Help for the Fake Self-Help Industry
Unraveling the paradoxes of self-improvement
Are you familiar with the mystery of how the self-help industry could even exist?
Certainly, that industry is flourishing. In bookstores, for example, the self-improvement section is typically much larger than the philosophy, religion, or psychology sections.
The top publications on Medium deal with technology, computer programming, startups, and self-improvement. The publications known as “The Mission,” “Personal Growth,” “Better Humans,” and “Be Yourself” all have over a hundred thousand followers (and in some cases several hundred thousand). Other top publications like “The Startup,” “Startup Grind,” and “The Writing Cooperative” fall within subgenres of self-improvement. The top three Medium tags are “startup,” “life,” and “life lessons.”
(Admittedly, some of that data is flaky since the follower counts are likely inflated and evidently don’t reflect the number of viewers who read the articles, judging from the low claps for many of the articles published in those allegedly popular forums. Still, those are the public indicators.)
Oh, and in the US the self-help industry was worth over $10 billion in 2021.
But how could there be a demand for this kind of advice? And who could properly guide those in need?
The paradoxical demand for self-help products
According to some market researchers, “The average purchaser of a self-help product is an affluent woman, between 40 to 50 years of age, living on either the East Coast or the West Coast.” Millennials, mind you, are expected to replace baby boomers as the primary consumers.
This industry is paradoxical, then, in that those who could most use some guidance in improving themselves are, rather, the older rural folks who are the least likely to seek this help, whether because they can’t afford it, they’re too old to change, they’re too busy working tough jobs, they turn to old-fashioned religion instead of secular substitutes, or they’re victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Those who want to consume self-help books, articles, and seminars aren’t seeking advice on how to fix their problems. On the contrary, if they have the leisure time and the self-absorption to be reading or watching this material, or if they’re an average middle-aged woman living on the East or West Coast or a spoiled Millennial, personal defects aren’t their primary obstacles in life, and they’re doing relatively fine in neoliberal terms.
What they’re seeking instead is validation, reassurance, and flattery. They want to confirm that they’re already doing what they’re allegedly supposed to be doing. True, a perfect person wouldn’t need such reassurance, but the advice on offer isn’t about perfecting yourself; rather, it’s about feeling fine with who you already are. This industry doesn’t excel in judging its participants.
The self-help providers’ strategy is to pamper sensitive folks who might suspect something’s awry in their life, but who don’t want to do real work to identify and to rectify the problem. These “gurus” are savvy businessmen who supply easy, comforting answers, tailormade for affluent consumers who are after only fast food for the soul.
This isn’t to say middle-aged American women or Millennials face no serious problems. It’s just that those problems are structural, meaning they’re cultural, political, economic, and existential, and the self-help industry is a distraction from those harsh realities of materialism, neoliberal capitalism, populism, and nature’s godlessness.
The strange supply of fake wisdom
Those supplying this kind of advice are just as peculiar as those who are demanding it. Imagine the effrontery required to offer life advice to strangers! You just pretend to know everything, or you find you like to show off or to boss people around, so you specialize in telling strangers what to do.
Presumably, most of the self-help authors on Medium, for example, aren’t licensed therapists, psychologists, or psychiatrists. They’re only freelance writers who are exploiting a niche as a business opportunity. They see that some human herds are looking for cheap reassurance via feel-good platitudes. Alternatively, this audience craves distractions, the self-help pseudoscience and fantasies acting like the Food Channel’s fancy recipes that most viewers never bother to try.
These self-help writers realize that they can pretend to be experts because the readers are likewise only pretending to need help. The illusion is thus a classic folie a deux, a mass hallucination propping up a systemic fraud.
Just ask yourself: If you were really in need of life advice, would you seek it from a strange charlatan on the internet? How deep must the self-deception be for the readers to crave such advice, without realizing that if they have the luxury to settle for that impertinence, they must be relatively well-off and should be focussing not on self-help but on helping others.
And what of the trained professional therapists who churn out this content? Surprisingly, their participation in this industry is just as inexplicable. Recall how these experts demur from psychoanalyzing politicians from afar. This is called the Goldwater rule, and it’s accepted practice at the American Psychiatric Association.
The same logic applies to diagnosing any stranger, though. After all, why should psychiatrists or therapists be disinclined only to tamper with elections, by offering advice based on zero patient data? Isn’t it just as irresponsible to mislead the public with such pretenses? Most folks don’t wear the symptoms of their personal or cognitive disorders on their sleeves, like Donald Trump.
What would honourable self-improvement look like?
Can we imagine what a non-bizarre self-help industry would look like? That is, can we disentangle the above paradoxes and conceive of a kind of mass therapy that wouldn’t be a thoroughgoing scam?
The first step would be to disregard the whining of the spoiled upper class; at least, we’d have to avoid offering the superficial help that those elites crave. If the idea is to cure serious personal problems, we’d have to target those who are so deluded that they wouldn’t even agree they need help. In other words, the advisor would have to tell the patient something he or she doesn’t want to hear. Thus, the legitimate therapy wouldn’t be a twisted form of amusement or a reinforcement of consumer narcissism.
Moreover, the advisor would want to prioritize the severest problems, which again are the systemic, societal ones, as opposed to the petty grievances with certain personality traits which aren’t defects at all and which probably couldn’t be altered. Of course, these advisors would therefore be in the business of philosophy or of some other mode of social criticism. The purpose might be to galvanize support for a mass uprising to reform the broken social systems that are making us anxious, depressed, myopic, or infantile.
For instance, the actual self-help industry would be held up as a symptom of a cultural affliction: we strive to be perfect because our desires are largely manufactured by parasitic industries, so we complain even when we’re relatively well-off and secure and when our conspicuous consumption is the source of the grave suffering of the world’s poor and of an unfathomable number of animal species.
This isn’t the diagnosis most people would want to hear because it amounts to an indictment of our liberal way of life. But again, that’s exactly what we’d expect from a self-improvement industry that isn’t just a travesty. If we were happy to hear the diagnosis, how sick could we really be? Or how timid or sycophantic would be the advisors to celebrate a sick culture with a parade of flatteries?
As for those advisors, we’d want to weed out the charlatans. The therapists, too, would have to go since they should be offering advice only in a clinical setting where they have the patient’s detailed information to ground their diagnoses.
Who, then, would be left to provide the indictment? Who’s an expert on these cultural matters? Academics would be suitable except that they seldom write for a popular audience. You’d need philosophers, theologians, or culture critics who have studied politics, business, history, critical thinking, and so on and who have some facility for simplifying complex arguments and worldviews.
The result, then, would be just what we see in the real world: the sham self-help industry would overtake the less popular, rarer, and more incisive forms of guidance.
Philosophy, for example, would go underground, with few willing to read or to write at that level of criticism. The circus of pseudo-wisdom, perpetrated mostly by poseurs and opportunists for fake patients would go viral — because our cultural problems are so grave that their avoidance drives us to gleefully allow ourselves to be tricked into presuming that all we need is more cotton candy.
