Thirteen Things I Hate About “Lifehacking”

Lifehacking is a “geek chic” term which gussies up the kind of “tips and tricks” articles that are more usually found in grocery store magazines. You know, the fluffy ones aimed at moms in line at the checkout counter. Ten Tricks To A Slimmer You! Thirty-Minute Vacations! 19 Tips For Calmer Kids! Improve Your Intelligence in Four Weeks!They cover a variety of topics, but they all have two things in common. First, they all have numbers, generally promising vast things in small amounts of time. And second, they all have superficial instructions. Whether they promise tips or a whole lifestyle, tips is what they offer: a few little tweaks that you may be able to add to the changes you are already making.

That’s what bugs me about this subgenre of self-help writing. It’s never about systemic change. Systemic change requires fundamental shifts in the way we approach our lives. It doesn’t fit neatly into a top ten list, and it’s not easy to describe clearly via a page of quick suggestions. It comes from finding out what someone else’s life was like (identification), what they changed (description, not prescription), and what it’s like now (hope). Lifehacking, women’s magazines, and a lot of self-help books, on the other hand, are prescriptive. They exult in at least pretending to tell people What To Do to Change Everything – not least because that kind of shiny snake-oil promise sells.

They’re selling a kind of hope, but often a false one. They claim to be able to tell people how to… achieve serenity, organize their homes, make more money, deal with abusive co-workers, et cetera… but while these ideas excite and even motivate a very wide audience, they are only helpful to a much smaller crowd.The process of change, as I understand it, tends to go something like this:

First, we become aware that change is possible. We struggle, often subconsciously, with the pros and cons, and eventually (hopefully) become willing to experience that change. We start to become aware of what we are doing that is blocking it, and that lets us participate actively, taking steps toward more change. We start to integrate those changes, and their effects, and we move into a new place in our lives, refining the steps we have taken, enjoying the changes we are experiencing, and looking toward the next change in our lives.

People can only really use lifehacking tricks in two of those stages: when we are participating actively in making a change (if it is the particular change that the author is talking about, and if the tools they suggest actually apply to our lives) and when we are refining it. Like, I always used to see lists of (for example) 25 Ways To Decrease Clutter, and I’d get all fired up and promise myself I was going to binge-clean that weekend or that I would at least buy some boxes or that I would certainly print out the list and save it to use over the next month, and then… the fire would die out, because I wasn’t ready for that shift. There was nothing deep down to fuel it. Sure, I wanted a cleaner home, but I wasn’t involved in any kind of shift toward that – or I was too early in that shift to be able to implement those tips. And, of course, at that point in my life – like anyone who is living in self-abusive clutter and chaos – I was all too eager to shame or berate myself for not being able to use those lists or figure out why I could never get around to using those lists!

Mainly, I object to lifehacking, by any name, because:

1. Lifehacking is all about control. Specifically, it’s often about trying to control the things we can’t. It targets the areas that people find unmanageable and says “Try this! No, now try THIS! No, no, THIS one will fix it!” Like, oh, are you disorganized? Have too much scheduled, took on too many commitments, and don’t know what to do with it all? Try THIS new gadget for “calendaring”! No, try this killer app for Getting Things Done! It just promotes the struggle with unmanageability, because people are very tempted by the idea that there is nothing they cannot change if they just try hard enough.

2. Lifehacking is so superficial. There’s nothing wrong with being superficial about superficial things. I don’t want a 300-page tome about how to get more mileage out of my car or clean out my email. But a ten-item list about serious psychological issues or deep-rooted emotionally-laden relationship stuff sells the reader short.

3. Lifehacking is so damn prescriptive. I’ll happily admit it: I don’t like people telling me what to do. Who does? I don’t mind advice I’ve asked for, or support from people I respect, but I’ll be damned if I’ll take, for example, a Tylenol ad telling me to eat breakfast to avoid headaches.

4. Lifehacking doesn’t know how to use I statements. I don’t want to hear what you think I should do. I want to hear what has worked for you. “Shoulding” on others is really controlling and invasive. Sure, I’ve done it; we’ve probably all done it. But, you know, it’s something to keep an eye on. When I start thinking about what other people should be doing, I know I’ve taken my eyes off my own paper and that I need to change my focus and get out of their business. Not time to go make a website or a book about how other people should be living their lives.

5. Lifehacking is amateur advice. This goes hand in hand with it not being personal experience. That cleaning article or that weight-loss advice might have been written by someone who is great at cleaning or who has lost a bunch of weight, but that doesn’t mean that they have a handle on the causes and influences or the different situations their readers might be bringing to the table. Which leads to a lot of wacky or horrifying gaffes or just plain misfires.

6. Lifehacking is bland. It’s generally either reviews of potentially useful products, which can be interesting (and which, uncoincidentally, usually do fall under personal experience rather that prescriptive advice), or basic common-sense (and often inaccurate) mainstream information about life. How many articles have you seen in women’s magazines about using bubble baths, personal time, and light reading to relax?

7. Lifehacking hijacks geek chic. Oh, maybe that’s too strong. It can’t kidnap the entire culture or its terminology. And it uses geek language because “lifehacking” started out as life tips, organizational tips, and “killer apps” being shared between coders and engineers. It was natural to them to think of it as “hacking” life. The places that use the term that way are kind of awesome; they tend more toward the “review” end of the scale, people sharing tools that have worked for them and telling others what has and hasn’t worked. It brings personal experience back into it. It’s the sites that do co-opt the term and apply it to something you’d be more likely to find in Woman’s Day magazine that bug me.

8. Lifehacking is just that: a messy hack, a patch to fix part of a problem, not a system update. If you overeat compulsively, lifehacking will not say, for example, “Here’s some information from other people who do this, and what they changed, and how it helped; here are some tools you can use to change your relationship to food and eating by addressing the underlying causes, and some ways to develop good basic ground rules for yourself.” It will say “Here is a list of fivetools that people sometimes try! One, exercise more. Two, keep a food diary. Three, stay away from fast food restaurants. Four, eat without doing anything else at the same time. Five, try a support group like weight watchers.”

9. Lifehacking pretends to be great recovery but it lacks even the boundaries to speak from its own experiences. Even articles that begin with “we” or “I” (“We all know that we should eat better,” “I have a terrible time with overscheduling,”) switch abruptly and irrevocably to “you” when they get to the list of “shoulds.” Telling someone you don’t even know what to do is terrible boundaries, and that’s often reflected in personal remarks from the writers – much of the time, these lists are written by people who admit they have not tried what they are suggesting, or for whom what they are suggesting has yet to work. They are often just sharing “common sense” or “common knowledge” suggestions – and unfortunately, what “everyone knows” is frequently wrong. Likewise, commenters rarely (sometimes, but very rarely) share that the whole list has worked for them; usually, the comments either say “Great list!”, “This misses the mark because….” or “I do item number 9 sometimes and I like it.”

10. Lifehacking promises what it cannot give. This is much like problem #8. It states a goal and implies that doing what it says will fulfill that goal, or at least help people achieve it. But with the majority of these goals, the reader has to have done a great deal of the groundwork beforehand in order to even implement the suggestions given. There’s a huge amount that goes unaddressed by lifehacking. The worst of it is that generally, if someone has the kind of life problems mentioned in lifehacking sites, and hasn’t done that groundwork, they are carrying around a lot of (misplaced and undeserved) shame and guilt about their lives – and the “you should” format of lifehacking sites only feeds into that shame. Readers often berate themselves for not following the suggestions or wonder why they can’t seem to do these simple things, which furthers the vicious cycle of shame and resistance that keeps them stuck in self-harming patterns.

11. Lifehacking brings bureaucracy into your personal life. There’s a whole area of lifehacking that straddles the line between “here’s a killer app for organizing your contacts” and “here is a killer way to be organized.” It focuses on bringing terms like “personal productivity” and “GTD” from the office into our everyday lives. What’s next, sternly worded memos? It’s the terminology of control again, but with a Dilbert-like spin.

12. Lifehacking sets the bar really low. Okay, the bar is already set really low: sometimes it seems like almost everyone could use some kind of life skills class. Like we’ve discussed before, abuse often strands people in adulthood without any idea how to have a healthy relationship with people, or food, or work, or substances, or money, or whatever it is that our parents couldn’t teach us because they lacked themselves. Lifehacking sites take that low skill level and run with it. Any given site, for example, will usually aim all of its food or exercise or money tips at people who have no skills in those areas – no matter how many years they spend giving out those tips. The same goes for magazines. Not only is there no suggestion that readers might be able to revamp their entire relationship with, for example, food, or that they might want to – there’s also no awareness of the personal issues underlying those relationships, or how they fit into the whole. It’s all “you need to stop having a sedentary life,” “you need to spend more time with your kids,” “you need to start eating breakfast,” all the time.

13. Lifehacking states the very obvious, and sometimes the freaking insane. Hitting three major lifehacking sites reveals a consistent combination of good-but-superficial-patches and hackneyed, overrepeated suggestions. My favorites: take the stairs instead of the elevator to get more exercise! Count your blessings! And on the deeply insane side: If you help people, they will get addicted to you! (Lifehacking readers might notice that lifehack.org isn’t linked there. I’m giving them a pass because they tend to have more effective how-to articles and to have good information about things like emotional health.)

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