Dismantling the Self-Help Industrial Complex

What 300 days of meditation taught me about wasting my life.

It’s 1991.

John was a former college golfer. He once won the Missouri Valley Conference championship. After college, he tried to turn pro and bounced around mini-tours and the developmental circuit for a few years. Scraping by, sleeping in his car and cramming three other guys into cheap hotel rooms.

Prize money was tiny, and what little there was got eaten up by travel costs and entry fees. No endorsements. No sponsorships. No guaranteed money.

He was a solid college golfer but not a nationally dominant superstar. Good enough to turn pro, not so dominant that anyone was watching.

Then a phone call.

John Daly was the ninth alternate for the PGA Championship at Crooked Stick.

The ninth alternate. He wasn’t supposed to be there. He was a nobody, a rookie who’d never won anything on tour. But players kept dropping out, one after another, and by Wednesday night, Daly got the call.

He drove through the night from Memphis to Indiana. Eight hours. Arrived so late he never played a practice round. Never walked the course or saw the holes. He showed up Thursday morning, teed it up, and started hitting.

He won the whole thing.

No course knowledge. No preparation. No warmup routine.

He just showed up and played.

Four years later, St Andrews. The British Open. The oldest championship in golf, played at the course where the game was invented.

Daly smoked cigarettes between shots. Wore pants loud enough to hear from the parking lot and looked like he’d wandered in from a roadhouse bar.

Slammed a couple Diet Cokes for breakfast each morning and won that too.

Two major championships. Both won by a man who didn’t do what you’re supposed to do. Didn’t prepare the way you’re supposed to prepare. Didn’t optimize, analyze, or manage anything.

Other golfers spent hours on the range. Worked with swing coaches. Studied course strategy. Built routines.

Daly had Diet Coke, Big Macs, and a carton of Marlboros.

The warmup isn’t the game.

John Daly-Golf Day

Get ready with me.

It’s 7:45 AM on a Tuesday in 2019.

The alarm goes off and I’m up. Not because I want to be, but because the routine requires it.

Meditation first. Twenty minutes on the cushion, the Calm app tracking my streak. 300 plus days, creeping up on a whole year. I don’t know if it’s helping anymore but I’m terrified to stop and find out.

Then journaling. Three pages, longhand, just like Julia Cameron said. Morning Pages. Stream of consciousness. I don’t know what I’m writing most days. The same loops, the same anxieties, the same lists dressed up in different words. But I fill the pages, that’s the practice. The practice is the point. The practice is always the point.

Then movement. Not exercise, movement. Today it’s restorative yoga, tomorrow is pilates. Nothing that breaks a sweat. This is regulation, not exertion. I’m not trying to get stronger. I’m trying to calm my nervous system so I can get ready for the day. The day I will spend getting ready for the day after that.

Breakfast is a smoothie. Ashwagandha and collagen peptides and flaxseed and almond butter, blended while the mushroom coffee brews. I gave up regular coffee years ago. Caffeine was spiking my cortisol. Now I drink something that tastes like dirt and costs four times as much.

Supplements are lined up on the counter like little toy soldiers. Eleven pills before 9 AM. Magnesium glycinate for sleep, omega-3s for brain health, vitamin D because I read I’m probably deficient, lion’s mane for focus, L-theanine for calm, and a probiotic for the gut-brain axis. I couldn’t tell you if any of them are working. But I’m not going to stop and find out.

I wear the Oura ring. Check my HRV, Sleep Score, and Readiness. The ring tells me to take it easy today. The ring tells me to take it easy most days. I should’ve been taking it easy on buying rings that tell me to take it easy.

I also track my cycle. There’s an app for that, too. I adjust my expectations based on what phase I’m in. Follicular. Luteal. I know the words now. I know all the words now. I’m fluent in the language of managing myself.

Mid-morning, a podcast. Huberman Lab. Today, it’s something about dopamine and morning sunlight. I walk out to the back porch and stand there for ten minutes, barefoot on the dirt. Grounding. Earthing. I read it helps with inflammation. I have no idea if I have inflammation, but I stand there anyway, looking at my phone, listening to a podcast about why I should be looking at the sun instead of my phone.

Therapy at noon. Same therapist for years. We talk about my mother. We talk about boundaries. We talk about my attachment style, avoidant (obviously), but with some anxious tendencies when I’m stressed. We talk about my window of tolerance. We’ve talked about my mother so many times that I could write a dissertation on her. I’ve made progress. I’m always making progress. I’m never done making progress.

Lunch is optimized. Protein and greens and some kind of fermented thing for gut health. It doesn’t taste good. It’s not supposed to taste good, but it’s good for me, probably. I’ve forgotten exactly why.

Afternoon, I read. The Body Keeps the Score has been on the nightstand for four months. I’m only halfway through. I keep stopping to highlight passages, write notes in the margins, cross-reference with Attached and Set Boundaries, Find Peace, and the entire Brené Brown canon.

Brené, my Queen!

3 PM, time for breathwork. Box Breathing, a last minute addition based on my sleep score. Fifteen minutes. An app guides me through it. An app now guides me through everything.

By 4 PM, I’m exhausted. I haven’t done a single thing for another human being all day. But I’ve managed myself into the ground.

Evening wind-down begins at 9. Blue-light blocking glasses go on. iPhone goes in the other room. Magnesium tea steeps on the counter. No screens. Melatonin at 10.

I read a few pages of Queen Brené and think about vulnerability. I’ve been thinking about vulnerability for years. I’m not sure I’ve ever been vulnerable.

11:30 PM. Weighted blanket. Silk pillowcase. The sunrise alarm clock is set for tomorrow. White noise machine hums in the corner. I put in my earbuds, and a guided sleep meditation plays me into the dark.

I did everything right today.

Tomorrow I’ll do it again.

Photo by THLT LCX on Unsplash

The Janitor

It’s 1962.

President Kennedy is touring NASA in the middle of the Space Race aganst the Soviets. He walks through the facility, stopping to talk with everyone he passes. The scientists explain their research. The engineers describe their designs. The technicians detail their roles in the mission.

Then President Kennedy passes a janitor mopping the floor and asks him the same question.

“What do you do here?”

The janitor didn’t say he mopped floors.

“I’m helping put a man on the moon.”

Same building as everyone else. Same question, completely different kind of answer. The scientists described what they did. The janitor described what his mission was.

Photo by Laurel and Michael Evans on Unsplash

The 21st Century Wellness Girlie Ouroboros

Ask any doctor why they went to med school, and they will give the same answer. To help people. Ask a teacher, a nurse, a firefighter, or a police officer the same thing. You’ll get the same answer. Something in us needs to be useful. Not productive, not optimized, but useful. To serve someone or something greater than ourselves.

The janitor mopping the floors at NASA understood this. His work mattered because it was in service of something beyond him. He didn’t need an app to track his purpose. He saw his purpose every night when he looked to the sky. I had the Oura ring, the breathwork, and the meditation streak. I managed myself with extraordinary precision.

But the nervous system I was working so hard to regulate?

It evolved to regulate through connection and service. Through being needed. Through showing up for someone other than myself.

There’s the problem with the Self-Help Industrial Complex. Self-help for the purpose of self-help. Personal development for the purpose of personal development. Healing that never graduates to living.

And there’s an entire industry built to keep you there.

The coaches. The courses. The retreats. The freemium apps with premium tiers and annual subscriptions. The influencers selling morning routines and Amazon storefronts full of supplements they get for free. The publishing houses pumping out a new trauma book every season. The therapists, the podcasters, the facilitators, the shamans, and the experts who didn’t exist ten years ago and now have hundreds of Yelp reviews.

They need you to stay broken. Not forever-broken, that wouldn’t sell. Just broken enough to keep buying. Broken enough to need the next book, the next workshop, the next certification, the next level, and the next product. Healed people don’t have subscriptions, nor do they need a morning routine that takes three hours. Healed people are bad for business.

It’s a $13 billion industry in the U.S. alone. That’s not counting the apps, the supplements, and the influencer economy. That’s just self-improvement books and coaching. Thirteen billion dollars a year for what we all got for free from Brene Brown’s initial vulnerability TED Talk in June of 2010. All we’ve been doing since is gilding the lily.

It’s like a snake that loops around and slithers up its own asshole. Going nowhere and calling it progress.

John Daly showed up and played. The janitor showed up and served.

The only optimization routine that ever mattered is the simplest one: Wake up and show up.

Author’s Note:

If you enjoy my non-fiction writing, you may also enjoy my fiction. The first collection is called Je Ne Sais Quoi — three short stories about outsiders and the places that claim them.

Read the first one here. Want all three? They are available on Buy Me a Coffee!