Socrates Wasn’t Your Self-Help Guru… & That’s the Problem
Published: January 21, 2025
Every few years, an ancient philosopher gets dragged into the modern self-improvement industrial complex, repackaged as a life coach, productivity hacker, or mindfulness guru. This time, it’s Socrates.
Agnes Callard’s new book Open Socrates argues that real self-improvement isn’t about willpower but about ideas—big, lofty, intellectual ones. She claims that the problem isn’t that we know what’s good and fail to pursue it, but that we don’t actually know what’s good in the first place. It’s a bold claim, and honestly, it’s a bit exhausting.
Sure, thinking deeply about morality, justice, and truth sounds noble. But if the solution to becoming a better person is to turn into an armchair philosopher, then we’re doomed. Because let’s be real—most of us aren’t spending our afternoons sipping wine and debating ethics in the Athenian agora. We’re drowning in email, dodging rent hikes, and praying our health insurance covers that weird back pain.
Philosophy isn’t the answer—it’s the problem
Callard’s take is interesting, but it suffers from the same issue that plagues a lot of academic philosophy: it assumes people have the time, patience, and privilege to wrestle with abstract ethical dilemmas when most are just trying to survive. Socrates could afford to sit around all day asking people if they really knew what courage was because he wasn’t juggling two jobs, raising kids, or wading through student debt.
And let’s not forget—his relentless questioning got him executed. If Socrates were around today, he’d probably be that guy on Twitter who replies to every post with “But have you really thought about this?” until he gets ratioed into oblivion.
The self-improvement trap
The modern obsession with self-improvement is already exhausting, and now Callard wants us to add philosophy to our to-do lists? We’re already drowning in advice: wake up at 5 AM, eat like a caveman, journal, then optimize your life like a Silicon Valley exec. And now, on top of that, we have to wrestle with Socratic dialogues just to figure out if we should cut carbs?
It’s not that Socrates didn’t have any value—his relentless questioning did change the way we perceive knowledge and ethics. But let’s be honest: most people aren’t looking for an existential crisis when they pick up a book about self-improvement. They just want to stop doomscrolling and finally go to bed on time.
Thinking won’t save us—action will
Callard’s faith in intellectualism is admirable, but it’s also deeply naive. Knowing what’s good doesn’t mean you’ll do it. You can read the work of every great thinker from Plato to Kant, but at the end of the day, you still have to get up and actually live your life.
Socrates taught that recognizing your own ignorance is the first step toward wisdom. But wisdom doesn’t come from endless contemplation. It comes from making choices, taking action, and, sometimes, messing up along the way.
So, by all means, read Open Socrates. Think deeply about ethics. But don’t let philosophy become just another way to procrastinate on living. Because in the end, Socrates had one luxury we don’t—time. And most of us don’t have the time to question everything. We just have to get on with it.