‘Are you sure you want that one?” asks the assistant in the flagship Waterstones store in Piccadilly, London. I’d picked up a classic self-help book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, amid a tranche of the much more fashionable titles such as The Let Them Theory; Fawning; The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck; The Courage to Be Disliked. “Is that not the one everyone’s reading?” I ask. She hands me the cloth-bound Don’t Believe Everything You Think. “This is the one everyone’s reading.”
Self-help book sales in the UK grew every year between 2015 and 2023, according to Nielsen. And that’s just the overt titles, not counting “stealth-help” (memoir, nature writing, bibliotherapy – poems and what’s considered likely to cheer you up). But the books shifting the most units in recent years are a very specific tranche of self-help: the idea that you help yourself by only looking out for number one. Some are about stopping trying to please other people; others say stop thinking about them altogether. What could I learn from reading them?
