Assassinate Your Friendship With the World: Noah Cicero’s Thank You: The Path of Acceptance & Gratitude – Conor Hultman
November 18, 2024
I do not read self-help books. That does not mean I am uninterested in helping myself. I think self-help books are comparable to pornography. They do not offer any original thought. They are used to make yourself feel good. I value self-help less than pornography because the latter is honest about itself. No one using pornography believes they are self-helping, merely self-abusing. It seems that many people buy self-help books, and most who do probably believe it can help them.
I read Thank You: The Path of Acceptance & Gratitude because Noah Cicero is a very good writer. Three previous books I have read and admired greatly. Bipolar Cowboy (2015) is the book I recommend to anyone expressing discontent with contemporary poetry. It has two poems that almost made me cry, really. One is about the author wanting to talk to an ex so torturously that he texts her to beg her not to answer his calls. The other is about Hulk Hogan earnestly appealing to the author’s inner six-year-old to not give up on himself. Cicero can spin potent gold out of ludicrous straw.
This is all to say, I thought if anyone could write the first good self-help book, it might be Noah Cicero. I was mistaken. Thank You has all the innocuous vapidity of the rest of its genre. Its only coherence is “love.” Its uniform is soft and shapeless. I cannot imagine any idea inside not being already thought of by every person on Earth at some point in their life. I wondered if this was not another Noah Cicero, but the author biography reassured me.
The general philosophy, if you can call it that, is not unrepresented in Cicero’s creative work. Las Vegas Bootlegger: Empire of Self-Importance (2020), his most recent novel, is all about an alienated lawyer who, on discovering that most of his coworkers despise him, sets out to love himself and help others. It is strange to see here a writer’s beliefs set out so nakedly. Thank You is like an explanation no one needed, the ideological spine of all his works without the tissue and nerves. It worked better as literature than as platitudes.
Self-help steals a lot from philosophy and religion, which is why it is often confused for them. Thank You most resembles an ecumenical Buddhism, desaturated of any imperatives but “Please love yourself and others.” The assumed readership is the broadest possible denominator, irrespective of background. Some of the ideas are contradictory to certain faiths and traditions, especially as regards values and ethics. It is too optimistic to assume all people can be dispensed the same advice like this. People take advice too readily today, and from unvetted sources. You should only take advice from those you personally know, or want to emulate.
Self-help is distinct from philosophy or religion as a product term. As such, rather than describing how things are or ought to be, self-help is prescribed on a consumer-by-consumer basis. “Who is this book for?” Perennial wisdom suffers no such question. James Stockdale endured seven and a half years of torture in the Hanoi Hilton with the philosophy of Epictetus. I cannot imagine a person so far gone that I would give them this collection of healing whispers and ASMR palaver. If they were dear to me, I would sooner have them sedated and committed.