Novels are the Best Self-Development Books

Self-development books seem to be all the rage at the moment, while novels and storybooks seem to be going out of fashion. A great many people apparently devour the former while saying they have no time to read the latter.

I believe this to be misguided. For my part, I have found that really good novels have taught me much more about life and how to improve mine than self-development books ever could.

Self-development books basically give you general theories about life and support these theories with a few arguments, thought experiments and examples, but do little in the way of actually proving them adequately. Broadly speaking, they tell you how it is, but don't really show you how and why it is that way thoroughly. They tend therefore to depend on stary-eyed trust in the author to be knowledgeable and truthful, and a willingness to implement the advice they give more or less blindly.

For one thing, this leaves one liable to forget the ideas and conjectures they put forward even if they might be true/useful; as any good scientist will tell you, it takes real life experience and real observations to prove a theory, as well as to be sufficiently convinced of it to remember, embody and act upon it ( i.e. actual self-development). What's more, books like this have a lot of leeway to spout nonsense and in many cases intentionally disorient and deceive the reader, often for political purposes. For example, in Jordan Peterson's Twelve Rules For Life, you are never far away from some reactionary trope, like the idea that humanism and liberalism are intrinsically and exclusively products of "the west".

Novels put forward ideas about life using much more data to support them than self-development books. When we read a novel, we study extensive hypothetical life situations, the decisions people make in them, and their ultimate outcomes, all in vast, vast detail. Moreover, as we read, the believability of what is happening in the novel is a necessary condition of our continued interest -- continued study of the hypothetical events. A further condition is the expected usefulness of what the outcomes might reveal. That is to say that, as we read a novel, we can decern intuitively not only the validity of the data and logic being put forward, but also it's usefulness to us personally, and the two intuitions combine into the sheer pleasure of reading.

The characters and events in novels seem to live and grow in us. And thereby, we have continual access to the truths about life that they reveal.

With memorable characters, we can always ask ourselves as we go through life: "What would the count of Monte Christo say about this?"; "How would Heathcliff enflame this situation?"; "How would Fagin screw me over here?" and so on.

When we find ourself in a real life situation, we can, as novel lovers, readily impose a mixture of characters and dynamics onto the scenario both in front of us and within us, and thereby instantly be empowered by wisdom regarding what to expect and how to proceed.

All in all, I would say that this is a much, much more powerful life-hack than: "remember to view yourself as a money-maker if you want to build habits that make you money", or similar nonsense.