I’m reading a book by a guy named Rolf Dobelli, called ‘The Art of The Good Life’.

On the back there’s a description that says:

‘In the Art of The Good Life, you’ll find fifty-two intellectual shortcuts for wiser thinking and better decisions, at home and at work. They may not guarantee you a good life, but they’ll give you a better chance’.

Uhu.

That’s a pretty smart thing to claim, and also very obvious and kinda lame, because that actually goes for every book that was ever published.

Anyway.

I used to drown myself in books like these, lap them up like a thirsty koala after a nasty bushfire, but I’ve almost completely stopped doing that, and this was merely a holiday fluke.

There are a lot of books like this one, and they make for solid bestsellers.

What’s not to love?

You take the endlessly compelling topic of human behavior, drag some historical figures on stage, talk about their routines, drop some statistics, translate all of that into universal actions, and squeeze a bit of advice out of your observations to top it off.

These books make total sense and are very soothing for the mind.

But they’re also very useless.

Studying and analyzing people and writing down what you see, doesn’t mean you have the key to change, at all.

It just means that you have a sense of what most people tend to do, and that you’ve turned that into an interpretation that claims to be practical.

Which it isn’t.

Let me tell you why.

In the end, all the bright and shiny and philosophical advice always comes down to things like

‘Only 0,003 of your worries will come true, so stop worrying.’

‘You never really know how successful, wealthy people feel, so stop being jealous.’

‘Just think differently.’

Rrrright…

This is like telling a depressed person they should just stop thinking dark and hopeless thoughts, or trying to help out an alcoholic by saying they shouldn’t think about booze.

At first, it may sound like a solution, because technically it makes sense.

But it’s nonsense.

This is simply not how we work.

It’s how we often THINK we work, but it’s not even how we think.

I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it a million more times: we are not logical creatures, and we can’t change our thoughts because we want to.

We don’t make our thoughts in the first place.

We just don’t.

These books turn people into statistics, and the compelling power comes from the idea that if we intellectually understand our behavior, if we pin down the stupid stuff we repeatedly do, we can do it differently.

That’s extremely naïve, but it clearly sells like a motherfucker.

It sells because we want to believe it’s true, because it makes sense when we read it and the mind loves stuff that makes sense.

But life is mostly about the moments when NOTHING makes sense, and no amount of meticulously collected facts will help you out when you’re overwhelmed.

Self-help books thrive on this misunderstanding.

They’re like watching a very experienced personal trainer showing you how to do specific exercises, and feeling stronger and fitter and healthier just by looking at them.

And the next moment you find yourself alone in the gym.

We don’t change because we read a book.

Even if the book is very smart and full of wisdom about how and why we do things and other cutting-edge observations, illustrated with lots of examples.

Life is not driven by sanity and clarity and conscious decisions in most cases.

It’s just not.

WE’RE just not.

We don’t deliberately do most of the things we do, and we most certainly don’t prepare our actions in a neutral way and from a neutral place before we do them.

If you don’t get a feeling for the spontaneous unfolding of life and if you don’t realize some sort of distance from the stuff you feel inclined to do, you’ll keep doing the stuff you’re inclined to do, over and over again.

That’s absolutely inevitable.

But we just love the idea of reading one more self-help book before we finally get it and be in control of our destiny.

What we DON’T like is being pointed out how absolutely minimal the influence of our intellectual mind is, how tiny the effect of all the facts we’ve stored, and how impossible it is to change your way of thinking after you realize it’s not really helping you out.

We don’t like the way it actually works (sloppy, randomly, impulsively), and we don’t mind fooling ourselves.

We’d rather believe in the logic of knowing how we function, than surrender to the not-knowing, something that will eventually leave us with way more options and exactly that (and more) what we were looking for in the books that make so much sense.

Anyway.

Dobelli has an audience of millions and keeps selling books.

It’s not always cool to be right.

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(Photo by Miranda Ayim)