I have suspected for a long time that the art of self-improvement (you might call it a cult or a fetish) has had a large BS component. I recall with amusement a housemate priming himself in front of a picture of a BMW, intoning something along the lines of "I'm a winner" over and over again. His long-suffering companions had also to put up with marketing sessions in the living room and motivation tapes played over and over. After six months or so of this conditioning, resistance was difficult. Truly, you can start to believe the cliches, generalisations and pat responses, all washed down with a beery mix of pseudo-Friedman/Rand neo-liberalism. Soon enough you are signing up to sell plastic containers (yes, I did) or attending Amway meetings(no, I didn't).

This was the extreme end of the self-improvement quest, the one tied in with making money. It is still with us and the players are unrepentant, even though many of them make their stash off the backs of ordinary people. My friend (of the previous paragraph) ripped off friends and family to achieve his so-called winning outcomes.

At a less mendacious level, most people seem to have bought into the notion that self-development is a key aspect of life. Looking within to find strength, joy, renewal, healing etc has been a leitmotif of the past 40 years. It has given rise to endless self-help books, flirtations with Eastern religions, programs, activities, fads and the like, most returning in another guise cyclically. The over-arching doctrine might best be summed up as the power of positive thinking, a power which has led, through its unrestrained application, to a kind of neurosis.

The Danish psychologist Svend Brinkman puts this much better than me.

"We are only allowed to be positive, we are only allowed to be happy and anything that threatens these states of mind is considered wrong."

and

"People's problems are explained with reference to the fact that they weren't positive enough"

It is not hard to see where this might lead - the constant seeking of our inner potential is likely to be exhausting and ultimately debilitating. Depression rates are soaring even as more and more people sign up to the doctrine. Brinkman argues for a healthy dose of negativity bolstered by some Stoic philosophy as a palliative.

For decades I have called myself an optimist, without really quite believing it to be so. Maybe it was all the nagging of those self-help tomes and the indoctrination of that living room in the share house. I am guessing that it might be better to call myself a realist, a position which calls out for a balance between unbridled positivity and gloomy pessimism. Or perhaps a cautious optimist? I don't know.