… How can we help?

I was 24. Drinking a litre of cheap whisky a day. Alone in my flat. Drink-driving to the shop for the next bottle. And convinced I was beyond saving.

“I am doing everything right,” I thought. “Why am I just not changing?”

This moment of hopelessness did not emerge from nowhere.

By that point I had already spent thousands of hours trying every self-help tool imaginable: powerful psychedelic drugs, various therapeutic modalities, life coaching, hypnotherapy, and a ten-day silent meditation retreat where I meditated ten hours a day.

The groan was sincere – because, in a sense, I was doing everything right. Right by the standards of the wellness and self-help phenomena currently taking Gen Z by storm. Fortunately, the final stone left to turn over in my self-help journey happened to be the Bible, which, to my utter surprise, revealed to me the Saviour of the world, Jesus Christ. I’ve been sober ever since.

The extremes reached within my story aren’t common within Gen Z, I’ll admit. But the undercurrents of the story are common.

Generation Z are becoming increasingly obsessed with self-help and, like I was, are seeking salvation through it.

If you haven’t spent much time on social media, it’s hard to recognise just how big a phenomenon self-help has become, or how many forms it takes.

This isn’t just one young man’s story. A whole generation is being taught how to fix itself. And it isn’t working.

So why has self-help gripped Gen Z so much? And how should the church respond?

Gen Z’s relationship to self-help

Self-help can be defined as anything that promises a better life through improving oneself. The appeal of many of the biggest names on social media lies in their narratives about improving yourself.

Andrew Tate is a prime example. Young men may find him because of the extreme views he asserts about women – but they stay for his self-help content. Type his name into YouTube and you encounter reams of motivational videos calling men to work hard, get rich and get in shape. He promises that self-improvement is the only path to life’s “ultimate goals”: women and success. His self-help videos alone have racked up billions of views.

On the other end of the spectrum sits Keila Shaheen, a 24-year-old TikTok star whose progressive therapeutic perspective is alien to Tate’s. Shaheen champions the practice of shadow work, which is exploring hidden, suppressed or uncomfortable parts of the self in search of healing.

Her book The Shadow Work Journal became a self-published bestseller. At points, Shaheen was reportedly the bestselling author across Amazon’s entire book platform, outselling major political titles and celebrity biographies. She primarily promoted the self-help book through TikTok.

Within less than a decade, Jordan Peterson went from an obscure Canadian professor to a global name whose main YouTube channel has crossed 1,000,000,000 views, dispensing advice on how men and women can improve themselves.

The numbers tell a similar story elsewhere.

• A 2023 OnePoll survey found that 81% of Gen Z respondents believed they could write a self-help book themselves, compared to just 48% of millennials and 28% of boomers.
• The #SelfImprovement hashtag has racked up over 9,000,000 posts on TikTok.
• #Manifestation posts have had over 23,000,000,000 views.

This is just a small example of how people from a wide spectrum of convictions and political persuasions are united in their ever-increasing attraction towards self-help.

Why is it like this?

In order to understand this phenomenon, we need to understand how human beings relate to pain.

If someone injures themselves, their immediate reaction is to minimise it. The greater the pain, the more extreme the remedy: from a plaster, to the hospital, to morphine.

This is true not only of physical pain, but of our emotional pain too. People with backgrounds of abuse are statistically more likely to become drug addicts or enter co-dependent romantic relationships. Deeper emotional wounds are typically correlated with more extreme attempts to escape from the pain they cause.

I raise all this because Gen Z, by almost every metric, is the generation reporting the most painful emotional life. It makes sense, then, that they are also the generation most attracted to the solutions self-help offers to their pain.

There are many theories about the factors behind this pain: social media use, “child-centred” parenting, the early outsourcing of childcare, rising divorce rates.

But the core reason is this: we’ve rejected God and His life-giving design. Through His Word, God has laid out a roadmap for how we are to flourish as human beings.

Just as there are external laws governing physics, there are natural laws and patterns that govern human beings. Try to build a plane while ignoring the laws of physics – the way God has ordered creation – and that plane will fail to take flight.

The same is true for human beings. The more we are out of alignment with the good and life-giving order of creation and blueprint for life God has revealed, the more disorder and chaos we generally experience.

Some of our grandparents may have rejected God, but they still lived lives broadly in alignment with the Biblical pattern. They saved sex for marriage, had children within marriage, didn’t divorce, kept stricter parenting styles, and mothers were generally around more in the children’s formative years. They were still shaped by Christian morality.

The children they raised, therefore, had lives still fairly aligned with God’s life-giving blueprint, meaning they still experienced the crumbs and morsels of God’s goodness through common grace, even without a relationship with Him.

This generation is different

Not only have they rejected God; they’ve also rejected His life-giving pattern. The culture and families Gen Z have grown up in are far from the life-giving Biblical blueprint God has laid out in the Bible. They have not only rejected the Bread of Life; they no longer even have the crumbs and morsels their parents or grandparents had to get them by.

It is in this place of existential pain and spiritual bankruptcy that Gen Z are desperately trying on whatever plaster they can find to fix that pain – whether New Age spirituality, meditation, digital detoxing, therapy, or Jordan Peterson’s vision of responsibility and accountability.

How should the church respond?

As Christians, we will encounter young people who have emerged from this world. We will even encounter believers who flirt with the paradigms above. So how can we love them and point them towards Christ?

The first step is to dispel the unhelpful assumption that none of these self-help practices offers any relief, and that people who indulge in them are simply deluded.

Some of these practices are completely empty, but many are not. As noted, God has ordered this world in a particular way. If you live in alignment with the natural order of human life, you tend to flourish more. The truth is, some of these self-help practices push people closer to God’s design for human life, and so help them.

I remember when I was living a destructive lifestyle of drinking, drugs and excessive social media use – meditation actually made me feel better. That was not a delusion. Both common sense and science suggest that, in a world constantly filled with excessive stimuli, if you step away from that noise for 15 minutes a day and just focus on your breath, you will find a degree of respite.

If someone has lived a life in which they’ve never truly felt “heard”, they will experience great relief from being in a therapeutic relationship with someone who listens to their worries each week. God has designed us to be around people who are quick to listen and slow to speak, so therapy can fulfil that God-prescribed social dynamic in part.

Self-help can take someone from 0/10 to 4/10 without Christ, but it can’t quite scratch the itch of the human condition. And deep down, people know this. They know that “there must be more to life than this”. This is the rich evangelistic soil that needs to be sown into. For example:

“Yes, I have no doubt that the stillness of meditation may provide you relief. But do you ever leave meditation feeling that there must be something more? Is your heart still restless? The good news is that there is more. The stillness experienced in meditation is meant to be paired with an encounter with the loving Father you were made to commune with. True peace is found through Jesus Christ, who died for your sins, that you may enter the Father’s presence through the forgiveness He offers.”

“It’s amazing to hear you’ve felt truly heard and cared for, for the first time, in therapy. The Bible calls all human beings to be quick to listen, so it’s no surprise you’ve felt such relief from being listened to well. But what happens when the therapist goes away? What happens when you don’t have someone’s ear? As Christians, we are told God hears the cries of His people; God is described as the One who sees and searches our hearts. God can fully love and listen to us in a way no therapist can, and provide a peace that surpasses all understanding. This is now available to you through the work of Christ on the cross, if you turn from your sins and towards Him.”

We need to be willing to affirm that they may have found some relief from these self-help techniques, but also have the conviction that it’s only a counterfeit or shadow of what can be found fully realised through Jesus Christ and the life the Bible calls us to live.

I know this soil intimately. I was the 24-year-old with a litre of cheap whisky beside me, every self-help tool in the world tried and discarded. What finally healed me was not another technique. It was a person. And the wounds the plasters could never reach turned out to be the very ones Christ came to heal. Psalm 147v3: “He heals the broken-hearted and binds up their wounds.”