4 Self-validationThe affirmation by individuals and groups of valued personal characteristics of the self that contribute to a sense of positive self-worth.
The cult of perfection is part of the wider culture of achievement and high-status differentiation. It treats the goals of acceptance, approval, social impact and self-validation as universally desirable. This is manifest in the exceptionally high number of lifestyle platforms dedicated to techniques of self-improvement and self-transformation, covering the topics of beauty, fitness, fashion, relationships, wellness, wealth and business success. It might be thought that questions of improving lifestyle immediately raise related social and economic questions of inclusion, equality, justice and social engineering. Be that as it may, the vast majority of lifestyle guru sites pass over these questions in seraphic silence. Instead, their typical approach is determinedly person-centred. They address an audience for whom the complexities of life have proved challenging with practical, plain speaking, oracular, non-hierarchical remedies. Gaining practical, positive self-knowledge is the bugle call rallying audiences to lifestyle communicators. Although most lifestyle gurus regularly participate in conferences, symposia and teach-ins, digital communication is the overwhelming and decisive point of exchange.
Despite the strong ethos of non-hierarchy, and the deliberate emphasis upon empathy (co-partnership), accessibility (friendship) and complicity (against ‘the system’) between Communicators (gurus) and Communicants (audiences), the latent power dynamics typically privilege the former over the latter. The paradox of these lifestyle sites is that they generally claim to solve various challenges of complexity in life with simplicity. This is communicated to followers in three main ways:
1 Lifestyle gurus present themselves as having faced, and vanquished, the same or analogous life traumas that their audience encounters. Among the most common traumas are serious physical illness, depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, career disappointment, relationship troubles and chronic self-dislike. Emotional disturbance may derive from continuing concrete health issues and their consequences, or more general anxieties about not possessing desired levels of acceptance, attraction and approval, or just not ‘fitting in’ with others. The persuasive power of lifestyle gurus is directly related to their apparent ordinariness and receptivity. The first rule of effective on-site contact is to create a culture of exchange in which audiences trust that communicators genuinely understand, and feel, their pain. A compelling narrative of self-transformation, articulated by those who have already successfully made the journey, is key.
2 They advance a step-by-step programme to enable people to improve themselves and, in doing so, to extract themselves from the negative thinking that prevents them from optimal conduct and reaching their full potential. This programme is typically supported by products and services of commercial benefit to the lifestyle guru in question. From a psychological standpoint, positive thinking, celebrating inner strength and the need to love oneself are the most common remedies.
3 Programmes of intervention may draw on selected strands of scientific knowledge to appear credible and true. However, although lifestyle gurus commonly appeal to scientific knowledge, they are generally defined in antithesis to professional expertise and elite diagnosis and treatment. While lacking any objectively adequate certification of probity, and with surprisingly low responsibilities to subject themselves to independent regulatory discipline, the lifestyle solutions and motivational programmes advanced by lifestyle gurus carry the enamel ring of common-sense. Virtue signalling is the means to achieve the end of life satisfaction. The power of positive thinking, self-knowledge and level-headed acceptance of one’s limits along with consciousness of one’s potential, prevail over all other proposed solutions to lifestyle dilemmas and problems. Although much online advice wears its ‘alternative’ credentials with pride, solutions to life’s problems are generally exclusively focused on the individual. Testimonials to the value of collective mobilisation, organisation and protest are thin on the ground. Complicity against the domination and power of professionals is a crucial resource in social bonding and trust building. Lifestyle gurus offer lifestyle solutions that are crucially, outside of the system. Remedies are usually presented in a ludic way, involving escapism and fun. In the country of wounded amour propre, the smiley solution set by the lifestyle guru is king.
The Generalised Other and the Looking-Glass Self
The rise of lifestyle gurus as a component in the lives of ordinary people reflects a change in the ratio of inter-personal relations in society. For over a century, sociologists have studied how spatially segregated relationships influence self-formation. In doing so they have devised a variety of concepts to investigate and clarify the issue. For example, George Herbert Mead (1934) developed the concept of the ‘Generalised Other’ to refer to the assembly of roles and attitudes of others that provide role models of behaviour. Integral to the concept is the nuance that this assembly includes ‘Significant Others’ – those who play a major role in providing direct and indirect advice and guidance. They may take the form of family relations, friends, artists, scientists, politicians, religious leaders and other types of celebrity, whose example is internalised and pursued as a lodestar of personal well-being. Lifestyle gurus are unequivocally ‘significant others’ for their subscribers and followers. Earlier, Charles Horton Cooley (1902) had already introduced the famous concept of the ‘Looking-Glass Self’. The term refers to the construction of a self-image through the reading of how we imagine ourselves to appear to others, based on their reactions to our behaviour. Our judgement of what motivates their reactions, and the feelings of pride or shame that result, either reinforce or undermine our self-image. The result is a social self based on co-presence, imagination and reflection: ‘each to each a looking-glass reflects the other that doth pass’ (Cooley 1902: 93). While Mead included indirect relations in the formation of the self, for the greater part Cooley concentrates on the direct, inter-personal relationships that individuals have with others. Mead was a great advocate of the value of Cooley’s social psychology. As he notes approvingly, Cooley’s definition of society is ‘the contact and reciprocal influence of certain ideas named “I” … I do not see how anyone can hold that we know persons directly except as imaginative ideas in the mind’ (Mead 1930: 694). Not surprisingly, Mead’s view of the Generalised Other echoes the basic tenets of Cooley’s concept of the Looking-Glass Self. It holds that one has an idea of oneself through interaction with others and the perceived impressions of others that one attributes to them. At the heart of the self is self-reflectivity and self-feeling. However, the content of this private, inner reserve is largely a product of the observable emotional, rational and imaginary relationships that one forges with others.
Mead and Cooley wrote before the age of modern mass communications. It is generally accepted that the rise of modern mass communications, particularly television, has altered the ratio between the influence of direct and indirect relationships in the construction of self-feeling and self-knowledge. A key concept here is ‘para-social relationships’. Coined at the dawn of the television age, the term refers to the affective and imaginary relationships that audiences form with figures transmitted to them through the media of film and television (Horton and Wohl 1956). On-screen Others became significant affective resources for modifying the Looking-Glass Self. These para-social relationships were understood to challenge the primacy of kith and kin networks, especially in the lives of vulnerable and isolated people (Horton and Wohl 1956). In general, the discussion accepted that it was the fate of para-social relationships to loom larger in the field of interpersonal contact. Horton and Wohl did not speculate upon the form and content of imaginary and fantasy relationships in the para-social field. However, it is clear that these matters are integral to the concept.
Today, the ubiquity of digital technologies in the West means that the concept of para-social relationships needs to be radically recast. Horton and Wohl took it for granted that para-social transactions are located within the organised system of media transmission. In contrast, online transactions in social media are conducted outside of the system. Emotionally speaking, the internet has enabled vlogging sites, political platforms, chat rooms and crowdsourcing, in which interaction is founded upon an alternative sense