You chose the picture of a physically fit man, posing and showing off his muscles. However, your article overlooks the reality of the male self-improvement experience.
Men and women are different.
For example, you write “Good mental health is closely related to self-acceptance. Establishing the latter should be your primary goal. Meanwhile, self-improvement marketing often neglects that part and reinforces your sense of inferiority for the sake of financial gains.”
The male experience is competition, and self-improvement marketing recognizes that. While it is possible to both be inferior and to accept that inferiority, those people aren’t the target audience for self-improvement marketing.
The fact that some men are stronger, taller, richer, smarter, or leaner than others is not in dispute. While your choice of photograph might be sardonic, the fact is that men are ranked in comparison to other men in all aspects of their lives. Most importantly, men are compared and ranked by women.
OK Cupid did a study of how men rate women on attractiveness, on a scale of 1 to 5. It’s approximately a bell curve that peaks at 2.5
However, when women are rating men, OK Cupid found that only 20% of men are rated above 2.5, the middle of the scale. That means that women rated 80% of men below what OK Cupid intended to be “average.”
OK Cupid has since deleted the study from Medium, but you can still read it for yourself here. https://web.archive.org/web/20130316093238/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dating/
Male self-acceptance requires recognition of the fact that men compete for female attention, and few men succeed. Thus, a man who wants to improve himself (as many do) must recognize that securing the affection of an “average” woman requires him to be a well-above-average man, as the self improvement marketing suggests.
In other words, he probably isn’t “enough” right now, or he wouldn’t be seeking self-improvement advice, because “average does equal failure.”
While you’re right that self-improvement might not make these men happy, maybe they’d consider it an improvement in their lives just to have an attractive woman message them back on a dating app.
The make authors you cite, like Gary Vee and Tim Ferris, aren’t necessarily selling dating advice. They are selling advice that will make men more successful, more competitive, and thus more attractive to women.
That means that the you identify as the lies in the male self-improvement industry are only misconceptions about the generalization of male self-improvement advice as if it were applicable to women.
Because men and women are different, and they improve their lives in different ways.
