Self-Help Books Are For Losers (Like Me)

Pour one out in memory of the self-help book.

Yes, I know, all the books are slow sellers these days, especially the nonfiction ones and the ones that don’t feature sexy dragon riders. But self-help books in particular are taking it on the chin, with sales dropping significantly year over year. Publishers Weekly has the stats, and others in the industry are concerned. Tim Ferriss, author of the “Four-Minute” self-help series, posted some of his own book sales data on his blog, disclosing massive drops in his print, e-book, and audio book sales since 2022. His data went viral for its prognostications and his assertion that AI was scraping up self-help insights and feeding it directly to consumers, bypassing the book and its author’s ideas directly. Nothing has picked up the mantle left behind by last year’s bestsellers, Atomic Habits and The Let Them Theory, and publishers and authors alike have noticed and are anxious.

It’s not just AI, of course. One cornerstone staple genre of the self-help industry has historically been books on dieting and exercise. You don’t need a degree in criminology to realize that Ozempic has killed off that subgenre of self-help. Consider also the rise of self-help apps, online access to coaching services, and Gen Z’s tech-fueled post-literate lifestyle, and you’ll see how the genre of self-improvement is shifting away from the press toward new and easily accessible technologies.

Self-help books have been low-hanging fruit for Mockingbird writers since the very beginning. It is a strange bit of sociology. People want to get better and measure up to the world’s expectations, so they buy books that promise to help them. And if that book doesn’t work, they find the next book to buy. One would think that if a book were so good at helping people fix their frustrating lives, that book would become the staple that would shut down the genre. If a self-help book actually worked, logically, the self would no longer need help. But society keeps publishing books with unfulfilled promises to a people who remain trapped in their own inner frustration. The pattern repeats itself, and everyone just seems to be okay with it, buyer and seller alike.

(As an aside, for my money the only two books to actually make a dent in human limitation have been The Bible and The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.)

The self-help impulse isn’t going away, of course, but it’s worth mourning the end of clarity that self-help books provided. It was so easy to deride the medium of self-help books because of how obvious it was that they didn’t work. People didn’t rein in their spending, change their diet, get better jobs, or find inner peace because they read a book, and if they did achieve any of these goals, it was probably because they didn’t need the book in the first place. To pick up a self-help book was, admirably in my opinion, to admit to being a loser.

I remember an old boss at a part-time job telling me about how much he loved The Secret, the Rhonda Byrne pseudoscience self-help positivity manual from 2006. I was in college at the time, and he was telling me this as a thirty-something branch manager while he passed out beer to underage employees at an after-work party. He was hosting the party because he lived with his parents, and they were away that week on vacation. (As an aside, if the law of attraction were true, I don’t think he realized how poorly his circumstances reflected upon his character.) Here was a man who desperately wanted more for himself, I remember thinking. It was easy to see he was a loser by his lifestyle, but knowing that he was also searching for help by reading The Secret made me like him more. He was a loser, but at least he knew it, and that was something.

This is why, I think, the waning influence of self-help books is a sad portent: the act of buying, reading, carrying around a self-help book written by someone we implicitly believe to be wiser than ourselves made it far easier to identify others and ourselves as losers in need of, well, help. And the realization that one is a loser who needs help is one of life’s most important and necessary milestones. Purchasing How to Win Friends and Influence People was a financial and educational confession of loneliness and professional disappointment. Checking out The Four Agreements from the library was an admission of personal inner suffering and sadness. You had to concede you were fat to pick up a copy of The Atkins Diet. Skinny people weren’t buying that book.

The ease of these new technologies of self-help blur that line. You don’t have to publicly out yourself as a loser to ask AI about friendship and dating. We get to remain in the delusion that we are managing our lives when we pay for an app that budgets for us. An influencer’s short video is all we need for help sparking joy in our life. A therapist is for people who are weak and need help, but one can still be a superstar while receiving help from a life coach. The book was a physical symbol of defeat. The app allows us to labor on under the delusion of victory without first acknowledging that we are losers.

Greg Kinnear’s character Richard Hoover in the movie Little Miss Sunshine (a movie fav turning 20 this year) helps explain this harsh but necessary point. Richard is an aspiring life coach and self-help guru. The movie opens with him on stage pitching his “Nine-Step Refuse to Lose” program to an unseen audience. When he concludes his pitch, the lights come on, and we see ten people in a mostly empty school auditorium. A polite smattering of applause quickly peters out as the attendees head for the exit. After declaring with confidence that there are only two kinds of people in the world, winners and losers, it is revealed that Richard Hoover is a loser. He just doesn’t know it yet, though we the viewer understand his loserdom immediately.

If Richard Hoover were a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur pitching a mindfulness app, he would still have been a loser, but it would not necessarily have been obvious from his pitch. Or if Richard Hoover were smiling into a smartphone camera with little ring lights giving his pupils that trademark otherworldly glow, striving to build an influencer’s audience for his “nine steps,” he would be grinding away. If Richard Hoover were an AI evangelist building a therapeutic AI life-coach agent that would lead people through his nine steps for life change, it would just be part of the hustle.

Something about Hoover’s desire to publish a self-help book, oblivious to the fact that his own life was in need of serious help, clarifies just how much of a loser he was. Why is it that we haven’t extended this same loser label to tech moguls, influencers, mindfulness app users, AI devotees, self-care sycophants, and any number of other ways this impulse arises in its digitally mediated forms?

This isn’t about rejection or stigmatizing this technological shift. The realization that one is a loser is the first step in life-change regimens that actually work. “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.” Or as one inspirational author wrote 2,000 years ago, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Without the premise of defeat attached to these new technologies, people will continue to labor under the same delusions that made self-help books so ineffective. It prolongs a necessary inner shift that is the prerequisite for true healing and wholeness.

The Hoover family, we discover, is full of losers who refuse to accept their loserhood. A sweet but frumpy girl in a beauty pageant, a mom who can’t stop smoking, a suicidal philosophy professor uncle, a grandpa kicked out of his nursing home for his drug use, and a brooding teen who hates his loser family and wants desperately to escape it … By the end of the movie, each member of the family has their hope of victorious living dashed in front of them, but the movie’s great surprise is that they are all better for it. They survive their trials full of love and are released from the winning burdens they had placed upon themselves. That we all might find similar release in our own lives.

The drive to self-help ends when we are loved as losers, not when we prove we are winners. That is, after all, the experience promised by both of those books that actually do catalyze transformation in a person’s life. You’d do yourself a lot of good if you just embraced that you’re a loser and grab a copy of one of those bestsellers. But buyer beware: the help that comes will not come from yourself.