The unintended narcissism of personal epiphanies.
No tech articles this week, as I’m just back from holiday. Normal service will be resumed next week.
Do you still have “that book”? You know, the one that you read and you found that it so closely mirrored your experience, or gave answers to questions you thought were unanswerable, to the extent that you thought, “Wow, that’s amazing! Everyone needs to read this!”
I know I do. As I worked through my first mid-life crisis, I was recommended M. Scott Peck’s ‘The Road Less Travelled’. “Life is hard,” it started, and I was hooked. The discovery that the author was a serial philanderer and alcoholic did little to dampen my ardour; indeed, it only increased as I realised he was human too.
It was only decades later that I realised many of the ‘Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff’, ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul’, ‘Men Are From Mars’ and indeed, the current generation of similar books (quick tip: to get published, put a swear word in the title) share a thread: a personal analysis of individual experience.
They are also, frequently, written by people of a certain age. My suspicion has long been that they arise from the ashes of personal challenge — epiphany following hopelessness, like sunrise follows dark. At such moments, the human tendency is (in my experience) to become somewhat evangelical: the world must know. In book form.
The reader’s realisation that the author has slain similar dragons creates its own epiphany, together with a reinforcing feedback loop: I must be right, thinks the author, as, well, look at all the people who have said so! Cue publisher asking for follow-up and a guaranteed future on the self-help speaker circuit.
Strangely, none of this ever gets talked about — we prefer our gurus to appear fully formed, no doubt from some guru school, where they have spent decades of apprenticeship before emerging into the light. And similarly, their words are presented as fact: no “What I have found,” nor, “This won’t be true for everyone, but,” nor, “In my opinion,” to precede sentences.
Which makes sense: if they were just the words of the struggling person in the street who had learned a few things, they wouldn’t be that interesting, would they? None of this is a bad thing in itself, as it results in old wisdoms being re-iterated by, and interpreted for each generation.
However, our desire to keep things simple affects our ability to discern and, frankly, makes us lazy. If we are presented with three reasons why something may be so, why look for a fourth? And meanwhile of course, the views as originally expressed become entrenched: it is hard for a guru to change his or her mind (ask Chris Anderson).
We can all have opinions and experiences, hard data and soft anecdotes. But the moment that we disconnect our views from the information that supports them, we risk creating a new kind of truth — one dependent on esteem rather than fact. Even in this unprecedented age, there is nothing new under the sun.
All the best, Jon
P.S. Incidentally, the book I picked up on holiday was Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. I haven’t finished it yet, but I can confirm it fits into the category of being a Very Important Book. And it does buck the trend, as will many others.