For Millennials, Self-Help is More About ‘We’ Than ‘Me’

Contemporary books defined as “self-help” have mostly served the Boomer generation.

Millennials, and the Generation Z cohort that follows close behind, are realizing that these traditional self-help narratives—ones that focus on the development of the self for the benefit of one’s self alone—aren’t going to work for them. (Of course, whether those narratives ever worked, for anyone, is somewhat up for debate.) Instead, recent book releases are reflecting a cultural longing for collectivism; a desire for meaning that manifests in communal virtue and societal improvement.

In other words, millennials aren’t looking for lifehacks to win friends and influence people; they are looking for workable systems that will sanction and codify their behaviors. Luckily for them, philosophers have been working on doing just that for the past several thousand years.

Enter Democritus, Epictetus, Epicurus, and Cicero, the new patron saints of a decidedly nonreligious, yet still morally fixated, generation. In a crowded mega-genre worth $800 million annually, the Greeks’ love of knowledge is turning into a publishing gold mine. Out this month are two more books to add to the philosophy/self-help shelf: Catherine Wilson’s How to Be an Epicurean: The Ancient Art of Living Well and William B. Irvine’s The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher’s Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient. These books speak to our hunger for a common moral baseline that will define our virtue, something solid to hold on to in the face of collapsing economies, a climate crisis, and a world whose suffering feels too much to bear. This longing resonates especially at times like ours when the possibility of certainty (what can we really know?) seems, well, uncertain.

Stoicism and Epicurean philosophy have been ideological rivals for thousands of years, but they are not wholly opposites. Stoicism is rigid, persistent, and mostly uncomplicated, while Epicurean thought is plush, receptive, and nuanced. But both branches of thinking concern themselves with ways to mitigate pain and disappointment. This happens to be especially important in an aggressively capitalistic society where we have been conditioned from birth to want beyond our means. For the Stoics, the solution to wanting is self-denial, or more precisely, a denial that we have desire. For Epicureans, particularly the contemporary Epicurean viewpoint, the answer to dissatisfaction brought on by excessive desire is to contain that desire to what we can realistically attain.

The primary source material for the Epicurean philosophy is Lucretius’s poem, “On the Nature of Things.” It’s a long treatise, based on the writings of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, and it covers everything from the soul/body connection to the motivations that bring humans constantly into war. The text details the rise and fall of Greek and Roman societies with a sequence that the modern reader may find eerily familiar, writing:

As we now know, ancient artisanship produced objects of utility and beauty for trade and domestic use, but only by making use of slave labor in huge urban workshops. The concentration of settled populations fostered learning in mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, and other sciences, as well as the great feats of ancient engineering. It also produced a parasitic upper class that lived from the hard labor of others, enjoying their rents, tax revenues and inheritances, but at the same time gnawed with anxiety over managing and retaining their wealth.

For a culture that trades in passing the same bucket of guilt-laced anxiety back and forth, for ever and ever, with no escape in sight, it’s easy to cosign this retelling of how a bourgeois class was born. And Wilson predicts, correctly, that Lucretius’ synthesis of his own cultural history is easy to resonate with. As far as what’s next, she argues that to move forward into a better life, we have to stop being gluttons for punishment for a past we can’t change. To the Epicurean, as Wilson explains, “You don’t deserve punishment, and you don’t deserve to treat yourself either. It isn’t a question of deserving at all.” In other words, we should put our focus on what brings us joy and comfort; when we feel guilt over our focus on these pleasures, it would not be wrong to mitigate or dismiss that guilt.

“Choice and avoidance” is the key strategy to optimizing the pleasure we feel in this lifetime (for the traditional Epicurean, there is no afterlife). And Wilson is careful to draw a distinction between gravitating toward pleasure and indulging in greed; from her reading of Lucretius, the Epicurean should exercise their free will only to the extent that no one else is harmed. There’s even a section at the end of How to Be Epicurean on how the philosophy can inform social justice work.

As for power, Wilson says,“the Epicurean invites us to distinguish between naked authority – the raw exercise of power: the power to make laws, to establish rules for institutions, to inflict suffering on others, or to reward them with what they value – and legitimate authority, arising out of human agreement.” This appeal comes to the Epicurean tradition by echoing the rhythms of nature, whose inhabitants tend to practice an instinctual democratic socialism. These Epicurean ideals feel especially appealing at a moment when melting glaciers and a burning Amazon rainforest have become an everyday reality.

To the Stoic, painful circumstance is not the problem, but the sensation of pain is one to conquer and to dismiss. The philosophy may appear overly simplistic, but Irvine explains that it can apply in a variety of situations. In the book, he tells the story of people he deems admirable, many of whom did not declare themselves as practicing Stoicism but who he deems “congenital Stoics.” In the face of “setbacks,” detailed by Irvine as anything from a flight delay to physical assault, he recommends exercises that engage the mind elsewhere such as travel, learning an instrument, or taking lessons in a foreign language in order to experience unfamiliar circumstances and, in turn, be less phased by less-than-ideal circumstances. For the Stoic, putting yourself out there is the point; any favorable outcome is secondary.

Stoicism may appeal more broadly to those who seek absolution from our shared role in creating human suffering. After all, if we can choose to be undeterred by our own personal setbacks, why can’t everybody else? The influence of modern Stoicism is evident, from Jordan Peterson’s polarizing, stoic-infused 12 Rules for Life—which sold 3 million copies—to Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck, which has been on The New York Times’ bestseller list for 140 weeks and counting.

The idea of publishing a handbook for living well can be traced to Rome, where the writings of Cicero (On Duty) drew on Stoic teachings. At the time when these philosophies were still emerging, so was the concept of modern citizenship and new ideas about the relationship between the individual and political bodies. These questions—of how improving ourselves improve our community, what the Bible calls “how iron sharpens iron,” and what The Good Place refers to as “what we owe to each other”—have developed in tension with one another, and their gravitational pull on each other holds strong today.

But as time went on, these manuals that blended the rules for life with the politics of domesticity evolved into something less altruistically minded. By the 19th century, self-help took the prevailing form of popular books about manners; in particular, “courtesy and conduct” books, meant to pass down the habits of “fine breeding” from the Victorian-influenced upper class to the emerging middle class. These books emphasized individual goodness, but for the benefit of the social pyramid’s top members at the expense of the economic and social subjugation of its lower classes. Florence Hartley’s The Ladies Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness (1872) is a prime example; it reads like a primer on trickle-down economics, but for the purpose of making the lower-class seem less odious.

Through the earlier part of the 20th century, self-help books were primarily composed of strategies for individual improvement, but any focus on the improvement of a larger group dropped out. Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich (1937) and Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now sixty years later perpetuated the cult of personal agency, reinforcing a capitalistic approach to capturing and manipulating power; how to dodge, duck, and delude your way into transcendence, how to escape the prison of being the person that you are.

Of course, focusing on the individual runs the risk of skirting the larger responsibilities of society by holding us all fully accountable for our own well-being. But this fixation on what goes on inside of a single human heart, and the emphasis on its utmost importance, is no longer going unchallenged in the self-help realm. To better realize its potential, “self-help” must address how badly we want institutional solutions for our broken systems. We want not to be just good, but to live well. We even have a ubiquitous word for that: wellness.

But wellness is slippery, and growing harder to define. Is it optimizing our time in our bodies, so as to eliminate inefficiency? Is it to live in a way that skirts pain and welcomes pleasure? To live a life of “wellness,” it would appear that we need wisdom. But what is wisdom, and how do we attain it? These are, of course, the same questions philosophers have attempted to answer since before the written word began.

To their credit, neither Irvine nor Wilson are advocating for a philosophy that checks out of the realities of pain and suffering. Irvine quotes Seneca, reminding readers, “we must agree to go easy on one another.” And Wilson observes, in her case for Epicurean living, that “ambition, aggression and corruption render societies that appear externally to be flourishing internally rotten.” To the millennial reader, these concepts make sense. Giving others the benefit of the doubt, within reason, feels like an important step to creating a better society. And fostering selfish ambition really can feel akin to welcoming disaster, a way of making society worse.

Over the span of a few days, I have encountered many of what Irvine would refer to as “setbacks.” I was informed that an immediate family member’s cancer is now in its terminal stages. I have had to do some creative innovation regarding my checking account as I wait on freelance payments that are months overdue. And just now, I walked my screaming two-year-old to a bodega after midnight, as he is sprouting giant molars that grow underneath and through his jawbone in a process that, I am told, is normal for human children. (The bodega was for me. I am now drinking.)

For the Stoic, these circumstances would be a fine opportunity to practice my philosophy by insistently, with calmness and gratitude, continuing toward my desired outcome, which happens to be finishing this essay. For the Epicurean, the route to my practice would be a little less direct—though I am experiencing some emotional pain and distress, I can attempt to make completing this essay as pleasurable as possible, while looking to the longer-term pleasure prospect of it being published. I suppose I am practicing a mixture of both (cheers!). It appears to me that both philosophies, in this case, would recommend the same immediate outcome. But what about tomorrow?

The hope of a better tomorrow for me, alone, is not sufficient. It’s not sufficient to follow an individual path to a better life, only to harbor that goodness for myself. The arguments of philosophy-infused self help draw audiences in with the premise of a moral compass, but in the end, the onus is on the lone individual to fix themselves, to become “well,” and through osmosis, to heal society at large. In 2019, this is appealing. But I don’t know if it is enough.