This is the age of self-improvement. There's no shortage of self-improvement videos, but very few of them seem to actually work.
Since I make YouTube videos myself, a few things are visible to me from the producer's side. I want to talk about them.
Advice That Sells Is Not Advice That Works
When you consume self-improvement content, you hope to become a better person. And your YouTube feed shows you content that gets good ratings.
Effect and rating. There's a gap between the two.
The first gap is one of timing. Self-improvement content only shows its effect when applied over the long term. But the rating happens immediately. You hit like or subscribe after watching, or partway through. When you rate something on the spot, there's no time to feel any effect. Nobody follows a video's advice for a few months and then goes back to like and subscribe. You leave a like or a subscribe based on the feeling you get right as you watch.
That's why videos that stir up emotion rise to the top, rather than videos that work. Motivational videos are the typical example. As a result, self-improvement content leaves a lot of room for marketing. Just look at who's famous on Korean self-improvement YouTube right now. I'm not saying those people make bad content. Think about what skills let someone gain influence in the self-improvement world.
The second gap is between effect and hurdle. A method with a big effect relative to its hurdle would be truly good. A high-ROI method, you might say. But unfortunately, hurdle and effect are in a trade-off relationship. As the saying goes, Good things take time.
For example, a video telling you to take a cold shower1 to boost your dopamine would be popular. It feels like something you could try tomorrow morning. But telling people to go to a psychiatrist, get a brainwave or temperament test, and get a prescription would not be popular. It's a high-hurdle method that costs money, time, and the energy to find a hospital and book an appointment. It's also boring. But the effect is certain.
Content that works this well asks the viewer for a specific, big change. That kind of content is hard to follow and, being specific, isn't much fun. That hurts watch-through rates, and it's hard for such a video to blow up. Among content that talks about dopamine, doesn't the stuff from actual psychiatrists rarely show up in your feed? (Likewise, for skin problems, strange folk remedies are trending instead of dermatologists.)
Unverified Advice
By the nature of YouTube, there's more experimental, superficial advice than proven methods. The same goes for blogs and Twitter, where the barrier to producing content is low. Usually it's advice drawn from the author's own experience, and these days it's gotten worse, with a lot of it generated by ChatGPT. It's also armed with trendy, scientific-sounding keywords like neuroscience.
(Though, to be honest, after saying this I did once get a foot reflexology session.)
It's bound to be this way, because people are drawn to experimental stories rather than commonly accepted ones. It's because of people's tendency to seek stimulation. You opened YouTube to watch something fun for once, so you can't watch something boring. Proven methods may be ones you're already using or have heard of, or they may work well but be hard to follow.
Take Andrew Huberman, who has been sweeping YouTube feeds lately. As soon as Huberman said on his podcast that looking upward with your eyes wakes you up, Korean self-improvement YouTubers frantically stitched together clips about it. But if this had really been an effective method, Starbucks' sales would be dropping, online lecturers would be teaching drowsy students to wake up by looking upward, it would show up on the channel of Jung Seung-je's obsessive fan, and the government would be running a campaign to look upward for a moment to prevent drowsy driving. If a method really works, the field adopts it quickly, without exception. You'd expect at least some videos testifying that it works, but there aren't any.
Advice Nobody Is Accountable For
A feature of self-improvement is that you don't have to take responsibility for your content. There are terms like pseudo-medicine and pseudo-science, but no such thing as pseudo-self-improvement. That's because wrong information in medicine can wreck people, while in self-improvement there's nothing like that. In self-improvement, anything goes. The methods on offer might help a little if you try them. But that's exactly why it's so easy to fall into the trap. You could be doing something else with that time. And it can obscure what really matters.
Self-improvement takes a long time to get criticized. Even the once-hot Miracle Morning seems to be only now starting to draw some criticism. Until a method is proven less effective than it was promoted to be, a great deal of time and attention gets spent.
Also, many self-improvement videos are made by stitching together clips of foreign gurus, and made this way, the meaning doesn't come across. Even if you understand the content itself, behavior only follows when you take on that person's mindset, and that isn't covered by one or two videos.
Christians go to church every week because they want to live as the Bible says. Wouldn't taking on a master's mindset take more than one or two videos, like reading their books and following the guru's Twitter, in other words, being a real fan? It's very hard for a clip of superficially picked highlights to lead to action. You need to be a fan.
Beyond the question of whether self-improvement videos work, I think feed-driven information intake is a serious poison to a knowledge worker's competitiveness. You need the ability to set your own goals and go find and dig up content yourself. It will only get rarer from here. With self-improvement videos too, you should look for the skills you need and watch those. Consuming content filled with marketing and abstractions to rack up likes and subscribes won't get you anywhere. I'll close with words from Nassim Taleb, who shares a similar view.
Don't read the newspaper. Don't follow the news in any form.
Read last year's newspaper instead. This doesn't mean ignoring the news.
It means you should look at the news from the events, not the other way around.
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Footnotes
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Since cold showers came up, I've been doing Hot-Cold Contrast Bathing lately. ↩