[tigerthink]

How does self-improvement (ala lifehack.org) fit it? I personally think it fits very well. The trouble is that these sorts of personal development blogs are still mainly in it for the money and they aren't scientific enough (e.g. they'll tell you what to do and maybe how to do it, but not necessarily why to do it.)

Also, they often focus on superficial behaviors instead of underlying thinking patterns. For instance, here's a way of thinking that I've found to be useful: 99% of the time, there's no logical reason to feel fear in any social situation. Whatever happens, when all is said and done, it really doesn't matter what other people think of you. If that seems like a "no-duh" way of thinking to you, think back to when you were in high school.

A superficial example of this behavior is learning to meet new people. But someone who hasn't grasped the underlying concept will have a hard time meeting people, no matter how often they read about how to meet people on personal development blogs.

Besides money, another reason for this personal development blog bullshit is that a lot of the bloggers are themselves in the process of figuring out how to be successful, etc. It's much easier to write instructions for someone else than yourself, so they start blogging about what they think will work for them without necessarily having tried it for very long. Thus the field of personal development can be something like an echo chamber, where the same ideas are repeated over and over.