BY STEWART SLATER

“I’m just not myself today” is one of those phrases we have all used, but which makes little sense. For if we are not ourselves, who are we? Are we being, as the medieval mind might have it, plagued by demons? Are we, like the characters in a 1950’s B-movie, under the control of aliens? Have we undergone some mysterious process of metamorphosis through which we have miraculously become someone else?  

Of course not. We use the phrase when we have done something less than praiseworthy – made a mistake at work or snapped at a partner, perhaps. It is an excuse, a way of avoiding blame. But it works because it reflects how we think of ourselves. We believe that there is something, a “self”, which is uniquely “us”, which persists more or less unchanging through time and which has certain characteristics. Since we generally wish to think well of ourselves, we tend to believe that the characteristics our selves have are positive (others may take a different view). They are who we really are, so when we do something wrong, this cannot be a reflection on them, which must remain pristine, but on something else, something “not us” which we never bother to define.  

This approach will be familiar to anyone who has ever found themselves in the “self-help” section of a bookshop or listened to any of the countless podcasts in the genre (including those produced by “f**cking grifters” in California). There is always some real “you” which is good and anything about you which is less than ideal is, somehow, “inauthentic” – not “you”. Just as medieval indulgence-sellers promised, “As soon as the guilder into the basin sinks, the soul into heaven springs”, merely buying the book/attending an event/listening to the podcast will be enough to scrape off these barnacles of inauthenticity and liberate your “real self”.  

It is curious, however, how similar these “real selves” actually are. As soon as the “fake self” is stripped away, their owners automatically acquire the job/house/car/friends/gorgeous partner and holidays they desire. Those of a leftier persuasion than me might wonder why a consumerist society has decided that one’s best self is the one which is able to consume the most, but that is an argument for another author. Let us content ourselves with noting that no-one who has unleashed their “real self” is ever thought to be sweeping the floor in the dead of night at a provincial Burger King.

We may admit that humans exist on a spectrum in every characteristic we have discovered but strangely, by some alchemical process, our “real” selves all have the same destiny.  

If the end-states offered by the varying players in the market are remarkably similar, so too are the routes they use to get there. All one needs is an updated version of an ancient spiritual practice. But “updated” often serves as a synonym for “cut-down”. The point of spiritual practices is that they are hard. They demand patience, discipline and, often, discomfort.

Not, perhaps, words readily associated with modern humans. Like homoeopathy, therefore, self-help argues that tiny doses of ancient approaches are sufficient to treat the ailing modern. Stoicism is numbered by academics among the “virtue ethics” because it preached the cultivation of virtue, something which few, if any, would ever achieve. The highest profile work of modern neo-stoicism, however, mentions the word not once. According to the scholar D.T. Suzuki, a Zen novice is thought to begin fleetingly to glimpse the faintest outlines of meditation when he is doing it for four hours at a stretch. A modern human is told that mastery and its attendant benefits can be achieved merely by listening to an app for ten minutes on the tube.  

If the therapy offered by self-help is best described as “Buddhism/Stoicism without the bad stuff”, practitioners of these traditions would perhaps describe its aim as “Buddhism/Stoicism without the good stuff” for the targets these borrowed practices are aimed at are fundamentally alien to their original schools. In the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures, a metaphor for Zen Buddhist development, “whip, rope, person, and Ox – all merge in No Thing.” Enlightenment consists not in finding your true self, but in realising that there is no self to find. Stoics did not believe that the “real self”, if it could be discovered, was perfect; humans were inherently flawed. Nor, would its discovery lead to wealth/fame/whatever. These things depend on the outworkings of fate – the point of Stoicism was to bear the result with equanimity.  

If self-help, then, fundamentally misunderstands its tools, this is merely part of its greater misunderstanding of the problem. For, while we may like to believe that there is some core, knowable “real” self to which we can be reduced and which is good, this is nothing more than a convenient story we tell ourselves.  

As we noted earlier, when we say, “I’m not myself”, we never bother to say who did the thing for which we are attempting to avoid blame. There is a good reason for that. It is, of course, ourselves. But that means that we need to acknowledge that we are capable of doing wrong, that instead of the purely good characteristics we believe we have, we also contain an admixture of bad. If our “selves” are to describe who we really are, we need to expand our definition to include these rather than shrink it to exclude them.  

The psychologist Carl Jung is credited with inventing this distinction. He talked of the persona, the image we present to ourselves and the world, but also the shadow – the darker parts of our personalities which we hide from others, and from ourselves. However, it is only by reckoning with this shadow that we can become complete individuals, that we can understand ourselves. The persona is “that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.”

It is ironic that in its mission to liberate our real selves, self-help, by concentrating on our fictional personas rather than our actual shadows, actually moves us further away from understanding them.  

This is not to say that really knowing ourselves is easy. Jung thought it should be everyone’s mission but, like the Stoics and virtue, doubted anyone would ever achieve it. Minds, he argued, recoil from confronting their shadow, and only do so with great effort. Beyond that, however, there is much which is really us, of which we are unaware. We might reasonably include our bodies in such a definition, but how aware are you of your spleen? Do you know it is there? Have you ever experienced it? Unless it has gone wrong, the only reason to believe you have one is that, like numerous other organs, medicine insists you do.  

Even if we restrict our “selves” to our minds, there is much that is mysterious. We cannot predict what we will be thinking in five minutes’ time. We have no direct access to our subconscious, all we can do is watch the thoughts it sends bubbling up to our awareness and try to draw some general conclusions. Even then, we can be wrong – we have all found ourselves surprised by our reactions to some event.  

A popular metaphor in modern psychology is that of the elephant and the mahout. Our conscious minds are a small man on top of a much larger, more powerful creature over which he has some, but not total control. To define the pair, we need to understand both man and elephant, not just some parts of the man, as self-help would have it. For we are bigger than we like to credit. Rather than rely on misunderstood tools from misunderstood traditions to solve a misunderstood problem, remember, instead, the original Western words of self-help, the motto of the Delphic oracle – Γνωθι συτον –  “know thyself”.  

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.