|
Happy Monday, friend! If you’ve gone book shopping with me in the past five years or so, you know that I will always beeline to the Personal Development section, previously referred to as the Self Help section. That evolution of self help to personal development — and the cultural pressures that came with it — really struck me on a recent trip to LA. While wandering around the Barnes and Noble at The Grove (attack me all you want, but it was raining and cold and who isn’t comforted by the familiarity of a B&N?), I was elated to find my beloved Personal Development section was the second largest section in the store. I was blown away. Long gone are the days of a small section of self help books by psychiatrists with cheesy titles — and along with it, the stigma that shopping in the self help section carried. Self help, by it’s very title, assumes there is something wrong or broken that needs to be fixed. Not only do you need to be fixed, you are so desperate to be fixed that you go specifically to this book store to find a book that will help you work through your issues. To be clear, I have never prescribed to this line of thinking. But there are countless articles from the past 20 years about how to not be embarrassed about shopping in the self help section, or listing out the least embarrassing self help books to buy, alongside sitcom jokes about being caught searching for advice in the self help section. I don’t know exactly when we rebranded “self help” to “personal development”. But when we did, we also rebranded the associated feelings of “needing to be fixed” to the opposite. Now, personal development is the goal. By shopping in the personal development section, you’re focused on growing and bettering yourself. You aren’t broken, you just want to make yourself even better. You’re focused on optimization and have a growth mindset. Alongside all of this, the personal development/self help category has exploded. Books that would have been found on the bottom shelf in the back corner of a Borders (RIP) are now best-sellers, placed on their own table in the front of the shop. From Atomic Habits to The Body Keeps Score, books about how to exist but better are finally mainstream. So… what’s the point of this? It goes back to a point I have written on time and time again: Is this focus on personal development and growth good for us? And once again, I’ll say that I’m not sure. At least half my bookshelf would fall under the personal development category. I love reading about how others view life and living, and what they’re doing to live their best life. But I also firmly believe in the power of intuition, that we don’t need to buy books or attend seminars or buy things to make ourselves “better”. I don’t know if I even believe we need to be striving for “better” — aren’t we good enough as we are? It’s hard to push back against a society that needs us to hate ourselves. The diet and self care industries alone generate hundreds of billions of dollar of revenue each year. And I certainly don’t have the solution to fighting back against this. However, I do believe that at least part of the antidote is to trust ourselves, our intuition, and our body to show and tell us what we need. That’s the focus of today’s recipe. Much more to come regarding our cultural shift towards glorifying personal development. Stay tuned! Sending love, Emily P.S. If a friend forwarded you this email and you’d like to sign up, or if want to check out my previous issues, you can do so here.
|
