Ephemeral Knowing: An Introduction

Self-help books, only one facet of the $13 billion self-improvement industry, brought in almost $19 million in 2021. Over the past two decades, the self-help non-fiction genre has delved into a wide array of experiences: losing weight, career success, time management, improving relationships, and even increasing the vague and abstract notion of happiness. And yet, as we commit so much time and resources to betterment, the national statistics on depression, anxiety, and suicide continue to worsen. A deep decline in our collective mental well-being does not reflect the knowledge on our shelves. Or maybe – it reflects exactly that.

Reading has become another metric in self-improvement instead of what it used to be: joy. Our self-improvement compulsion mutates our ability to experience any action as an end in itself. As we get better at counting the number of calories we eat, clocking the number of steps we walk, and cluttering our kindles with promises of the perfect future-self, we forget what it used to be like to simply eat, walk, and read.

Don’t get me wrong. I admire our efforts to be better. We do not evolve like other species – we evolve with intention. This is what makes us special. I do question, however, what ‘better’ means to us. I do wonder what I might find if I spend time recognizing joy instead of chasing it.

Every so often, I come a across a book that does not have answers, but transforms my questions. These new questions illuminate what ‘joy’ or ‘better’ or ‘improvement’ mean to me. Sometimes this book travels into my office with one of the adolescents I am working with, sometimes a friend has recommended it, and sometimes I have unknowingly pulled it off a bestseller list (as a result of my own self-improvement compulsions).

Ephemeral Knowing is an attempt to share these gems with you in the form of short book reviews. None of these books make promises of a better tomorrow. All of these books have the potential to incur slight rifts in our consciousness. So slight are the rifts that the memory of them fades as soon as we get up from our couch and step into frenzy again. A reminder, perhaps, that clarity can not be captured.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” – James Baldwin

First book review coming soon!