January is the best month of the year. The month when the new you emerges, the real you, free of carbs and alcohol, clear headed, back in the gym and 100 per cent resolute. The month when you can look in the mirror and say, “This year! This year it will be different.”
Self-help books can be useful here. Although generally written with the kind of self-belief that usually precedes an armed uprising, that clarity of thought has its appeal. “Do as I say,” they tell you, “and maybe next year you won’t be stuck to the couch in your pyjamas.” It’s Faustian, but appealing.
But the question is, which one? Self-help books are like personal trainers. Some will coax you out, others just threaten you. But which one is going to unlock that skinnier, brighter, fitter and far wealthier you lurking just beneath the surface? I may have some advice.
Before Covid, I had discovered the enormous pleasure of listening to audiobooks while walking the dog, a rare bit of multitasking that had seen me progress from West Cork to Stephen Hawking’s Brief Answers to Big Questions. To the average observer I looked like a man in a woolly hat walking a dog, but in reality I was man grappling with the big questions AND walking a dog. “Where is God in the Big Bang theory?” I might have been thinking as you went past.
When Covid hit, though, I knew that the powers of the universe, wherever they might reside, were delivering into my lap a great gift. The 2km limit, a dog, audio books and a lot of free time were the new Lottery numbers. Throw into this mix the “self-help audiobook” and we had the nuclear fission of life change.
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The first book I spotted was The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, by Mark Manson. The title appealed to me. I would enter Covid cheerful but naive and emerge surly, bad tempered but focused. With chapter titles such as “Happiness is a Problem”, “You are Not Special”, “Rejection makes your Life Better”, and “You’re Wrong about Everything”, I knew I’d come to the right place. “Get your lead, canine friend,” I barked, “the future is here.”
But there was a problem. The audiobook was only five hours long. I had it finished by day three, and had more questions than answers. I spotted You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero. The clincher, again, was the chapter titles — “Your Brain is your Bitch” and “Lead with your Crotch” particularly appealed.
Jen was big on being comfortable with making large amounts of money. “Money, Your New Best Friend,” was one chapter. I liked this a lot. I liked envisaging a very wealthy version of myself. I like my existing friends but a new one called Money — well, go on, push up on the couch.
Jen’s book seemed to want to prepare me for the problems that vast wealth would bring me before even telling me how to actually get the cash. If it had come with furnishing tips for your new home, holiday guides and a Duolingo course in Italian for your new life on Lake Garda I wouldn’t have been surprised. But once again, it was only five hours. This wasn’t giving me long enough to become comfortable with property prices on the Upper West side of Manhattan.
Enter Atomic Habits by James Clear. I wasn’t blown away by the chapter titles — “The Secret to Self-Control,” “How to make a Habit Irresistible.” Where was the hyperbole? At its core was the idea that small incremental changes in your life eventually translate to profound change. The only change I made was to stop listening.
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I was ready for the big one, Jordan Peterson’s Twelve Rules for Life. The subtitle, “An Antidote to Chaos”, said it all. And 15 hours duration, yes. Now we were talking. With chapter titles such as “Stand up Straight with Your Shoulders Back”, I knew this was the tough love I needed. The beast we needed to become, his evolutionary bad boy, he explained, was the lobster.
A lobster is not an animal you want to make an enemy of. They’ve been around for millions of years, and not by accident. They do not take prisoners. They are what we must aspire to be. But there was a problem. Jordan narrates the book himself. It took a few days but I recognised him as a man I didn’t want with me on the walk. If you’d met him on your walk you’d have crossed the road to avoid him — having him in your headphones was torture. Plus, one small point: if lobsters are so brilliant, why does it end so badly for them, so often? How can you top the evolutionary tree and still end up being served in garlic butter with a green salad? Sorry, I’m not feeling the inspiration there.
I had also started to detect a bit of a pattern to these books. You struggle a bit in life and as you are trying to find yourself you read a lot of self-help books. Then you have a Damascene moment and discover that the key to turning your life around is to become a bestselling self-help book author. It’s the ultimate case of “those who can’t, teach”.
There are recurring tropes. Believe in yourself, for a start, surround yourself with good people, move away from people who are negative in your life and develop good, healthy habits.
Despite the walks, and the dog’s incredible fitness, I emerged with precious few insights except that those people I have met in life who have exhibited “incredible self -belief” have only ever seemed to find that belief when they had nowhere else to turn. The thought reminded me a bit of the serenity prayer. We all still need the wisdom to accept the things we can’t change, but we also need the abs, friendships, support mechanisms and low-carb diets to change the things we can.
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• If 2023 isn’t the year when a “crack team” of climate experts is surreptitiously assembled by White House boffins to save the planet, then I recommend you stop buying long-playing albums. If scientists aren’t being awoken as you read this, stop investing in your pension.
Stop making long-term plans. Start doing today what you could do tomorrow. Finish that box set. Put on your good clothes. Start using the “good” room. Drink the special wine. Stop collecting things. Explore the world of winter sun holidays.
These are just the common sense things. If the scientists are still asleep by Easter you should consider crime, polyamory, spending money you will never have and tattoos you will not live long enough to regret. Dogs will, at last, really be “just for Christmas”.
It all hinges on the “crack team”. Our image of these is based mostly on Hollywood movies. Good looking, genius goofballs, who are at last given the keys to daddy’s car. The reality, I suspect, might be closer to Kwasi Kwarteng’s brief Ferris Bueller’s Day Off moment with the UK economy.
In our household this is playing out in the shape of a wood-burning stove. It has been suggested that it would be “perfect in the kitchen”. I have urged caution. Is this not the domestic equivalent of opening a coal mine? I have also quoted Greta Thunberg at length. I do not wish, this late in life, to attract that kind of “energy” on my socials.
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However, should you meet me in 2023, and there is faint whiff of kiln dried ash about me, stop buying drinks that “take a while to settle”. Start drinking shorts, or possibly even shots.
