A razor-sharp nonfiction book that dissects the failures of the bloated self-help industrial complex to improve our lives, while also unearthing what real change could look like.

PEOPLE SKILLS:
The Impossible Task of Personal Growth–and Why Change is the Answer
by Lily Scherlis
Liveright / Norton (US) / Hutchinson Heinemann (UK), publication date TBC
(via The Gernert Company)

Psychology is rife with metaphors, and today’s self-help movement is no different: you can “optimize” your routine, as if you are designing an app; you can set better boundaries, as if you are a lawn; you can say when you’re “at capacity,” as if you are a battery; or you can “invest” in self-care, as if you are a stockbroker on the trading floor of the soul. From a pragmatist’s perspective, borrowing the language of the times to instill psychological insights makes perfect sense, and when self-help advice sounds so intuitive, it’s easy to buy in. But problems arise when we mistake metaphors forged in the crucible of our hyper-individualized neoliberal culture for a true metaphysics of the mind. You may indeed have a 401k, but you are neither a lawn nor a battery. 

In PEOPLE SKILLS, Lily Scherlis places the concepts so many of us cling to for sanity as we navigate an increasingly uncertain world–think attachment styles, emotional intelligence, and even the idea of people skills itself–in sociopolitical context, from cold war ideological panic to anxieties unleashed by globalization. Many of these ideas have their origins in legitimate psychological insights and research, and some of them can be helpful, some of the time. But when they are warped, watered down, and overapplied, they give rise to a curious paradox: As inadequate institutions crumble and we are forced deeper into financial and emotional dependence upon one another, our primary yardstick for measuring our own well-being is the ability to perform independence. In a society that values economic growth at all costs, the only way to avoid being left behind is to keep growing yourself; in a world getting worse, the only solution is to be better. 

But this is an impossible task: In the never-ending quest for self-improvement, the goal is always just out of reach–which is exactly how the $1.5 billion self-help industry wants it. Lily gives us permission to step off the hamster wheel of personal growth and think about other ways of addressing our problems—and to question whether they’re really problems at all. We are intrinsically interdependent beings, she reminds us, whose obligations to ourselves are never really divorced from our obligations to one another, and when we retreat to our own private spheres in order to self-actualize, we merely atomize our troubles, disappoint ourselves, and reinforce the status quo. In encouraging us to flex new psychic muscles instead of reaching for the same canned jargon, PEOPLE SKILLS ends up being its own kind of self-help, ironically. For Lily, the goal is not growth but change–for ourselves, and for our world. Neither can happen without the other.

Lily Scherlis is a writer and artist, and a PhD candidate in English and Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. Her writing has appeared in n+1, Harper’s, The Guardian, Parapraxis, The Baffler, The Drift, and Cabinet, among other venues. She lives in Brooklyn.