“Good puzzle” wrote James Joyce in Ulysses, “would be to cross Dublin without passing a pub”.
I humbly submit that a better, and infinitely harder, puzzle would be to scroll through YouTube, Facebook, Instagram or TikTok without encountering a clipped video of a guru telling a podcast host the way to become rich, happy or irresistible, via one weird trick that they, and they alone, possess.
In fact, this phenomenon is now so widespread that there’s an entire genre of advertisement in which headphone-wearing actors extoll the virtues of a product to a fake host of a podcast that does not exist.
They primarily work because it’s almost impossible to keep up with which gurus exist in the first place. This week, podcaster Andrew Huberman was the subject of one of those delicious long-reads, the kind you read avidly in one sitting even when they’re about a man you have literally never heard of before.
I appear to be somewhat alone in my ignorance, as Huberman is cited throughout the article as one of the world’s most popular public intellectuals, a man with millions of listeners, who’s tagged in Instagram posts by Reese Witherspoon, and sold out the Sydney Opera House just five weeks ago.
A neuroscientist with a focus on personal growth, he speaks about productivity, mental fitness, and optimization (very much using the American spelling), buttressing his prescriptions for better mind and body with neurological factoids about biological processes, visual-system wiring, and dopamine receptors.
He does this on both his own extremely popular show Huberman Lab, and as a guest on many of the other most famous podcasts on the planet. Since I’d sooner eat a yard of my own shite than listen to anything that smells vaguely of Joe Rogan, all of this had passed me by.
The allegations which came out about Huberman this week — namely that he had been engaging in affairs with multiple women, riven with lies, deceit, and controlling behaviour — likely come as a shock to his diehard fans, to whom he’s cultivated an aura of yogic moral clarity and purpose.
It comes just three weeks after revelations emerged around Jay Shetty, another mega-successful self-help guru, who’s amassed a large fortune on his own riches-to-rags-to-riches-again story of finding enlightenment as a monk; a story which, it’s now alleged, features many, quite substantial holes.
None of this would mean very much were it not for the fact that these gurus now seem to make up about 80% of the current online ecosystem, and very often the book charts as well.
The world of self-help is hardly new, but is currently experiencing a period of unprecedented dominance and seemingly endless expansion. Its contours, too, have changed.
While diet and exercise plans still do a healthy trade, dated ideas about calorie counting and fat-shaming have been re-branded to emphasise wellness and strength, even as they clearly prescribe the very same calorie counting and disordered eating that was once presented up-front.
Most striking of all has been the demographic change, from mass-market paperbacks crowding airports in the 80s and 90s aimed at affluent women, to the vast web of books, podcasts, speaking tours, and documentaries that are now centred around men and — most specifically — the men teaching men how to be happier, more productive, and more appealing men.
The term “self-help” is eschewed in such cases, substituted for more satisfyingly manly words like “protocol” and “mindset”.
A quick search on Amazon Books reveals 50,000 results for “mindset”. There is scarcely a job, concept, or abstract noun, which does not have one of its own.
Among bland titles like The Fitness Mindset, Money Mindset, or The Achievement Mindset, there are more specific offerings like The Bronze Age Mindset, The Ballerina Mindset, or The Presidential War Mindset.
While the majority of these are directly contradictory of each other — one wonders if The Small Mindset and The Infinite Mindset pair well together — most are likely harmless waffle, filled with as many broadly helpful truisms (“be kind to yourself…”) as they are unfounded conjecture (“…because these crystals say so”).
But into this void has crept, for some time, a concurrent thread of malevolence, most specifically those who launder regressive, harmful values through the asinine therapy-speak which has now become the background noise of the internet.
Andrew Tate is rightly reviled for his hateful sermonising, but his ascent was only made possible by the space created for him by the scrutiny-free landscape of “personal growth” in which his persona took flight.
Jordan Peterson has amassed enough money to buy a small country by bundling insipid bromides about tidying your room alongside increasingly unhinged rants about sex, race, covid denialism, and the Great Replacement Theory.
Both men, like Huberman, Alex Jones, and Joe Rogan before them, sell the same supplements, powders, and diet plans that appear to bankroll this entire oeuvre. All provide an unimpeachable lesson: This is what works.
At a time when people are more disconnected, seeking parasocial enlightenment has never seemed more attractive. Selling sugar pills and quackery to the gullible, never more lucrative.
Revelations about the private lives or public lies of these gurus are unlikely to change this any time soon. It’s their world and we are just scrolling through it.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine 1,000 snake oil salesman lecturing us so they can sell us bark powders, mask their own bad behaviours, and/or slowly pivot to being racist freaks.
If that all sounds a bit pessimistic, I can only apologise. My copy of The Optimist Mindset hasn’t yet arrived.
