…and a spring water chaser

So I wanted to post a little follow up based on a discussion I read this morning on one of the blogs I frequent. I thought I could try to suss this out for myself. Just to give you some context, back in March, I wrote an article about how depressing it can be to read self help blogs. At the time, I wrote:

I think the reason I find this irksome is that nothing would please me more than to ‘follow my passion’ but there’s all sorts of reasons why it can’t be done, and I find this incredibly depressing. Much as these online gurus state time and again that yes, it can be done “Just look at me!” and then cite everything from fear to lack of direction as reasons why people still think that they can’t follow their dreams, I think that it’s just a cold hard fact that not everyone can. In fact, I wager the vast majority can’t. There’s a ton of reasons why people can’t do this from financial to disability to psychological. Some people sure can, but my god, they are few and far between.

The thing that was eating at me was reading about people who “follow their passions” and do things like write a blog for a living and somehow make enough money and they profess how happy they are and oh, look–you can do it too! I’m not saying I don’t have a problem with that. In fact, I do. I still think it’s an issue that the current so-called “A-list bloggers” are mostly there to say, “look at me and what I’m doing and you can do it too! Digest this slowly and change your life!” Pish. In fact, it’s dangerous, in that it may serve to depress people more. These folks are taking risks with a detached readership they cannot know. It’s often not a good thing. What I was failing to see is that it’s a two way street. Depending upon how the ears of the receiver are tuned, the depression can come from taking the advice as affront, and I am guilty of that.

To illustrate, I’ll point to recent events over at Get Rich Slowly, one of the blogs I frequent. Yesterday, JD, our blogger, posted a link to a calculator of sorts that’ll calculate how much you can save if you bike, verses if you drive a car. Reading it, I thought it was pretty cool. I used the calculator to the best of my ability (accounting for having to convert and modify everything from US to Canadian–why can’t someone in Canada do these cool things? Sigh.) I learned that I could save something like $200,000 over the course of my life assuming I bike rather than walk. It was an interesting exercise, and yeah, it got me thinking about my bike more.

Apparently though, a lot of other readers took umbrage at the whole thing. There were concerned comments pointing out that people felt judged, and that not everyone can bike, and it’s unrealistic, and yadda yadda. Basically, it’s a facet of the very thing that was vexing me back in March. So much so, that JD today posted a follow up to address the fact that he wasn’t making a judgement call, but rather putting a piece of information out there for people to do with what they will. For the whole unfolding drama, I’ll just point you to the post and let you suss it out if you’d like to go in depth.

For me, the point wasn’t at all about biking or people’s ability to do this. For me, the thing that hit me was that I never really consciously put together that these sites are ones I read for ideas rather than gospel. I tend to get these things confused, and the confusion results in the depression. I can’t be the only one. Let me see if I can unpack that a little. Say I go to some site with some guru who’s somehow gone from being an overweight, unhappy, cubicle worker with a heavy debt load to some fit, loving, attentive individual, who is self-employed with all the money in the bank his new, minimalist, environmentally aware lifestyle needs and living the good life doing exactly what his passion calls him to do. Wow, I see he was just like me! Wow, I see he’s climbed out of it! Wow, he’s even telling me how he did it! This man is a bona fide messiah. Living proof that a poor schmuck like me can rise to the great happy individual I’d always wanted to be, and I will be great–god knows, he is. “Success leaves clues”–so say the self help former self-loathing bathtub dish washers.

So I read all the words and somehow start to take all this as a blueprint more than a suggestion. I overlay the jogging, the car-free culture, the vegetarian diet, the quitting of the job and all that rot onto my well-established lifestyle and I see the plans don’t fit. Well, that’s okay, say the gurus. You do things slowly. You form habits. You work with what you’ve got to get to where you want to be. You buy x sometimes, other times you do y or use z or go read this other wannabe blogger who was kind enough to guest author a post with how they do things. The thing is, these things don’t work for me. I can’t bike to work because it’s too far (well you should have moved closer), I can’t afford to move closer because it’ll negatively impact my income and therefore what I can do (well you need to re-think what’s important to you and adjust your life), I can’t adjust my life because I have a family who depends on things (well you need to bring the family on board–I did it). So on, ad nauseaum.

What I’m trying to say here is that it seems that there’s two problems. I think the first is the way this information is delivered, and the second is the way it’s consumed.

Let’s take on delivery. Any “A-list” blogger will tell you they never set themselves up as a gold standard this-is-how-you-do-it, I-have-all-the-answers kind of enterprise. All of them either come from a place where they want to help people because ‘helping people is their passion’, or from a place where they are simply keeping a record of their own journey, and somehow the blogosphere has latched on. I imagine there’s crossover, where people start writing what they’re living, and then when they get a following and more importantly an income stream, they then become the ‘helping people’ sort. Honestly, the blogs with the most value to me are the ones that chronicle a journey–just an honest assessment of what’s going on. The best ones will deliver this message in such a way that it’s never, ever unclear that this is their life. This is what’s happening with them, and that they do not, nor can they, give any more of a shit about their readership’s lives than exactly what’s printed there. The problem happens when the whole thing gets commodified. When you’re a brand, and you become an example. Cue Uncle Ben wisely stating “with great power comes great responsibility”. Bloggers who put themselves out there as examples are then a “what to do” class, and those folks will be the ones the readership compare themselves to and get depressed. Leading us to…

Consuming information. People are strange, unpredictable, and above all else, unique things. I’m not going to go into a psychological diatribe about personalities and need states and all that. But I will say, people want to feel like they’re doing their best, and they want to feel like they’re OK. Whether that’s OK by their own definition or OK by some idea of what they think OK should be. The thing that gets lost is that no one’s life is anyone else’s life. “Be yourself–everyone else is taken.” People don’t get that. Shit, I don’t get that depending upon my mood on any given day. That’s why people get upset when the mold doesn’t fit. No blogger anywhere can help anyone by helping them help themself. These folks simply are not close enough, the internet being what it is. People will take things in through their own filters.

That last bit is both the most important part, and something that no blogger has any control over. I guess I just want the “A list” group to know that once you’re a brand, you’re not going to help anyone by putting things out there as “yes, you can do it–look at me”. It’s bullshit.

We as readers, on the other hand, have to know that what’s out there is for us only in as much as we can use it as a tool to jig what we already have, from where we already are, and only if we truly can and want to. That’s a leap most people can’t make all the time. JD hit it on the head:

When you read what other folks do to save money, don’t feel judged. In real life, listen to what others are thinking or saying, but don’t let their notions bring you down. They’re not you. They aren’t living your life. They have their own strengths and weaknesses, just as you have yours. Make the most of what you have. Do what works for you. Instead of comparing yourself to others, compare your Present Self to your Past Self. Your goal is to constantly improve your own life, if only in little ways.

I say you can replace the “to save money” with “to lose weight”, “to declutter”, “to be a better person”, or any of that other good stuff just as easy. Be OK with you. You’re a work in progress, and that’s OK. I think that above paragraph should be plastered on all the “A-list” bloggers sites. It still won’t help the masses who truly want to ignore it or don’t get it, but it’s a good step.