I’ve never been a big Tim Ferris fan. “The Four-Hour Work Week” just kind of pissed me off, really.
But this is a good article, where I feel like he calls himself to account.
[The Self-Help Trap: What 20+ Years of “Optimizing” Has Taught Me])(https://tim.blog/2026/03/04/the-self-help-trap/)
“You can spend your whole life preparing for, instead of playing, the game of life. But why would anyone, including yours truly, succumb to this? … Subconsciously, it spares you from the messiest but most rewarding game of all: human interaction.”
Life is really messy, and we (me, and yes, you too) generally suck. We’re irrational about some things, we have bad habits, we’re inconsistent, etc. etc. etc.
I get tired of people claiming they can remove all the negative aspects of the human condition. Because they can’t. And when someone tries to follow their advice and fails, they think it’s a deeper problem with them, rather than with the stupidity of the advice itself.
Someone once told me that “guilt” is when you think, “I did something bad.”
But “shame” is when you extend that thought with, “…because I am a bad person.”
Too often, the self-help addiction takes guilt and turns it into shame.