The Problem With Self-Help

Hey there,

We’re living in a time where becoming a better human looks less like “go on a walk and talk about your feelings” and more like a CrossFit workout mixed with a cult retreat that takes AfterPay.

Everywhere you look, someone is cold-plunging in a horse trough.

Someone else is waking up at 4:30 am to journal about their core values in a $90 notebook.

And a 19-year-old on TikTok is selling a course called “How To Unlock Your Limitless Potential” for the low price of a used Honda Civic.

Self-help used to be simple…

Read a book. Take a walk. Call your mom. Maybe drink some water.

Now it’s a billion-dollar funnel where “optimizing your life” somehow requires:

17 supplements, a $400 smart water bottle, red-light therapy for body parts you probably shouldn’t be pointing lasers at, and a morning routine that takes so long you basically need a second morning routine just to recover from it.

Somewhere in all of this, we started believing that growth has to be complicated to be real.

That if it’s not extreme, expensive, intense, or aesthetically pleasing, it doesn’t count.
Improvement used to be something you did.

Now, it’s something you’re expected to buy.

The self-help industry didn’t become huge by accident.

It grew because the world got harder, and people got overwhelmed.

Salaries stagnated. Burnout skyrocketed. Workweeks stretched past 60 or 70 hours.

Debt piled up, and the cost of existing climbed like it had a personal vendetta.

People needed relief. They needed direction. They needed simplicity.

What the self-help industry gave them was everything but that.

What started as self-care became self-optimization.

What started as mindfulness became a performance.

What started as personal growth became a lifestyle, one you could conveniently buy in monthly installments.

And companies realized something crucial: simplicity doesn’t scale, complexity does.

Telling people “sleep more, eat whole foods, move your body, go to therapy” doesn’t build a nine-figure empire.

But selling them a 28-step morning routine with a 9-day detox on a 12-month subscription wrapped in a “new identity” does.

Somewhere inside all of that noise, I got lost too.

I bought the supplements, did the cold plunges, and followed the complicated routines.

One morning, staring at my counter, I realized I was taking 17 supplements.

Seventeen.

That’s not health, that’s becoming a human maraca.

My routines got so complicated that I was spending more time managing my improvement than actually improving anything.

It felt productive and looked impressive, but it wasn’t changing my life.

It was just filling it.

Because that’s what the self-help industrial complex does:

It keeps you busy, buying, and believing complexity is the same thing as growth.

When you peel back the marketing and the guru language, you find something nobody really talks about:

The industry sells you the idea that your problems are complicated because complicated problems require complicated solutions.

And complicated solutions can be monetized.

Meanwhile, real life isn’t that complex.

You’re tired and overwhelmed.

You’re lonely and disconnected.

You’re distracted and stressed.

You’re not recovering.

These aren’t identity crises. They’re human experiences.

But when every emotion becomes a problem that needs a system or a protocol or a course, you stop trusting your own ability to navigate your life.

You outsource your intuition.

You adopt someone else’s rules.

And you start optimizing instead of living.

We don’t fall for self-help complexity because we’re gullible.

We fall for it because it gives us dopamine.

Planning a transformation feels like transformation. Buying a system feels like progress.

But then it fades.

And now you’re left with a protocol that requires more time and energy than you have.

So you quit, and you blame yourself.

And the industry whispers, “It’s not you. You just need the next system.”

After taking a real break from social media, months of actual quiet, everything looked different for me.

The selling. The performances. The polished perfection.

Growth isn’t complicated, it’s inconvenient.

Eating mostly whole foods? Inconvenient.

Going to bed earlier? Inconvenient.

Exercising? Inconvenient.

Letting yourself rest? Extremely inconvenient.

None of this looks good on Instagram.

None of this requires a checkout page.

But it gives you something else: a life that actually starts improving.

You don’t escape the self-help industrial complex by adding more routines.

You escape it by subtracting everything that makes your life harder without making it better.

The first thing I did was stop outsourcing my thinking.

The second thing I did was focus on things that were so simple it felt almost insulting:

• Sleeping more.

• Eating real food.

• Lifting heavy things.

• Walking outside.

• Doing one hard thing a day.

• Letting myself be human.

And slowly, I started to feel like a person again.

I wasn’t trying to be optimized. I was just living.

And it felt good.

What the self-help world won’t tell you:

Your life changes more from deleting one thing than adding ten.

Delete the pressure. Delete the complexity.

Delete the belief that growth has to look impressive.

And improvement stops being a performance and becomes a quiet, consistent part of your life.

Simple. Repeatable. Unsexy. And real.

If you want to actually improve your life, you don’t need a $400 morning routine.

You need a quiet moment, a simple habit, and the guts to show up tomorrow.

– Scott

P.S. Get more stuff from me (so my wife doesn’t make me go back to a “real” job):

• My podcast

• YouTube

• Instagram

• TikTok