Why Simply Hustling Harder Won't Help You With the Big Problems in Life 

There is an implicit promise hidden in the millions of words spilled on time management, productivity, and self-help: if we could just figure out the right strategy, we’d finally be able to live a more meaningful life.

“American culture has popular theories about how to build a perfect life,” writes Kate Bowler in her new book No Cure For Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear). “You can have it all if you just learn how to conquer your limits. There is infinity lurking somewhere at the bottom of your inbox or in the stack of self-help books on the bedside table.”

This guarantee of the American self-help industry is the same one Bowler saw in her work as a historian of Christianity at Duke’s Divinity School, that “everything is possible if you will only believe.” But at age 35, Bowler was diagnosed with incurable stage IV colon cancer, throwing into sharp relief ideas about productivity, efficiency, grind culture, time, and the lie that getting life “right” is simply about finding the right strategy.

In No Cure For Being Human, Bowler, who has been able to manage her cancer with immunotherapy, explores what it’s like to spend years studying and learning about how to conquer your limits, only to run into a limit that refuses to be conquered. After spending so much time steeped in our efficiency-obsessed “gospel of hustle,” which always demands more, pushing us to conquer every to-do list (which would allow us to finally graduate to doing everything on our bucket list), she describes the book as a project in “trying to figure out what enoughness feels like.”

So we were curious to ask her how to cope with that feeling of having too much to do and too little time to do it, which self-help cliches are bullshit, and what to do when you find yourself in a situation where self-help doesn’t help much at all.

In the book, you write, "I found moments of enoughness without the promise of more.” That “moment of enoughness” feels like the place we're all thinking we can get to by getting to the bottom of our inbox.

We are believers in the gospel of hustle, the gospel of efficiency and the gospel of time management. We are convinced that we need to just discipline ourselves into better routines. I'm a historian of self-help, so I've read hundreds and hundreds of these formulas. I sincerely tried to look at all the advice that I was getting. In each one, there's always a little bit of wisdom, always kind of a great idea in there. But the whole idea of a formula breaks down when it can't solve the problem of being a person. It doesn't solve the problem of pain. For example, the gospel of hustle, the more I worked, the more work I got. Even success looks like failure, and I was just trying to get to the end of the mythical workday.

You’ve studied the prosperity gospel—this idea that in return for faith, God will provide for you—but have you also studied other, non-faith-related self-help as well?

Well, it’s a common misconception that self-help is not a spiritual genre, which it is. It's largely based on the metaphysical tradition that imagines that our minds are powerful incubators. It has formed some of the primary assumptions of what we call the American Dream. It’s individualistic, and assumes a very inflated sense of agency. It's hyper instrumentalist, meaning it always assumes that you don't just have truth, you need tools, you have to make everything into a strategy. All of those are really based on beliefs that have a long religious past. That metaphysical tradition believed that the mind was the most important spiritual generator, that our minds were the thing that aligned the power of the universe with our own abilities. That was the beginning of “good vibes only.” [laughs].

It's the beginning of this obsessively modern iteration of the self-made man, especially the self-made businessman. It came out of the rise of cities, rise of income inequality, people started selling these cheap self-help books on street corners that tried to explain why some people rose and other people fell. There's different versions, but all of them have the same belief in a rabid individualism. Some look explicitly religious, others look Pentecostal, others look like just cowboy movies, people who can always do it on their own.

It slowly grows into this stable of literature we call self-help, which is there to support the idea that if an individual just takes on a certain set of habits and mindsets, they will be able to conquer any of their circumstances. That little set of beliefs is the heart of self-help, and it just has a very long history in American culture.

As a historian of self-help, what are some of the stickiest traps? What are some of the things that feel most like, "Oh yeah, that's the answer!”

The first is convincing people that they're invincible, and that all they need to do is harness that energy toward the goal. Another great lie is, "Everything you need is already inside of you.” It's such bullshit. Most of what you need is going to be outside of you. It’s structural justice and a community that holds you, and coming to terms with your own limitations and frailties. But you can't sell that. You can't sell seven principles for power thinking if your seven chapters were, "One: Accept Your Limitations; Two: Locate yourself socially to figure out what supports are being denied to you." [laughs] Wouldn't now be a great time to imagine that we are not going to be masters of our destiny? That we’ll all likely need each other in the months ahead? Instead, we have an epidemic of loneliness and a tremendous amount of shame around not having mastered that side hustle, or conquered the capitalistic self.

I guess that's why I'm so interested in uncovering the assumptions underneath self-help, because I think some of the assumptions about our selfhood, about how we're made, about what we're for, are deeply harmful to us. If we continue to promote these stories that we are these self-constituting work robots meant for invincibility and progress, we are going to find ourselves not just very tired, but really confused about our limitations.

Do you think those stories have been precipitated by the retreat of organized religion?

I just don't think that what we think of as secular is secular at all. We're just renaming our religious beliefs as something else. In this case, we're just saying, "My gospel tells me that I should be tireless, my gospel tells me that I should be self-mastering, my gospel tells me that my thoughts are the most important thing about me.” Our economy sped up, our economy bottomed out, and here we are, very confused about whether we're failing or not. I wouldn't describe it so much as a vacuum as a renaming. I always use “secular” in these really sarcastic quotes, but it's really pretty deeply religious in its underpinning.

These ideas that you put forth in the book, the wisdom you’ve gained in your experience of surviving cancer—that no life is finished, that you can't solve the problem of finitude—does any of that change your day-to-day now?

In the first moments of a crisis, it really does put into stark relief what we should love. But that feeling goes away with time. You can't live in crisis mode forever. Part of my hope is to hold onto some of the things I learned right away, just out of sheer horror. [laughs]

I learned that nothing would really get better than the people that I was given, and nothing could be more beautiful than that—being given a kid, a family, and friends to love. I was like, "Well, that's it, part of my job is to just stay completely in love with the people I'm given.” I think that stuck. I've really kept that front of mind, because I don't want to have to relearn that. I know that a lot of survivors feel that way, where I'm scared of forgetting the things I learned.

When you're suffering, life just can become not just really beautiful, but also very flat and hard because you never get a break from it. You have to live on the side of the cliff forever, so it's not like pain naturally gives you a sense of perspective. You just get these little glimpses of it, but then you have to hold on, because otherwise it does fade.

You also write you used to “experience time as productivity.” How would you say you experience it now?

This has been the struggle I have every day, and part of why I've been writing so much about this. The more scared I get, the harder and faster I work. That's because it's so hard to give up on the illusion of getting life done. I'm very good at working hard, which is wonderful and absorbing and lets me not have cancer for a bit, which is such a privilege. I just get to go somewhere else in my mind and work on something, and that's been a lot of how I've survived—being able to not feel eclipsed by things I didn't choose.

So does that change how you think about productivity?

I do think of it much more in terms of calling, and less in terms of hustle, I guess. I know that most people can't afford the luxury of meaning in their jobs. A lot of people just have to work. They don't necessarily get to ask questions like, "Is this my life's deep call? Is this work expressing the gifts that I have to give?" That was a question I had to answer really concretely when it was that first year, and I was supposed to die, and, inconveniently, that was also the year I had to finish this massive, unbelievably historically specific book in order to keep my job.

I was thinking a lot about what makes something inherently valuable. For me, it turns out that writing these very dense history books is a part of the way that I see beauty and meaning in the world, and that I'm going to keep doing it even if it is probably concretely a giant waste of my time. I write stuff that 500 people will read, and I actually think that's kind of wonderful, not because of some deep romantic purist view, but because that just happens to be what I'm best at, and I think that the work itself is good for civilization.

I have been trying to separate out hustle for hustle's sake, hustle because it gets you somewhere, hustle because you think you'll wake up tomorrow feeling like you're further down the road, and then learning how to do the work because the doing of the work makes you the kind of person you're supposed to be.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

The Case For Letting Things Fall Through the Cracks 

A conversation with author Brad Stulberg on finding lasting fulfillment, creating real priorities, and, fighting against the sense that you're not enough. 

By Clay Skipper