‘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?
Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves and How to Find Our Way Back, by the US psychologist Dr Ingrid Clayton, is the latest book in the selfish self-help subgenre. You’ve probably heard of “fight, flight or freeze” – the body’s primal responses to threat. Flight is a great response if, for example, you meet a tiger. It’s not so helpful in a work meeting. “Fawning” is a new addition to the trauma response lexicon and, Clayton writes, is distinct from the well-worn terms “people-pleasing” and “co-dependency” (though she says they are “branches on the overall fawning tree”). Often, fawning behaviour is politically reinforced by the patriarchy and “white body supremacy” (an attitude that elevates whiteness as the standard by which to judge everyone). So fawning is not your fault, but it is your problem, because it entails stifling your thoughts and feelings, sidelining your needs and imperatives, to mollify another person in the moment.
Clayton’s book is good: expert, vulnerable, disarming, thoughtful. Nevertheless, it lands squarely on the self-help question of our time: “What would you do if you were putting yourself first in your own life?”
Mel Robbins has sold 6m copies of her book The Let Them Theory, and has 11m followers on Instagram. Her philosophy is that not only should you put yourself first (which she calls “let me”), you have to also let others put themselves first (“let them”). For example: “Let my family be late to absolutely everything we go to,” she writes. “Let the neighbour’s dog bark all day.” There’s an intellectual honesty to this, in so far as it asks readers to consider not just what would happen if they lived more selfishly, but if everybody did. But at the same time, Robbins’s tone is “wise up” – everyone else is already letting their dog bark all day. If you can’t embrace the “let them, let me” credo, you’ll be stuck in a world where you’re worrying about the negative opinions of others, and – newsflash – they’re not worrying about yours. This will consume your time, energy and emotional headroom, to the extent that, ultimately, you won’t be in charge of your own trajectory. That’s what she says to packed theatres on her global tours – London this year; New Zealand, Australia and the US (again) next. She has been a lawyer, a broadcaster, a podcaster; she’s been riding high and shot down like a broad from a Frank Sinatra song. But, essentially, she’s someone to whom people listen – whether her words are in a book, on Instagram or spoken live.
I do not want to sound like a second-wave feminist, but the male authors in this terrain are basically the same, but stupider. Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life frames the problem slightly differently: seeking the approval of others is just one of a number of fallacies – along with seeking happiness, “victimhood chic”, the “responsibility/fault fallacy” – getting in between you and your goal, which is to not give a fuck. Manson started blogging dating advice in 2008, before graduating to everything advice.
Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga’s The Courage to Be Disliked – which has sold 10m copies, and “can change your life” (according to it) – is written as a dialogue between a prominent Japanese philosopher and psychologist (Kishimi) and a youth (Koga is 52; hell, let’s call him a youth). It is based on the precept that Freud was wrong, and his contemporary Alfred Adler (we’ll come back to Adler) was right – the past doesn’t matter; only your goals matter. Freud was an aetiologist (looking for causes); Adler was a teleologist (explaining behaviour in terms of the purpose it serves, rather than its root). From here, all problems become interpersonal problems (which is absolutely true unless your problem, for example, is that your local food bank just flooded and you have nothing to feed your baby; but I guess the baby is still a person, so fine). And therefore it follows that being disliked by other people “is proof that you are exercising your freedom and living in freedom”.
Joseph Nguyen’s 2022 book Don’t Believe Everything You Think: Why Your Thinking Is the Beginning and End of Suffering is a global bestseller. He makes a similar case, based on wisdom from Zen monks – who themselves are a patchwork of parables, rather than actual monks – that all negative emotions are generated not by circumstances or past events, but by the way we think about them. His prescription is even simpler: stop thinking. I’m not joking. By chapter 7, we’re into “Practical steps for how to stop thinking” (they are – pause, take a beat; ask yourself whether your thinking is taking you in a good direction; understand that you have a choice to stop thinking; say a mantra, maybe “thinking is the root cause of suffering”, or “stop thinking, idiot”; finally, experience the feeling, without putting any thoughts on it. Yes, these steps – pause, ask, understand, say and experience – spell PAUSE; well spotted).
These radical self-reliance books are on a spectrum, from the smart and well-researched to the less smart. All are threaded together by their confidence, but what self-help book has ever not had that? One thing is certain – it’s falling on parched earth, hitting a help-thirsty world in its most receptive spot. People are waiting for permission to live their best, Ayn Randian life, one in which your only moral purpose is your own happiness, and anyone who can convincingly give that permission – well, I wouldn’t want to speculate on their fulfilment, but they’re definitely minted (opinion is divided on wealth and its place in the firmament of meaning).
Laurie Santos, a psychology professor at Yale University, speaking to me by email, betrays some impatience with the idea that self-reliance will bring wellbeing. “Study after study shows the opposite. We often think we’ll be happiest when we focus on ourselves, but one of the most reliable ways to boost our own happiness is by focusing on others. I always tell my students that self-care is a misnomer. Becoming other-oriented boosts our mood and gives us a sense of purpose.” Santos points to research from Harvard Business School, which shows: “Spending money on others makes us happier than spending that same amount of money on ourselves. What’s fascinating is that this effect has been replicated across cultures and income levels, suggesting that the happiness benefits of giving are universal and deeply rooted in human nature.”
The language of boundaries – and the attendant motives for and consequences of laying them out, which are not giving a fuck and being disliked – tends not to speak of money. Clayton has thoughts on the way fawners annihilate themselves by giving away all their money (she describes one client who was found to be distributing 82% of her disposable income on others). Generally, though, the parables of the successful boundary are described through emotional dynamics – a careless family, an undermining boss, a self-involved partner. The lessons of the successful “let them”/“fuck them” relationship are to deprioritise the unsatisfying. It’s not that generosity is considered in these equations and found to be less important, rather that the circuitry is never activated.
“There’s also lots of work showing that our social connection is super important for happiness,” Santos writes. She points to a 2002 study published by the Association for Psychological Science journal that found that social connection was a necessary condition for being truly happy with life. “I worry that some of these individualist, self-reliant strategies miss that,” she says. Robbins, with her immense engagement on social media, has been challenged on this, and writes in her book: “Some people have shared that they feel lonely after using the Let Them Theory. If you’re feeling this way, it’s a sign that you’re applying the theory incorrectly.” It’s not a pass to ghost people who are getting on your nerves, it’s an invitation to take responsibility for what you want and pursue it. If you end up lonely, it’s because you’re not taking enough responsibility (surely you didn’t want to be lonely?).
What self-reliance theory, even the best of it, doesn’t address is just how much social connection starts with something you don’t especially want to do. For example, on a very regular basis, you’ll probably have to leave the house in inclement weather. It’s been interesting to watch the evolution of comfort narratives, especially on social media – first discernible in the “hygge” fetish of 2016 (when it was shortlisted for Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year), an endless croon to the Scandi lifestyle of log fires, cosy socks, dimmed lights and not seeing anyone. Since then, it’s been problematised by reality – loneliness levels are rising. If history is made by people who show up, so is community.
Taoic and Indic religions form a lot of the scaffolding of self-reliance, whether it’s the shaman who shows up for one of Clayton’s ex-fawner clients (to be real, this ends in a lovely story about some baby bears), the young Zen monks of Nguyen’s anti-thinking strategy, or a guest appearance from the actual Buddha, who, according to Manson, from a theological and philosophical perspective, didn’t give a fuck. This isn’t new. “Historically,” the eco-philosopher Rupert Read says, “religion and spirituality have been used again and again to promote resignation and fatalism. When you detach these religions and spiritualities from their cultural milieu, it’s quite easy to transform them into something that’s against their intent. There is a deep way in which a more communal and collective orientation towards life is prevalent in eastern cultures. Without that, practises of meditation and mindfulness come to seem like tools for individual self-development – sometimes for self-help, sometimes in a business context.”
Manu Bazzano is a psychotherapist who trained as an Adlerian and is also a Zen priest. “The funny thing is, in Zen practice, a good inner experience comes when we start doing something for other people – allow in concern for other people’s suffering and distress, and there is a lightening of my obsessive concern for myself.”
So what is the end point of having the “courage to be disliked”? Congratulations, you now care so little about other people (their opinions, their feelings, their perspectives) that you no longer care about the past. Kishimi and Koga quote Adler in their book: “Trauma does not exist … no experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure.” “The self is determined, not by our experiences themselves but by the meaning we give them.” (These are Kishimi and Koga’s italics). This is indivisible from Nguyen’s ideas, and it’s true, Adler definitely did say that. Again, though, some context has been lost: Adler may have been relentlessly goal-oriented, but he was also “almost like a lefty, socialist counterpoint to Freud”, Bazzano says. The technical word for a sense of community, connectedness or belonging as psychoanalytic quantities – gemeinschaftsgefühl – was invented by Adler, who would be rolling in his grave if he knew he was here cast as the grandfather of Being Disliked. In fact, Kishimi and Koga’s book does discuss finding meaning in being of use to others, but in such a way that has entirely removed the perspective of others, which is a bit like helping an old lady across a road without checking that’s what she wanted. She hates that.
“It boils down to this,” Bazzano says. “The measure of mental health in a person is the degree of their interest in others. That could be their neighbours, or it could be social and political.”
Ah, politics; with the exception of Clayton, who delves very deeply into the structural forces informing much of our collective fawn behaviour, the rest of these authors enjoin you, whatever the politics you’re living under, to suck it up. They often start with an anecdote about their own a-materiality – welcome to their past life, they’re in $800,000 of debt (Robbins) or they’ve just sold all their stuff and moved to South America (Manson). It sounds bad, right? Yet “we are often actually happier with less”, Manson writes. Anticonsumerism is a familiar trope on the left, as it is closely allied to anticapitalism, but in the context of self-reliance manuals, its vibe is more “stop bleating, there is no such thing as a victim”. Read too much of it (which I definitely have), and it comes to sound a bit Trumpy (“maybe the children will have two dolls, instead of 30”). It’s obvious, in a way – if you’re looking out for number one, the last thing you want to do is get politically organised, and if you’re not going to organise, you need to accept what’s in front of you.
“Overall,” Santos says, “we have a bias toward what Nicholas Epley calls ‘undersociality’ – we are miscalibrated about how good all forms of connecting with others will make us feel.” Before you go all in on self-reliance, have you tried giving a fuck and being liked?
