Which Death God Can I Sacrifice The Entire Self-Development Genre To?

Let it f*cking END

The best and worst part of working in a bookstore are the recommendations you get from the customers. Wedged in-between backpacks, squashed down aisles, someone will invariably crop up out of nowhere, lurching from the bookshelves like a reanimated corpse to recommend you something you’ve never heard of. I’ve found some of my favourite books this way and I’m fairly open to genres.

Except for one.

It’s kind of like a religion. Usually men, usually white (but hey, let me tell you this genre attracts readers of all genders, race, and creed which is doubly worrying), and they kind of hang around the Self-Development/Business section like a fart you thought you’d try and sneak out except what was meant to be a love puff is actually a crop-duster. It lingers.

These guys linger.

Usually they pick up the heaviest, manliest book they can find, throwing furtive glances over their shoulders. They’re so desperate to be asked what they’re reading that they’re practically salivating. My hot-take is that they’re the counterpart to the Pick-Me Girl. They’re the King and Queen of Purgatory. Their stubby fingers clutch a book by Ray Dalio or Ant Middleton or Robert Greene the way Nosferatu would hold a victim, and from the corner of your eye you can see them staring at you. They’re a child who’s just vomited and appears in their parent’s doorway at 3 in the morning like an apparition from Macbeth.

“See me,” they desperately whisper with their eyes. “See me.”

I indulged one of them once. Not because I believe in this shit but because I was curious. I find it really hard to get out of bed in the morning, it takes me a few hours to even think about going for a walk, and I don’t have the luxury of having my servant cleaning out my bedpan whilst my lady-in-waiting combs my hair. So I said, “Fuck it,” and bought The 5am Club by Robin Sharma. And what did I learn?

Folks, I am happy to inform you, once and for all, that the reason, the real reason that you are poor is not because of inconsequential things like capitalism or inherited money or colonial wealth-stealing legacies…drum roll please.

IT’S BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T WAKE UP AT 5AM!

You just didn’t work hard enough! All billionaires get up at 5am, didn’t you know? They have some crazy manifesting routine, drink a glass of water, probably bump a few lines of coke before blasting off into space just in time to get the latest intel on how to colonise the galaxy.

None of it is remotely helpful or interesting. These books are literally stretched out axioms like croissant dough. You can look up the contents of every one of these novels on Google, get a neat dot point summary, and realise you learnt either nothing new, or something that could have been a slogan on your dad’s T-shirt. “Working for what you want will give you what you want.” No shit. I want to do away with this entire genre. I want to nuke it. I want to rip a radioactive fart on it so hard that it becomes inaccessible for millions of years.

It’s amazing that neoliberalism has developed its own canon of mythos and fiction. Because that’s all this is— there is no hack to becoming a millionaire. You’re closer to becoming homeless than metamorphosing into Monsieur Musk but the only way to keep people locked in the cycle of “But what if I could do it? What if I’m different?” is to create our own pantheon of gods, our own religious texts. Who would be Zeus, I wonder? And where did the myth start?

I’d like to do rounds, like a WWE championship. Let’s start with the heavyweights— Steve Jobs versus Bill Gates. DING DING DING they enter the ring, beers on tap folks. Jobs does this neat little thing where he grapples with Gates, flips him over, then holds him in a headlock until Gates gasps and wheezes, slamming the floor with his outstretched palm, “Mercy!” he cries. “I yield!” Jobs releases his grip, straightens up before announcing, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” The crowd goes wild.

Round 2: Middleweight Division. We’ve got Tony Robbins versus Jordan Peterson. This is personally my favourite round because Tony just runs on the spot for five minutes until he lathers up a hysterical sweat while Jordan Peterson lectures Tony to make his bed before sitting in a messy corner and writing his ten banal commandments. There are no blows this round, it’s more psychological, these guys really know what they’re doing after all, if you don’t get it you’re not on their level.

Round 3 we’ve got the featherweights, Mark Manson and Robert Greene, probably the most boring round. Mark does a lot of swearing and gesticulating, saying normal things but with profanities because it’s edgier (obviously) and Robert Greene uses a lot of words but says nothing at all which causes him to be the clear winner because it’s a real testament to how far we’ve come with literature that you can write 496 pages of absolute filler.

I hate the idea that my passive time is built for and around work. I do not work eight hours a day to come home and spend my leisurely hours trying to become a better worker. I spend my down time consuming as it is, our entire culture is built around it, and so I refuse to make myself into a husk for something that does not fulfil or sustain me. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Marx’s theory of alienation is seminal and I will not let neoliberal myth infect the time I most value, the time where I should be resting and retreating and creating (not for profit but for the pure joy of it).

It’s funny. I’m not actually against the idea of self-betterment. I’m not (shock) part of the camp that glorifies apathy and toxic behaviour. I don’t want to remain shitty. I want to self-reflect, I want to improve. But my self-betterment is borne from experience, not a glass of water at five am. It comes from the fucking painful art of death (metaphorical) and reflexivity where, two or three years after an incident, I’m able to say, “Huh. Maybe I was a bit shit after all. What can I learn from this?” Constant self-analysis does not lead to the holy grail of self-development. Actually living gives you the wisdom you so desperately seek.

Here I will give the dear old men a break. They deserve a rest after all that rolling around. The other side of self-development that I wish to obliterate the way the Death Star destroyed Alderaan is the double sided coin of the girl-boss/spiritual girl. This is to the women in power suits who believe that punishing themselves is the way forward to success. This is also to the women, particularly the white ones who’ve discovered kundalini yoga (I can laugh because I was one of them at one point), and believe that wisdom comes with age and experience, not one meditation, not one journal entry, and certainly not six weeks of sugar free eating.

I worry that the youth are so obsessed with appearing wise and mature that we ignore and actively push away the reality that we’re all just a little bit dumb. I certainly am. I do dumb shit all the time. Do I do less dumb shit than the year before? Absolutely. In fact I breathe a sigh of relief that I don’t react to certain things the way I used to. But to pretend that I am somehow at the zenith of wisdom AT THE AGE OF TWENTY SIX, is simply a marketing sham which has allowed for young twenty year olds to sell e-books and guides which impart nothing of value. We commodify down to the atom. Everything is sellable, everything marketable. Why are we obsessed with success so early, so young? I want to bring your attention to my favourite quote by Björk which I will paraphrase because for the life of me I cannot find it (but if you can please post the link in the comment section).

I find it strange that people are so obsessed with being successful so young. Here in Iceland most of our writers only become successful later in life, in their sixties, so the concept that you have a great body of work in your twenties is strange.

Look I might have embellished that a tad but you get my point (I’m a Sagittarius, I won’t let facts get in the way of a good story). And it begs the question, what the hell are we truly improving for? If it was to improve the way we engage relationally, I might understand. If it were to heal our relationship to shame, I might understand. But why are we all out here doing backflips for a gold star that we will never receive at work? It feels far too much like the Regency period (and there is more I want to say on this but perhaps another time) that we are performing betterment for social gratification.

The self-development girlies set up a tripod and then light their beige candles in their beige living room in their beige loungewear and then journal in their beige notebooks like a Jane Austen character writing a letter mid-party to win the affections of the bachelor on ten thousand a year (so mysterious! and what a handsome hand she has!). I want to know where they’re getting all this money from? How do they start a business at twenty three? How they have the energy to constantly make Tik Toks like, ‘Journal with me,’ or ‘Watch as I become my best self’ but it’s just a horrible strobe light image pastiche where colour is leached out of the universe and everything they eat has no carbs and they seem to only go to the gym and eat snacks built for an actual fairy.

One of my favourite essays by Brandon from Sweater Weather, ‘Bro Where’s My Marriage Plot,’ actually looks at this phenomenon. The self-development boys hold their big books up in the aisles like Anne Hathaway holding her fan in Princess Diaries 2, a desperate plea, a signal that they are accomplished too! That they also have a handsome figure!

Queen Clarisse Renaldi: One handles a [book by an ex-soldier who’s turned to hustle culture influencing] very deliberately. It’s a tremendous tool of communication. That’s it. You can say things like ‘I’m feeling [like waking up at 5am and drinking spirulina powder], come hither.’ You can say, ‘I never wish to [have down time] again!’ Go away. You can say, ‘I’m feeling terribly [about myself because this cultural mindset is made for robots and not humans] today.’

But I think worst of all is the response I get when I’m asked if I read these books because let me tell you, these customers want to convert you. They don’t just buy their book and be on their merry way. No, they want validation, feedback, something. And it always seems like a script which will always go like this (and I’m keeping this gender neutral because I’ve had this conversation with men AND women):

Act 1 Scene 1

A nondescript bookstore. Enter Customer who makes a beeline for the counter.

Customer: Hey, do you have [insert book here] in stock?

Me: Yeah, let me check the shelf.

Customer follows me to a narrow book aisle. I find said book, pass it to them but find my exit somewhat blocked.

Customer: Awesome, thanks so much. Have you read this?

Me: No, I haven’t.

Customer: Do you read stuff like this? It’s amazing. Totally life-changing.

Me: No, I don’t read this genre.

Customer: Seriously? Is it because you find it all daunting? It’s crazy because you could really change your life if you just invest in yourself. I never read stuff like this years ago but then I heard of [insert cultural pundit name here] and starting listening to their podcast and that’s when it all started to click, I got super into this whole world and let me tell you it’s amazing. Say, have you read anything by [insert secondary author here]? They’re awesome, too. Why don’t you read books like this? I can’t believe you don’t read anything in this section. You’re probably into romance, huh? Actually, do you use Spotify? Here, let me give you this podcast. They’re on Instagram, too. They just really speak the truth, you know. I’ve just never felt better. I only sleep five hours a night. I only drink smoothies. I never shit. Do you invest in crypto? I run on the spot like a hamster on a wheel as soon as I wake up for two minutes until I pass out and then astral project to a plane where I’m my most successful self. Have you heard of Barre? Pilates? Reformer? Have you been to Bali? They do great workshops like [insert name of spiritual or leadership camp here]. Do you eat sugar? Do you fast? I literally have not pooped in six months. I have never felt better.

I’ve actually had some of them lurk with TEXTBOOKS (I wish I was joking) or introductions to dubious online-only courses like they’re part of a huge pyramid scheme. And isn’t Instagram influencing/marketing/the self-development genre a bit of an MLM in the first place? Getting us all to sell to each other, peer-to-peer trading— it’s so strange, I can’t be the only one finding this all so bizarre, right? It can’t just be me?

And so I am on the hunt for a death god. A big fuck off death god who absorbs things into their black hole gullet. That squeezes Nutribullets into noodles before obliterating them. That will bend and fracture and splinter the genre into nothingness. The death god will preferably reside on a volcano which will naturally come equipped with an Aslan-style stone sacrificial tablet and a viewing platform for my friends and family. It will also come with a nice cup of tea so I can take my time. There are no clocks, time doesn’t exist. I’m also blasting crypto off into the stratosphere, essential oils can go, too. And of course, the death god would be sympathetic to my cause, unless the self-development army has got their first.

And imagine my surprise when I arrive, ready to wave this whole episode into history, and the death god looks up at me with their naphtha flare eyes, something’s wrong. They’re in monochromatic sweats. They’re wearing a Fitbit. Their phone pings constantly, they’ve got an eye on the stocks. They’ve just finished their green juice (no sugar), but they’ve gotta jet, they’re gonna be late for a Tony Robbins seminar, they’re so excited, they tell me. This is it. Death has been a bit slow lately, they’ve been too comfortable, too content. Joy and rest and the warping of time is wrong. There’s only twenty four hours in a day you know, and imagine how much they could achieve if only they woke up at 5am?

---