I used to read a lot of "self-help" books and blogs. I never enjoyed them as much as I enjoyed reading philosophy. I don't know what good reading all those books did for me. There was a point of diminishing returns reading them, especially when reading them was fuelled by a sense of not being good enough. The suppressed premise in all self-help books is "You need to do more," which can easily bleed into the following perverse premise: "You need to be more."
As someone who enjoys memetic cartography, here is what I see are the three waves of self-help:
Success Manifestors
Success Mindsetters
Success Hackers
Each wave has its unique origins:
The Manifestors emerged from the "New Thought"1 movement. Exemplar books include Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale.
The Mindsetters came from salesmen-turned-motivational speakers. Exemplar books include See You at the Top by Zig Ziglar and Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins.
The Hackers are inspired by millennial digital nomads. Exemplar books include The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss and $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau.
Each wave has a primary philosophy and discipline guiding it:
Manifestors use what is now referred to as the “law of attraction,” a belief that positive or negative thoughts and feelings will attract a person’s life circumstances.
Mindsetters use some psychological program, most popularly "neurolinguistic programming," to mimic successful people's mindsets, speech patterns, and behaviors.
Hackers use the system to their advantage, engaging in “lifestyle design,” avoiding playing the losing status games associated with the 9-to-5 lifestyle, applying the Pareto principle2 to everything.
While I advocate less foolish wisdom lovers to familiarize themselves with the best of these waves, I caution against becoming a disciple in any one. Uncharitably expressed: the Manifestors are engaging in normie magick, the Mindsetters are larping the successful, and the Hackers are parasitizing the system that wage slaves are upholding. Being more charitable: all of these techniques do work. However, they stop working and become harmful if they become one's sole approach to life.
What is the next wave of self-help? There is an eclectic mix-match of various philosophies and practices being explored today. Here are some I see: rationality, quantified self, psychedelics, psychotherapy, trauma processing, embodiment, the coach industrial complex, productivity porn, FIRE movement, minimalism, retvrn to tradition, hypermasculine manosphere, looksmaxxing pick-up artists, improv, Nietzscheism, Navy SEAL mental toughness, fanatics of Huberman protocols, the longevity scene, prepperism, clout-chasing wellness influencers, solopreneurship, nonduality, secular Buddhism, modern/minimal Stoicism, applied complexity, sensemaking, we spaces, conspirituality, neo-pagan animism, and chaos magick.
I'll dub this fourth wave the Success Experimenters: those who have no loyalties to any one philosophy, practices, or self-help guru, and are willing to try whatever may work. Each wave represents its era well, and the experimental nature of the fourth wave makes sense in light of our increasing internet interconnections, which come with rapid exposure to novel methods and frameworks.
Whenever the fourth wave fades, there will be no fifth wave of self-help. Why? Because the value of success will increasingly no longer be something people are inspired to strive for. The throughline between all four waves is the conscious value of success and the shadow value of status. I'll define the former as the "recognition of achieving something" and the former as "one's social ranking."
Success and status have been the driving values in Western culture, slavishly compelling those to do more and increasingly making the vast majority of us feel like we need to be more, leading to a dispirited culture marked by toxic shame. The good news is that more people are slowly shedding the influence these values have and are now pursuing the deeper values underneath them, namely agency and power.
I'll define the former as "taking action believed to lead to accomplishing outcomes."3 Defining the latter is challenging, but it's akin to something like "influencing and controlling others." I see the value of agency and its unfolding value of "hyperagency"4 replacing the value of success and its unfolding value of fame. Likewise, the value of power and the skill of power literacy5 are replacing the value of status and the skill of status hacking.
This value shift is a good thing. Firstly, agency holds greater wisdom than success. Stoically speaking, it aligns with the "dichotomy of control" principle, emphasizing what's within our control and disregarding what is not. Unlike success, which relies on others' recognition and approval, agency only needs minimum self-belief and a flexible outcome-orientated focus.
Secondly, most people are ignorant of power dynamics and sorely lack power literacy, leaving them clueless about the real-world machinations of power-savvy people. Making matters worse, chasing status, a very hackable value, results in a world filled with over-credentialed "empty suits," individuals who are possessed by status anxiety6 and chase inflated job titles and other status symbols without increasing their actual power.
’s excellent The Gervais Principle maps out the dynamics of many organizations in modernity: the "sociopaths" with power literacy are at the top, the "clueless" ones (think middle-managers) go "above and beyond" to chase status, while the "losers" know the game is rigged, doing the bare minimum to get by. Although individuals at the bottom may not possess the same level of power literacy as those at the top, their literacy surpasses that of the clueless individuals in the middle.7
Given there are more losers today, meaning there is a sense that more are losing in the system that is not worth winning, and with the clueless becoming painfully noticeable and increasingly being ridiculed8, a greater sense of who has power and how they are getting it is becoming clear. This gradual demystification of power is a positive development.
While I see the shedding of success and status and its replacement of agency and power as good, it is full of potential risks. Greater sophistication with agency and power can arm sociopaths better and create more of them. A superordinate value, or meta-value, is needed to police the excess of these new driving values: wisdom.
Wisdom allows value diversity, optionality, and flexibility; sometimes, it is wise to focus on agency and power, especially compared to foolish-prone values such as success and status. Wisdom also affords more communal values such as compassion, cooperation, and justice. An orientation toward wisdom is an orientation toward wholeness.
We are at a pivotal moment regarding our collective focus. If agency and power become the de facto collective values sans wisdom, we'll continue to witness a cancerous pursuit of narrowly self-serving interests with more efficacious means, resulting in hazardous consequences.
The good news is that the Experimenters are moving in the right direction but still need to catch the right scent9. As Heraclitus states: "Those who love wisdom must investigate many things." The Experimenter's eclecticism, which embraces diverse practices and values, will eventually allow them to sense the "deep code" of all their pursuits, naturally guiding them toward the meta-value of wisdom.
I choose to see this as inevitable, and the responsibility of the less foolish ones is to encourage fresh perspectives, gently stewarding this unfolding revelation along.
In my philosophy practice, I undertake daily inquiries with individuals, delving into their most pressing issues, untying their “existential knots.” To see if there are any openings for long-term inquiry partnerships, contact me at thestoa at protonmail dot com. Additionally, I'll be offering single-session inquiries throughout the year, which you can schedule through the link below. You can read more about my practice here or here.
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A 19th-century US spiritual movement, rooted in diverse metaphysical concepts, including the belief in “manifestation,” aka thoughts/feelings/vibrations attract a certain reality.
80% of outcomes result from 20% of causes.
Modern rationalists of the LessWrong (LW) ilk are quite preoccupied with agency. In the LW glossary it is defined as “the property of effectively acting with an environment to achieve one's goals. A key property of agents is that the more agentic a being is, the more you can predict its actions from its goals since its actions will be whatever will maximize the chances of achieving its goals.”
“If agency is the capacity to make choices within conventional social processes, hyper-agency is the capacity to be a creator or producer of those processes.” -
, “Perspectiva in 10 Premises”I have written about power literacy in the following entries: “A Less Foolish Power Literacy,” “Wise as Serpents,” “Status or Power or Wisdom or ...,” and “Own Your Power.”
“Status Anxiety: A worry, so pernicious as to be capable of ruining extended stretches of our lives, that we are in danger of failing to conform to the ideals of success laid down by our society and that we may as a result be stripped of dignity and respect; a worry that we are currently occupying too modest a rung or are about to fall to a lower one.” - Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety
Contrasting sociopaths and the clueless, the former engages in “powertalk,” consequential communication that reshapes power dynamics significantly, while the latter engages in “posturetalk,” parroting the powerful without their substance, done more for appearances rather than actual influence. See Venkat’s “The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk.”
The NPC and midwit memes are two examples of such ridicule.
The “postrationalist” scene is at the bleeding edge of the Experimenters. See
’s “Rational Magic” essay.