How productivity culture is a lot like a religion
"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." - Kate Bowler
Interview: Why Simply Hustling Harder Won't Help You With the Big Problems in Life