I Got Your Self-Help RIGHT HERE

Guilt has been around since God made Woman to tell Man that he was a worthless slob and should go rake the leaves around the Garden of Eden to improve the property value. Okay, maybe not, but it's at least been around since man harnessed enough brain-power to generate it. The self-help industry did not have the motivation to arrive very early in man's history simply because there was not a self-help industry to motivate it to arrive. The self-help industry finally arrived shortly after the arrival of Homo Erectus in the form of cumbersome stone tablets that were carved and sold by the precursors of H. Erectus, the Homo Habilis, who were angry at having their neighborhoods gentrified by the slightly less hairy and larger-brained H. Erectus. The fossil evidence garnered from these tablets reveals such classic auto-validation as:

1) Ugh
2) Urghhh
3) Grrrrphthgggle
4) Live every day to the fullest

Since language had not been invented yet (the last one seems to be a random assemblage of scratches that just happen to form a coherent sentence in perfect Jargonese English), the H. Erectus who purchased these stone tablets (using violence upon the H. Habilis as the most obvious and plentiful currency) glanced at the flint scribblings upon the stones and decided that they meant something along the lines of, "You need a change of scenery, so you should really migrate from Africa after the Pliestocene glacial period and get a good start on civilization; your future, less hirsute children will deny your existence in favor of a nebulous and unproveable God in gratitude for your meanderings."

The H. Erectus did just that, and the H. Habilis neighborhoods were safe. An unforeseen side-effect of all of this "help" that the H. Habilis supplied their unwanted H. Erectus neighbors is that H. Habilis died out for some reason that is theorized to be related to an au courant invention, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, that was caused by too much slab-shaping of gibberish. The unfortunate end result was that H. Habilis became unable to hold a spear for the required time to retrieve the archaic version of fast-food and died out en masse of starvation shortly after the departure of the H. Erectus. The lessons that this teaches us about the self-help industry are many-folded and smelly, like a fat-girl's vagina:

1) Ware the man who tells you he can help make you better, as he probably has his own motivations, none of which have anything to do with your actual well-being.
2) The moment that your well-being and his motivations no longer coincide, he will rid himself of your wearisome burden, thus helping himself.
3) Unless there's a lot of cash on the line, then he's still interested.
4) Really, he's got all the time in the world for you, as long as the moolah holds out. When do you get paid again?
5) No matter what sort of gibberish anyone spouts at you, you will take only what you want from it, and do what you probably already know you need to do.

I've been watching this crap wax and wane like filthy tide-water on the Jersey shore for far too long, and it's just the same shiny turds coming from a different anus. Religious cults, self-help seminars, political pods and other groups all use many of the same principals to get you to join (some taken from Lofland and Stark (1965) American Sociological Review 30:865-875, with further elaboration by yours falsely):

1) Tension: A discrepancy between how one finds oneself and how one wants to be. This could be the result of an actual problem or a perceived problem; the perceived problem could be the result of internal conflict brought about by external forces, such as upbringing, societal pressures, and peer-group pressures ("C'mon, Bob, you're not down with us unless you try the Fugu fish. Oops, fuck, you're dead. What a retard. Oops, fuck, I'm dead too.")
2) Seekership: Conventional changes of lifestyle from internal sources seem inadequate to the changes that one wants wrought, so the person may feel that the adjustment should come from an external source (bars, whore-houses and gambling establishments just aren't cutting it anymore).
3) Turning Point: The person feels themselves to be at a critical or pivotal stage in his/her life, thus enhancing the feeling that an important change is in order. (I've GOT to quit going to bars, whore-houses and gambling establishments.)
4) Cult Affective Bonds: A friendship or some type of bond with a current cult member must be established for con- version to take place. Cult members are usually first introduced to their cult by a friend or acquaintance in a group.
5) Extra-Cult Affective Bonds: affiliation with people who have negative opinions of the cult must be weak or at least weaker than the cult bond. This can also be accomplished when people don't know enough about the cult initially to form any kind of opinion on it. (Evil can flourish in secrecy; nobody knew how wack-job Scientology was until it had already sucked in about half of Hollywood and a few other people who'd never read an L. Ron Hubbard book and seen first-hand what a lousy author he was).
6) Intensive Interaction: this separates "verbal" converts from "total" converts. The interaction with "verbal" converts is generally to get them to become "total" converts through greater interaction with the "total" converts. (Thus begins the Dungeons & Dragons school of self-help: the higher your level, the more costly the next level is to obtain.)

I've got some self-help advice for all of you: buy a fucking Skee-Ball machine. It's just like an auto-validation seminar, only cheaper and more satisfying:

1) You have a set goal that you have to work daily at to meet (getting all 12 balls in that goddamn 100-point hole at the tippy-top on either side).
2) You get consistent and accurate feedback on how you're doing in achieving your goal (the amount of tickets the machine vomits onto your shoes).
3) You have to keep pumping money into it (ball-shine, red tickets, prizes, electricity, sheetrock for the holes in your walls), though not as much as a regular seminar.
4) It's good exercise (for =BD of your body, at least, so maybe add "become ambidextrous" to your goal).
5) You always get SOMETHING out of it (even if it's just a few tickets to buy a plastic whistle or bird-call).
6) You have something tangible (the Skee-Ball machine and a bunch of crappy prizes) that you can sell to someone, rather than just stuffy old self-knowledge that isn't worth anything to anyone except other seekers of external validation (hell, Tim Robbins and Deepak Chopra make a HELLUVA living doling out nonsense for cash-figures that would make Donald Trump blush like a virgin in a porn-theater (wasn't sure if everyone would know who the Sultan of Brunei or Alan Greenspan was, so I went with Donald Trump for that analogy)).
7) There's no misunderstanding your goal, unless you are an utter moron, which in itself is a good piece of information to have.
8) You get to throw things.

People, we don't need any seminars or books or audio CD's or the sounds of our own snoring during a self-help seminar played back to us in order to find out what's wrong with us. We have LSD for serious introspection, methamphetamine to give us focus, marijuana to make us (overly) sensitive, cocaine to make us chatty and gregarious, booze to make us take a swing at our friends when they won't share any of the above, and Ecstasy to make us feel better about taking drugs and trying to punch a friend in the face when we should be attending a self-help seminar.

If all else fails, HIRE ME. I will follow you around drunk for a week to see how you interact with people and your environment. You will get IMMEDIATE FEEDBACK every time I think you're doing something wrong or stupid and at all other times, in a brazenly loud, public and slurry spectacle so you will remember my verbal harangue whenever you go to do that thing that irritated me (and therefore made you a worse person in my eyes). The cost is minimal. I require a decent Scotch (Laphroaig 10-year or Glenlivit 15-year will do nicely), several changes of clean clothing during the evening, someone to scrub the intestinal malfunctions from my shoes before I awake each morning, bail for any unforeseen altercations with bystanders or local constabulary, and hospital insurance for when I attempt to subdue a pole-lamp that appears to be staring at me too much OR if I attempt to make out with a parking meter or any electrified appliance. All that should cost somewhat less than 1 or perhaps 2 seminars, and I'll even cut you a "friend" price, because, really, I'm here to help YOU as long as the moolah holds out. When do you get paid again?