The self-help industry

Continuing from our discussions in the last issue, we delve once again into the murky waters of people’s (mostly men’s it turns out) declining reading habits. I always give careful consideration before decrying something, and the topic we will address in this issue is a claim about which I have given years of consideration: that the self-help industry has been the undoing of modern literarure.

And yet the industry is as strong as ever. It has consistently set records every year in print sales and popularity from 2012 to 2023 (2024 numbers are not available yet). In addition, a new genre of “stealth help” is cropping up with memoirs, anthologies and poetry serving up what is essentially dressed-up self-help content.

I have read far more self-help books than I care to admit, mostly trying to understand their appeal. Looking back, I cannot think of more than a few with which I was genuinely impressed and thought valuable. The rest expertly re-packaged obviousness as newfound life advice. And I often found ancient self-help books to be far more worthwhile than their modern counterparts—after all the genre is not modern—so what changed with time? Three observations follow.

A diminishing focus on philosophy

Self-help books originated in philosophy. If you are liberal with definitions you might as well convince yourself that self-help as a genre was philosophy itself. When the Epicureans spoke of richness or Sun Tzu wrote about war or the Stoics discussed equanimity, they were all looking at life on a grand scale. It was less about what you did day-to-day and more about how daily living translated to a life well-lived. And in that they all disagreed with one another, so people could pick and choose the reasons that appealed to them the most.

Modern-day self-help books are homogenous. They all agree with each other on a philosophical level and only concern themselves with the many different ways to get there. Today you will find on bookshelves a dozen books that all make various cases for why you should “choose your hard” or overwork yourself, convincing you that those are the only correct approaches to life. The other extreme are similarly strong cases for culture-centric approaches to living, like Hygge or Ikigai. There is an assumption of principle followed by instruction; there is rarely any philosophising.

Fundamentally designed to erode

When we think back to Victorian times novels like George Elliot’s Adam Bede come to mind, as Rebecca Richardson points out, but these now-famous titles were, in their time, outsold by self-help books like Duty , Life and labour and Character, names that many self-help afficonados are unlikely to identify today. Even Darwin’s The origin of species was outsold when it was published by Samuel Smiles’s Self help.

My point is that self-help books are staunchly tied to the societies and cultures of their own time. Indeed that is what makes them sell. It is also what makes them outdated when they place too much emphasis on connecting to the present time alone. Despite what ‘life coaches’ may have you believe, we never live in just the ‘now’. We live in context, in history, in evolving philosophy and in the ebb and flow of societal advancement or degradation.

The rapidity with which self-help books spread their tentacles across other genres in the 19th century has led to that period being marked as the origin of the modern self-help book. The late-1800s saw books on everything from ‘The Art of Money-Getting’ to ‘Men Who Have Risen: A Book for Boys’ and ‘Self-help: A Book for Young Women’, slowly laying the foundation for modern books that all ultimately centre around taking control of all aspects of one’s life. In the process they are pretending as though self-help is now a science. The trouble with pretend-science is that it is only a matter of time before things lose their footing.

The modern reader has unrealistic demands

So what if the self-help genre steps away from philosophy? And so what if they only address fleeting cultural trends over long-term, multifaceted advice?

Without these ideas to ground them and clarify their promises reasonably, self-help books are at the mercy of readers. And what do readers want? Quick fixes. Straightforward answers. Tangible solutions. Instant gratification. The usual sort of outlook fostered by an attention-grabbing, overstimulating internet. No book can possibly deliver, because books are fundamentally like beverages designed to be sipped over a long time and not like medicine to be gulped in one go. Often one continues with a book long after one has finished reading them.

Many self-help books have nevertheless tried to address these new demands. You can tell because once you have read such a book you come away with the feeling that it could just as effectively have been scribbled on a sticky note.

The emergence of services like ‘Blinkist’ have only worsened things, bolstering the idea that all books have to offer is the pith that can be squeezed out into 5-minute summaries.

Society and self-help

So why address this topic at all? A lot of people are blaming self-help books for men’s declining reading habits. “The self-improvement-obsessed grindset bros who can't spare the bandwidth to pick up a novel,” said Jason Diamond writing for GQ, “are the people who need literature the most.” Earlier this year Constance Grady addressed the debate a little more directly (and I daresay humorously) writing in Vox. She points out that too many young men are “turning to figures like Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate for intellectual stimulation.” In other words, walking, talking self-help books.

I think, ironically, the answer lies in better self-help books. Philophy makes you reckon with yourself and with your ideas. It can also provide a level-headed framework for discourse that sidestepps reactions to trends. And it can provide answers that, while not being immedate, quick fix solutions, are nevertheless just as satisfying. The very narrative they have stuck to since Victorian times of praising millionaires and placing mindless hustle on a pedestal are being amplified today. “Reading fiction doesn’t fit into the idea of hustle culture,” as Mr Diamond writes, “and there are plenty of men out there with large follower counts on social media who tell subscribers that it’s a worthless, time-wasting activity just for women.”

If the problem is not men reading fewer works of fiction but men being led astray by self-proclaimed “lived experts”, perhaps it is time we looked not to overcome self-help books but seek out better ones instead.