” And I think that really holds self-help back-the promise of easy results.Īs far as the resonance it has for this time, I didn’t know quarantine was going to happen when I wrote the material, but I do hope that the last chapter in particular-the one about being your own friend-could be helpful for people feeling a similar type of loneliness to what I was feeling when I wrote it. A realistic self-help book wouldn ’t sound like “Easily banish your anxiety with these simple tricks!” It would sound like “Moderately improve your anxiety over a span of many years by continuously choosing to do the hard thing instead of the easy thing, and there’s no real end point-you have to keep going indefinitely if you want to keep improving. Like, it sort of feels like self-help books are designed more to sell books than to offer practical help. I think self-improvement itself is a good thing, but sometimes the message gets a little muddled. What do you think about our self-improvement culture generally? I see them, they see me, and that’s enough. They didn’t know they were my friends, but I like it that way. It felt comforting to go to the grocery store. There have been years where going to the grocery store was my main form of socialization. It was also about the one-way grocery-store friendships I have. You can have good intentions, and end up causing weird things to happen, but you’ve still got to try, you know?

It was so funny, but it was deeper than that too.Īmong other things, that chapter was secretly about intentions. You had a chapter about trying to practice loving-kindness, joking that you’d always thought you’d be one of the greats at that.

How the solutions themselves become the next generation of problems. Allie Brosh: So, you know that thing where you have a problem, and in trying to solve the problem you generate a brand new type of problem? It’s sort of about that.

Allie find love or die trying