Who Are You When Everyone Stops Looking?

Ryan Lindner, The Half-Known Life: What Matters Most When You're Running Out of Time

Ryan Lindner was absurdly young when his first heart attack hit, requiring him to have a pacemaker installed. Since then, he writes, he’s lived in fear of another. Already working as a behavioral coach with some pretty high-profile clients, Lindner began reevaluating not only his own choices, but the advice he’d been giving others. He began an extensive reevaluation of what makes life meaningful, in the constant presence of death.

It’s always risky reviewing self-help books. Because different counselors have different talents, and readers have their own natural dispositions, a perfectly good, scientifically robust text might miss its audience. Lindner’s spirited, individual voice resembles less a psychologist than a motivational speaker, or perhaps a street evangelist. His deeply personal insights aren’t for everyone, but they contain enough incentive to spur the right readers to action.

We tend, Lindner writes, to seek validation outside ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing careers, possessions, and relationships. But these things are all about how others see us; they aren’t ourselves. The problem, for Lindner, arises when people lose perspective and think these external accomplishments are our identity markers. When that happens, we aren’t present with ourselves, but pursuing outside validation that never quite arrives.

Lindner circles this point, examining it from multiple angles: Who are we when we’re at work, or in relationships, or alone with our thoughts? Where do we stop owning stuff, and stuff starts owning us? How can we distinguish what matters from what’s transitory, what’s real from what’s an illusion? His writing less resembles scholarship than a non-religious sermon, an exhortation to examine unspoken assumptions about ourselves and our relationships.

I don’t mean this non-religious sermon comparison flippantly. Lindner’s writing resembles my first time reading Lao Tzu: the point isn’t necessarily any factual claims or how-to procedures for a better life. His point, instead, is to uncover the parts of our lives and experiences we haven’t considered directly, and remind us that these parts exist. He doesn’t give you step-by-step instructions, but questions he wants you to live with.

Ryan Lindner

Most self-help nonfiction follows two basic patterns: the author uses either long autobiographical vignettes to demonstrate points, or extensive evidence from hard science and psychology. Lindner does neither. After his autobiographical introduction, he mostly asks readers questions and demonstrates common patterns. His fast-paced writing breezes energetically, like a prose poem, carrying readers through the patterns Lindner has witnessed in himself and his clients.

I had initial doubts about Lindner’s approach. Literal-minded readers may find his intimate, informal approach off-putting. Post-Enlightenment rationalism has taught readers to seek supporting evidence whenever anybody makes broad claims about life and behavioral ethics. I pooh-poohed Lindner while reading him. Then I put the book down and felt myself strangely compelled to jump into a task I’d long avoided: cleaning the sink. Hmmm, almost like I felt motivated.

Don’t mistake my meaning. Lindner offers evidence, but not from science. He mixes his and his clients’ experience (he removes any confidential information) with quotes from respected sources like Clarence Darrow, Maya Angelou, and… um… Jim Carrey. Some quotes he uses in ways that contradict their original context; I suspect he found at least some of them with Google. This doesn’t mean he’s wrong, only that Lindner’s approach is casual.

Self-help is popular in America because, I contend, many people realize we need help. We realize something is wrong; we just can’t positively identify what. So we seek everything, from feel-good gurus like Tony Robbins to lite-beer scientists like Malcolm Gladwell, because they offer different approaches to fixing the gaping wounds we all feel in our lives. They’re mostly disappointing, not because they’re wrong, but because our needs are individual.

Ryan Lindner implicitly recognizes that your circumstances aren’t mine, or his. He doesn’t try to pitch corporation-friendly pablum. Instead, like Lao Tzu, Lindner wants readers to sit quietly with his enigmatic poetry, asking themselves the questions that daily life tries to muffle. No pseudo-Zen koans or six step plans here; Lindner wants you to uncover who you are when everyone else isn’t looking. And only you can answer that.

Around the halfway mark, Lindner writes: “Do you want change? Okay, be precise; that’s where the progress is. Let’s have a specific, civil dialogue. Offer solutions.” This is slightly ironic, since Lindner’s writing is often general and not solutions-oriented. But, I realized, that’s what he meant: offer solutions specific to you. Lindner can’t do that, only you can. He can ask the necessary questions, but only you have the answers.