Where Most "Meaning of Life" and "Life Purpose" Books Might Mislead You

You can't write a book called The Meaning of Life: A guide to finding your life's purpose and not have a strong opinion as to challenges with most philosophy, self-help, and personal growth books. Obviously, there are many, many takes on the question of what the point of it all is, and the overwhelming majority of them are honest and have positive intent. However, I have read hundreds of them and found that there was one thing that I thought should be dissected and explained but never was: how does life work, and what causes the recommendations provided in these books to lead you to a more meaningful life? Without that explanation, people might do the wrong thing for them or do the right thing accidentally only to not know what happened when it stops working for them.

I'd like to make a post explaining the trade-offs being made in this type of literature and how the majority of them make the same ones, thus missing out on parts the explanation that would help certain segments of the population. The following is a list of those trade-offs, why they are made, and how you can account for them when you read them so you do not misinterpret or misapply the advice:

• They Presume a Goal – The reason for this trade-off is quite obvious: the only way to give actionable advice on how to get somewhere is to define where you are going. The drawback, of course, being that if you do not have that goal, at best the book is useless to you and at worst you are being led in the wrong direction for your life. So most texts assume that you want some of the universal wants in life: happiness, health, wealth, relationships, friendships and family bonds, or significance/excellence. Books with a clear target market put the goal in the title so you only buy it if you have that goal, but the ones that offer catch-all solutions will state the above goals as what everyone wants and provide a formula or set of instructions to get them. To avoid going down the wrong path, make sure that your goals are aligned with the book's.

• They Prescribe Ethics – Similar to the goal, the trade-off here is that most people want guidance on how to proceed to find meaning in life, so they are looking for a prescription. Therefore, purpose books often give you a strict set of rules to follow to achieve the success that either the authors have achieved or that the philosopher believes will make a good life (I'm looking at you, Aristotle). The drawbacks of this trade-off are two-fold: if your goal is not exactly the same, then the exact same ethics will not apply; even if your goal is the same, there are many paths to achieving a goal and so a variety of potentially useful ethics that might apply to you and not to others. In the former, exercise 30 minutes per day, three days per week might be good for most people, but it will not be sufficient if you are training for a marathon (i.e., a different goal). In the latter, you might want to stay in shape but prefer outdoor exercise to indoor gym exercise, which might be the examples that the author provides. If your goal or optimal approach is not the same, then the suggested ethics could be off for you.

• They Make Unprovable Assumptions That Influence Their Advice – Of course, here I am referring to any theological or spiritual guidance that assumes where life came from, where it goes when it dies, and what you should do in life as a result. Even atheistic and nihilistic philosophical texts that try to counter those forms of guidance will start with the unprovable assumption that nothing exists but what you can observe in your physical reality. In either case, they run into the "God exists; therefore, don't eat meat on Fridays during Lent" problem: not only is the guidance based on unprovable assumptions, but you often get recommendations to do things that you don't understand (and, sometimes, aren't explained to you) because no one ever explains the causal relationship between the assumption and the recommendation. Unfortunately, this problem still exists in the criticisms, just in the opposing form of, "Nothing else exists, therefore your life is meaningless." That is just as dangerous, since the additional assumption based on the unprovable assumption is that something beyond this universe would have to exist to give this existence meaning (spoiler alert: it does not).
• They Assume That What Works for Them Will Work for You – Humble authors will openly admit that they don't know everything and present an honest account of how they did something. There are formats such as biographies that are not advice-centric and so they can just report what they did without implying that you can do it, too. But most content in the self-help genre is meant to be "rah rah" in the sense that it motivates you, so they do the best they can to send the message, "If I can do it, anyone can!" Now I want to give many of them credit for openly stating that they cannot assume that what worked for them will work for you, but they have to assume that it will at least be useful in helping others find their way or they couldn't write anything useful. If those assumptions are wrong, such as someone who just happened to get lucky by getting into an industry (e.g., podcasting, cryptocurrency) early, then the advice will not work for you.
• Their Beliefs Influence Their Recommendations – This trade-off is inevitable because you have to have a set of beliefs and assumptions underlying any proposition you make. But many people's recommendations incorporate their beliefs even when they don't need to. That could be anything from someone recommending a certain brand of product when they don't have to, someone recommending a certain field or type of mate based on their own preferences, or someone suggesting a certain set of rules based on their opinions of certain people, systems, etc. It is difficult to know what advice requires a belief to be true and what advice could be given without making as many assumptions, so this is not easy even when you try to avoid it. It is much easier to target an audience with a similar belief system and help them more since they hold the same beliefs as you than to do a catch-all where you please no one because they all want you to assume certain things to be true and are offended that you don't. (note: I ran into this myself when I tried to set the question of whether God exists aside for my book and tried to give an argument to theists to bear with me as I do that; I received criticism from both sides about how I was taking the other side just because I wasn't vehemently on their side!)
• They Oversimplify and Use Figurative Language for Memorability and Marketability – There's no getting around that people have limited attention spans these days and that having a simple message with beautiful stories behind it is the most tried-and-true method for both attention and retention. There is also the need to brand things for trademark, copyright, patent, and marketing purposes. That's why everything comes down to a few-step process, a secret success formula, or a [Brand-Name] system that you need to follow. Obviously, this approach works magnificently or people wouldn't use it, but the trade-off here is that there are factors that have to be left out and messages that might be misconstrued because of the simple, attention-grabbing messaging. As such, you might go in the wrong direction if you misinterpret or misapply the recommendations—even though said messaging at least got you to act (or buy!) where you might not have otherwise.

It is inevitable that you will run into these problems as you read these kinds of texts, and so this post will hopefully help you look out for them and account for them as you read them. Just note that these are not criticisms per se as much as they are helping you understand the unspoken drawbacks that come with the benefits that the author sees in making those choices.

In case it's not obvious, these are the very problems that led me to writing my own book on the topic, focusing on a science-based approach to life philosophy and figuring out the scientific drivers of a human's sense of meaning. In it, I made the opposite of all of these trade-offs since I had never seen a book try to do it (since these techniques work to either push the author's agenda to influence the reader or help with sales and adoption of the material). As such, I face the opposite of these problems:

• I don't assume a goal, meaning that I can help you figure out how to identify one yourself but can't be as specific in recommending exactly what to do for that goal.
  
• I don't prescribe ethics, so you can't just take a list of specific do's and don'ts from the book to achieve your exact goal (yes, I violate the "don't make me think!" rule).
• I make no unprovable assumptions, so you might prefer to hear from someone who thinks the same way as you do on that matter.
• I don't provide "This worked for me!" testimonials or success stories to convince you as to its efficacy, as I focus on proving how it works instead of trying to dazzle you with outstanding results.
• With fewer assumptions made, I must provide fewer definitive, absolute conclusions—i.e., how to figure it out vs. what to do is less likely to mislead but also less likely to drive action.
• I kept the simple terms (i.e., eight drivers described in one word) but then provide a lot of detailed, literal, scientific explanations that might lose some people for the sake of precision and correctness.

No book will be perfect for everyone because everyone is at a different point in his or her life and will, therefore, need to receive information in a very exact way to be optimal given the current state. But since most—if not all—books I've read on the topic seem to make those same trade-offs, I figured that making the complete opposite trade-offs would serve the one niche I never really saw catered to: people who want to understand how life works so they could make the best decisions for themselves. If that is you, then I suggest my book before most others; if you would rather get the simple answers or learn from an author who makes some of the same base assumptions as you, then that is perfectly fine and I suggest that you find the right one for you. In the latter case, hopefully the above list will at least keep you aware of the trade-offs so that you know how to account for them when you try to incorporate any philosophy or advice into your life.