It's come to my attention that people are losing more and more faith in their own capabilities as human beings.
A few years back, I found myself at the midnight release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Alongside the books were free leaflets for parents about "how to console your child if Harry dies in this book".
At the Waterstone's in the Galleries shopping centre where I live, I'm pretty sure the single largest non-fiction section is "self help", with every Tom, Harry, Sarah and Sue giving you their foolproof way to sort your life out.
If you browse the magazines at the WHSmith's a few doors away, a large proportion of the magazines their are telling you how much weight to lose and how to do it, how to entice and keep hold of sexual partners, how to deal with children, spouses, co-workers, bosses, employees, clients.
But the things is, these writers we put so much faith in are hardly more qualified than we are to judge how to live our lives. You can't get a degree in raising children or conducting a successful marriage. And I very much doubt the tabloid dietitians of the world have fathomed enough of the mysteries of the human body to know how weight loss works to the extent they claim.
And, so much is subjective, anyway. The author of these books and articles being brandished at us don't know our peers, our family, our own bodies. How on earth do they know which techniques work for our own lives?
Different children react to different inputs. Different people are suited to different pathways to physical health. Different partners require a different kind of romantic relationship. So much so, that any claim that a technique is going to work for every relationship, every family, every person is frankly laughable.
And yet, there is a market for all this stuff. Why?
I humbly offer that people have become far too hungry for someone else to take the reigns. It seems that many of us are willing to listen to the advice of any kind of authority on anything, even when, rationally speaking, we know there is little they can know more than us about a situation.
Many things in life are difficult. But we have each been blessed, either by a designer or by evolution, with remarkable rationlising and thought processing abilities. You, reader, have more or less the same mental functions as the people who split the atom, who founded agriculture, who built the aeroplane, who began to understand the human mind. The fact is, you have been designed to face life.
Of course we should listen to the views of other people. But equally, we should remember that they are just that, views, and the mystique of their location behind a word processor does not make their opinions worth any more than yours.
So when you have a problem, go with whatever your brain and instincts tell you is right. Not what the latest tabloiding or blogging sensation has to say on the matter.
A few years back, I found myself at the midnight release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Alongside the books were free leaflets for parents about "how to console your child if Harry dies in this book".
At the Waterstone's in the Galleries shopping centre where I live, I'm pretty sure the single largest non-fiction section is "self help", with every Tom, Harry, Sarah and Sue giving you their foolproof way to sort your life out.
If you browse the magazines at the WHSmith's a few doors away, a large proportion of the magazines their are telling you how much weight to lose and how to do it, how to entice and keep hold of sexual partners, how to deal with children, spouses, co-workers, bosses, employees, clients.
But the things is, these writers we put so much faith in are hardly more qualified than we are to judge how to live our lives. You can't get a degree in raising children or conducting a successful marriage. And I very much doubt the tabloid dietitians of the world have fathomed enough of the mysteries of the human body to know how weight loss works to the extent they claim.
And, so much is subjective, anyway. The author of these books and articles being brandished at us don't know our peers, our family, our own bodies. How on earth do they know which techniques work for our own lives?
Different children react to different inputs. Different people are suited to different pathways to physical health. Different partners require a different kind of romantic relationship. So much so, that any claim that a technique is going to work for every relationship, every family, every person is frankly laughable.
And yet, there is a market for all this stuff. Why?
I humbly offer that people have become far too hungry for someone else to take the reigns. It seems that many of us are willing to listen to the advice of any kind of authority on anything, even when, rationally speaking, we know there is little they can know more than us about a situation.
Many things in life are difficult. But we have each been blessed, either by a designer or by evolution, with remarkable rationlising and thought processing abilities. You, reader, have more or less the same mental functions as the people who split the atom, who founded agriculture, who built the aeroplane, who began to understand the human mind. The fact is, you have been designed to face life.
Of course we should listen to the views of other people. But equally, we should remember that they are just that, views, and the mystique of their location behind a word processor does not make their opinions worth any more than yours.
So when you have a problem, go with whatever your brain and instincts tell you is right. Not what the latest tabloiding or blogging sensation has to say on the matter.
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