Every Thursday is Goat-Free Simplicity day at Living Behind the Curve.

New age self help gets it wrong. As an industry, it seems to be of the consistent opinion that if you start feeling better about yourself, good things will happen. This is is a very popular opinion, but it’s backwards.

I ran across a video on the net of the episode Oprah did about The Secret. I’ve heard quite a lot of people talking about it, mostly in very unflattering terms, so I checked it out. The Secret, it seems, is visualization. Fake it till you make it. Affirmations. If you can dream it, you can be it. It’s not a new concept, obviously — philosophical fraternities like Freemasons and Rosicrucians and western esoteric and occult orders like The Golden Dawn and Theosophy have been teaching this stuff in one way or another for hundreds of years, and if you believe their lineage claims, thousands of years. And yes, I’m coming out to say that any group or system or book that appeals to enlightenment junkies will essentially tell you the same thing. The details will be different, as will the symbolism and the method, but in the end it’s all very similar. If you can sufficiently convince yourself that a change in the universe will come to pass, you subconsciously begin behaving in a manner that will allow these changes to occur. The explanations on the mechanics vary widely, but that’s the gist of it.

There seems to be a very big difference in execution, though, between the “traditional” enlightenment systems and the new age self help version. The enlightenment folks will be very quick to remind you that a ritual or practice alone usually isn’t enough to manifest a change the you want, but that you need to prepare yourself beforehand and take action afterwards. If your change doesn’t manifest, you didn’t sufficiently prepare yourself, or you didn’t do the practice appropriately, or you didn’t apply enough follow up. If you succeed, congratulations, you are probably prepared for next time.

New age self help systems, I’ve noticed, don’t work this way. They seem to rely entirely on the method they favor, and don’t have a whole lot of preparation or follow through. This is certainly how The Secret is presented. You just do the visualization, and good things will happen. It gets more sinister then that, though. New age systems have a nasty, cult-like habit of saying, explicitly or implicitly, that any success you may have is due to their system, but any failure you may have is entirely your fault.

Nice, huh? They’re selling wishful thinking that nullifies your personal accomplishments and claims them as their own, while simultaneously negating their failures and heaping them on you.

Do I think they work? Maybe. Everyone needs a filter or a system by which they can view their lives and create some semblance of order or organization so problems can be dealt with and moving on can happen, if only occasionally. Traditionally, this has been a function of religion, with philosophy following a distant, if trendy, second. With our (American) culture growing more secular and cynical over time, those options become less viable, or perhaps plausible, to the individual. Unfortunately, the need is still there, and that vacuum has been filled to bursting by the new age self help industry. It may be quite helpful to some people, but I think that, on the whole, new age self help misses the boat, and here’s why.

Enormous amounts of energy are devoted to the concept of self-esteem. It’s become so prevalent in public education, for instance, that it’s become a joke. (Did you hear the one about the school that banned kids from playing tag because being “it” might harm their delicate self-esteem? Oh wait, that’s no joke.) Somewhere along the line, the idea spread that a person can only achieve if they feel good about themself first. This is bullshit. Self esteem that isn’t grounded in something is hopelessly fragile and must constantly be reinforced externally. Furthermore, it can build a rampaging sense of entitlement. This combination results in truly insufferable people. You know the type — full grown adults who are all smiles and sunshine until you tell them no, and they suddenly transform into a college-educated, tantrum-throwing toddler who missed their nap.

People like this base their self-esteem entirely on other people telling them that they have worth. As long as the world plays along, everything is hunky-dorey. If one of these deluded handjobs is suddenly confronted with opinion that they’re not the wonderful person they’ve been led to believe, however, they have no defense. That negative opinion floats in and nestles right next to all the positive stuff and holds just as much sway as anything else they’ve heard. Someone bearing negativity at you is a profound personal attack when you build your self image on nothing more substantive than “you’re special for just you being you”. (My sincerest apologies to Mr. Rogers.)

The real kind of self-esteem comes from accomplishing things. Doing stuff makes you feel good. This sort of self-esteem grows internally; you don’t need to rely on other people to tell you how awesome you are, because you can instantly recall that feat of awesomeness and tell yourself. It’s also a much more solid form of self-esteem — if you don’t rely on people to buoy your sense of awesome, you’ll be much less vulnerable to other people reminding you how much you suck.

So here’s the simplicity lesson for today: Just do it. (Sorry, too, Nike.) If you find yourself completely crippled by a soul-crushing depression, see a doctor. Otherwise, forget the new age self help garbage and just get started. Find your bills and start crunching numbers. Look at your pantry and plan tomorrow’s dinner. Sit down and write the first part of the first chapter of your novel. Find a box and declutter your kitchen table. Accomplish something. No matter how small it is, it will feel good, I promise, and it will be the first step to successfully completing great things. When you make good things happen, you’ll feel good about yourself.

Note: if this is all a little too… concrete for you to deal with, check out the writeup of The Secret that Trent did over at The Simple Dollar. He comes at it from an entirely different direction, and I can’t disagree with one word he says.