How To Stop Reading Self-Help Books: Some Simple Steps And a Dash of Critical Thinking

A world full of self-help books and we still need help. One self-help book followed by another, like cars rolling off an assembly line. And so the cycle of reading continues. We’ve become addicted to self-help books. What’s gone wrong? As we grab the next self-help book, barely having finished the last, we’ve assumed the genre reflects and satisfies our need for self-fulfilment. And yet, it’s always playing catch-up. I examine how the self-help genre is embedded in a dominant ideological current running through ever-increasing parts of our culture. The individual is the site where all the fixing work takes place. Single answers. Easy fixes. Single individuals. Through detailed analysis of the mundane practices of everyday life, I show that there is another ideology, operating in tandem but concealed because of its ‘mundaneness’, through which we’re finding ourselves. What we crave is to engage in the shared production of our lives. We want to be like other people. The self-help book genre is preventing us from being genuine individuals. We must place the individual back in the social. I pursue this analysis using critical thinking; I recommend that you follow my lead.

Dr Cherry is an independent scholar who writes on topics across the social sciences. He has previously written on the phenomenon of self-help and is currently preparing a monograph on the rhetoric of and in social science writing.