Look out for number one! Selfish self-help books are booming – but will they improve your life?

If you yearn for an Ayn Randian existence of absolute self-reliance, there are plenty of bestsellers that can help. They may not make you happier though

‘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?