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Comment by planet-and-halo | Hacker News Reader

You sure aren't. One of my buddies worked with an older woman who owned a bunch of self-help-y type business books, they were talking one day and she said, "You know, I noticed we all owned a bunch of these and it wasn't changing the way anyone worked." I thought that was pretty salient. The demand for ideas seems to be much more based on the satisfaction of novelty and being "in the know" and much less on actually utilizing any of it. These publishers try to feed that demand continuously, which is just kind of a ridiculous quirk of the human brain, and like any other irrational demand it has no inherent limit. So like you said they start scraping the bottom of the barrel.

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Yeah, I had similar feelings about the self-help/personal development/business "literature" space, and it drove me towards learning more about philosophy. A big thing that frustrated me was a lack of critical thinking, especially attempts to understand or reconcile why seemingly contradicting principles each seem reasonable and effective in similar situations. (Given seemingly the same situation, book A says X is the correct approach to take, but book B says (seemingly) not-X is the correct approach.)

I think there should be a sort of academic-esque literature (in the sense of journals and critique) that analyzes these things.

The benefit of self-help can be like escapist fiction, except the protagonist isn't Luke Skywalker or Frodo but you, yourself.

It seems to me, self-help is mostly just people spouting ideas with little scientific backing anyway. People get caught up in famous person X wrote this book. It seems like sometimes the person is actually knowledgeable like Jordan Peterson given their credentials for instance, but then they just draw conclusions that don't follow, make logical leaps, write platitudes, state common sense, etc.

Also it requires a lot of conscious effort to change the patterns that make up yourself. The first step is to learn that skill. It seems like that is where everyone mostly fails.

Ironically, I could write a self-help book/blog using these observations and present myself as an authority, but I realize these are just my opinions.

It's likely that self-help books do help some people, but only some. The disconnect people have is probably a result of different self-help books being suitable for different people in a way that we have a hard time defining. Eg imagine a self-help book catered towards introverts. Extroverts might not find it all that helpful, but be unable to realize why, yet their (introvert) friend swears that it was enormously helpful. Some (small) group of people feel that the book was helpful to them. They got that kick from it that started their engine. Another group might get it from another book.

Combine this with people liking new things and I think it explains a significant part of the self-help book industry. And why do people write them? Money, but also the same reason we write comments here. It somehow feels good to share your opinion, regardless whether you say you're an authority or are just sharing an opinion you're not completely sure of.

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