The lost hope of self-help
I see a distinct difference between habits like smoking, a choice which doesn&#x27;t make a person bad or good but affects their life in practical ways, and habits like charitable giving, which do have repercussions in terms of that person&#x27;s moral character. There is a spectrum of morality that we each inhabit, our place on it not necessarily affecting our effectiveness in life. At the extreme ends, like being a psychopathic killer on the bad end, or being a person who surrenders the entirety of their surplus time and resources toward charitable causes at the good end, does have a major practical effect on an individual&#x27;s effectiveness in life. This moral spectrum is a bell curve, with most of us falling toward the middle, wherein morality plays almost no significant part in our life. A person can live their whole life without ever flirting with the edges of this curve, and still be a well-adjusted member of Western society.<p>The crux here is that in a rationally-minded, secular culture, those moral habits become idiosyncratic choices, pursued by each individual within the context of their community. When a person steps up into a cosmopolitan, world-citizen mindset, relative morality suddenly seems like a massive failure on humanity&#x27;s part. Some then don the drapery of the moral absolutist, either searching for or consciously choosing a moral lens with which to view the world.<p>If my comments above mean to convey anything at all, it&#x27;s mainly that the planet is slowly becoming one community. Habits like being punctual, following traffic laws, eating a healthy diet, don&#x27;t necessarily need to have a moral aspect. They simply need to help the individual fulfill a functional role in this interconnected world. That individual may also coincidentally discover another dimension to their behavior, the moral axis, but that plane is much more open to interpretation and less easily measured(tracking being an overarching fetish in the self-help world). I can tell you how punctual you are by looking at your timesheet, but I can&#x27;t objectively tell you how good you are by measuring how many thank-you notes you wrote this year. I think it is disingenuous to expect the self-help industry to tackle the moral aspect of behavior and expect it to succeed in any meaningful way. I would love to see that book written, in a non-alienating, non-judgemental tone, but I suspect it an impossible deed, an idealistic fool&#x27;s errand even.