I have had a recent brush with self-improvement/self-help/personal development books. Call them what you will, books where prescriptions of mental and physical exercises are meted out in an attempt to meet a hierarchy of needs without addressing the foundations of those needs—would be a far more accurate description.

In the UK alone, 2022 saw the sale of personal development books cross the £50 million threshold. The market (not just books, everything) in the US (which comes with further trappings of seminars and a ridiculous array of crap you can buy) is estimated to be worth something like $9.9 billion in 2019 and it doesn’t appear to have shrunk in the interim, despite the pandemic.

The global self-improvement apps market in 2019 was valued at $2.5 billion. It is here, fair ladies, gentlemen, and lovelies of non-binary gender, that we set the rest of our story.

I subscribed to Headway

You see, last weekend, I had an ad pop up for the Headway app. It was a reasonable deal to try it out for three months at a reduced price. And somehow on setup, I ended up with it pushing self-improvement books over anything to do with fiction or non-fiction. I’m not sure why sign-up pushes you towards that when you can see from the above link that it has far more than self-help to offer.

Explainer: Headway is a platform that offers audio and written summaries of books. The summaries are usually under 20 minutes in length and are meant to be a way of getting key points and learnings from a book without having to read the whole thing.

No matter what I did with these settings, it pushed self-help over the rest of its library.

As you can see, when I start to scroll down the app it begins to offer links to less self-help content. But the top of the app is all self-help.

A week of regret

So I spent the past week mainly trying out self-help recommendations that on the whole made me want to vomit. Why? Because they were mainly dealing with how to approach problems that have been created by US society, economics and politics. Some of the issues have bled over to the UK thanks to certain political ideologies in our ruling classes since the 1980s, but on the whole, our challenges are not the same.

What I learned from the titles I tried to listen to is that people need the opportunity to meet their foundational needs (food, shelter, belonging), or else the information in these books is utterly useless. Also, listening to loads of self-help books in a short space of time is meaningless because they all either spout variations of the same themes or offer conflicting advice.

And I also learned that there was no point in subscribing to Headway if it was going to push meaningless crap at me first over other more meaningful content. That was a subscription canceled before it had the chance to renew at a more normal price.

(Yes, I am complaining about the effort involved in looking for non-algorithmically fed content.)

Now onto listening to more meaningful things or just reading in the first place. My reading pile hasn’t gotten much smaller, I can tell you that.