Tomorrowmind: Thriving at Work with Resilience, Creativity, and Connection–Now and in an Uncertain Future by Gabriella Rosen Kellerman and Martin Seligman, 1/5

This book not only represents everything that is classically hateable about pop psychology and the self-help genre, it plumbs new depths of dystopian deception. To be fair, there were warning signs, starting with the point in the introduction at which the authors straight-facedly suggest PRISM as a “handy (if out of order) acronym” to remember the concepts of resilience and cognitive agility (R), meaning and mattering (M), rapid rapport to build social support (S), prospection (P), and creativity and innovation (I). That peculiarly unhelpful scrambled egg of an acronym should have been my clue to close the covers and move on down my to-read list. Unfortunately, I decided to wade through a repetitive, half-baked, jargon-laden mess that ultimately morphed into a sales pitch for BetterUp, written by its chief product officer (Kellerman) and, as a little further research quickly revealed, the namesake of BetterUp’s foray into artificial intelligence–MartyAI.

How dark is that? Not only does Tomorrowmind fail to provide anything of value to readers struggling to cope with the stress of an increasingly volatile, technology-driven, future-oriented work environment, the authors actually manage to leverage that same audience in support of their own contribution to the dystopian future they pretend to address–offering the life coaching services of a lifeless, ai-powered chatbot. Ironically, Kellerman and Seligman have achieved more success by pivoting their psychology careers to address modern times than many of the people they use as positive examples in their book. Needless to say, their success hasn’t come from subscribing to life coaching services, buying self-help books, or applying the muddled concepts on view in this embarrassment of a contribution to literature.

Why I read it: The topic sounded interesting and I had respect for Seligman based on his book Learned Optimism.