Page 121 - Men’s Health - USA (December 2019)

SOME OTHER
toward self-improvement. These action
items are often arbitrary and unscientifi c,
but they’re very seductive. “My publisher
really wanted me to put those things in
there, and I told him, ‘Absolutely not. They
don’t work. I don’t want to write them,’ ”
Manson says. “Some conventional self-
help people read the book and were like,
‘There’s nothing actionable in here, so this
is a waste of time.’ ”
Instead of giving readers a step-by-
A
step road map to a perfect life, he rec-
ommends that they learn how to accept
life’s imperfections. If other self-help
books are crash diets, then Manson is the
tough-love nutritionist, sitting us down
and telling us to stop eating Pop-Tarts. “I
say, ‘Thirty days is not enough. You have
to manage your relationship with the
Pop-Tart for the rest of your life.’ ”
It is an unsexy philosophy, delivered by
a man whose professional qualifi cations
amount to “I’ve had a blog for a while.”
“People are like, ‘Why should I listen to
you?’ ” he says. “I’m like, ‘I don’t know.
Don’t.’ I’m not going to stand up here and
say that I’ve got it all fi gured out—here
are my 18 degrees. I just started writing
about my problems and my issues and how
I dealt with them. And people liked it and
kept asking me to write more.”
But Manson feels no less qualifi ed
to proselytize than any other industry
kingpin is. Rather, he views his ability to
recognize when he’s out of his depth as a
strength. He’s the fun aunt of life advice.
Courtesy author (Wiking, Helmstetter). Jeff Watts (Kendi). Getty Images (Van Ness). The Gottman Institute (Gottman).
He’s also a great peacetime babysitter, up
for changing the occasional diaper, but
when things get really shitty, he hands us
off to the people who know best.
He tells me that a self-help writer can
either choose to be honest about what
he doesn’t know or delude himself into
thinking that he can solve everyone’s
problems. “I stay in the shallow end of
the pain pool,” he says. “I’ve written
on the site that I specialize in ‘mild life
problems.’ Like if you’ve had a breakup, a
major career decision, or a midlife crisis,
I’m your guy. I get questions from people
who are schizophrenic or bipolar and I’m
like, ‘Hey, man, I’m not qualifi ed for this.’
And I give them resources, links, and
phone numbers for people who are.”
I ask Manson why his strategy of setting
himself up as the counterpoint to bullshit
might make his work particularly appeal-
ing to men. He speculates that the Inter-
net has made people more skeptical—even
a little bit paranoid. “Because we are
exposed to so much information, and we
are aware of the ugly underside of a lot of
things. When you’re able to stand up and
be like, ‘This group is bullshit, and here’s
why,’ that generates a lot of attention,”
he says. Men, he suggests, have always
had the desire to improve themselves and
their relationships, but they sensed the
self-help industry’s phoniness. “It just
felt bullshitty to them. My criticisms, I
think, just put words to what a lot of them
felt. I hear that all the time, too, actually:
‘I never liked self-help stuff , and I didn’t
know why until I read your book.’ ”
AFTER The Subtle Art took off , Manson
had a brief existential crisis. He wanted
to keep writing books, but he knew any
would be unlikely to outsell that one.
He was grappling with a quandary that
faces a disrupter of any major industry,
from mattresses to happiness: Once
you’ve popped the bubble, how do you
keep growing?
“I think my whole career has been me
kind of ascending within a genre or a com-
munity and then stepping out of it, kind of
like moving on to something broader,” he
says. “The same way, when I was 27 or 28,
that I said, ‘I don’t want to be writing about
dating stuff the rest of my life,’ I don’t want
to be writing about self-help stuff the rest
of my life. I feel like there’s a fi nite amount
of things to say, and then once I say them, I
just want to move on.”
There are writers in every genre, but
particularly in self-help, who spend
their entire careers rehashing the same
material. Indeed, an occasional critique
of The Subtle Art, which seems to rankle
Manson, is that when you peel away his
no-nonsense tone and his analysis of the
industry, he isn’t really saying anything
new. I ask him whether he felt he was
repeating his ideas while writing Every-
thing Is F*cked. He concedes that some of
the topics in the books are parallel but says
that Everything Is F*cked is the calculus to
The Subtle Art’s algebra: a more complex,
nuanced version of the fi rst book’s simpler
principles. Yet he is aware that there’s only
so much you can say about self-improve-
ment, and only so many diff erent ways to
say it, before you start repeating yourself.
Not that writing the same book over and
over again is always bad, Manson adds,
ever hedging a criticism. Some people
enjoy knowing that they’re going to feel
SELF-HELPERS YOU
SHOULD GIVE
A F*CK ABOUT
Kristen Meinzer, cohost of the pod-
cast “By the Book,” distinguishes the
new men in the betterment space.
1. MEIK WIKING
Longing for a bit more joy and
comfort in your life? There’s no
better source than the man who
runs the Happiness Research
Institute in Denmark and made hygge a house-
hold word. Check out The Little Book of Hygge.
2. SHAD HELMSTETTER, PH.D.
Helmstetter is the dad voice
we all deserve to hear in our
heads. His message: Be a little
kinder to yourself. He lays out
his methods in his primer, What to Say When
You Talk to Your Self.
3. IBRAM X. KENDI
Want to face (and fight) your
own biases, better understand
race in America, and contribute
to making our society a more
Antiracist, which is part memoir, part guide.
4. JONATHAN VAN NESS
Van Ness’s message isn’t about
telling people they’re flawed but
rather embracing and loving
who they are. Catch him on
Queer Eye, on his podcast, or in his new book,
Over the Top: A Raw Journey to Self Love.
5. JOHN GOTTMAN, PH.D.
just a few minutes. Learn how
and apply his wisdom for yourself with The
Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.
centered and motivated for the fi ve hours
it takes to read a book.
“I don’t think it would’ve lasted this
long or been this big if there wasn’t some
good that came from it,” he says of the
industry. “I think the question is just:
What is it? And my argument is that most
self-help material is really just designed
to make you feel good.”
While Manson’s books may not fl uff
readers up with promises of the bounty of
the Universe, like The Secret, or arm us
with easy tricks for getting what we want,
like The Game, they are designed to make
us feel good: Nothing makes us feel better
than being wise to a scam.
LAUREN LARSON lives in Brooklyn and is a
Men’s Health contributing editor.
MEN’S HEALTH / December 2019 123