Book Review: Stop Living on Autopilot

Title: Stop Living on Autopilot

Author: Waleska Curvelo

Quote: "Why does it feel like no matter how hard I work, I can't make progress toward what I really want?"

In the 1980s the authors of books like this one had degrees in psychology, the books were called self-help books, and their content usually contained a lot of theoretical blather about the emotional roots of all of our problems. Some things have improved since then. The authors are now called life coaches and the content of the books is now frankly just inspirational pep talks. You can do whatever you want to do! If you make the right choices! What choices that are, only you can say! If you're wrong about the steps to take to get what you want, it's not my fault! 

I've certainly read self-help books that were worse than this one. Curvelo at least writes good clear English, instead of inventing a technical-sounding jargon all her own, as some of the psychological self-help guides used to do.

Better? What is better, in the context of self-help books? What is worse? Because these books try to be so open-ended and valuable to everybody, any of them might deserve credit for encouraging someone to run with a brilliant idea, or blame for encouraging someone to cling to a terrible idea. 

For better or worse, both when I've been pointed out as an example of success and when I'm probably being pointed out as an example of failure...the "just set goals and stick to them" approach to life has never really worked for me. The Bible advises us not to attach ourselves to "Tomorrow we shall go to a certain city, and stay there for so long, and do such and so," but to allow for the vicissitudes life tends to have: "If God wills we shall go to a certain city..." We can buy tickets with a certain destination on them, but if a snowstorm blows up in the way, we may be spending the night somewhere other than that destination. I suspect God has a big laugh at the expense of the very "goal-oriented" Type A who forms attachments to goals and steps. 

I even remember, in my early twenties, a few experiments with thinking the "goal-oriented" way. "I currently have this job, where I'm making this amount of money and can afford to use this much to pay off my college loan debt. I've applied for this other job, where I'll be making this amount of money, but I'll have these expenses, but anyway I should be able to set aside this much to pay off my college loan debt." I may still have the old notebook where I wrote that kind of thing down. So what happened next? In that particular case, I thought I had recovered from "chronic mononucleosis"; I was wrong. The disease flared up. I lost the job I had and someone else was hired for the other one. My college loan debt was eventually paid off, but not that year and not that way.

I do believe it's a good idea to have some idea where we would like to go in life, but it's also a good idea to notice how much our goals and steps have in common with sand castles on the beach.

You may have better luck than I had at "goal-orienting" Say you want a college degree. That's a nice goal that many people find achievable, although I didn't happen to be one of them. You want a college degree, so you enroll in a college, confer with an adviser, plan the courses you need to take, register for the courses, do the course work while setting aside enough of your paycheck to pay for them, or pay as much as you can of the cost of them...This feels good to the orderly and logical part of your brain, it's almost certain to be useful at some time in your life, and actually the odds are that you'll get the degree for which you're studying. Even in the 1980s most people didn't get "chronic mononucleosis," nor, when most people go back for a second try at a degree they didn't finish in their teens, do they find both of their parents in separate hospitals within the year. Most people who register for college courses and do the assignments will, in a few years, have a college degree. It's a good credential to have and represents valuable learning experiences...whether or not you ever work for even one year in the job that college degree was meant to prepare you for...

When I was growing up, detachment from career goals, specifically, was considered a wonderful thing for girls to have. Because of course everyone knew that most girls who prepared for jobs in teaching or bookkeeping or nursing or whatever were really going to get even better opportunities...what a wonderful surprise! how special!--to get married and have babies. And some of us are still today in denial about how much harm the idea of everyone having multiple babies has done to this world. 

But does that mean that it's good to plan our lives in any expectation that life is ever going to be orderly and logical? Meh. It never hurts to plan for the possibility that the chaos in our lives will subside enough for some steps we might take toward goals to lead us in the direction of those goals, but I think most authors of self-help books could be more realistic about the fact that life is chaotic. 

Curvelo does suggest, in a lovely tactful non-evangelical way, that steps toward goals should be congruent with being the kind of person you want to be. If you earn a degree that qualifies you for a job that ceases to exist as of three weeks before you receive your diploma, at least you learned things and you probably met people you appreciate having the chance to know. If, in the name of steps toward the goal, you told lies or cheated people, that will affect your self-image...

I think Curvelo errs on the side of sanctimony in saying that women shouldn't talk about the harmful consequences of a hundred and fifty years of preferential treatment for men. Of course all men are not our enemies. Of course most of us love our husbands and brothers and fathers and sons...though some of us have learned the hard way that men who behave well toward us, because they respect our physical relationships to them or our families' wealth and status or it might even be our characters, don't behave so well toward "outsider" women, or poor women, or younger women who are more easily intimidated. Of course we want, in any case, to help our men do the best they can. I don't think that means pampering their ego defenses. I think men need to face the facts: If you think your teenage daughter is in any danger of being raped, then you know, deep down, that a curfew on men would be a good thing. 

I enjoyed Curvelo's comments on social media, especially the advertising these days, from people whose thinking seems to go "After you used the 'skip' button to tune out my ad once and listen to what you wanted to listen to, I'll then leap in and interrupt what you were listening to, just in case you've changed your mind in the last five minutes!" Yes. Social media had the potential to do advertising much less offensively, more effectively, than television simply by recognizing the different conditions under which people use computers and watch television. Computer users may be bored but we tend to be awake, usually doing some sort of paid work, whereas TV watchers are often using TV as a sort of loud white noise and/or asleep, or trying to sleep. Being noticed as a vague annoyance by someone who's not thinking may sell a few more products than being noticed more consciously as having crafter a clever advertisement. Being noticed as an interruption by people who are working, or taking breaks from work, does not go so well. Youtube and Rumble could have opted to offer ad filtering in such a way that viewers never heard the same advertisement twice in a year, or that advertisements consisted of ten seconds of silence or instrumental music while the product logo or image was on the screen. Instead they've chosen to advertise more annoyingly than commercial television. Yes, we can all reduce the level of annoyance in our lives by reducing the number of videos we watch, or watching only the least popular channels on which Youtube and Rumble don't place advertisements. This will eventually be good for Youtube and Rumble, too. 

I think Curvelo honestly intends to coach readers toward success in life. Life and readers being what they are, sometimes she'll succeed, sometimes not.