Word: self-help
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...happens, a solution is available in the form of inspirational aids that have propelled the new fad for less stuff into a prospering self-help industry. It's called the Simplicity Business. Anybody can learn how to shed frustrations by sifting through a near torrent of books, CD-ROMS, audiotapes and newsletters, all of them exalting the simple life...
There is a lesson here not just for policymakers but also for the rest of us. "It is human nature always to want a little more," writes the psychologist Timothy Miller in the recent book How to Want What You Have, perhaps the first self-help book based explicitly on evolutionary psychology. "People spend their lives honestly believing that they have almost enough of whatever they want. Just a little more will put them over the top; then they will be contented forever." This is a built-in illusion, Miller notes, engrained in our minds by natural selection...
Mirkheim's plan is to make a movie of the best-selling self-help book Daniel Strong, which requires that he finagle production rights from its shady author, Dr. Waxling (Timothy Jackson). His quest leads him into a world of gore-obsessed receptionists, New York drug dealers, coked-up campaign managers and one very convincing, very scary stand-in for the Devil...
...take strong exception to Samuel J Rascoff's views on creative writing ("Trying to Teach Creativity," opinion, Feb. 17). "Education, creative writing style," he writes "frequently degenerates into literary self-help." What he fails to recognize about creative writing classes is that, far from being weekly episodes of narcissistic introspection, they are workshops in which more time is spent reading and considering the work of others than in presenting one's own work. We who take creative classes are probably a lot more outward-looking than some single-minded Ec concentrators, because we are constantly confronted with the lives...
Education, creative writing style, frequently degenerates into literary self-help. Students write their own autobiographies--their own traumas, their own childhoods. In short, these courses valorize a narcissistic, solipsistic version of education. Education becomes a means of recovering one's own past or reconstructing one's own memories, rather than attempting to understand the lives and memories of others...