America’s Obsession with Self-Help
This is a common type of HN thread where the linked article is pretty bad, but the headline topic is interesting enough that people want to comment on it from their own experience. In this case, every single comment (100% as of this posting) is a riff on the headline topic and says nothing at all about the content of the article.<p>Well, I will say one thing about the article. It summarily dismisses Stephen Covey&#x27;s Seven Habits as nothing special, without engaging the content of the book in the slightest, and criticizes Covey for not talking about racism and sexism. If you want this article and its writer in a nutshell, there you go.<p>There are a ton of articles like this out there, even on this exact topic of ridiculing self-help from the compulsive, perfunctory woke standpoint that dominates our elite media culture. This one was very middle-of-the-fairway. The best I can say about it is that it contained a tiny bit of history, and we were spared the usual exhortations to adopt more collectivist politics. (In their prescriptions for America, the writers always talk exclusively about politics,  never even thinking about what people could be doing differently in their own families, friendships, neighborhoods and communities. Slaves to individualism in their own way, they would never imagine that anything but the State can save us.)<p>Frankly, these dull, robotically woke articles from legacy media are a much more nauseating aspect of this cultural moment than bad self-help books. And Seven Habits is more worth your time than anything this author will ever say.