fiction self-helps better
Every one that knows me also knows me as the bookworm. I used to hold that title with pride and still sort of do. It’s more like a quirky thing that makes me „a walking lexicon,“ as one friend endearingly put it. What has made me a walking lexicon, however, was not self-help books. It wasn’t even non-fiction, but literally fiction. Fiction allows us to explore a different reality built on different premises than ours, making the abstract „college stuff“ accessible to a teenager like I was.
I only began reading non-fiction in 2024 at age 18 or 19. Back then, I started with self-help books and stopped after reading just two. I certainly didn’t stop because I realized I was above that genre, but rather because I realized I could get so much more than what these books could offer me from fiction. A recent example that absolutely transformed me from the inside out and which I’m planning to reread so soon is The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin. I have been a convinced atheist since the age of 13 despite of, and probably because of, my environment being comprised of believers in a higher power more broadly and religionists more specifically. Additionally, I had been a convinced anarchist for a few years at that point and knew why I wasn’t simply a liberal, socialist, or similarly worshipping the boot. All this to say, I didn’t need a utopian novel to know that we could do better, and that the environment I knew was incredibly oppressive and irreformable.
Words could not even begin to describe what I felt reading it and how it changed my view on life in the months that followed me reading it. It pulled me out of a depressive episode, plagued by the crushing pointlessness of life in the face of climate collapse. It was neither a tutorial, a pamphlet for a dogma, nor a reproduction of our reality that works to legitimize it and paint dissatisfaction with it as a personal failure. What The Dispossessed afforded me was a critical discussion of a utopia, its fallacies, and its critical necessity for the continued existence of all life on Earth. In fact, LeGuin pioneered and popularized the critical utopia genre, so I wasn’t „fed“ a dreamy, perfect world, but rather what could go wrong, an approach to address staleness with a continuous revolution, and how obscene our world (which so closely resembles Urras) is in comparison to Anarres. It gave my vague dreams a needed grounding that gave them shape rather than nerfing them, something that no self-improvement/self-help book could’ve ever given me.
So with this post, I echo what Pirate and Ash have argued for in their own posts: Drop the self-help and read fiction, for fuck’s sake!