We live in an age of self-improvement abundance. Are you stressed? Why not tap your forehead, hack your vagus nerve or grind like a Navy SEAL? You won’t need to leave your house — there are apps, webinars, biometric bracelets, A.I. coaches and probably 12 new technologies by the time you finish this sentence.
Lately, however, something surprisingly archaic has been doing the rounds on the self-help internet and sticking on Amazon best seller charts: a musty old book from 1903. “As a Man Thinketh,” by James Allen, offers advice that was frozen in amber before the sinking of the Titanic or the first successful airplane flight. Yet it keeps finding new fans, especially male ones, all of whom seem eager to post about it on Instagram — investors, personal trainers, holistic lifestyle coaches, actors with lumpy muscles. On Reddit, discussions of the book bloom like wildflowers in groups as diverse as “Asperger’s” and “Law of Attraction,” “Stoicism” and (brace yourself) “Semen Retention.” (“This is the book that made me want to start my SR journey,” one participant wrote. “It won’t be easy, and I’ll have to discipline myself more than ever. But what a man can be, he must be!”)
Speaking personally, as a self who needs a lot of help, I love self-help books. I own a giant stack and take embarrassing amounts of notes and always believe they are going to change my life. They never do — but that’s fine, because it means I get to go out and buy more self-help books. So I was happy to order a “deluxe edition” of “As a Man Thinketh” (fake leather cover, image of Rodin’s Thinker stamped in gold) and settle in.
It’s a breeze of a read; I inhaled it one afternoon instead of taking my usual nap. Suddenly, I found myself in possession of the miraculous solution to all my problems.
What is this miraculous solution? Well, according to Allen, it is … thinking. Having thoughts. Exercising the good old noggin. The book takes its old-timey title from the King James Bible: “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.” My favorite synopsis comes from the rapper Gucci Mane, a big fan of the book, who once reduced it with perfect accuracy to two sentences: “Watch what you think about. You are your thoughts.” Allen repeats this idea over and over. “Act is the blossom of thought,” he writes in Chapter 1, “and joy and suffering are its fruits.” I underlined this, nodding. “Good thoughts bear good fruit,” Chapter 2 proclaims, “bad thoughts bad fruit.” Very true, I whispered, stroking my chin.
It’s simple advice — but honestly, I could use it. Because how do I thinketh? Not great! My brain is like a lava lamp, with the same few blobby thoughts (The world is terrible and I am terrible and I want gummy bears) glooping up and down all day long, combining and changing shape, bumming me out.
On Allen’s advice, I began to try to control my thinkething. The world is a nice place, I told myself, and I am a capable person who is thriving. Those little white lies did, actually, feel nice — at least until I looked around to see that powerful men were still raining bombs down on civilians and, closer to home, I had missed another writing deadline. Was I supposed to just assert that these things were good?
“As a Man Thinketh” doesn’t offer many practical tips. It is 99 percent vibes. I had many questions. What is the difference between a “good” thought and a “bad” thought? How do we access the cognitive control panel that allows us to choose?
Allen never tells. He just riffs and riffs. The “good” side of his thought ledger seems to contain such stereotypically manly virtues as power and certainty and control. Every man, he writes, must “manfully control his thoughts. … Doubts and fears should be rigorously excluded.” (It’s a little like “The Secret,” but for men.) With total confidence, Allen swaggers right into some very ugly ideas. “The truth is that oppressor and slave are cooperators in ignorance,” he writes, “and, while seeming to afflict each other, are in reality afflicting themselves.” I shivered in recognition — it’s the kind of pseudo-intellectual rationalization of evil you can still find all over modern social media.
In the days after reading this book, I walked around trying to “tend the garden” of my thoughts. I found myself making some unusual decisions. One day at the store, I offered to buy my son a treat. Nothing for me, I insisted, because, as Allen reminds us in his chapter on health, “when a man makes his thoughts pure, he no longer desires impure food.” But then I spotted a bag of my favorite cookies.
“Do you like these?” I asked my son.
“Hmm,” he said. “They’re OK.”
“Wonderful,” I said, and I bought them for him. He didn’t touch them. The next morning, as I found myself eating cookies for breakfast, as crumbs tumbled down my shirt, I experienced a moment of self-doubt. But I quickly seized control of my thoughts. These cookies, I told myself, are delicious, and it is good to enjoy life, and we shouldn’t waste food.
What I discovered, in my brief experiment in thinkething, is that, in the absence of clear definitions of “good” and “bad,” it is easy to prune the garden of your thoughts into self-serving shapes. But I believe we have some responsibility to make our thoughts correspond to reality — not just to expect reality to swing its huge weight around, magically, to align with our thoughts. This is especially true now, in the vortex of chaos we call 2026. Maybe this will sound like bragging, but I would rather be unhappy and weak and full of self-doubt than dishonest and cruel and puffed up with false certainty. If I ever write a self-help book, I think I will call it “As a Man Muddles Through the Disappointing Confusion of True Self-Knowledge.” Maybe, a hundred years from now, it could be a best seller, too.
The post Do You Even Thinketh, Bro? appeared first on New York Times.
