Is today’s self-help teaching everyone to be a jerk?

Draw boundaries. Protect your peace. Worry less about pleasing others. The prevailing (and best-selling) wisdom of the day encourages an inward turn.

There’s a certain flavour of advice that is dominating the self-help bestseller list. These books have titles like The Courage to Be Disliked and Set Boundaries, Find Peace. They tell readers not to worry so much about letting people down, not to answer those calls from aggravating friends, not to be afraid of being the villain.

This all becomes more alarming when you think of the bestseller list as a mirror of the social moment, which some historians say it may be.

Take Dale Carnegie’s perma-popular How to Win Friends and Influence People, which came out in 1936, meeting readers haunted by memories of bread lines and the slow, dirge-like notes of Brother, Can You Spare a Dime. The unemployment rate was at 16.9%. Jobs were scarce and financial security was elusive; Carnegie’s rules for life fell into readers’ hands like manna.

Carnegie promised that some of history’s great men, say Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln, had achieved success with a formula so simple that it was within anybody’s reach. Placate people. Dole out compliments. “Don’t feel like smiling?” wrote Carnegie, who had changed his last name’s spelling to match the steel magnate’s, to whom he had no relation. “Force yourself to smile. If you are alone, force yourself to whistle or hum a tune.” (Lincoln’s letters to some generals were apparently heavy on flattery.)

The book was an instant success, reaching an audience that felt hard on its luck and appreciated a formula for riches that seemed both secret and utterly replicable. It has gone on to sell more than 30 million copies.

Thirty years later, it was the social fabric that seemed in tatters when the country looked toward a new type of self-help manifesto. This time, Americans were preoccupied with images of high school dropouts in the streets of Haight-Ashbury, children running off from their parents and the divorce rate rising. Feverishly, people read Dear Abby and Ann Landers.

In duelling advice columns, one published in the Chicago Sun-Times and the other in the San Francisco Chronicle, the twin sisters Abby Van Buren and Ann Landers doled out advice that imagined people were still living in a time of stricter social obligations and chivalrous romantic ones. Their columns let readers ever so briefly reinhabit a world in which families looked the way they always had, as Jessica Weisberg (now a senior producer at The New York Times) recounts in her history book Asking for a Friend. “Do not agree to engage in any practice you consider frightening, abnormal or weird,” Abby wrote to a reader. “In America, one out of every four wives work,” she wrote to another. “Is this good? I doubt it.”

Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that in a time of hyper-visible conflict – social media filled with memes of crying migrants shared by the official White House account, insults hurled in public between the country’s highest leaders – the self-help message of the day tells its readers that it’s perfectly okay to turn inward, even if that means ignoring the apparent travails of others. It’s a message retrofitted for appeal in a moment when every glance at a phone screen surfaces wrenching images of catastrophe.

Really, the prevailing advice of 2025 seems to be this: it’s okay to be a little bit of a jerk.

The Courage to Be Disliked has sold more than 10 million copies. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck has been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 300 weeks since it came out in 2016. In September comes the much-anticipated Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves — and How to Find Our Way Back. (Even Atomic Habits, by James Clear, which has spent more than 250 weeks on the bestseller list, tells its readers not to worry as much about making thorny macro changes in their lives and to focus instead on little adjustments. Americans have always loved to believe that the gap between you and a better you is as small as making the right breakfast.)

“Sometimes we need to say, ‘Is this my problem to solve?” Dr Ingrid Clayton, the Fawning author, said in an interview. “Can I sit on my hands?”

The thesis of Fawning, like many of these books, is of course more textured: The author, a psychologist, says that some people are conditioned by their life experiences to placate others and that they’d be better served by resisting that twitch and putting their own desires first, even if it’s as simple as declaring where they really want to eat lunch.

Across this new set of self-help titles, authors tend to urge readers not to become so invested in being liked and instead focus on being satisfied themselves. It’s a tantalising set of takeaways for people used to soaking up therapy language about setting boundaries and cutting off “toxic” people. The self-help genre has determined that the answer to the moment is to be unapologetically self-interested, and broadly unapologetic.

Covid lockdowns left some people turning inward – questioning whether they really needed to take vaccines and rejecting the idea that they should do so for the sake of others’ health, frustrated with rules around wearing masks to protect their neighbours. There’s a pandemic individualism hangover, and at least some self-help books are amplifying its takeaways.

Lindsay Gibson, a clinical psychologist who wrote the bestselling self-help book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, said the idea for her book developed from conversations with patients whose family members were acting like overgrown children. This gave Gibson a sense of mission – to show people like those patients that they were not really to blame for all their problems.

But especially online, lessons about self-improvement become flattened as they spread. The subtext of these new self-help books – to go easier on yourself, even embrace being the bad guy – travels quickly. TikTok influencers garner millions of views urging followers to “protect your peace”. “Your inner peace is the most sacred thing you have,” goes the common refrain. People scrolling through are advised to “protect their peace” with a whole list of to-dos, like “distancing ourselves from people and spaces that drain us,” or justifications like “saying no doesn’t make you unkind”. In many of these videos, there are clear ties to the sort of titles selling out on self-help lists: “Protecting your peace might make you the villain & that’s okay.”

In one recent video on TikTok, an influencer shares with her more than 500,000 followers the “10 things I stay away from to protect my peace”. Number six on the list is “watching the news”.

Self-help has always been a sneakily political genre. Carnegie’s book, for all its promises to democratise the tools for amassing influence, depicted the powerful as both relatable and deserving, accruing their fortunes with charm and winning smiles. Conversely, Dear Abby and Ann Landers in some ways helped smooth the way toward social progress – the two advice-giving sisters evolved with the culture, and when they changed their minds on interfaith marriages and divorces, they gave some readers social permission to do the same.

Today, the tone of some self-help books often crops up on right-leaning podcasts, in which hosts put an obsessive focus on self-improvement, turning inward by fixating on the foods we eat and the way we sleep. Influencers in the “manosphere” court listeners by urging them to make their beds, lift weights and take creatine supplements. Hosts in the “womanosphere” tell their fans to eat more protein and let go of stress so they can improve their fertility. The messaging slips between advice and politics, fitness tips giving way to presidential endorsements and nutritional advice turning to monologues against feminism.

I asked Clayton if her anti-people pleasing, “do less” message might have bigger social or political ramifications. “I think anything can be taken to extremes – it’s certainly not in the spirit of my work,” she said, though she quickly added: “Who am I to say that someone ‘protecting their peace’ in that way, needing to disengage – there might be some truth to that. They might need to disengage in order to grow their capacity and they can step back in when they have more agency.”

Of course, there’s always the risk of more people feeling let down because they’re surrounded by friends newly intent on “protecting their peace”. Fortunately for the publishing industry, those people might end up in the market for self-help, checking out America’s favourite national pastime, self-improvement.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Emma Goldberg

©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES

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