\n<\/p>\n
\u2018A<\/span>re you sure you want that one?\u201d asks the assistant in the flagship Waterstones store in Piccadilly, London. I\u2019d 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. \u201cIs that not the one everyone\u2019s reading?\u201d I ask. She hands me the cloth-bound Don\u2019t Believe Everything You Think. \u201cThis<\/em> is the one everyone\u2019s reading.\u201d<\/p>\n Self-help book sales in the UK grew every year between 2015 and 2023, according to Nielsen. And that\u2019s just the overt titles, not counting \u201cstealth-help\u201d (memoir, nature writing, bibliotherapy \u2013 poems and what\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n 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\u2019ve probably heard of \u201cfight, flight or freeze\u201d \u2013 the body\u2019s primal responses to threat. Flight is a great response if, for example, you meet a tiger. It\u2019s not so helpful in a work meeting. \u201cFawning\u201d is a new addition to the trauma response lexicon and, Clayton writes, is distinct from the well-worn terms \u201cpeople-pleasing\u201d and \u201cco-dependency\u201d (though she says they are \u201cbranches on the overall fawning tree\u201d). Often, fawning behaviour is politically reinforced by the patriarchy and \u201cwhite body supremacy\u201d (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.<\/p>\n Clayton\u2019s book is good: expert, vulnerable, disarming, thoughtful. Nevertheless, it <\/strong>lands squarely on the self-help question of our time: \u201cWhat would you do if you were putting yourself first in your own life?\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Just a few of the self-help books that are jumping off the shelves.<\/span> Photograph: David Levene\/The Guardian<\/p>\n 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 \u201clet me\u201d), you have to also let others put themselves <\/em>first (\u201clet them\u201d). For example: \u201cLet my family be late to absolutely everything we go to,\u201d she writes. \u201cLet the neighbour\u2019s dog bark all day.\u201d There\u2019s 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\u2019s tone is \u201cwise up\u201d \u2013 everyone else is already letting their dog bark all day. If you can\u2019t embrace the \u201clet them, let me\u201d credo, you\u2019ll be stuck in a world where you\u2019re worrying about the negative opinions of others, and \u2013 newsflash \u2013 they\u2019re not worrying about yours. This will consume your time, energy and emotional headroom, to the extent that, ultimately, you won\u2019t be in charge of your own trajectory. That\u2019s what she says to packed theatres on her global tours \u2013 London this year; New Zealand, Australia and the US (again) next. She has been a lawyer, a broadcaster, a podcaster; she\u2019s been riding high and shot down like a broad from a Frank Sinatra song. But, essentially, she\u2019s someone to whom people listen \u2013 whether her words are in a book, on Instagram or spoken live.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 along with seeking happiness, \u201cvictimhood chic\u201d, the \u201cresponsibility\/fault fallacy\u201d \u2013 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.<\/p>\n The Let Them theory is not only should you put yourself first, you have to also let others put themselves first<\/p>\n Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga\u2019s The Courage to Be Disliked \u2013 which has sold 10m copies, and \u201ccan change your life\u201d (according to it) \u2013 is written as a dialogue between a prominent Japanese philosopher and psychologist (Kishimi) and a youth (Koga is 52; hell, let\u2019s call him a youth). It is based on the precept that Freud was wrong, and his contemporary Alfred Adler (we\u2019ll come back to Adler) was right \u2013 the past doesn\u2019t 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 \u201cis proof that you are exercising your freedom and living in freedom\u201d.<\/p>\n Joseph Nguyen\u2019s 2022 book Don\u2019t 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 \u2013 who themselves are a patchwork of parables, rather than actual monks \u2013 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\u2019m not joking. By chapter 7, we\u2019re into \u201cPractical steps for how to stop thinking\u201d (they are \u2013 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 \u201cthinking is the root cause of suffering\u201d, or \u201cstop thinking, idiot\u201d; finally, experience the feeling, without putting any thoughts on it. Yes, these steps \u2013 pause, ask, understand, say and experience \u2013 spell PAUSE; well spotted).<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 it\u2019s 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 \u2013 well, I wouldn\u2019t want to speculate on their <\/em>fulfilment, but they\u2019re definitely minted (opinion is divided on wealth and its place in the firmament of meaning).<\/p>\n 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. \u201cStudy after study shows the opposite. We often think we\u2019ll 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.\u201d Santos points to research from Harvard Business School, which shows: \u201cSpending money on others makes us happier than spending that same amount of money on ourselves. What\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n The language of boundaries \u2013 and the attendant motives for and consequences of laying them out, which are not giving a fuck and being disliked \u2013 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 \u2013 a careless family, an undermining boss, a self-involved partner. The lessons of the successful \u201clet them\u201d\/\u201cfuck them\u201d relationship are to deprioritise the unsatisfying. It\u2019s not that generosity is considered in these equations and found to be less important, rather that the circuitry is never activated.<\/p>\n <\/span>The courage to be disliked? \u2026 Zoe Williams tells it like it is.<\/span> Composite: Guardian Design; David Levene<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s also lots of work showing that our social connection is super important for happiness,\u201d 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. \u201cI worry that some of these individualist, self-reliant strategies miss that,\u201d she says. Robbins, with her immense engagement on social media, has been challenged on this, and writes in her book: \u201cSome people have shared that they feel lonely after using the Let Them Theory. If you\u2019re feeling this way, it\u2019s a sign that you\u2019re applying the theory incorrectly.\u201d It\u2019s not a pass to ghost people who are getting on your nerves, it\u2019s an invitation to take responsibility for what you want and pursue it. If you end up lonely, it\u2019s because you\u2019re not taking enough responsibility (surely you didn\u2019t want to be lonely?).<\/p>\n What self-reliance theory, even the best of it, doesn\u2019t address is just how much social connection starts with something you don\u2019t especially want to do. For example, on a very regular basis, you\u2019ll probably have to leave the house in inclement weather. It\u2019s been interesting to watch the evolution of comfort narratives, especially on social media \u2013 first discernible in the \u201chygge\u201d fetish of 2016 (when it was shortlisted for Oxford Dictionary\u2019s 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\u2019s been problematised by reality \u2013 loneliness levels are rising. If history is made by people who show up, so is community.<\/p>\n Taoic and Indic religions form a lot of the scaffolding of self-reliance, whether it\u2019s the shaman who shows up for one of Clayton\u2019s ex-fawner clients (to be real, this ends in a lovely story about some baby bears), the young Zen monks of Nguyen\u2019s anti-thinking strategy, or a guest appearance from the actual Buddha, who, according to Manson, from a theological and philosophical perspective, didn\u2019t give a fuck. This isn\u2019t new. \u201cHistorically,\u201d the eco-philosopher Rupert Read says, \u201creligion 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\u2019s quite easy to transform them into something that\u2019s 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 \u2013 sometimes for self-help, sometimes in a business context.\u201d<\/p>\n It boils down to this \u2013\u00a0the measure of mental health in a person is the degree of their interest in others<\/p>\n Manu Bazzano is a psychotherapist who trained as an Adlerian and is also a Zen priest. \u201cThe funny thing is, in Zen practice, a good inner experience comes when we start doing something for other people \u2013 allow in concern for other people\u2019s suffering and distress, and there is a lightening of my obsessive concern for myself.\u201d<\/p>\n So what is the end point of having the \u201ccourage to be disliked\u201d? 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: \u201cTrauma does not exist \u2026 no experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure.\u201d \u201cThe self is determined, not by our experiences themselves but by the meaning we give them<\/em>.\u201d (These are Kishimi and Koga\u2019s italics). This is indivisible from Nguyen\u2019s ideas, and it\u2019s true, Adler definitely did say that. Again, though, some context has been lost: Adler may have been relentlessly goal-oriented, but he was also \u201calmost like a lefty, socialist counterpoint to Freud\u201d, Bazzano says. The technical word for a sense of community, connectedness or belonging as psychoanalytic quantities \u2013 gemeinschaftsgef\u00fchl<\/em> \u2013 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\u2019s 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\u2019s what she wanted. She hates that.<\/p>\n Read too much of it \u2013 which I definitely have \u2013 and it comes to sound a bit Trumpy<\/p>\n \u201cIt boils down to this,\u201d Bazzano says. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019re living under, to suck it up. They often start with an anecdote about their own a-materiality \u2013 welcome to their past life, they\u2019re in $800,000 of debt (Robbins) or they\u2019ve just sold all their stuff and moved to South America (Manson). It sounds bad, right? Yet \u201cwe are often actually happier with less\u201d, 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 \u201cstop bleating, there is no such thing as a victim\u201d. Read too much of it (which I definitely have), and it comes to sound a bit Trumpy (\u201cmaybe the children will have two dolls, instead of 30\u201d). It\u2019s obvious, in a way \u2013 if you\u2019re looking out for number one, the last thing you want to do is get politically organised, and if you\u2019re not going to organise, you need to accept what\u2019s in front of you.<\/p>\n \u201cOverall,\u201d Santos says, \u201cwe have a bias toward what Nicholas Epley calls \u2018undersociality\u2019 \u2013 we are miscalibrated about how good all forms of connecting with others will make us feel.\u201d Before you go all in on self-reliance, have you tried giving a fuck and being liked?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2018Are you sure you want that one?\u201d asks the assistant in the flagship Waterstones store in Piccadilly, London. I\u2019d 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26923,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[1001,16123,37,771,337,2189,16122,15553,6200],"class_list":{"0":"post-26922","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-booming","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-improve","12":"tag-life","13":"tag-number","14":"tag-selfhelp","15":"tag-selfish","16":"tag-wellbeing"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26922\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/26923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}