Just do it! And they will, if need be.

Faithful readers will recall that in SHAM, as well as in a prior post to this blog, I spoke of the original conception of "self-help," which had little to do with touchy-feely psychobabble and everything to do with purposeful action (primarily in the areas of common law and mental health). The New York Times evokes that earlier conception of self-help in the title of an article about the tenants of several thousand Manhattan high-rise apartments and condominiums, who are gearing up for one of the greater joys of urban living--a strike, in this case by building-services employees. The Times notes that New Yorkers (historically unflappable and renowned for their resolve in the face of even the most extreme crises and hardships) are also queueing up to volunteer for the sundry tasks normally handled by union workers. These include "doorman duty, garbage detail and elevator operation."

The Times piece goes on to note that "there has been no shortage of guidance on how to prepare, including booklets with titles like 'In the Event of a Strike'...and 'Residential Building Preparedness Information' from the Realty Advisory Board. Both are replete with sample job assignment charts, sample notices to residents and sample signs.... They also include advice on topping off oil tanks in advance, checking boilers and water tanks, printing identification cards for residents, setting up a committee to check on the frail and elderly, collecting mail from the post office if necessary, talking to service contractors in case of emergencies, arranging for package delivery and more."

You notice it doesn't say anything about "keeping a positive mental attitude" or "walking like a winner!" The information being disseminated is pointed and functional.

See, this is why I get so frustrated when I hear about things like Meeting Professional International's 2004 online survey of corporate meeting planners and HR types, which showed that 81 percent of them would rather focus their meetings around a rah-rah motivational speaker (or some comparably frilly celebrity*) than around someone who can come in and impart hands-on, tactical, actionable expertise. Yeah, I know--hands-on, tactical, actionable expertise is tedious, especially when your convention is being held in Maui and your mind is already out at poolside, waiting for the 2 p.m. luau. But wasn't the whole point here to engineer success? To help people actually do better at their jobs and at life? That's something that--I say again--isn't going to happen merely by your standing in front of the mirror each morning chanting "I am successful and well-liked, I am successful and well-liked, I am..." (Nor is it going to happen by having someone stand in front of you and chant it at you.) Success is not, per se, a state of mind. Despite what you may hear from the likes of Tony Robbins and Oprah, I'd argue that a positive state of mind is far more likely to be the result of success than the cause of it. Sure Donald Trump has a "positive outlook"--he's a freakin' billionaire! And even though he's had his ups and downs, those ups and downs have played out at a far more exalted level than 98 percent of the rest of us will ever experience. So if Trump "expects the best," he has damn good reason for it.

Success is a process, and process implies action. Even when it means something as simple and pedestrian as opening the front door for your neighbors or taking out their garbage in a pinch.

* "A high-powered business executive" did come in third in the MPI survey. But what meeting planners usually want from such a figure is not "tactical" information, but more of an abstract, ultra-high-level pep talk. Companies don't bring in Bill Gates to hear him prattle on about how he overcame code errors in prototypical versions of DOS. They want to hear him prattle on about the "glory" of building a gunslinging, billion-dollar enterprise, the "energy" of the Microsoft environment, etc. So really, for my money--or theirs--this too falls under the heading of a "motivational speaker."

Dream your life away...while you're awake!

Among the more eyebrow-raising subsidiary movements now afoot in SHAM--a parent movement that, you would've thought, already had raised eyebrows about as far as they could go--is the endeavor to teach you "how to get the most out of your dreams." Literally. I just watched a GMA piece titled "While You're Sleeping." ("Dream Your Troubles Away" was an alternate crawl that danced across the bottom of the screen during the segment.) The guest was one Deirdre Barrett, a Harvard psychologist whose research in dreams has led her to collaborate on several books on the topic, including, a few years back, one of her very own, The Committee of Sleep.Though Barrett, at least, treads a certain middle ground between academia and pop culture (like, say, a lightweight Marty Seligman), many others have forged into this area whole-hog, seriously proposing that the solutions to things that trouble us or inhibit us while we're awake may lay in things we conjure while we're asleep. Let me qualify that: I don't really know how "serious" they are in making that case; I suspect they're no more serious than the gurus elsewhere in self-help. But they do know a terrific marketing hook when they see one. Americans tend by nature to put a lot of stock in dreams (especially when you're speaking metaphorically: "Follow your dreams!" and such). And almost all of us are tempted to take the easy way out--"Hey, I know! I'll find the answer in my dreams!"--before we commit to rolling up our sleeves and doing the arduous work normally required to overcome major obstacles. I'm reminded of those fat-burning systems that supposedly "melt the pounds away while you sleep!" It was the same lure: No pain, plenty of gain.

Now, I'm not a psychologist (though I've been accused of playing one on TV and during other SHAM-related media appearances). But I'm not sure that surrendering the conscious to the unconscious is such a good idea. Aside from--again--the glaring lack of science behind this initiative, it does not strike me as prudent or healthy to urge people to act upon, or even give a great deal of credence to, impulses (let alone "life plans") that suggested themselves while their rational selves were basically shut off. I don't know about you, but if I implemented even half the stuff that came to me in my dreams... Well, we've leave that for another day, on another blog. Heck, sometimes it's bad enough what I think of while I'm awake.

He calls it "SHAM Scam"--and I couldn't agree more.

Quick plug time: Nice feature about SHAM/SHAM in May's Scientific American by the venerable and, among critical thinkers, iconic Michael Shermer, who edits Skeptic. Check it out.

Never mind how she died. Who was she when she lived?

JUST WATCHED an interesting 48 Hours Mystery on Marilyn Monroe and the still hotly debated circumstances surrounding her untimely death. Without question, Monroe's enduring hold on the popular imagination exceeds that of any figure* in American history--with only the possible exception of Elvis.

To me, the most intriguing aspect of this most enigmatic (and peculiarly American) icon was who Monroe was--or wasn't--and the steps she took to "fully actualize," if you will. Looking at Monroe's life in sober-minded fashion, through the clarifying lens of hindsight, one would almost conclude that she prized self-destruction as her foremost goal, or at least a core value. It seems reasonable to state that in the course of becoming "all she could be," Monroe in effect transformed herself into something she wasn't--or clearly shouldn't have been. The real Norma Jean Baker was, by all accounts, a sweet, soft, nurturing girl (albeit a confused one). And though she might never have rivaled the last of her three husbands, playwright Arthur Miller, for sheer intellectual firepower, she would nonetheless surprise people (which is to say, people who bought her screen self) with the acuity of her randomly authored observations on life and living. Too bad she was unable to apply that same vision to herself. (But then, isn't that ever the case?)

The point here is that Marilyn Monroe represents as good an object lesson as there is in how some of us (if not many of us) pursue images (or "story lines") rather than authentic, idiosyncratic, unique lives. We seize upon, and pattern ourselves after, boilerplate personas that approximate what we think we want, and we set about the fastidious process of arranging our lives to conform to that persona. As best we can, we squeeze ourselves into one of the dominant psycho-social archetypes, or maybe a blend of two: We become The Successful Corporate Guy/Gal, The Don Juan/Vamp, The Star Athlete, The Brain, whatever. (Have you noticed that all the sexpots from the 1950s and '60s looked, acted, and dressed the same? Sure, some were blondes, some were brunettes, a few were redheads...but other than that? They were interchangeable. They even spoke their lines the same, through the same absurdly puckered lips.) Which, again, returns me to my objections to ANYTHING that frames itself as "12 steps..." or "10 sure-fire ways...", etc. It's a contradiction in terms to distill human individuality down to a prototypical format that supposedly can be applied across the board. And if you do that, it is not "self-help." What it really is--as we've observed before in this blog--is self-abandonment: the abdication of self to a generic image. That generic image did not work for Monroe. Indeed, it was catastrophic for her.

Which is also why it's so important--essential--to realize that "self-actualization" should never be framed as necessarily implying the pursuit of wealth and/or fame. Or even status. It's altogether likely that a certain naturally lovely young woman named Norma Jean could've achieved her most successful self by staying down on the farm and milking cows, instead of running off to the Left Coast to become a private joke among her Hollywood peers and a disposable sex toy to an entire generation of men named Kennedy (as well as their relatives and hangers-on).

The truly tragic part is...we almost never know such things in advance.

* and one uses that word slyly, in Monroe's case.

----------------------------------------

AND, MOVING ONCE MORE FROM THE SUBLIME TO THE RIDICULOUS, A QUICK (SORRY RODG) LOVE SMART UPDATE: Someone please explain to me how a two-line, 5-star review from a nicknamed reader dubbing himself "synaptic mogul" gets to be a coveted Spotlight Review. "Mogul" writes of McGraw's book that "just to be on the safe side, I tried it out first on my wife. [?] I'll be darned if we didn't end up doing that hot monkey sex till almost dawn..." Oh please, gag me.

Who moved my job?

You'll remember me saying in SHAM--I'm oversimplifying here, but it's the gist of things--that the great sin of Victimization was that it gave people a mechanism for evading responsibility for all they did, thus creating a generation of blame-shifters, while the great sin of Empowerment was that it made people feel overly responsible for all that happened to them, thus setting them up for a terrible descent into confusion and self-loathing when things don't go as planned. Though we see plenty of evidence of the Victimization Effect throughout society, the kind of mass-market Empowerment of which I wrote is a relatively new phenomenon (circa 1990 or so?), thus my argument about its ills was--I admit--largely theoretical.

There's a book out now, The Disposable American by New York Times business journalist Louis Uchitelle, that chronicles the rise of an ironic and disturbing new sense of fatalism among American workers. (That is not Uchitelle's primary theme, I hasten to add. He's basically arguing for corporate America and, yes, the government,* to be less Darwinistic and play more of a role in looking after its workers. But it's an important subtext.) Based partly on critical thinking and partly on personal interviews with a diverse cast of employees, Uchitelle makes the case that books like Who Moved My Cheese?,** far from equipping people to control their own destinies in the workplace (which of course is the supposed intent of such books and the cheery message of their ad copy), have just made Americans feel excessively bad about themselves in a world of downsizing and inevitable layoffs. In reality, says Uchitelle, workers do not have the power over their environment or even their own careers that the self-help movement makes them think they have, no matter how many books they read or seminars they attend. We probably know this instinctively, but we've pushed such knowledge aside amid the relentless onslaught of "be all you can be!" sloganeering.

In current market conditions (those conditions being one of Uchitelle's pet peeves), a company that's going to have a layoff is going to have a layoff. And it's going to do it based on factors that have little or nothing to do with your positive mental attitude. And it's going to do it without necessarily consulting you in the first place. Even when it comes to individual staffing decisions--"Should we fire Smith or Jones?" or merely "Does Smith deserve to work here anymore?"--people simply don't have the personal input or influence that they'd like to believe. There may be factors in such a decision that neither Smith nor Jones ever thought about. There may be deep-seated personality aspects of Smith or Jones that just rub bosses or other employees the wrong way. For all we know, there may be things that Smith and Jones are doing and saying--based on having read a book like Who Moved My Cheese?--that are actually causing them to be poorly regarded at work. That's not something Uchitelle says explicitly, but is it really so far-fetched? Have you ever been around someone who's just finished a course on "assertiveness"? I have, and such people, despite their best intentions in taking the course, can be obnoxious bordering on make-you-want-to-stab-them. (The joke about assertiveness training, which was very hot back at the peak of codependency fever, is that "You can tell when somebody's taking an assertiveness course: They're always sending back the food at restaurants, no matter how well or poorly it's prepared...")

Anyway, I think it's interesting reading.

* Uchitelle does write for the Times, after all.
** The link will take you to a fascinating little rumination on Johnson's famous book and related matters.

Think outside the egg!

Did an interesting West Coast talk show last night, Opportunity Knocks with Tom Stern. It was my first SHAM-related appearance in a while, and though I felt a tad rusty--long-winded and elliptical when I should've been pithy and direct--evidently I gave a good enough account of myself and my gripe with self-help: At the end of it all, Stern, who's been doing Opportunity Knocks for a year now, told me I was the most articulate guest they'd had yet. I mention that less for the pure joy of tooting my horn than for what it says about the dearth of intelligent comment in American media, and how low the bar is set, overall.*

I wrote SHAM for two reasons. One, writing is how I make money--or how I try, in any case. But really, I wanted to spur debate on something that wasn't, at the time, generating much of it. Amid the unrelenting Dr. Phil-mania that had seized hold of America when I began the book, I wanted people to think a bit more about this flourishing $10 billion industry that has gone for so long unexamined, and the role it plays in our culture (a largely subversive one, I would argue). I wanted people to think about the concepts that we take as givens, i.e. assuming with little or no evidentiary back-up that they're good for us (e.g. self-esteem, confidence, personal empowerment and the like). No one was talking about these things before. Which is not so surprising, alas, because no one really examines the givens in any area of society anymore--a fact that was underscored, in another one of those small ways, by the response to my recent, contrarian piece on Barry Bonds. A fair number of readers who got in touch with me seemed to feel it was such a "revolutionary" take on the matter, when in truth it's something that should've occurred to just about any thinking sports fan on his own, were we not so intellectually constipated and set in our ways. I ask myself: How come they're not debating this perspective on the Bonds/steroids controversy on ESPN? How come nobody even seems to see the existence of an "other side"?

Thirty or so years after the emergence of the now-cliched exhortation to "think outside the box," we still spend so much time with our minds taped inside it.

The level of discourse is pretty bad out there, folks. And it isn't getting better. Not when a lightweight like Katie Couric ascends to the same evening news anchor desk once commanded by Walter Cronkite and, before him, Edward R. Murrow. Not when millions of women turn to the insipid Oprah Winfrey to set the conversational agenda in their daily lives. Not when an erstwhile bona fide journalist like Diane Sawyer spends a week touting her "exclusive!" PrimeTime interview with Tom Cruise, then devotes much of the show to going all jiggly over his relationship with another cutesy Katie (Holmes), at one point pretending to a nauseating degree of fascination as Tom rhapsodized about his love of the way Katie's little tongue pokes through her teeth when she smiles. (God help us, I hope Sawyer was pretending.) And not when a blustering, buffoonish bully like Sean Hannity can hail himself, and be hailed, as a paragon of clear thinking and sociopolitical insight. Understand, I'm not attacking conservatism per se; if you've read much of my other work, you'll know that when I venture into politics, I tend to err on the right. I'm simply asserting here that of all the demigods in right-wing radio, Hannity may be the least entitled to the platform he enjoys. And probably has the most damaging effect on actual, productive debate. (Yes, he's even worse than Michael Savage. Savage, for all his eponymous insensitivity and surface vitriol, is a pretty bright guy who asks good questions now and then.)

We need to do better than this. That's my Easter wish for us as a nation: a critical-thinking renewal along the lines of the spiritual renewal that this day is meant to symbolize.

* And let me be very clear, that is not intended as an implied swipe at Stern and his show. He seems like a literate guy, and his sense of humor is sharp and layered with meaning. I'm just saying, radio hosts have come to expect so little from guests nowadays that if you do their show and halfway make sense, without excessive drooling, they treat you as some kind of oracle.

The eyes lack it?

I know this seems off-topic--and no, I'm not trying to boost page hits by "going tabloid" with SHAMblog. But is it me, or is there something almost chillingly vacant in the eyes and overall expressions of the two (admittedly beautiful) ex-teachers who've been prosecuted in recent times for bedding underage students? Like there's no "there there"?* At your left is Pamela Rogers,** just re-arrested for pursuing further online contact with the 13-year-old she took up with during class--a violation of her conditions of probation. (Think: Mary Kay Letourneau.) At right is Debra Lafave, who beat the rap after admitting having sex with a 14-year-old, and blaming her actions on "mental illness." (I put the phrase in quotes not because I'm making fun of her, but because it's what she literally said, that's all.)

I know a woman who's fond of saying that "the eyes are the window to the soul." Which should mean they're also the window to the self. (See? It's a stretch, but I made the connection.) What do you folks think? To what degree can you tell who people really are by looking in--through?--their eyes?

* As Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland, where she grew up. Many folks seem to think the putdown was originally spoken in reference to L.A., which is incorrect, of course, though that association may be equally valid.
** and it just occurred to me... I know that's probably a concept shot--but just how tall is Pamela Rogers, anyway??

"Take me out, coach. I'm ready to play..."*

Facing deadline pressure aplenty--some of you have commented on the relative dearth of fresh material of late--I thought I'd take the opportunity to give about half of this post over to another "guest column" by SHAMblog regular Cal, who has about as keen an eye for bright, shining new examples of SHAMistry as any of us.

Cal writes, now, with regard to another article about life coaches in the New York Times of April 11. This one's on "retirement coaching," a supposed specialty for which, Times business writer John Leland notes, "there are no accreditation requirements...and no one tracks how many have hung up shingles in recent years." Here, as we've seen with so many other SHAM sub-specialties, consumers who avail themselves of the programs and methods are treated to still more general burble that's carefully package as individualized, personally relevant advice. Leland draws the reader in by recounting his own experiences with the $39.95 tutorial progam for an online retirement-coaching service, My Next Phase; he describes it as "the lastest entry in a suddenly teeming field of books, coaches, life planners, motivators, counselors and spritual guides that promise to help retirees and near-retirees customize and accessorize their coming years the way Martha Stewart helped them master the home." Overall, Leland explains the trend thusly: "The unexamined life, Socrates said, is not worth living, but an unexamined retirement is a marketing opportunity."

Because we're not constrained by the diplomatic mindset that governs editorial policy at the Times, we'll say it this way: Retirement coaching is the latest wrinkle in the ongoing assault on the Baby Boom generation (and its money) by the vast and predatory marketing juggernaut that has made an industry out of staying in step with Boomers at each stage of their sybaritic lives. No doubt the next phase of this coaching outreach will be "Getting the Most out of Death."

With that as preamble, we'll let Cal take it from here. He was intrigued by Leland's piece, he writes, because "both my parents are nearing retirement and I know that their retirement plan is going to be different than many." He adds, "working in the financial world I find it absurd to pigeonhole a generation of Baby Boomers into a computer program about the next phase of their life."

Cal continues, "Why this concept doesn’t work, like all the other concepts of SHAM, is that it relies on a program designed for the masses to help the masses, [which is] especially true in this case because it revolves around a computer program, not a specific coach. The computer program is the coach." Though to Cal's read, Leland is somewhat ambivalent about the value of retirement coaching, Cal feels that Leland "leans more towards" the idea that it's a bit of a boondoggle: "He writes that Baby Boomers who are transitioning closer to retirement (or those that may already be there) approach it as 'an undefined regimen that involves soul searching, emotional self-examination and motivational counseling.' All SHAMbloggers can pick out the words that make this concept laughable: soul searching, emotional self-examination and motivational counseling.... He quotes a director of the National Academy on an Aging Society who states that those transitioning into retirement are thinking, 'How am I going to move from material things to meaning? They're the first ones going into this new territory, so you can see they they're reaching out to mentors.' " But, asks Cal, "Who qualifies the mentors or coaches?"

We already know the answer to that one: Nobody does.

Cal notes that he could "could go on and on about this article and outline the reasons why these coaches" can't deliver on their promises, but to sum it all up, "I can tell you that I wouldn't trust my retirement with a 'coach' that is not certified in any way to plan my life savings. The answers these retirees are looking for surely will not be found through soul searching, emotional self-examination and motivational counseling."

Amen, Cal. Couldn't have said it better myself.

* apologies to songwriter Randy Newman.

'I could use a new adrenal cortex, doc. And while you're in there...'

I've written a lot of articles in my life. If you tote up everything--full-length features, essays, first-person memoirs, short "FOB"* takes, and you give me credit for reprints as well as originals--I'd have to guess I'm closing in on 1000 published pieces by this juncture. And among all that work, compiled over a span of some 24 years, nothing has ever caught on like my current opinion piece about Barry Bonds and steroids.

Written originally for the Los Angeles Times, it has now been reprinted in 10 newspapers (not all of which are Google-ized, for some reason), including the Chicago Sun-Times, the San Jose Mercury-News and, today, the Philadelphia Inquirer--all ranking dailies in their own right. In one sense, of course, the piece is topical/timely, given the new baseball season, the furor over "what to do about Barry," and baseball's just-announced investigation of steroid abuse, led by former Sen. George Mitchell. But I think the essay's appeal goes deeper than that. I think the Bonds hook is really just the sizzle here--and that the steak is the questions the piece (implicitly) puts forward about the nature of being: Again, what makes you who and what you are? And how much can you change what you are--especially by "artificial" means--and still be you? And, the biggest question, Is there anything you can do to yourself that makes you manifestly not-you?

Those, anyway, are the sorts of questions that have tended to come up, at least from more enlightened hosts or callers, during the handful of radio appearances to which the Bonds essay has led. They're serious and pertinent questions, too--issues we're going to have to grapple with at some point, because technology's onward march is not about to stop. Today, "surgical enhancement" conjures images of facelifts and boob jobs, relatively superficial stuff. Tomorrow? It could mean (and almost surely will mean) the rewiring of internal circuitry and replacement of whole sets of critical organs and other "spare parts." It could mean implanting printed circuits into people's brains to remediate their weak points and/or further augment areas in which they already excel. (What happens on American Idol once you can buy a voice? What happens to med-school entrance requirements once you can buy intelligence?) The days of relying on syringes and capsules for a competitive advantage (in sports or in life) will seem oh-so-quaint.

Makes you wonder, what will they throw at ballplayers then? Computer chips? Scalpels?

* Industry shorthand for "front of the book"--those short pieces in the front of a given magazine that usually tell you things like how to cook a better hamburger, apply make-up that will stay on even in the pool, or keep your kids from meeting registered sex offenders over the internet.

The last post about the ultimate book on the final topic you'll ever need to read...before you read the next one.

You'd think there'd be room in any given realm for just one book called "The Last [fill in the blank] You'll Ever Need," but indeed, books thusly titled (or subtitled) have become something of a sub-industry of their own within the self-help movement*. Though many critics and armchair reviewers took Paul Pearsall's 2005 effort, The Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need: Repress Your Anger, Think Negatively, Be a Good Blamer, and Throttle Your Inner Child, at face value, it was actually just the latest of at least five books bearing titles along those lines.

So far as I can determine, the trend dates all the way back to 1983, when no less than three such books found print. Amid the renewing promise of January 1 of that year came Jerome Lund's oddly titled The Last Self-Help Book Before Getting Results (why before? Didn't he plan to deliver the results?); Lund** more recently has found fame and fortune with his collaboration on Aramaic Documents from Egypt: A Key-Word-In-Context Concordance. In June 1983 Walker Percy published Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, a more inquisitive and literary exploration of the realm, or about what you'd expect from Farrar Straus & Giroux's foray into self-help. (If FS&G could've persuaded Saul Bellow to write on self-help, I'm sure they would have.) September saw the release of So...Why Aren't You Perfect Yet for $4.95?: The Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need, by Michael Popkin, who later went on to build a successful franchise in self-help's parenting wing (e.g. Active Parenting: Teaching Cooperation, Courage, and Responsibility). The market duly saturated, contrarian self-help authors took a nearly two-decade sabbatical, which ended with the November 2001 publication of Five Simple Steps to Emotional Healing: The Last Self-Help Book You Will Ever Need, by Gloria Arenson. Arenson's book still holds its own on Amazon, as will be true of any book whose title contains the words simple, steps, emotional, and healing, in just about any order or combination.

Those at SHAM's core generally accuse the authors who write these books of being sly and disingenuous--of distancing themselves from the genre (and disparaging self-help's utility and honesty) as a devious way of sneaking in the back door and stealing themselves a nice slice of the same pie. It's an accusation that for some inexplicable reason has also been lodged now and then against me and SHAM, most publicly by Mark Victor Hansen during our Anderson Cooper mini-debate. This makes no sense at all. Now, did I want my book to sell? Duh. Of course I did. (How many authors do you know who write books that they hope will fail?) But nowhere in SHAM do I attempt to establish myself as a guru in my own right. In fact, we purposely omitted the final chapter contained in the original proposal--"Where to Find Real Help If You Need It"--lest we open ourselves to that very charge: that my expose was, in essence, a self-help book in disguise. No way. The book was an exercise in journalism**, and I defy anyone to prove differently.

I do, however, think there's some merit to those accusations when they're aimed at this mini-proliferation of "last" books. Whether the tone is tongue-in-cheek (Popkin), searching and cerebral (Percy), earnest (Arenson), or a hybrid of all of the above (Pearsall), all of these books try to straddle the fence between critique and program. That's because all of these authors perceived the phenomenon that was unfolding everywhere around them, compared their own bank statements with the advances being paid out to SHAMland's established or emergent gurus, and made a sensible, pragmatic calculation: They wanted in. They just wanted to be able to respect themselves in the morning.

Can they do that? You be the judge. Pick up a few of these books--I recommend Percy's and Pearsall's as the best of the bunch--and let me and/or your fellow SHAMbloggers know what you think.

Oh, and it bears noting that all of these authors were wrong: America clearly needed many, many more self-help books. And isn't done yet. Not by a long shot.

* or carefully positioned on its periphery.
** It is possible that this author is not the same Jerome Lund--he's listed in the second case as Jerome A. Lund--and if that's the case, I apologize to Jerome A., who I'm sure would rather be known for his knowledge of Aramaic languages than for a poorly titled self-help book.
*** and, yes, I allowed myself the author's prerogative of making editorial comment on what that journalistic effort had uncovered.

It just...says it (or sings it) all.

I tell you, folks, every now and then in this life you stumble upon something that is just so...so uplifting, so fundamentally life-altering, that you feel you simply must share it with the rest of humanity; indeed, it is your duty to the species. And so, in my continuing effort to equip you, the SHAMblog faithful, with all the tools you could ever need to become happy and fully actualized, I hereby give you the "Self-Growth.com Theme Song" (sung by the rather chillingly named Michele Blood), which you can download for your very own at the popular self-help portal by the same name.

Now please listen as many times as you can stand it*, try to feel duly enriched, and then, as Dr. Laura used to say, "Go take on the day...."

* i.e. probably once, if that much.

MindFindFlyingBlind.

"IN 1995, MATT FRASSICA, tired of singles bars and set-ups by friends, tried his hand at dating online. There he met, and later married, a woman who also liked long walks in the rain and homemade lasagna. They were even featured in People magazine as a prototype of successful cyber-romance. Then the fairy tale ended. Mr. Frassica said he realized he was gay, and..."

Thus opens a lively and provocative story in today's Wall Street Journal, cleverly titled "Mismatched.com," which introduces readers to the Clear Next Phase of the cyber-romance movement. If Phase 1 was casual dating, and Phase 2 was the emphasis on finding and marrying a Life Partner, we now appear to be careening into Phase 3: DIVORCE. Given that online dating took off in the waning years of the 1990s, and that a first marriage that's doomed to fall apart typically does so in about eight years, "statistics would suggest that the first wave of divorces among online daters is just now beginning," says the Journal. Writer Ellen Gamerman's evidence is largely circumstantial, but she serves up a fair amount of it, combining pungent anecdotes (like that of newly gay Matt Frassica) with expert comment in building her case.

While there is no compelling reason to believe--just yet--that online marriages are inherently more fragile than marriages that evolved in standard fashion, Gamerman notes, "Marriage counselors and divorce attorneys say they are often struck by how much of what brings people together online ultimately contributes to the undoing of the relationship."

I did not deal at any length with online dating sites, per se, in SHAM. But what unites such sites with the self-help movement's relationship wing is the (unproven and, in my opinion, almost surely false) premise that long-term compatibility can be distilled to a series of bullet points or a 25-"dimension" (or 50-dimension, or even 1000-dimension) personality profile. And in any case, compatibility does not equal companionability. And neither necessarily equals happiness. Remember the old saying, "opposites attract"? I grant you, the principle has never been scientifically verified (except in magnets), but we all know couples who have almost nothing in common except their profound love and attraction for one another. And if you think about it, there's even a crazy kind of logic to it: Isn't it possible, just possible, that the friction of incompatibility* is what creates the electrically charged atmosphere that keeps a relationship fresh over the long, increasingly mundane haul? Isn't it possible that compatibility on virtually all points spells B-O-R-I-N-G?

The absurdity of today's fixation on planting the seeds of a relationship in a huge plot of common ground seems clear in a 2004 Match.com study quoted in the Journal. The popular hook-up site tells us that "11% of its married couples were 'in love prior to ever meeting face-to-face.' " I ask you--based on everything you know about living and loving--does that sound plausible? Does it even make sense? Wouldn't you think it's preferable to fall in love with people you have actually met?

I'm going to close with one of my rare verbatim quotes from SHAM, this time pp. 182-3, not because I think my words were so brilliant but because I'm pressed for time and the passage says what I want to say about as succinctly as I can say it: "[Today's] shop-manual approach to dating precludes that glorious alchemy between one singular man and one singular woman that produces an enduring, highly individualized coupleness.... The simple truth is that no one can orchestrate real love or even honest chemistry. No one can explain why people feel love for those they feel it for. The only certainty is that men and women are going to be drawn to the people they're drawn to...." That's not a process that can truly, naturally unfold in the disembodied world of cyberspace.

P.S. LOVE SMART UPDATE, Afternoon, April 2. I know that at least one of the faithful is bound to chastise me for returning to this well--he theorizes that most of you have had quite enough of Dr. Phil, thank you, at least from this blog. But since we're talking about the subject of love, marriage, and related advice, I thought it might be apropos to mention the highly negative, highly literate review of Love Smart--by "Raj"--that now occupies the No. 1 slot among reader reviews. (Again I feel compelled to add that no, "Raj" is not me writing under a pseudonym.) I also thought it might be interesting to observe the review's fate over the next few days. It has already accumulated 11 negative (i.e. "not helpful") votes, an astonishing tally for any review that's been up for just one day and that wasn't written by "Dr. Marilyn Barry"--except of course that "her" feedback score is always overwhelmingly positive.

* and you know what I mean here. We're not talking about total, machete-wielding incompatibility, but just a certain energizing static.