The sinister truth behind the self-help industry

Calling out and dismantling the false narratives and predatory behaviors of the self-help industry.

I found myself deep in the self-help world almost by accident. After being a high-school English teacher for nearly six years, I found myself burnt out and in the worst mental and physical health of my life. 

Quitting still remains one of the best decisions I ever made and I soon catapulted myself into the world of being a freelance writer and a professional photographer.  It was during this time when I was self-employed, that I stumbled (by design) into the world of girl bosses and self-help.

I was in a much better place mentally than I was while I was teaching thanks to therapy and medication, but I was constantly feeling the pressure to “be better” and to be “successful”.

I listened to every podcast. I read every book. I even took some webinars. And I couldn’t figure out why everything I consumed felt…wrong. And why nothing was working.

The reason didn’t hit me until I read “Girl, Wash Your Face” by Rachel Hollis. It was a book that everyone in the self-employed world was reading at the time and as a reader, I picked it up hoping for some relatable stories and real advice. What I got was an abundance of privilege and advice centered around it.

It was then when it all clicked for me: the self-help industry wasn’t built to help people, it was built to profit off of vulnerable individuals forced into systems that suppressed their basic needs.

The numbers tell a clear story

The self-help industry was a $43.7 billion industry back in 2022. While the self-help industry has been a prominent and growing industry for a while now, the pace that it has grown in the past decade can’t be ignored. In the next few years, the industry is projected to grow by 5.1% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate).

While these numbers may seem impressive, the numbers also tell a more sinister story: the truth.

From Grand View Research

The self-help industry saw one of its biggest growths in 2020 when over 45,300 new self-help books were published and 71,000 life coaches filled the internet. I don’t need to remind you of 2020, but the industries that grew the most during this year were industries that tended to prey on individuals who were desperate for real help. Because that real help wasn’t being provided for them.

Industries such as the Multi-Level Marketing industry boomed in 2020, growing by nearly 13%. Distributors of these companies flocked to social media promising individuals who were laid off a chance at a work-from-home lifestyle that would allow them to become successful. Instead, 99% of these individuals would only find themselves breaking even or, more likely, in debt.

The self-help industry functioned in a similar way. Self-help “gurus” and “coaches” rushed to social media in the hopes of selling their latest book, course, or mastermind to people desperately seeking help, promising them the key to success. Instead, at best people would waste their time reading the latest self-help bestseller just telling them to “think positively”. At worst, people would spend $100,000 on a generic mastermind group promising millions of dollars in value and giving nothing. 

To further look for the truth, we need to look at who the industry is targeting. The answer? 70% of self-help consumers are women. In a world where gender still determines your rights and opportunities, the self-help industry sees profit in predatory marketing disguised as empowerment. The self-help industry tells women they can have it all if they just believe in themselves without taking any real steps in achieving systemic equality. This marketing is a lie. And they know it.

In order to effectively market a product and in order to successfully build a brand, like many self-help gurus and their companies have, you need repeat customers. Which is the backbone of the self-help industry. About 85% of personal development customers are repeat customers. The self-help industry will have you believe that this number means that they’ve created hyper-loyal customers. I want to argue something else. 

Let’s go back to the root of all of self-help: people turn to self-help because they need help. People are desperately searching for help because they’re stuck. They’re trapped in a society where nothing they do ever accumulates in the success they were taught to strive for. Or they’re trapped in a cycle where they can never make ends, no matter how hard they work. Or they’re struggling with mental health on a daily basis, but have no access to healthcare and don’t know where to turn. No matter their reason, they turn to self-help for the answers.

From @msrachelhollis

And self-help will give them empty platitudes and ideas that sound nice and inspiring. They may even give them a few tricks to try. And people will do them and try them. But nothing changes. They’re still trapped. So, they buy the next book or next course. Because maybe they’ll learn what they need to in the next thing. But, nothing works. So they buy the next thing. And the next. And the next. 

There’s an 85% repeat rate of self-help customers, because the self-help industry doesn’t want to actually solve problems. They want to profit off of them. 

The reason why self-help advice doesn’t work 

The root of most self-help ideology is the “self”. This stems all the way back to the Transcendentalist movement of the 1800s and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”. The root of this ideology and many of the ideas presented within the self-help industry surround the idea that an individual self has the ability to make their life better.

Which sounds very empowering. 

However, we live in a society where this is not the reality. We live in a world where opportunity is based on where you were born, how much money you were born into, your gender, your race, and your abilities. Only one of these is self-determined (gender), however, individuals who self-identify outside of the sex they were born with have less opportunity. 

These factors determine your access to education, professional opportunities, healthcare, housing, food, water, and safety. And while it sounds empowering to tell you that you can change your access to these things, that is, most often, not the reality.

In order to increase our access to inherent rights and opportunities, we need to look beyond ourselves in order to enact real change. But, this is not a common message in self-help.

And this is dangerous.

Let me give you an example: a twenty-year-old with chronic depression can’t afford therapy or medication so they turn to self-help. They read a book that tells them that a simple shift in their mindset will allow opportunities and happiness to come into their life. No matter how hard they try to shift their mindset, they’re not able to. Instead of recognizing that this is because their brain functions differently than other people (which is not a bad thing), they will blame themselves for being a failure. For not being “good enough” to change their mindset. It places a moral measurement onto their mental health, further shaming them and further deepening their depression. 

What needs to change isn’t this individual. It isn’t their mindset. It’s that they need access to healthcare so that they can get help from a licensed psychiatrist and psychologist to help give them tools to help them live with their depression that fit their specific needs. 

The self-help industry misses the mark because they put all of the ownness on an individual instead of putting the ownness on a collective. A collective that can push for change.

The saddest part of this whole thing is that the self-help industry is so close. One of the reasons why so many people are repeat customers in the self-help industry (on top of not finding the help they're looking for) is the sense of community that can come within the self-help industry. 

From @amanda_montell

Many life coaches or masterminds create communities with their client base. Unfortunately, they use cult-like manipulation tactics, specifically in regards to the language they use to manipulate their client base. So instead of actually forming communities for change, they are forming communities of pressure designed to shame others into being better (“motivation” “accountability buddies”) that ultimately means them “investing” more money in themselves and in whatever life coach or mastermind they’re stuck in. 

In more severe cases, these self-help communities can turn into actual cults like we’ve seen from NXIVM and Scientology, both built around and starting with self-development courses. 

But, what can we actually do to help? 

I was first introduced to the self-help world because I was looking for resources on how to live with my mental illness and become a successful freelancer. Most people turn to self-help because they desperately need help and aren’t finding any available resources.

The need for self-help is there. The solution is eliminating the need. 

We live in a society that is based in capitalism and imperialism, which fosters a lie of the importance of individualism. Which helps maintain these systems, because nothing can change with an individual. Things only change in a collective. Self-help is not a solution to systemic problems, which are at the root of all of our individual problems we’re seeking answers to. Collective-help is. 

Collective-help and creating community is a tool that can help with not only answering our needs we have right now by taking care of each other, but also actually empowers us to make change on a larger scale to ensure that our needs are met on a systemic level in the future. 

To learn more about how to create community in your life to bring about support and change, I highly recommend reading “Mutual Aid” by Dean Spade.

In the meantime, while I obviously don’t support the self-help industry as a whole, there are a few outliers in the industry who are doing good work. Here’s my list of self-help books I actually recommend for people to read because they center individual’s needs and collective change.

Together, we can switch the narrative of self-help and dismantle the self-help industry by calling out their predatory behavior through embracing a new collective-help model in order to ensure that in the future, there will no longer be a need for a self-help industry to begin with.