haaay.
I laughed, I cried, I laughed so hard that I cried...
We live in a self-help age. In fact, i dare you to find someone who hasn't snuck a peek at one of these lifestyle-bibles, whether it's Dale Carnegie, Dr. Phil, 7 Habits, or another self-improvement book. The search is futile because we live in a culture which bombards us with millions of different messages saying that we aren't good enough, productive enough, thin enough, having good enough (or enough good) time and the list goes on and on, and there are hundreds of books out there which proclaim to have the answers.
Who could resist? diba?
It's not that they ridicule those of us who had made honest attempts at improving our lives, but rather that it takes on the self-proclaimed Self-Help Guru's who have founded empires (and made millions) on the backs of such hapless souls. In fact, I would argue that in their own perverse way, the authors have offered their own improvement strategies to readers. Through their sometimes irreverent, sometimes more biting critiques of the Self-Help Empires, they remind us that oftentimes the most effective coping strategies are a healthy sense of humor and the insistance on not taking life so damn seriously.
We live in a self-help age. In fact, i dare you to find someone who hasn't snuck a peek at one of these lifestyle-bibles, whether it's Dale Carnegie, Dr. Phil, 7 Habits, or another self-improvement book. The search is futile because we live in a culture which bombards us with millions of different messages saying that we aren't good enough, productive enough, thin enough, having good enough (or enough good) time and the list goes on and on, and there are hundreds of books out there which proclaim to have the answers.
Who could resist? diba?
It's not that they ridicule those of us who had made honest attempts at improving our lives, but rather that it takes on the self-proclaimed Self-Help Guru's who have founded empires (and made millions) on the backs of such hapless souls. In fact, I would argue that in their own perverse way, the authors have offered their own improvement strategies to readers. Through their sometimes irreverent, sometimes more biting critiques of the Self-Help Empires, they remind us that oftentimes the most effective coping strategies are a healthy sense of humor and the insistance on not taking life so damn seriously.
Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time;
what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.
-Sydney J. Harris
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