Copyright thedriftmag
Donald Trump’s endeavors in business and politics frequently overshadow his contributions as a philosopher of the futility of human achievement. “We’re here and we live our sixty, seventy, or eighty years and we’re gone,” he reflected to Playboy in a 1990 interview. “You win, you win, and in the end, it doesn’t mean a hell of a lot.” Subsequent winning does not seem to have shaken this conviction. “Nothing matters,” he informed Larry King in 2004. “You do shows, you do this, you do that, and then you have earthquakes in India where 400,000 people get killed. Honestly, it doesn’t matter.” Apparently catching a brief glimpse of the abyss during the 2020 campaign cycle, Trump expressed his wish to “hop into” one of his supporters’ trucks “and drive it away.” As he mused, “I’d love to do it. Just drive the hell outta here. Just get the hell out of this.” Who among us has not daydreamed, now and again, about leaving it all behind? The anesthetizing pleasures of disengagement seem especially seductive these days — thanks, in no small part, to Trump himself. In the decade since his reinvention as a political juggernaut, the idea that nothing matters has gained significant purchase, often in response to the endless chaos of which he is both cause and symptom. As a wide range of social scientists, pollsters, and trendspotters have observed, a sense of fatalism has increasingly suffused the attitudes of many millennials and zoomers. (“Get in, loser,” Cosmopolitan invited readers in 2024. “We’re heading into the void!”) The most straightforward way to cope with hopelessness is to tell yourself that hope was a mistake in the first place. In his 2019 book Everything Is Fucked, the sequel to his 2016 bestseller The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, the self-help guru Mark Manson puts the point with characteristic economy of expression: “Hope Is Fucked.” Manson’s rise to airport bookstore superstardom, however, suggests that most people do not find the process of unburdening oneself of one’s fucks to come as naturally as it does for Trump. Many, in fact, find the task rather daunting. At first you may feel better about whatever’s crushing your spirits if you accept, as Manson urges, that “pain is the universal constant,” and that you will never get what you truly want out of life. It doesn’t really matter if things just keep sucking forever; it is only in hoping for something better that you set yourself up for disappointment and frustration. There, isn’t that a load off? Then you’ll be in the shower or trying to fall asleep and you’ll remember everything you’re giving up on, all the pain you’ll never escape, and your chest will tighten and your breath will quicken and you’ll thumb back through your copy of Mark Manson to remind yourself just how all of this is supposed to work. If Manson’s tomes are too vulgar (in either sense) for your taste, fear not. An apparently inexhaustible supply of alternatives now fills the shelves — books that similarly promise to help you make your peace with the reality that disappointment, frustration, and agony are inexorable parts of life. “Although pain is inevitable, suffering is optional,” Joseph Nguyen tells readers in his best-selling Don’t Believe Everything You Think (2022). Professor and fitness influencer Michael Easter’s The Comfort Crisis (2021) explains that our lives are actually too easy, and we should be grateful for those challenges we haven’t yet managed to eliminate. Some of these books share with Manson’s not only a general outlook on life but also a sense of which words are funny. Sarah Knight’s Calm the Fuck Down (2018) explains, per its subtitle, “How to Control What You Can and Accept What You Can’t So You Can Stop Freaking Out and Get On With Your Life,” while Michael and Sarah Bennett’s Fuck Feelings (2015) promises, according to its promotional copy, to show readers how to “put aside your unrealistic wishes, stop trying to change things you can’t change, and do the best with what you can control.” Readers who prefer their self-help to come with a sheen of erudition can increasingly count on finding similar wisdom about human finitude dispensed in the philosophy section. Turning to philosophy to learn how to live is nothing new, of course. But the explicitly inspirational and instructional valence of much that appears today under that heading, even from academic presses, is striking — as is the apparent consensus that the central task of philosophy is to guide seekers to a greater acceptance of imperfection and insignificance. Sometimes these books focus on a particular school of philosophy, giving readers an “-ism” — existentialism, Buddhism, Taoism, and above all Stoicism, now practically a genre unto itself — with which to identify. Others staple together eclectic smatterings of received ideas into less partisan surveys on how to cope with failure and disillusionment. The self-help industry has in turn embraced this conception of “philosophy,” to the point where it’s no longer always clear whether to categorize a given book of advice as philosophy or self-help in the first place. In his author bio, Nguyen entices readers with the boast that he draws “inspiration from philosophy,” among other sources. In The Let Them Theory, the top-performing self-help book on Amazon as of this writing, the former attorney and current podcaster Mel Robbins explains that her program — a set of tools to free readers from the belief that “we can protect ourselves from pain, disappointment, rejection” — is “rooted in ancient philosophies and psychological concepts that have guided people for centuries,” including Stoicism and Buddhism. Oliver Burkeman, author of the newsletter “The Imperfectionist” and several books including the recent Meditations for Mortals (2024), similarly avers that “centuries of philosophical reflection” underpin his advice to renounce the quest for “dominance over a reality that can otherwise seem so unmanageable and overwhelming.” To be philosophical, apparently, is to accept our lot. I get the appeal. Like most Americans, I’ve known the frustration and resentment that follow catechesis in the religion of self-fulfillment. I understand what it’s like to be told to look within yourself to find your destiny, your calling, your deepest desire, and to be assured that hard work and the right attitude can make it real: the excessive self-reverence, and then the inevitable self-recrimination. That there is now such a demand for books about the inevitability of failure and the wisdom of not giving a fuck suggests that many of us today suspect that our selfhood is a flimsy foundation on which to build a life, inadequate to the insuperable obstacles that prevent us from imposing our designs on the reality we inhabit. We’ve been tricked, or have tricked ourselves, into overestimating our own agency — and we hope a firm Stoic hand can smack us back into perspective. The “philosophy” packaged and sold to the reading public offers only a superficial correction, however. To imagine yourself as a modern-day Seneca, a sage liberated from the cares afflicting more ordinary souls, is its own form of self-indulgence. Renouncing the need to matter does not always draw you out of your own ego, but can leave you even further lost inside of it. Just ask the president. Self-help philosophy often brands itself as an “antidote” — to quote the title of one of Burkeman’s early books — to the unrealistic expectations and toxic positivity that more mainstream self-help currents have inflicted on modern culture. The self-help philosophers are correct that the genre they’re invading has long been dominated by a rather outlandish sense of what one can accomplish through the exercise of individual freedom. In her classic 2009 work of cultural criticism Bright-sided, Barbara Ehrenreich argued that positive thinking, the idea that you should always expect the best and believe in your ability to achieve your dreams, had served since the nineteenth century as the official American ideology. There is plenty of evidence for this judgment on today’s best-seller lists. “The secret to getting results that last is to never stop making improvements,” James Clear writes in Atomic Habits, which has sold over 25 million copies worldwide since it was published in 2018. “It’s remarkable what you can build if you just don’t stop.” Books in this vein often rely on the language of either science, like Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck’s Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2006), or evangelical Christianity, as in the work of megachurch pastor and Success Is a Choice (2020) author John C. Maxwell. By expressing faith in our ability to master our reality and overcome obstacles, these books are the present-day heirs to Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, a 1952 bestseller that switched between Christian and pop-psych rhetorical modes. Peale’s book has spawned countless imitators since its initial publication. Notably, its author also presided over Trump’s first wedding and seems to have shaped the future president’s thinking, at least in those moments when he was not preoccupied with cosmic pointlessness. Peale, in turn, drew on a set of spiritual beliefs and practices, known collectively as New Thought, that had been popular since the Gilded Age. New Thought — its most famous 21st-century articulation is The Secret, the 2006 manifesting manual touted by Oprah Winfrey — proceeds from the premise that material obstacles to human desires are basically illusory, the consequences of mental error. Through proper focus and prayer, New Thought claims, anyone can access a deep reservoir of divine creative energy and channel it to solve whatever difficulties they face, from physical illness to unemployment. As one New Thought tract published in 1903 puts it, conventional wisdom taught people how to get along “under the circumstances,” but it was high time that Americans started asking how to “get over the circumstances.” But while New Thought and its descendants dominated the self-help publishing industry for much of the twentieth century, more accommodating attitudes toward “the circumstances” persisted elsewhere in American culture — a medley of spiritual practices and lifestyle trends that, in their vision of an inscrutable and ultimately unmasterable reality enveloping us all, can be understood as predecessors to today’s philosophical self-help. Exiled from Nazi Germany, the Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno looked with dismay on what he saw as a surge of interest in 1940s America in the occult, from astrology to palm-reading. These, according to Adorno, were mechanisms for coping with a social world that appeared impervious to rational methods of control. “If, to the living, objective reality seems deaf as never before,” Adorno wrote, “they try to elicit meaning from it by saying abracadabra.” New Thought and related positive-thinking currents also taught readers to recite incantations; “every day, in every way, I am getting better and better,” one popular “affirmation” went. The purpose of midcentury occultism, however, was not to convince yourself that you were more in control than you might think. It was to discover that the world was ruled by forces more mysterious and powerful than you could have imagined: the planets, the spirits, the Jungian collective unconscious, the pilots of the flying saucers Americans suddenly began to spot everywhere starting in 1947. The best you could hope for was to learn how to play by their rules. The feeling that the world was unresponsive and uncontrollable gained purchase as postwar America confronted the threats of environmental crisis, nuclear apocalypse, and, by the 1970s, economic stagnation. Many of the practices associated with the counterculture and the New Age movement, from homesteading and communal living to psychedelic drug use and free love, can be understood as attempts to refocus on the simple, immediate pleasures of life when faced with the transparent meaninglessness of traditional achievement: a spouse and kids, a white picket fence, a corner office. How could any of that stuff matter when the Cuyahoga River was on fire and the Bomb could go off any day? Herbert Marcuse (a former Frankfurt colleague of Adorno) argued in his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man that contemporary Americans seemed increasingly to embrace “spiritual, metaphysical, and bohemian” pursuits, exchanging ambitions of social transformation for the stylings of “Zen, existentialism, and beat ways of life, etc.” These attempts to find meaning or purpose in personal projects or private spiritual exercises were, Marcuse felt, “quickly digested by the status quo as part of its healthy diet.” In the early days of the counterculture, the vogue for spiritual experimentation Marcuse identified spawned new publishing trends that blended self-help with philosophy. After toiling in relative obscurity for two decades, the self-styled “philosophical entertainer” Alan Watts broke into celebrity in the 1950s, selling countless copies of books that simultaneously introduced readers to East Asian philosophy and gave them practical advice on how to live. Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) and Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh (1982) also staked out spots on best-seller lists by synthesizing “Eastern” and “Western” wisdom in ways that countless devotees found relevant to the challenges of ordinary life. Today, readers can still find Zen wisdom transposed into a secular philosophical key, especially in the best-selling books of the Korean monk Haemin Sunim (author of three of the top five entries on one online list of “The 10 Best Books on Secular Buddhism”). Dispensing a familiar message about the need for detachment and acceptance, Haemin will help you cultivate Love for Imperfect Things (2016) and learn what to do When Things Don’t Go Your Way (2024). “We are unhappy because we can’t find peace with what is,” Haemin explains. “We wish things to be different from what is happening at that moment.” This advice, expressed in different registers and idioms, is at the heart of self-help philosophy, and the genre’s exponents are convinced it undermines fundamental convictions of the culture they’re addressing. The philosopher Costica Bradatan suggests that his paean In Praise of Failure “may seem surprising,” since “there seems to be nothing worse in our world than to fail” — although there is very little that will surprise the devoted self-help philosophy reader in Bradatan’s instruction “to see things as they are, as opposed to how we would like them to be.” In Meditations for Mortals, Burkeman quotes the German social theorist Hartmut Rosa to assail “the idea, the hope and desire, that we can make the world controllable” — allegedly “the driving cultural force of that form of life we call ‘modern.’” Burkeman explains that his brand of philosophical reflection can help us resist this ubiquitous impulse and embrace the fact that most things are beyond our command. “You needn’t reflect for long on the subject of human limitation,” he muses, “to see that the existence of problems simply follows, unavoidably, from the facts of finitude.” That is true, of course, which is why this insight is not nearly as disruptive to conventional wisdom as the self-help philosophers maintain. If all this advice really cuts against the grain of the modern world — a “World Striving for Perfection,” as the subtitle of Haemin’s Love for Imperfect Things puts it — the fact that, in various incarnations, it has proven so popular (and so lucrative) for so long is a bit of a puzzle. Perhaps it is less the “antidote” to the school of self-help that says you can do whatever you put your mind to and more its Janus face, gazing backwards with serenity at all the hopes our society has raised and crushed. While the earliest antecedents of today’s self-help philosophy emphasized esoteric and “Eastern” wisdom, the doctrine that finally managed to create a full-fledged sub-industry in recent decades was Stoicism, a philosophical movement first popularized in ancient Greece in the third century B.C.E. that persisted throughout the first centuries of the Roman Empire. Ancient Stoics saw the universe as the embodiment of reason, or a fate-like “logos,” and devoted considerable effort to unraveling its principles. Fans today approach the school of thought primarily as “a framework for living our life in the best way possible,” as the popular Stoic expositor Massimo Pigliucci puts it; they are more interested in the pathway to happiness than in the various classes of logical propositions, the “connectives” that join them, and their assembly through syllogism into valid arguments. The cognitive practices pop-Stoicism recommends — “keeping in mind what is and what is not under our control, focusing our efforts on the former and not wasting them on the latter,” Piglicucci summarizes in How to Be a Stoic (2017) — act in accordance with the self-help philosophy genre’s fundamental dogma: we make ourselves miserable by worrying about stuff we can’t affect and that doesn’t really matter. Do what you believe is right, accept the outcome that fate has in store for you, and you can be happy — even in the direst circumstances. As the journalist Hettie O’Brien observed in a perceptive 2020 piece on the attractiveness of the Stoic outlook in the depths of the Covid pandemic, discussion of the ancient philosophy ticked up in the 1980s and spiked in the 1990s, a decade frequently but misleadingly recalled as an era of complacent optimism. The end of history was, as Francis Fukuyama himself predicted, “a very sad time.” The loss of the systemic alternative represented by the Soviet Union and the triumph of capitalist globalization made the forces determining social reality feel even more impersonal than they had before. If some Silicon Valley Prometheans, striding atop the globe during the dot-com boom, felt godlike in their ability to manipulate the world, many Americans in the Clinton era felt at the mercy of fate, and found solace in the great ancient philosophy of amor fati (a phrase popularized by Friedrich Nietzsche but widely claimed by contemporary Stoic enthusiasts). Ross Perot’s 1992 running mate, Navy Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale, wrote a pamphlet in 1993 explaining how he used the teachings of the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus to reconcile himself to the inevitability of suffering, sickness, and death during his yearslong internment in a North Vietnamese prison. “It is impossible in such a body as ours, that is, in this universe that envelops us,” Stockdale quotes Epictetus as teaching, “that such things should not happen, some to one man, some to another.” The prior year, Bill Clinton told Garry Wills that besides the Bible, the book that had most influenced him was the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and Stoic luminary. These days, if you were to query a politician or CEO at random, you’d have a decent shot at getting the same answer. Stoicism is inescapable, fueled in large part by the tireless propagandizing of Ryan Holiday, the former American Apparel marketing director. Holiday first dipped his toe into the Stoic business with his 2014 book The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph. In the aftermath of its success (especially in the world of professional sports), Holiday unleashed a torrent of follow-up books with titles similarly fond of predication: Ego Is the Enemy (2016), Stillness Is the Key (2019), and Discipline Is Destiny (2022), among others. He also launched a media empire that now includes a popular podcast and a YouTube channel under the “Daily Stoic” brand. Holiday has succeeded in making Stoicism so ubiquitous that purveyors of philosophical self-help today often seem required to take a position on it, either joining the bandwagon or attempting to carve out independent niches. Manson has complained on his blog about the perception that The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck “is merely regurgitating Stoicism with a couple cool stories and F-bombs thrown in to spice things up,” when in reality he considers “Buddhism and Existentialism” to be his most important influences. He has, however, appeared on Holiday’s Daily Stoic podcast, to discuss “What You Should Actually Give a Fuck About.” Critics have paid special attention to Holiday’s fans in Silicon Valley and in various online communities devoted to misogyny or racism or — usually — both. The classicist Donna Zuckerberg drew attention to this convergence in her 2018 book Not All Dead White Men, in which she argued that “the men of the manosphere have a deep fascination with Stoic philosophy.” Evidence of Stoicism’s popularity among right-wing extremists has only mounted since. The far-right influencer and alleged human trafficker Andrew Tate fashions himself a Stoic apostle; as he says in one video shared by the Instagram account @kngstoic, “you’re born to suffer, which ties back into my whole crypto project.” Holiday, for his part, has called Tate “repulsive” and suggested followers turn to Marcus Aurelius instead. Yet, as the classicist and Meditations translator Gregory Hays has noted, Stoicism thrived among elite Roman men, staunch believers in the necessity of social hierarchy, and when Holiday says things like “obeisance is the way forward,” it is not hard to imagine the dark places to which such maxims might lead. Even so, the contemporary deployment of Stoicism is usually more banal than sinister. “The best revenge is to become unlike the one who did the injury,” Denzel Washington’s Macrinus quotes from the Meditations in 2024’s Gladiator II, addressing the philosopher-emperor’s secret grandson. Like many of the pearls of wisdom from the ancient masters strewn throughout the pop-Stoic corpus, the remark is so platitudinous that its primary effect is neither to enlighten nor to corrupt, but simply to bore. Anything can seem profound, however, if it is attributed to a certified Great Philosopher. “Of things some are in our power, and others are not,” explains an Epictetus maxim that can be found in nearly every contemporary treatise on Stoicism (if in different translations). In The Little Book of Stoicism (2019), Jonas Salzgeber quotes the same Greek sage on the implication of this observation: we should “make the best use of what is in our power, and take the rest as it happens.” Ah, okay. Such maxims litter the texts of the Stoic revival. The Dutch Olympic speed skater Mark Tuitert begins each chapter of his handbook The Stoic Mindset: Living the Ten Principles of Stoicism with a quotation from a thinker of yore, which previews the gold-medal guidance about to be dispensed. “Do not seek to have events happen as you wish, but wish them to happen as they do happen, and all will be well with you,” Epictetus tells us before the chapter “Accept Your Fate (And Love It).” It is, I suppose, strictly speaking accurate that if the approximately 8.6 million people who die each year due to a lack of access to quality healthcare were to wish their fate, their desires would not be frustrated, but tautological truth does not make for philosophical profundity. There’s only so much of this you can take. The neo-Stoics, seemingly aware of that fact, have lately evinced some concern about readerly exhaustion. Donald J. Robertson, whose 2019 book How to Think Like a Roman Emperor explored the connections between Stoicism and the tenets of modern cognitive behavioral therapy, returned last year to hedge his bets with a new volume, How to Think Like Socrates. The book jacket christens the Athenian master “Godfather to the Stoics,” which is true insofar as Socrates could be considered the “godfather” to all subsequent Western philosophy. (One podcast on which Robertson appeared to promote the book also dubbed Plato’s teacher “The Godfather of Self-Help.”) If you enjoyed learning about the Stoics, why not go straight to the source? Robertson writes that CBT advocates celebrate Epictetus’s principle that “people are not upset by events but rather by their opinions about them.” But it turns out “the same idea can be found four centuries” earlier, “in the Socratic dialogues.” Robertson claims that by emphasizing the rational interrogation of our opinions about what befalls us, instead of providing a fix-all formula, his Socratic method actually offers “a critique of what self-help has become” — his own previous foray into the genre, presumably, excepted. No matter how many books the self-help philosophers pump out, no matter how many people subscribe to their podcasts or purchase flame-garnished medallions reading “Amor Fati” from the Daily Stoic store, the genre must always frame itself as subversive, dispensing the kind of challenging wisdom that only great souls can stomach. If a tome published this January entitled Beyond Stoicism is any indication, the publishing industry will prove perfectly capable of recycling ancient philosophy into contemporary advice manuals even if the Stoicism bubble does burst. Cowritten by Pigliucci, New York City Stoics founder Gregory Lopez, and “The Stoic Mom” blogger Meredith Alexander Kunz, Beyond Stoicism assembles a team of Stoic all-stars to reassure readers that even if they don’t deem Stoicism congenial, they can still find solace in a grab bag of other ancient philosophies, such as skepticism, Epicureanism, and Neoplatonism. Despite their doctrinal differences, the authors explain, these creeds were all “articulated to help people cope with a world in turmoil and over which they had little, if any, control” — “much like our own turbulent times.” At last we have managed to reify not merely social reality but the act of philosophizing itself, treating it, like our uncontrollable world, as a thing: a coping tool you might select, like an ice cream flavor, according to your personal taste. It would be unfair, however, to conflate the entire field of self-help philosophy with the vacuousness of pop-Stoicism. Since the momentous surge of consciousness-raising in the summer of 2020, which left a mark in publishing as in every other cultural industry, even some advocates of the Stoic revival have shown signs of metabolizing the political criticisms most commonly lobbed at it. In Reasons Not to Worry: How to Be Stoic in Chaotic Times (2022), the Australian writer Brigid Delaney confesses that, when she first began to read about the philosophy, she was concerned “that Stoicism’s emphasis on responsibility for one’s own character and acknowledgment of the ultimate smallness of our spheres of influence meant that social justice and agitation for societal change had no place for a practicing Stoic.” Delaney recounts how she eventually came to see Stoicism instead as an antidote to feelings of despair and frustration that, in her experience, made it more difficult to engage in political action. “You were more likely to be an effective agent of justice and change,” she writes, “if you channelled Stoic techniques, including controlling anger.” This is quite possibly true — activists who hulk out every time something doesn’t go their way are not long for the inevitably frustrating work of politics. Still, it is hard to imagine a successful organizer who never tries to change anything that initially seems outside their “sphere of influence.” Some of the most thoughtful books at the intersection of philosophy and self-help deliver advice that the modern Stoics would also affirm — accept the limits of your control, moderate your expectations, question your assumptions about what really matters — while appealing to a litany of self-consciously left-wing, even revolutionary thinkers. The MIT philosopher Kieran Setiya invokes the heterodox Marxism of the Frankfurt School itself in his book Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way (2022). Explaining the central insight of Adorno and his collaborators, Setiya writes that “ideology distorts our sense of what is humanly possible,” which he takes to mean that the attempt to “conceive an ideal world” to which we should aspire is a trap, drawing us ever further into ideology’s clutches. That is perhaps a reasonable gloss of the mercurial thinker in his most pessimistic moods, though not those in which he was able to insist that “if people want to persuade us that the conditional nature of man sets limits to utopia, this is simply untrue.” Drawing on his version of Adorno, Setiya argues that, instead of asking how we can build the perfect society, we ought to recognize that “there is value in a single step toward justice, and one step leads to another.” Setiya suggests that such an outlook might have been what Walter Benjamin had in mind in characterizing radical politics as pulling the “emergency brake” on the great train of history rather than riding it into a new era of progress. In a similar vein, Avram Alpert argues in The Good-Enough Life (2022) that unlearning our expectations for “greatness” can help us resist the temptation of political overcommitment, which produces burned-out organizers and egotistical leaders. For Alpert, this is one of the chief lessons of the Black Freedom Movement, especially the unsung and disproportionately female cadres who did the unglamorous work of drawing ordinary people into the everyday activity of organization-building, while charismatic leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. absorbed the media spotlight. Alpert also proposes that moderating our expectations for our own lives can help us overcome our socially ingrained deference to wealth and power. Manson’s injunction not to give a fuck is “pretty good advice,” in Alpert’s view, but he insists it must be accompanied by an appreciation for — and a commitment to change — the structural forces that “make following it so difficult.” Everyone deserves a minimal standard of material security precisely so they can “have more time and leisure to appreciate the ordinary, good-enough pleasures of existence” and relinquish the never-ending struggle for more. The book in this genre that most forthrightly confronts its political risks is a slim volume called Anxiety, published in 2024 by Samir Chopra. The philosopher starts off on familiar footing by walking readers through the ways Buddhism, psychoanalysis, and existentialism — not Stoicism, although he approvingly cites its influence on CBT — treat the titular concept. In each case, he explains how the intellectual tradition in question considers anxiety to be an inescapable dimension of the human experience. According to Chopra, psychoanalysis, for example, teaches that our prospects of living comfortably with anxiety depend on “our ability to not expect” a “security” the world cannot “provide for us” — easy to say if you always know where your next meal is coming from. As I was nearing the end of the book, however, Chopra startled me by presenting, with considerable fidelity and sympathy, the political critique that Herbert Marcuse leveled at this whole line of thinking. “It would suit those in power,” Chopra writes, explicitly ventriloquizing Marcuse, “to know that those they have made anxious and fearful through their political and social arrangements are content to wallow in their anxiety and not take any action to reform the material conditions that brought it about.” Chopra urges readers to reflect on the entwinement in all our lives of ineliminable existential anxiety and distress caused by the structure of the society we inhabit. Socially manufactured anxiety, he argues, can and should be redressed. “Combating and confronting anxiety requires acceptance, activism, and contemplation,” Chopra avers, “an acute blend of which might be the salutary recipe for living with it.” I think that’s right. The question, then, is what the proper blend looks like. I started reading all these books in early 2024, when I was wrapping up a book of my own that was in large part about the history of New Thought and the mainstream currents of American self-help it inspired. I thought it was interesting that a sudden rash of texts seemed to be positioning themselves, at least rhetorically, against positive thinking and our dominant ideology of success. I was also hoping, semi-secretly, that they’d save me. Every day I woke up in despair: at the never-ending extermination campaign in Gaza; at the slow-motion immolation of higher education, the industry to which I’d devoted my adult life; at the manifest absence of any force effectively resisting far-right authoritarianism in the United States and around the world. The books I read offered, if nothing else, proof that I was far from alone in feeling this way. Nearly all of them began with some recitation of the apparently insurmountable crises afflicting us today, even if their lists were not exactly the same as mine. And they reassured me that I didn’t need to feel the guilt that so often stalked my despair. “Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect,” I learned from the Gospels during my Catholic upbringing. Here, instead, I read that giving up on perfection was a political obligation in its own right — the lesson, properly understood, of many of the thinkers I admired most. At some point, however, I realized that I was spending more of my time thinking about my own despair than about the problems outside myself that were supposedly fueling it. And it seemed to me that a lot of people I knew were doing the same thing. So many conversations centered on how we were doing our best under difficult circumstances. Attendance at organizing meetings dwindled. My own attendance dwindled. Life is hard, we’d tell ourselves. Rest is resistance. While an exaggerated sense of our own importance is a recipe for both political and psychological disaster, it is also possible to overestimate our insignificance. Acceptance shades easily into excuse. With enough practice tolerating imperfection you can learn to forget what it is you’re failing to live up to. When those expectations include owning a vacation home or winning a Nobel Prize, letting go might be healthy — but doing so is tragic when they include stopping a genocide or ending homelessness. If that seems like an unreasonable standard to hold ourselves to, it is only because so few of us today have experienced the way that participating in the exercise of collective power can augment and extend our personal agency. When we are left to fend for ourselves, the conditions that shape our lives tend to feel alien and monolithic, forcing us to choose between the two polarities of self-help: the delusional optimism of positive thinking and the stoic acceptance taught by “philosophy.” But preemptive surrender is no sign of wisdom. Any reality made by human beings can be remade by them. The price of this power is mutual obligation: we can never let ourselves off the hook. The things we can accomplish together are, by definition, within our sphere of control, even if we have to act through structures that are bigger than any of us alone to achieve them. As grating as it may be to admit, it turns out that some of those hoary positive-thinking cliches the philosophers rail against are true, as long as we stick to the first-person plural. We are responsible for how our lives unfold; we can do things that seem impossible. But for those of us living in the heart of the American empire, with our duly elected president marching our society gleefully into hell, this news is far from reassuring. What we do with our lives does matter — as much as anything possibly could. That should keep us up at night.
