Confession: I am fascinated by the self-help department of my local bookstore. I could wander in there and be happily lost for hours, up to my eyeballs in soul-searching and intuitive questions and personality tests and emotional iq and relationship advice and brilliant suggestions for finding balance.
I know I end up reading the same thing over and over again, simply written by different people with slightly different perspectives. Some of these people approach the topic from vastly, wildly different worldviews. There’s a self-help author from every camp, it seems, whether it be Hippie or Christian or New Age or Feminist or some undefined mix. Actually, I think the majority is some undefined mix.
That’s not my point, however. My point is that we should start wondering what kind of culture creates a market of continual need for every sort of self-help philosophy that can be produced. Because, essentially, they all say the same thing: Slow down. Think more. Do less. Find what you value. Lose what is unimportant. Make conscious choices. Quit trying to impress other people. Be who you are. Know who you are. Love freely. Cut off negativity.
Okay, there are different methods in all the books. I know I’m grossly paraphrasing the authors. But I’ve written a lot of those articles myself, and every time I stop and wonder why I even need to be repeating this stuff. This is common sense. These are basic truisms. <em>You can’t change another person.</em> I know that. <em>You won’t be happy with someone else until you are happy with yourself.</em> You know that. <em>Having it all has nothing to do with money. The good life may not be what you used to think it was. You don’t own stuff; stuff owns you. Relationships mean more than success. Simplicity and quality makes for a rich life.</em>
We are a culture of ceaseless movement. We love the newest, brightest, shiniest, most expensive. We make value-judgments almost exclusively on appearances, first impressions, and surface emotional responses. And those habits result in the kind of harried, meaningless lifestyles we adop without any intention.
How does this relate to sustainable living? Stopping to think and make choices to live sustainably is part of this same concept of “self-help”: it requires us to step out of a cultural box and make smart choices. They may not be popular choices, but they are better choices. Eventually, if we all keep making these kind of smart choices in how we live sustainably and in what we value, we will end up with a different kind of culture. After all, the culture is simply a collection of all of us, what we value and what we ignore. Let’s start shaking things up a bit.
Image Credit: jurvetson.
