“Neoliberal claptrap.” That was American novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt’s verdict on the kind of content that promises “Seven steps to happiness” or “How to be Your Best Self (Even While You’re Sleeping)” or “The Easy Way to Free Yourself from Existential Angst” or perhaps “The Anxiety Cure (How to not Give a Toss What Anyone Thinks of You)” — and on it goes.
The line was delivered during the documentary Dancing Around the Self by Sabine Lidl (Director, Screenplay) 2026, screened at the Berlinale film festival yesterday.
Her words landed hard, because I create self-improvement and coaching content, and I title my videos in exactly this style in order to build an audience. I admire Hustvedt’s intellect, her writing and her way of being and find the Svengali style of Deepak Chopra, replete with unsubstantiated claims and wild promises, quite repellant.
Sitting with this dilemma all day, one that has troubled me for many years, gave me the final push to shift my activities into edtech over coaching. As a creator who loves to build, share, and discuss ideas it’s an easy pivot. Training, running workshops, and leading online groups feature heavily in my professional background, so the professional challenges are well known to me. It’s also an exciting field right now.
But what about the content I’ve created? My focus has been on teaching and creating guided processes for the Sedona Method, which I can comfortably claim is effective for calming down, for being less possessed by anger, rage, despair, self-hatred and other deeply unpleasant experiences. People like it and comment on how helpful they found it.
Where is my integrity if I’m still promoting it this way?
This is where I’ve landed and I am sure it will evolve as I dive more deeply into learning over self-help content.
Meditation, self-enquiry, a passion for learning, and the desire to challenge yourself intellectually, physically, and creatively are not modern inventions — they are features of being human, visible for as long as humans have existed. Most of us have a natural impulse towards growth. We are curious, and we enjoy doing difficult things as long as they have meaning. This is not “neoliberal claptrap.”
What does fall into that category are idiotic promises, reductive approaches that violently deny the richness of human experience, and the relentless hectoring of people to better themselves by suppressing their aliveness, squeezing into conformity, and overriding their instinctive drives towards connection, movement, and nature.
Image credit: Hreinn Gudlaugsson, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://lnkd.in/dPK2j-jG>, via Wikimedia Commons
