Books

  Atomic Habits and Man’s Search for Meaning are both routinely filed under personal growth. That should make us suspicious of the category. James Clear is interested in why a person who intends to exercise keeps finding themselves on the sofa. Viktor Frankl was writing about meaning after imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps. One book is partly about making useful behavior easier to repeat. The other asks what remains worth living for when circumstances have stripped away much of a person’s control. Calling both of them “self-improvement” tells us almost nothing about which one somebody should read. The question I would use instead is more practical: what keeps going wrong? If the answer is behavior, there are books for that. If it is time, anxiety, self-criticism or bad judgment, the shelf changes. And if the problem is that all the goals are working but no longer seem particularly meaningful, a productivity book may make things worse by helping somebody become more efficie...