one example, but you will see this applies to nearly all self-help content. Most of it is about “fixing” something about yourself, forcing yourself into a certain idealised version. The subtle persistent message is – rejection, and hate that “Something is wrong with you, you are who you are is not enough. So you need to pretend what you are not, then maybe you will be enough.”  

It is rare to find books that try to understand the struggles of people purely out of curiosity, not as a way to fix them or achieve some goal. For me, real self-help content is the kind that helps you see yourself deeply and offers an understanding of who you are, without demanding that you change. They offer insights into life and yourself.

Spontaneity: The real spiritual revolution

That day I read a random quote that said, “The real emotional intelligence is not how you feel, but how you respond.” This is an absurd idea to me if your goal in life is self-transformation, a progress. A response is a well-thought, controlled behaviour, and this is nothing less than pretension. When you are in a situation that makes you angry and you control your anger, that does not make you a less angry person, you are still an angry person, pretending to be not angry. But this is the whole message of most of the self-help industry, how to pretend to be something you are not right now. I understand that in certain situations in life, it is necessary to act differently due to practical reasons. But it can’t be the way to live life, it can not be the way you progress in life. This awareness is a must that anything that I do, where I act what I am not, is pretentious and fake behaviour on my part. 

A spontaneous behaviour is something that comes naturally through you, without any self-consciousness on your part. The behaviour is totally effortless on your part. The real progress is a change in your spontaneous behaviour, a deep transformation that changes you effortlessly. For example, real calmness is when you don’t even realize you are calm, in the situation you used to get anxious, it must be that spontaneous. Else it is a pretension. You can behave calmly by forcing yourself, pretending but it is not the real spiritual progress. 

Unfortunately self-help industry is too focused on things like affirmations, changes in thought processes, techniques, tips, ideas, and strategies. The focus is on such things because they bring short-term change in the outside world, and you get short-term results. It is ok to use them, but we must be under no delusion that such things can bring real inner transformation. These things are all tools for pretension. A real transformation changes you so deeply that you don’t even realize you are a different person. You simply are different.

Most would say, ‘It is not possible.’, so for them, it will never be possible. 

But here is an idea: 

“I want a transformation in life that is completely effortless, and I want a change in my spontaneous behaviour, the very way I feel within me. It is not acceptable for me to live life pretending what I am not. ” 

This is the standard I put on anyone who is a true spiritual seeker and on myself.  If this idea resonates with you even in the slightest, then there is a definite possibility. Then the very way you see self-help content, spirituality, mental health and wellbeing industry will change.

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