But who, exactly, is doing the deciding? It can be hard to tell from self-help publications, which tend to mingle as many as half a dozen notions about the selves they are intending to assist. This confusion is to be expected. Self-help takes its cues from the day-to-day ideas about selfhood that persist among ordinary people, and those ideas are either complex or irretrievably muddled, depending upon how you look at them. In general, though, they tend to fall under the umbrella of one of two overarching metaphors: “self-creation” and “self-discovery.” The first metaphor, “creation,” suggests that the self is something we can improve, or even build from scratch, much in the way we might start or enhance a business. When people want to invoke this aspect of the self, they say things like “I need to choose who I want to be” or “We are the sum of our choices.” In fact, “We are the sum of our choices” is such an attractively responsible-sounding phrase that it has been repeated nearly verbatim in, among many other examples, movies like I Think I Love My Wife (in which it is deployed with maximum earnestness by Chris Rock), X-Men: Days of Future Past (James McAvoy, playing Professor X, wields the earnestness), Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (earnestness by actual psychologist Martin Bergmann), and of course roughly ten thousand self-improvement/motivational books and websites, where it is often credited to the legendary guru Wayne Dyer, author of the 33-million-copy-selling Your Erroneous Zones.

The second metaphor—“discovery”—suggests that the self isn’t made or shaped, but rather is uncovered through hard archaeological work, like an Etruscan vase or the tomb of Tutankhamen. This self isn’t created—it is revealed and expressed. When people have this view of the self in mind, they say things like “I’ve got to figure out who I am” or “I wanted to say what I was all about.” This way of thinking is an equally powerful force in contemporary culture, and it appears in everything from the songs of Macklemore (“I had to find out who I really was,” he declares in “Make the Money”) to the wisdom of Eleanor Roosevelt (“I think that somehow, we learn who we really are”). The idea that the self is “found” or “discovered” usually includes the suggestion that the self is constant and solid—almost a substance, like gold or myrrh. “Uncover the treasure of your true self,” advises the self-help author Guy Finley, because “you have been left a great inheritance.” At the end of the road less traveled, it would appear, is a big sack of loot.