I don’t actually relish all that much in being mean on this blog. I genuinely concede that people are giving there level best with their writing. I don’t feel like the world is full of people out to cash in by being frauds. Elle Luna likely thinks she has helped with her book. I don’t agree. I disagree enough that I think it is worth my sitting down and actively discouraging people from reading this book.
All works of self-help are bad. It boils down to this much – your problems are very specific, and the advice these books give are rather general. If it was advice catered to you, it wouldn’t be helpful to anyone else. That is the insurmountable hurdle Elle Luna, and all other people who want to write these things, must cross. But I was seduced by the title, because I go to bed every night wishing we could all live in a world with just a few hours more. I very rarely do the things I want to do (which are things I codify as ‘Must’), because the things I have to do (as in, ‘obliged to by the world we live in’) must come first, if I want to see myself through the winter. What I was hoping this book was that might help me come to reconceptualize these things in my own head, and thus find a way to strike a better balance.
No such luck.
This book is utter garbage. A privileged person talking about how she made choices where consequences have no teeth. Not all of us live in that world. Some of us are poor. For some of us, must is going to the job we hate to keep ourselves fed and housed. What can I say. I like living. I’ve been doing it as long as I can remember. This author just expects us to ‘follow our hearts’. Some of us live in a world of consequences.
If this book has any virtues to its name, its that it is blessedly short. I’ve read longer things on the New York Times. In fact, this started as a medium post, and I wondered how condensed it has gotten from there. The book was also filled with drawings among the mussings (which my kindle couldn’t process, and so I had to read this book on my computer, which led me to figure out for short it was). I ended up finishing it in one day. Thank god it was a library book.
Failures in Polymathy 