La pythie vous parle

La pythie vous parle – From ancient Greece to the present day, history is littered with people turning to ‘expert’ advice to improve their lives or get out of a bad situation. In today’s world, this trend has definitely taken hold, turning into a veritable collective obsession. The Internet, in particular, is teeming with consultants, coaches and gurus with millions of followers ready to advise us on just about everything… But in following their advice, we often lose sight of its meaning… so, for example, while we go to great lengths to preserve our health and live to be 100, we are incapable of knowing why we should continue to drag our carcass across the face of the planet for as long as possible. Drawing on a host of examples, Liv Strömquist’s The Pythia Speaks to You attempts to understand the reason for these contradictions and outlines seven pieces of advice on how and why we should live. In her pages, we come across a host of ‘experts’ and ‘advisers’: Carrol Righter, Ronald Reagan’s astrologer, invariably urging in his horoscopes to ‘be beautiful and happy’; Duchess Meghan Markle, writing life advice on bananas handed out to sex workers on the street; masculinist influencer Rollo Tomassi, advising men to stand still in the doorway of their homes to take control of their relationships; Instagram psychologist Nicole LePera, urging us to set limits on the people who take advantage of our emotional capital. We’ll also find out why St Catherine of Siena made a deal with God and starved herself to death to save her father’s soul; and why West Indian circus performer Ludger Sylbaris claimed to have made the best choice of his life when he decided to go out, get drunk, get into fights and end up in jail. Drawing on the writings of numerous philosophers and sociologists, from Zygmunt Bauman and Hartmut Rosa to Slavoj Žižek, Eva Illouz, Byung-Chul Han and Jacques Lacan, Liv Strömquist develops a subtle critique of personal development theories with her trademark humour and irony. At the same time, she underlines the moralising, guilt-inducing nature of these theories and their perfect fit with the neo-liberal conception of the individual and society. In short, La pythie vous parle is a personal development book… against ‘personal development’.