The Landfil of Self-help content

 

Everything I am about to pen down is a result of continuous frustration towards the YouTube algorithm and the plethora of self-help content widely available on the front page of the platform. What I have to say goes something like this.

The self-help category has always been an inflated one. Before the internet, the books were filled with titles alike to the ones I’ve pasted here as an example and even more. Let’s analyse what is wrong with each and every one of them.

• The 'anti-help' self-help

The anti-help self-help digs deep into the psychology of an ailing, fear-gripped individual who has already tried tons of self-help content and lost all hope and motivation from it. The self-help guru, here, preys on the vulnerable, dying, pot-bellied mental caricature of a person to rope it in one last time before leaving them dead. This is not to say all self-help content is bad. There is genuine help available out there for folks, but it just doesn’t look like this or is delivered in this manner. To quote an example, please follow or watch The School of Life’s old videos from more than 2-3 years ago.

• 'Power-through-it-all' self-help

While growing up and having a mature mentality does involve evolving into an individual one aspires and aims to be, the fact that it comes from a popular self-help author who has made millions off selling his book on doing the exact opposite, dissolves the point altogether.

• The 'perfect' self-help

This category of self-help content delivers perfectly to the naïve, open-minded, wide-eyed consumers who are entirely new to the area of self-help. While they blabber nothing new and their speech is almost entirely the same as all other self-help gurus, don’t mistake it for the good kind, since, as this example illustrates, no kind of asking for help will ever make someone not appear needy. Asking for help is needy. The problem is that it sends a message that there is something wrong with asking a friend or even a stranger for help, especially when asking for help automatically puts you in a submissive position to the helper. It is possible for a piece of content to become entirely worthless when it is titled like so.

• The 'brush-ti-under-the-carpet' self-help

I suppose my biggest problem with this self-help content is the AI thumbnail. The other, more obvious and serious problem is that it gives a dash of the serious and melancholy part of life, an ounce of sympathy to the consumer, where it is fully known that the only people clicking on it would be full of grief-stricken, unmotivated individuals who are trying their best through life.

 

 

I suppose my biggest problem with most self-help videos is that the makers never understand or seem to know about emotional connection, emotional intelligence, nor have gone into the depths of psychology and human understanding themselves. Furthermore, my algorithm hasn’t changed and still thinks I am an individual in my teenage years who needs self-help. I’ll end this text with a statement from George Carlin during one of his stand-ups:

“If you’re looking for self-help, why would you read a book by somebody else? That’s not self-help, that’s help!

 

There is no such thing as self-help. You did it yourself, you didn’t need help!”