By Nick Thorpe
I am in recovery from a long-standing addiction. While others may secretly gorge on chocolate or swig from a bottle hidden in the top drawer, I head furtively for the Mind Body Spirit section and binge on books promising to change my life in seven easy steps. I could once get an almost physical high breaking open the cover of another seductive promise – Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway, or How to Talk to Anyone – another scheme to eliminate the bits of myself I didn’t like, and win the war.
Then one afternoon, craving my customary hit in Waterstone's, I overdosed on the Victorian grandfather of them all: Self-Help by Samuel Smiles. Rarely has a surname been so misleading. The cover ought to have been health warning enough: my edition carried a line drawing of a man clutching his forehead, his eyes dark sockets beneath a migrainous frown as he studied his books by candlelight. It looked horribly familiar.
Born in 1812 in Haddington, Smiles tried his hand as a GP, political campaigner, newspaper editor, railway secretary and industrial biographer before capturing the zeitgeist with Self-Help. “The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual,” he summarised in the first paragraph, effectively writing the manifesto for the vast modern publishing genre he would unwittingly spawn. “Exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigour and strength.”
Back then, it must have felt bold and empowering. Coincidentally published on the same day in 1859 as Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, it sold more copies that first year than Darwin would sell in his lifetime, and has now topped several million in a staggering 40 languages, with fans ranging from Chinese emperors to Margaret Thatcher.
On one level, it’s not hard to see why. While Darwin’s theories seemed to point readers back to the primordial swamp, Smiles bombarded them with potted biographies of human perfectibility, available to anyone willing to persevere with all that hard work.
It’s what we all want to believe, isn’t it? That if we just try a little harder, reach that next rung of the ladder, everything will start to fall into place. But what if the relentless trying with which we fill our lives becomes the very thing that’s blocking our happiness? Psychologists now agree that crude willpower, like oil, is an expendable resource – it won’t last for ever. The truth is that it didn’t ultimately work even for Smiles himself – because not long after the publication of Self-Help, the champion of the Victorian work ethic quietly had a stroke.
“I was habitually careless of my health,” he would finally confess in an unfinished autobiography, after aphasia had forced him to learn to read and write from scratch. “I did not take my meals regularly… My physical power was getting wasted faster than my enfeebled digestion could repair it… Why did not I stop?”
It’s a good question. A few years ago I nearly suffered a physical breakdown of my own trying furiously to work myself into the life I believed I needed. Exhausted with the perpetual slog of self-improvement, I decided to spend a year loosening up instead. I began by jumping off a Cornish cliff, and strapping myself to the wings of a biplane – a sort of adrenalin enema for my overstuffed mind.
Then I ambled at home and abroad in search of answers to my key questions: Will life grind to a halt if I stop pushing so hard – or might I regain a little playfulness instead? Ultimately, can I learn the capacity for contentment, or is it as arbitrary as hair colour, a trait we’re born with? My gurus and role models ranged from monks to naturists, clowns to schoolkids. Some were radicals who had abandoned the rat race altogether, but others had found a way to dance with everyday pressures such as mortgages, parenting and pay-cheques.
Their common message was as paradoxical as it was unexpected: as Carl Jung put it, “we cannot change anything unless we accept it” – a truth even the NHS is now promoting through mindfulness meditation or self-compassion therapies. For me it was an epiphany that changed the way I live.
After a year of learning the lost art of letting go, I can’t help wishing poor old Samuel Smiles had access to such distinctly un-Victorian methods. I’m told I’m more playful, less self-critical, and therefore (ironically) more productive. I’ve also found the confidence to adopt a son with my wife – one of the single most enduring sources of happiness in my life. And I’m rather more discriminating than I once was in my choice of self-help books – in fact, in the process, I’ve arguably ended up writing my own.
Ah well. Old habits die hard, as they say.
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– Nick Thorpe's Urban Worrier: Adventures in the Lost Art of Letting Go was published by Little Brown on 2 June.
– Read more Nick Thorpe at his website, on Facebook and on Twitter.
– Nick Thorpe's Urban Worrier: Adventures in the Lost Art of Letting Go was published by Little Brown on 2 June.
– Read more Nick Thorpe at his website, on Facebook and on Twitter.
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