Dumbing Down Is Not A New Thing

MikeachimThe Everyday12 Comments

During our travels we have consorted with several kings, as different in their manners and their opinions as are the different geographical situations of their countries, yet little by little we have found among them the same accord in recognizing that all traces of science have vanished and that its splendour is spent; learning has become too general and has lost its depth; and one no longer sees any but people filled with vanity and ignorance, imperfect scholars who are content with superficial ideas and do not recognise the truth…

Masʿūdī (896-956 AD, historian, traveller, geographer and naturalist: “the Herodotus of the Arabs”).

“From The Meadows Of Gold”, Penguin Great Journeys No. 2 (2007).

Read the 1841 translation here.

Image: h.koppdelaney

How To Read A Self Help Book

MikeachimThe Everyday17 Comments

Help, by Dimitri N. - Flickr

First the snark…then the rant. If I start to go blue, call someone. Thanks.

It’s true what they say. We’re beyond all help – living the wrong lives, governed by the wrong rules and surrounded by the wrong people. All our achievements are meaningless because they got us here, mired up to the neck in the sucking dreadfulness of modern life. Life? Don’t talk to me about life. Life is a string of dillusionments and we’re tangled tighter than iPod headphones fished out a deep pocket. Ever day is the same as the last one – or worse than it. It’s all broken. We’re broken.

And on and on, they whine at us.

I’m so very sick of bad self-help literature making our lives miserable.

There’s way too many people out there claiming to be lifestyle experts (rather like the “SEO guru” infestation on Twitter. Come on – they can’t all be experts). And why the glut? Because demand is sky-high. We’re convinced that our lives need fixing. In fact, we’re more worried than ever. Can it be that all the previous self-help bestsellers, the Anthony Robbinses, the Dale Carnegies, that Tim Ferriss book…they’ve all failed? So should we keep buying their books? When a mechanic consistently fails to repair your car, should you keep going back to him?

But maybe it’s not the lifestyle coaches that are failing. Maybe it’s us.

Now hold up a second. This is what unscrupulous self-helpists hope we’ll believe. It gets them off the hook. When their methods prove ineffectual, it’s because we did something wrong. We deviated from the tried-and-tested one true path, and now we have to pay – preferably by buying their follow-up bestseller Here’s What You Did Wrong, Stupid.

Meanwhile, we suck. Again. And the circle of non-life turns and turns, and nothing really changes except the price of the books we feel compelled to buy. We’re trapped by a dependency on self-help books. We need saving from help itself.

(Talk about screwed).

But maybe it is us. Maybe it’s the way we’re reacting to all this self-improvement advice. Maybe that’s where we’re broken.

So what’s the answer? For just $0.00 plus ten simple, affordable payments of $0, I’m going to show you how – with my 3-step plan to Help Yourself Self-Help.Read More

A Scilly Swim (But Not Yet)

MikeachimThe Everyday5 Comments

Tresco by Tom Corser

The approaching shoreline is an arresting one. A few yards up the cream-coloured beach it’s England – well-kept hedgerows, chalk-dust paths, everything with that tamed look so welcoming to Anglophiles. Except this is the Atlantic. All around, the UK continental shelf is having one last fling with the open air – a scatter of low granite islands, nibbled inwards with half-circles of white beach as if the place was drafted with a pair of compasses. There’s so much sky it gives me a kind of reverse vertigo…

But I’m not looking upwards. I’m looking down.

When can we go swimming, Dad?Read More