A Novel Cure for the Self-Help Epidemic

T here is a self-help epidemic in the world of literature. Self-help books line the shelves of bookstores and inundate passersby with their catchy titles and colorful covers. They make a bold claim: Read me, and your life will be better. Unfortunately, self-help books can’t even begin to offer people what they need.

But classic novels can.

Self-help books and their bulleted lists falsely promise the secrets of life in 300 pages or less for just $17.99. This literary trend profits from our cultural obsession with self-optimization. Self-improvement is a $51 billion global industry that feeds on this obsession, as evidenced by $387 million in self-help book sales in 2024. Just this past year, Mel Robbins’s The Let Them Theory sold more than 2.8 million copies, contributing to a 14.7 percent increase in self-help book sales in 2025. People obviously crave answers. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be an entire industry built around providing them.

Despite a decline in sales over the past few years — mostly due to decreased purchases of dieting books with the introduction of GLP-1s — people continue to demand guarantees of increased productivity, habit-hacking, and manifestation, with “personal transformations, relationships, and motivational books being the top-selling categories,” according to a study conducted by Marketdata Enterprises.

However, there is a growing trend among young adult readers to indulge not in self-help books but in classic narratives filled with philosophical pleasures and pain, such as The Picture of Dorian Gray, Pride and Prejudice, and The Brothers Karamazov. These novels are coming into mainstream culture through phenomena such as #BookTok, which has created TikTok communities documenting their obsession with Dostoevsky and participating in “Dark Academia,” a popular internet aesthetic that centers on gothic themes, dimly lit rooms, and angsty poetry. 

While it could be argued that these readers only like the aesthetic of old libraries and Dead Poets Society, I believe this trend indicates that people, young people especially, want something more from their books than just lists. We want to be challenged; we want morally gray characters who wrestle with their own mortality and human shortcomings. We crave humanity.

Self-help assumes that the problems people have been trying to solve for centuries can be cured with a checklist and that our character is a skill set to be optimized rather than cultivated. Thus, our culture of self-optimization mistakes maximizing productivity for moral formation and personal betterment.

Novels, on the other hand, offer no hacks. In fact, they are often much more difficult to read and understand than self-help books, but that’s the point: They’re reflective rather than prescriptive. To be clear, trashy romance novels — a.k.a., “smut” — are not the types of novels I mean. Instead, I’m referring to pieces of literature that stand the test of time by examining eternal human questions using unforgettable plots and imperfect people. This list is different for every reader, but for me, it includes titles such as East of Eden, The Red Badge of Courage, and Frankenstein.

The pursuit of a fulfilled life is not something that can be cleanly condensed; to assume so is to ignore centuries of unresolved human philosophical debate. It requires the development of the moral imagination, an idea first introduced by conservative philosopher Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790. Burke describes the revolutionaries’ descent into moral degradation:

All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

Burke’s prescient observation explains that the moral imagination is the human capacity to understand ethical dilemmas. This capacity is formed through exposure to and understanding of art, literature, tradition, and religion rather than discerned through pure reason. Moral formation requires confrontation with human limitations and our tendency toward evil; novels force this confrontation.

While — I pray — most readers do not have a portrait that mutates with their darkest inclinations, the reader can relate to the struggle with shame and guilt, just like Dorian Gray. Most readers have struggled to find love while navigating the trials of civilized society, not unlike the characters in Jane Austen’s novels.

Love and heartbreak, death and destruction, and jealousy and joy are all universally acknowledged human experiences. Classic novels allow us to wrestle with these ideas outside of our own lives and learn from the consequences of actions that are not our own. This wrestling, in turn, develops our moral imagination and, ultimately, our capacity to address the moral dilemmas that plague mankind.

The best way to find these things in a society fraught with groundless entitlement and often unfounded dissatisfaction is to read stories of people who suffer. Read how they overcome difficulty, or how it overcomes them. Read stories of people who love. Read how they fall, how they betray one another, and how they reconcile — if they do. Read and learn.

In an essay about Burke’s moral imagination, Russell Kirk explains that books — stories — are our first defense against the moral imagination’s extinction. “A conscience may speak to a conscience in the pages of books,” he wrote, “and the parched rising generation may grope their way toward the springs of moral imagination.”

My generation is parched. The generations before mine no doubt feel similarly. Novels offer a drink at the well of humanity. Self-help books are but a mirage of that well.

Classic novels are the cure for this self-help epidemic. Only real, beautifully painful stories will satisfy what we are in search of because they don’t try to sell you perfection; they show you what it is to be human.