To begin, they cite self-help’s contribution to our culture of anxiety and overwork, which leads to what McGee calls the “belabored self” of modernity
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These books are not overtly marketed as self-help, but on the sly that is what they are: they are manuals on how to live your life, and how not
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In recent self-help works, modernism has become an unlikely mascot for the embrace of resilience in the place of perfectionism, realism rather than “cruel optimism.”
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that modernism is now experiencing a revival as a source of useful countercounsel in our advice-saturated culture
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It is because authors such as Proust, Kafka, Joyce, and Woolf refused to supply readers with the easy solutions the self-industry thought that they wanted (whether readers really wanted such facile answers is a question I address in later chapters)
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rich or winning friends but about how and why people read
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Self-help’s most valuable secrets are not about getting
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reading nonsequentially for personal use offers a window onto the way that reading and writing once “belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things