What self-help books tell us about ourselves

To understand modern self-help books, open “Always Remember: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm”. The sequel to “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse”—and no doubt the prequel to the “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Massive Royalty Cheque”—these animal parables topped Britain’s bestseller charts at Christmas. They have sold many millions of copies (often a bad sign) and been described as “heartwarming” (a worse one).

Open this volume and it does not disappoint. Its animal protagonists are fond of life, each other and of saying things about love in a charming handwritten font. Its insights are supposedly aimed at children, yet loved by adults. “Sometimes your mind plays tricks on you. It can tell you you’re no good, that it’s all hopeless,” reads one entry, which recently went viral on Instagram. “But remember this; you are loved, and important, and you bring to this world things no one else can. So hold on.” The tone is like that of Winnie the Pooh, but without the grit and darkness.

These days the self-help genre is expansive, including picture books and poetry as well as tips for climbing the career ladder. Yet it is rarely as instructive as it claims: buy “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” and it is far from assured that you too will become a Highly Effective Person. All the same, such books are often profitable and always telling. They provide invaluable guides for social historians, for they tell us a little about who we want to be and even more about who we actually are. Read through a century of self-help and you are offered an archaeology of anxiety.

In a seminal Victorian volume called “Self-Help” Samuel Smiles told his readers, who were trapped in a hierarchical society, that all they needed for success was “Will” and the “HABIT OF ATTENTION”. “Think And Grow Rich” (1937) taught Depression-era American readers that what they really needed to be wealthy was to visualise themself “ALREADY IN POSSESSION OF THE MONEY”. “Atomic Habits”, a bestseller published in 2018, teaches time-poor modern readers that they need only follow the “Four Laws of Behaviour Change”.

More recent volumes show other traits. God, increasingly prominent in cultural life, has made His appearance in self-help sections, too. Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, once said that social networks do best when they “tap into one of the seven deadly sins” such as greed or pride. Run your eye down a list of bestselling self-help guides—past titles include “The Five Types of Wealth” and “Mini Habits for Weight Loss”—and it seems that they do as well. The seven deadly sins may lead to seven-figure sales.

Many other self-help books commit their own, bespoke self-help sins. Vast numbers commit the sin of Tiresome Capitalisation; many commit the sin of graphs with no scale; several commit the sin of using the ghastly word “elevate”; others commit the unforgivable sin of poetry. “Each day I’m surprised/by the newness that I see…[by] the complexity of me” runs a poem in a newly released anthology called “Joy Chose You” which may well leave you feeling/that Revulsion Chose You, Too.

A lot of them aim at an antique grandeur. Stoicism is popular: Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations” has a 4.7-star score on Amazon; a forthcoming book is entitled “How To Live Like A Stoic”. However, the style and aims of most are very modern—and nowhere more so than in their obsession with time. Smiles’s “Self-Help” was first published in 1859, the same decade in which Britain became the world’s first predominantly urban society. People who had once lived in a world in which to everything there was a season—a time to sow; a time to reap; a time to sleep—now lived their lives to the sound of the ticking clock.

That sound echoes impatiently through the genre. Where Marcus Aurelius had meditated on the futility of human endeavour given the “infiniteness of eternity”, modern self-help moves at a quicker clip. The recent bestseller “4,000 Weeks” reminds you that this period is a human lifespan. “Atomic Habits” offers the “Two-Minute Rule” to improve productivity.

Self-help is in one way a genre weighed down by the cares of adulthood. In another, it is curiously infantile. (See again “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Very Profitable Publishing Franchise”.) Peruse a list of self-help bestsellers, from “Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?” to “Can’t Hurt Me”, and it may well feel less like a reading list for adults than the words of a tantruming child. Even when authors deploy a more adult vocabulary, the tone can be childishly petulant: one hit self-help book instructs in “The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck”.

This, says Svend Brinkmann, a Danish psychology professor and the author of “Stand Firm”, an anti-self-help self-help book, is typical: there is a “prioritisation of whatever…is childish” in much of self-help. Many books celebrate the “authenticity” of untrammelled emotion and encourage readers to let go of “the ‘false self’”. The idea that every thought and feeling must be given free rein is surely a product of the solipsistic social-media age.

Books may evoke stoicism—but they do so in an un-stoical way. The subtitle of that forthcoming stoic book is “A Handbook for Happiness”. Happiness, in the English sense of the word, is not a very classical aim. “Happiness” (which shares a root with words like “happenstance”) is a fickle thing: a glancing blow of good fortune, not a perpetual state to be striven for. Ancient philosophers were not looking for something that “comes and goes” but to “live a good life”, says James Warren, a professor of philosophy at Cambridge University. You do not manage to live a good life just “by reading a book”.

Perhaps the biggest question raised by self-help books is: do they help selves? There is some slim evidence that they can, but the effects are small. There is much better evidence for other things that actually make people happy, and most involve what Iris Murdoch, a philosopher and novelist, called “unselfing”: playing with a pet or with children, going for a walk in nature, going to the theatre or socialising. Fulfilment is “all unselfing”, says Professor Brinkmann: it is found when “your attention [is] turned away from yourself into the world”. So perhaps this January you should read an un-self-help book instead. ■