Date: May 15, 2025 at 02:42
There's a story I read recently. A woman detailing how she escaped a life wrapped in poverty and psychological chaos, raised by a paranoid schizophrenic mother, surviving off welfare, scraping through adolescence on a secondhand computer and a $28/mo internet connection she fought tooth and nail for. She learned to program. Built skills. Got a job. Made friends online. Helped a stranger survive a suicide attempt. Got into university. Graduated with a PhD and makes a living doing what she loves.
And at the end of this harrowing, incredibly human story, she leaves us with a single message:
This is part of the story of how the internet changed my life for the better. I’m an early millennial and I was raised online. Through the internet, I found friends, support, and the human connection that I was lacking in real life. I also found valuable information that helped me help myself and sometimes help others. The key with information is always to effectively filter the good from the bad, which is a genuine life skill unto itself. My life today isn’t perfect, but it’s better than it’s ever been. My message to all the people out there who are struggling is to believe in yourself. If you help yourself and you let others help you, things are never hopeless.
What's your response to that?
You could say it's nice. It's sweet. It's something you want to believe in. Or you could say what I'm thinking: it's the most dangerous thing I've ever heard. That's where I stopped nodding and started grinding my teeth.
Because that line--"Believe in yourself. If you help yourself and you let others help you, things are never hopeless"--that's not just a feel-good mantra for the struggling. That's the ideological payload. That's a recipe for self-blame when you can't make it out.
What this message does, however unintentionally, is repackage suffering into a morality play. And I don't think the author meant to do that. In fact, I believe she genuinely does see herself as lucky, and tried to express that. She even acknowledges her privilege to some extent as well:
I don’t want this to read like a story about how I overcame every obstacle alone and pulled myself up by bootstraps with no outside help. I struggled a lot along the way but the reality is that as challenging as my life situation was, as lonely and misunderstood as I felt at times, there was luck in my misfortune, and I did receive help. [...] I was lucky, through my university, to get access to professional therapists at discounted rates, which helped me begin my own healing process.
But the problem is that stories like this, no matter how caveated, still become parable when wrapped up with a bow in this way. They still become anecdotal evidence used to beat people over the head with shame.
There are a few things I want to enumerate here:
We don't "choose" our way out of a cigarette addiction. We don't "decide" to stop feeling anxious. We don't "self-actualize" into better versions of ourselves through sheer will.
These are systems-level issues. And yet, this message reduces the entire process of healing and escaping poverty to "believing in yourself," as if the mind is a simple on/off switch.
No. That's not an actionable strategy. It's a magical thinking. It's a way of outsourcing hope to the most unreliable of internal governors: the self-concept. It's telling people to treat a broken bone by willing it to heal. This is not how people work. Over a long stretch of time, people actually start to look like complex systems, not simple agents.
This is part of why I like the writing of Deleuze and Guattari. They conceptualize the self as merely a residual fragment of a much larger cycle of production and feedback (or pretty much the process of being a human). The self is the moment the machine says "I", or, as they put it, "so that's me!". This is what they call the third synthesis of the unconscious: the conjunctive synthesis.
It explains how stories, especially personal narratives, take disordered affect--pain, chaos, joy, whatever--and run it through the "I" machine, creating a subject. So when someone says "That's me. I believe in myself. I survived." they are not describing a fact but performing an act. It's not an ontological statement but a pronominal one. The self is continually produced and reinforced through an after-attribution; it's not a thing that passively exists.
So when the woman in the story says "I did this," that's a synthesis. But when we take that synthesis and use it as a model for others, the implicit assumption is that the self is a prime mover, a causal agent. But in reality, the self is a downstream effect of all the processes that make you, you. So when we tell people to "believe in themselves," we're asking them to treat their downstream self as a prime mover. Intentional or not, I'd call that a kind of abuse.
The point is that you don't have to make that synthesis. You don't have to say "that's me" at the end of your climb to something better. There's a way to tell your story without becoming your own teleology. There's a way to present your story without leading parts of your audience to tell themselves, "I am a failed subject; I'm broken because I can't hold it together like she did." But I digress.
It's interesting, because the author does mention luck, but the way it's framed is as a kind of addendum. It's an aside, a minor detail. But in reality, luck is the dominant factor here. The fact that she had access to discounted therapy. The fact that she was passionate about programming, which is a highly rewarded skill in this society. The fact that she was in a position to get a university education. These are not minor factors; these are the main event.
This is not to take away from her achievements. It's just that the narrative is still written in such a way that the author seems to believe her story qualifies her to prescribe a message to others. But the problem is that her access and luck are not replicable. Consider that there are people who did believe, who did try, who did reach out, and still didn't get their happy ending. Then, apply survivorship bias. Apply publication bias.
You notice what kind of story we hear taught over and over, while not just neglecting to discuss luck and privilege, but hesitating to call into question the cultural effects of "self-help" and "self-belief"?
In high school, I was a B+ student at best. I was never particularly motivated, and most probably too (di)stressed to thrive, but by the time I made it to university, I’d been programming in C++ for three years and had a huge head start on everybody. I had gotten accepted into a computer science program at a local university, and I decided that since computers were my turf, I was going to show everyone what I could do by getting the best grades. I was going to beat everyone without getting into a fight. I completed my undergraduate degree with a 3.97/4.00 GPA. Out of 30 courses, I received 27 As and 3 A-minus grades.
Okay. Let's break this down.
Shelving the fact that she had already been programming and had a head start on everybody. Shelving the fact that she was in a university with access to resources. Shelving the fact that she had a specific skill that is highly rewarded in the job market.
The underlying assumption here is that her 3.97 GPA and her 27 As are worth mentioning. What could it mean? Within the broader context of the paragraph it seems that it marks some sort of transformation: from an unmotivated B+ student to someone who is a high achiever.
But the problem is that the GPA is presented as a mark of success while discounting 1) her foundational ability to think in terms that suit the academic institution, 2) the course quality and difficulty, and 3) her personal circumstances that allowed her to work hard in the first place (passion, overall character, etc.).
Same deal here. Stories are not inherently neutral, even when told from a factual, chronological perspective. The subtext of the story includes the why for including certain details, and it so happens that this detail is a common trope in the meritocratic narrative: "I worked hard and got good grades."
She did. She worked incredibly hard. That's something you can control, the message implies. If she can do it, why can't you? Work ethic as a moral framework is toxic. Some people are just more exhausted than others. Some people just don't have the same capacity to work themselves to the bone and then recover at the pace required to succeed.
Hard work is not a neutral or equally accessible strategy. It's not a level playing field. Some people are born with bodies that can handle it, some aren't. Some are born with minds that can handle it, some aren't. The fact that this woman was able to combine her programming passion with her circumstances is not a universalizable formula.
This is yet another point in the story that erases the fact that her journey is not replicable. This is nowhere directly emphasized in the story besides the offhand mention of having lucked out and received help.
I don't want to fault the author for this. These are extremely nuanced points, and it's easy to overlook them while developing your story if you don't consider how it could be interpreted within the broader cultural context. This is not a problem with the author but how the story fits with the cultural narrative that is already established.
If you take the contrapositive of the way the message is phrased, "if you help yourself and you let others help you, things are never hopeless," then what you receive is, "if things are hopeless, you must have failed to help yourself or failed to let others help you." That's a toxic message. That's not only condensed ideology; it's socially unassailable; nobody can argue with hope. Nobody wants to be the asshole who says, "actually, believing in yourself might not be enough."
It may seem that I'm reading too much into this single sentence, but protractions like this happen tacitly or not. If somebody internalizes this kind of message, they will make inferences and decisions based on it whether they know it or not. The damage is done. The message is insidious because it's inoffensive on the surface. This could be shared on a motivational poster, but when you parse it, it's a deeply individualistic message that erases not only social structures but the very nature of human subjectivity.
You could argue that I'm being overly critical, and there's a certain degree of truth to that. But I'm not writing this because I want to be contrarian; I'm writing this because I see the same message repeated over and over again, and I don't see the harm being addressed. I don't see people talking about how this kind of thinking is precisely what makes mental health worse for many. I don't see people talking about how this kind of thinking is used to deny benefits, to cut social programs, and to justify the status quo.
You might think this post is about a specific story or a specific sentence (or, god forbid, a specific author), but it's actually about the way we tell stories, the way we share messages, and the way we create meaning. It's about how we use narratives to make sense of the world and how those narratives can be used to control, to manipulate, and to oppress.
So, if we want a better world, we need better stories. Hopeless ones, perhaps. Stories that don't shy away from the fact that despite your best efforts, despite your belief in yourself, despite your hard work, things don't work out. Stories that don't erase or mention casually the role of luck and privilege. Stories that don't reduce the complexity of human experience to trite, individualistic maxims. Stories that don't make people feel like failures because they couldn't achieve what someone else did.
We can't have a society where we celebrate people who managed to escape the system and then extrapolate their stories to everybody else. We can't have a society where the dominant narrative is that there's hope for everyone if they just try hard enough. We can't have a society where we erase the variation of human lives to fit into a neat set of base assumptions about control and responsibility.
Because that's exactly the kind of society we have right now. And that's the kind of society that this kind of narrative upholds.