It’s the relationships, stupid

Maybe I have to climb Maslow’s pyramid to be compatible with those?

> It was never the pyramid.

> It was never the optimization.

> It was the people around the fire.

"It was cold out, but none of us were cold."

"In that moment, there was nothing to do. Nothing to improve. Nothing to fix. It was perfect."

"We’ve all seen it. Clear as day, you can see the goal post at the top: self-actualization. LFG! It’s time to journal and 80/20 myself! Pass me a shaman and some modafinil. That’s the mission. That’s the point. Right? But hold on."

"Because at the end of the day—and at the end of a Montana night—the point was never yourself. It was never the pyramid. It was never the optimization. It was the people around the fire."

I don't say 'self acceptance' because that's often described as a necessary precursor to changing whatever we find difficult to accept about ourselves.

During time of war and uncertainty, self help takes on the form of Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

We are conditioned beings, we respond to the macro environment and dynamics.

In my self-help journey I came across meditation which ultimately led me to altruistic-based practices. So can't relate.

> A focus on improving the self usually first requires finding problems with the self

Oh I got in there the other way around. I wanted a few things out of life socially speaking but society was blocking me somehow. So I went out to investigate why that is and then studied it all and then solved my own problem. In order to do that, I had to improve myself as I wasn't connecting well with the world. I'm much happier with how I do that nowadays.

My waking call was, ironically, another management book "The Management Myth" by Matthew Steward (I think), which just showed me the ridiculousness of it all.

I'm happy that he has gone beyond the "book / author of the week" format and this blog post is most welcomed.

Relationships are crucial, especially ones that help elevate yourself or, at least, keep you on a stable level instead of dragging you down.

so, the self help didn't help and he passed the problem on his readers. Great!

The more interesting question is what that deficiency actually is. I think attachment theory gives a more precise answer: the underlying sense of insufficiency is mostly relational in origin. So his pivot to relationships has real intuition behind it — but it still mistakes the symptom for the cure.

The actual trap isn't self-help as a genre. It's using any action — including optimising your relationships — to externalise rather than confront what's underneath. The distinguishing feature is direction: are you doing this to avoid discomfort or to change your relationship to it? Rumination and productivity hacks fail by the same measure for the same reason.

His buried insight — "you cannot improve suffering away" — is the most important line in the piece, treated as a footnote. That's where the real work starts: developing the capacity to sit with what you've been avoiding rather than finding a better-feeling target for the same restlessness.

It is a bit ironic: the article is monetised self-help advice warning you about self-help, while introducing fresh deficiencies along the way — everything you learned was wrong — and staying carefully at the level of framework. That's precisely the move he's critiquing: redecorating the avoidance rather than confronting it. The most useful version of this piece would be considerably less optimised and considerably more vulnerable.