Can Self-Help Save Us All?

Emma’s focus is razor sharp. Gone is the undercurrent of high-frequency anxiety and stress that used to bubble beneath her surface. Every two months, a new package arrives on Emma’s doorstep, containing the key to her newfound inner peace. That order isn’t psychedelics, probiotics or even CBD. Emma’s secret is books. Specifically, self-help books.

As the 2010s drew to a close, publishers already knew what newspapers would later reveal: the public couldn’t get enough of self-help. Every week, up to 150 new self-help titles were being published, and in bookshops, books like Matt Haig’s (Canongate, $19.99) were migrating from the self-improvement section – long a haunt of weight-loss memoirs and left-field spirituality – to the bestsellers window display. A perfect storm of political unrest, climate anxiety and the seemingly unstoppable rise of the gig economy (and corresponding pressure to self-optimise) was brewing. Indeed, many believe that the self-help industry is “fuelled largely by fear, anxiety and insecurity,” writes Harvard University’s Professor Beth Blum, author of ($57.95, Columbia University