As an extreme example, pickup artists had a wave of success a few years back and people paid big money for those ridiculous courses. They got replaced with Andrew Tate style "a real man just smokes and fights and hates women" type content and people paid money with the hopes of becoming like them. Trends and life goals change, but people still gobble up self help.
The former imploded in the aftermath of Neil Strauss' The Game, which made some of the popular techniques well known and/or mocked (e.g. you had Howard on Big Bang Theory who in the beginning "demonstrated" several of the more ridiculous methods) and a lot of the field pivoted towards closer to regular self-help because the weirder stuff would get them called out.
I wonder to what extent that contributed to channeling the people who didn't want to put in the work towards people like Andrew Tate, with the mockery that followed and the less extreme coaches in that field moving away from it leaving a whole bunch of angry young men ripe for the picking, now with one more bone to pick.
we've seen it with exercise/dieting we've seen it with women/dating this types of things always persist
The outdated sense of leader of the willingly lead is a different matter.
How to care less about what other people think, but in a healthy way
Many of the authors are selling their narrow experience as if it's divine revelation, often literally because they're religious. The grift usually continues with sponsorships, plugging their other books (or their friends' books), or seminars.
I've read enough about sociology and psychology now that the whole self help industry disgusts me. Receiving such books or recommendations unsolicited strikes me as an insult from folks to naive or lazy to really get to know me first.
Oh and the fact they're making money? Yeah everybody has to eat, psychologists don't work for free either, neither does any doctor for that matter. There are people doing good out there and yes they will charge you plenty of money for it.
I've got some bad news for you about the SaaS industry
Dale Carnegie and Steven Covey have both been heavily influenced by Alfred Adler, the Austrian psychotherapist and founder of individual psychology.
But also pretty much all of the self-help books I've read can be summarized in a few paragraphs, that is, a blog post. The rest is repetition or examples. Which are important for learning and understanding, I suppose, but when an AI can both tell you the gist of it while applying it directly to your current situation, they can't compete.
But the form of books … Yes, by some reason it collapses. I personally attribute it not to “people realise those guys are salesmen”, but with the fact that none of really good ideas were produced by such books for a while. Now anyone who really has a new angle or new idea to say — they go straight to YT/podcasts, bypassing writing a book altogether. Because of this, me personally, when I check bookshelves, do not see any really new or interesting idea published in the field.
Next, consider the mediums for selling self-help: (1) in-person events, (2) books, (3) YouTube. (1) scales the least, but has the highest branding building effect. (2) scales medium, because it costs money for the customer to buy the book. (3) scales infinitely, because it is nearly free. Further, the most financially successful YouTubers first build a personal brand, then begin sell product placement by sponsorships. Further, they also begin selling "merch" (channel merchandise). That is the real gold mine of YouTube. Even sponsonships for most channels with less than one million subscribers pales in comparison to selling "merch".
About (1) (2) and (3) above, I would say that humans are usually more influenced by [the most] (1) seeing a person live, [next most] (3) seeing a person on video, and [the least] (2) reading their book. Thus, it seems logical that YouTube will replace books for self-help.
Without reading the article, my first instinct (after writing the above) is that self-help books are not being replaced with AI/LLMs. Instead, they are being replaced by self-help YouTube channels.
> starting to realize
That's hardly unique to the self-help world - doesn't a lot of tech also fall into that category?
- George Carlin
I wonder if that is a reason for the decline rather than AI.
> my self help consumption (across all media) has been dropping lately
I share this idea because I see a similar pattern in myself. For the self-help YouTube videos that I do watch, I am/was most interested in (a) exercise/fitness/diet and (b) personal/romantic relationships. After 1000 hours or so of this sort of content, I learned how to improve and "ascended". Now, I don't need to watch as much because my thinking on these topics is more advanced.
Deeper: How will these channels sustain themselves? It does not look obvious to me! If I were running a self-help channel, I might intentionally delete old videos after 6-12 months. Why? So that I can remake the same content again (and again)... to get a revenue boost from new(er) viewers. For anyone who is a full-time self-help content creator, probably 90% of the revenue is made in the first 30 days. (Wild guess, but there will be an extreme cliff of some sort.)
A lot of those non free services seemed to involve very poorly written and syndicated coaching apps.
Sure, you don't need to read an entire book to get the idea to do something, but that's way in which ideas get into your head and consciously or not, guide your steps in certain directions.
Of course, everything in self-help books should be taken with a grain of salt and also applied differently for each individual. It's just a way to get more ideas of what's possible, similar to travelling: it doesn't force you to do things in a certain way, it just shows you what's out there.
Anyway, "self help" is still one of the largest sections at my local barnes and noble—certainly by far the largest non-fiction section.
About 15 years ago my friend showed me this video of a "self-help" guy he was impressed with and inspired by.
..it was over 30 minutes of rambling that sounded like it makes senses but meant nothing and lead nowhere.
Looking back it was like listening to how early LLMs were: Just long strings of random words and vague sentences without actually saying anything.
Or how Saruman's power of the tongue was described as.
It's depressing and obvious to see how many people could be misled by this kind of charlatanism.
AI if done right could cut a lot of crap from human society.
Extreme Ownership really helped me be a better leader and take more accountability for my own actions
Atomic Habits really helped me think about goal setting and what the underlying driver was
Coaching Habit improved my 1:1s drastically (I basically stopped talking or advice giving and just listened -- profound, I know, but the book helped smack me in the face with it)
Many more examples, but there is definitely a ton of self-help hack slop out there as well.
I for one used to enjoy such books but have turned more to mind-fuck scifi (i.e. I keep hunting for the Ted Chiang level books, although they are also very rare). I find meaning in those.
"How to Win Friends and Influence People" is still popular today. Dale Carnegie wrote it in 1936.
Back in the '80s and '90s Tony Robbins infuriated millions of North Americans by spamming late television with his obnoxious self-help infomercials: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gUczh_vsRUI
As long as there have been dissatisfied people, there probably has been someone promising to be a deus ex macchina with the secret to turn their lives around.
There’s literally 100 years of self-help books before, who?
maybe you are judging and dismissing something with prejudice?
Why make a 24-minute Youtube video instead of an article with proper navigation?
This is slightly off-topic, but this is a pet-peeve of mine. I believe that for most practical purposes hypertext beats video:
- you can Ctrl-F through text (well, now you sort of can search through a video, but it is much less efficient)
- you can quickly skim through text to find what you need
- text can have proper navigation (chapters etc)
- texts can be linked to each other. Link could lead to a specific part of the text (proper navigation)
- text is much quicker and cheaper to produce
Yet a lot of people make and watch serious educational and informational videos. Why? I don't get it.
Of course I'd prefer a blog post with many looping, silent 5-15 second gifs and no extraneous like-and-subscribe and life-story-delivery. But c'est la vie.
This feels like something you could vibe code up (creating the blog posts from YouTube videos). Fascinating times.
But last weekend I had to remove a trim panel under the hood of my car to extract a dead rodent, and I was wondering how to get those round clips off without breaking them. This video helped: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K_rsVDj5s1o&ra=m
The AI summary of the same video explains the exact steps but doesn’t show them actually being done.
- ad revenue - youtube algorithm placement - sponsored content - street cred
With an article, if you're lucky google will base their AI overview on it, and the creator gets bupkis.
But as understandable as it may be, a clown whose job is to keep people entertained until the ad break can talk about a lot of things, but cannot be something else. This clown talks about math, the other one just rubs the microphone over materials and then says "smash that like button", but they all have the same purpose and can only differentiate themselves by how much engagement they create. The platform is the payload, the content is whatever.
When you're trying to repair a Playstation motherboard, you gonna need some photos and text.
I've commented about this before [1] but a lot of my simple searches lead to monstrous walls of text with tangential information about the query. The answer is buried well past a simple ctrl-F on the page. It definitely varies for domain though.
Not only that, they're creating content for each other. People who can barely compose an email run TikTok accounts and YouTube channels and podcasts with audiences in the millions.
I don't even know if I think this is a bad thing. Sure, their education system failed them, but they need to know how to do things, and they often have information worth sharing. Providing video tutorials almost becomes a question of accessibility (in the a11y sense) in some contexts.
I agree that a huge percent of 10+ minute YouTube videos would be better off as a few sentences and a bulleted list.
The success of YouTube and TikTok has shown that video is by far the easiest way for the average person to share whatever they know and have a chance of getting it seen. Where would the average person even post a article?
a picture is worth a thousand words. Of course your text article can have pictures, but how can you sure you include all the "useful" pictures. Then there is animation which is impossible to do with static picture.
Because increasingly many people wont even stoop to reading an article, but will put on some bs video - even for tutorials
Which one is more likely to result in more ad revenue for you?
Because articles make no money?
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d49d81d6-7aab-4730-9c3c-4...
Which I’m sharing as a meta point…I think self help books are declining because there’s a better way to get the information without all the filler. But filler makes the books thick enough to sell at the airport
Also - aren’t LLMs the ultimate choose your own adventure version of the information?
But I can tell you that it’s enough to refute the AI fallacy many believe.
To be clear, a summary will never replace reading 300 pages. But it might be 95% good enough for most people and in most cases, and that's often good enough.
People tend to spend about a third of their lives working for someone else, a third sleeping and the remaining third split between relaxing and working for themselves. This seems invariant. As people earn more money they just buy more stuff, they have no idea what to do with the extra time from not working as much so just keeping walking the hedonic treadmill.
If you can ingest compressed forms of ten self help books in the time it would have taken you to read one, does that mean you can now evaluate them all together, or include the best bits of all of them? Or are you really just addicted to trying to "get on top" and wasting your precious life away sitting at a computer talking to a fake person?
Youtube killed them because it is just a faster delivery of knowledge and information. For super-specific questions chatbots are even faster.
There was this recent Tom Scott interview where he recommends people start their video with quesiton A, ask B before A is resolved, then when that happens, already ask C, etc. and solve C and D at the very end to keep the viewer engaged. Most people seem to just ask A over and over and over with filler in between until the viewer's head explodes.
There I can listen to a 6 hours about the Olmec civilization.
The notion that 'My Octopus Teacher' or 'Boys State' - to name just two award winners of the last decade - could be replaced with some Youtube AI-narrated slop is just disingenuous in the extreme.
Reading an entire book may be more beneficient for habit forming, but most readers probably don't care about this.
Or even books like “The Phoenix(/Unicorn) Project”.
there's another fantasy aspect, which is discovering your sense of alienation from family and society is really because you're part of a special but oppressed group and won't admit it to yourself, and once you embrace your identity you can find fulfillment, love, and community.
now, in this case, the repressed identity is "capitalist", which is a peculiar way of looking at the world. but if you ignore this, the emotional beats of the story (finding yourself, coming out, found family) also work for the LGBT experience, even perhaps neurodivergence. I think this is why so many confused teenagers find themselves very moved by the book and are later embarrassed to admit it.
on the whole, it's not high literature but competently executed, the only really stupid thing about it is Objectivism.
We are heading for a future where the internet is frozen in time with a cutoff date created when the LLM summaries started.
The interviewer asked something like "who is our competition here?", and the friend of friend listed off other places in the mall to get ice cream, candy, deserts, etc.
Wrong answer. The ice cream and chocolate store was in competition with every other store in the mall. Time or money spent at the GAP can't be time or money spent here.
---
Whether or not people are using LLMs for news specifically, any new, large eater of eyeball-time is going to hurt the business landscape for all other eyeball harvesters.
Also, I think we have oversold the concept of story-telling. Many news articles start with story telling and take a while before coming to the point.
people use Facebook for news?
However, the loss of reading self-help books surely will hurt no-one. It is an ill wind, etc ...
Let's say I'm living in the past and think Star Trek TNG and the X-Files was peak TV. If I could just hit enter and generate an in-all-ways-believably-authentic episode, maybe I just wouldn't watch anything else. Would it matter to my brain that real people didn't make the episode if it was indistinguishable from the real thing?
"…You're absolutely right!"
Fiction, on the other hand… Much of fiction's value isn't just the content itself, is that they create a shared language medium. A book might actually be meh (came up with some examples, but then decided to drop it so as not to offend anyone), but the fact that people you talk with have read the same book and understand same references makes reading it valuable. So, it's unlikely to happen, until we delegate all of our communication to AIs, which isn't likely to happen any time soon.
Draw circle: Set up a highly successful business (prerequisite)
Rest of owl: Delegate stuff (what the book says to do).
It is pretty useless. Not suprised sales have declined especially since startups probably got harder since when it was written.
One of the first which I’ve ever read fully was Getting Things Done after a Lifehacker article eons ago. The book had zero additional information compared to the article. Back then I didn’t know that these books information density was almost zero, and still is.
Last year I bought a book about eating well. I could read only the first half, because it repeated until then basically a single mantra: eat fermented and macronutrient rich food. This was repeated different ways, without adding anything to this summary. Sometimes literally the same sentences. Reasons were not provided, or was on the level “I knew somebody whom this helped”, without even trying to convince me that it was really this what helped them, and not anything else.
The dietary guidelines from the US is a way better read, and that’s free. Even the current, clearly politically distorted one.
Maybe, that’s the main reason. Free information is better or at least good enough. I haven’t learned anything from these kinds of books which was not available freely (and legally… because you can obviously get almost any books illegally).
Maybe my attention span is truly stuffed, but I really can't stand it when a video essay is the most succinct source on a topic - waiting for someone to express their thoughts in speech, with sometimes slow cadences or their own waffling, combined with sponsor segments (yes I use SponsorBlock, but sometimes or on other devices ads get through), etc.
So I use AI summary for a lot of informational videos now unless I actually am watching it for the entertainment and production value. I don't need 10 minutes on "this will change the way we look at XYZ" that has only 1 minute of real information in it.
Recently, I had a similar idea when I tried to watch the TV series "SAS: Rogue Heroes". I quit after a few episodes because it was so damn slow. I spent most of each episode skipping pointless dialog and overly long landscape/driving scenes that added little to the story. I am sure the two seasons (10-20 hours) could easily be condensed into a much more exciting 2-4 hour film. I have heard the saying that the hardest type of novel to write is the shortest one. Constraint forces an author to carefully select the words, characters, and storyline that make the most compelling novel. When I was younger, films were rarely more than 90 minutes. These days, so many of them are more than 120 minutes with very little gained... just the same story was watered down over 30+ more minutes.
Well this is the difficult part. You can 10x the number of followers and still have less than 50 true fans.
On the actual content, I am actually not surprised at all. These AI systems are surprisingly convincing when giving personal advise - for better or worse.
If this source [0] is true then 65% of audiobooks (in 2022) were non-fiction. Likewise that the audiobook industry has grown by nearly 3x since 2022. So, by my math, it's simply that people prefer to listen to self-help books (which matches my own experience).
> If this source [0] is true then 65% of audiobooks (in 2022) were non-fiction. Likewise that the audiobook industry has grown by nearly 3x since a2022.
Lead to
> by my math, it's simply that people prefer to listen to self-help books (which matches my own experience).
I'm not sure I see the math there, when most nonfiction is not self-help books (and an increase in the broader genre says nothing about a specific niche)
> But what about ebooks and audio? Looking at all formats (print + ebook + audio) for the catalog in 2025, the second half of the year was down ~45% versus the first half.
This compares to 46% on print only
It all hinges on this statement. But I’m not sure it’s really AI that’s doing it, and not just a contributing factor. There’s higher cost of living, inflation, economic uncertainty, seemingly looming financial crisis, etc. A lot of impactful things happened!
A lot of self-help books fall into this category. But if you go to a publisher and say that you're going to publish a 20-page book, they're going to laugh you out of the room.
Humans have know blocks for their own well being. Most struggle with probabilities or long term planning. But they are teachable skills.
I just skip the motivational fluff and dig out the useful bits. Makes them very fast reads when you can skip majority of it.
The whole spiel about "I just want to help others in the same situation" died with the Internet, because for the past 30 years it has been entirely feasible to publish your advice and guidance for for free. The books are just for money and fame.
All IMO:
Syncophancy (and in extreme cases AI psychosis) is a huge problem when you take advice from AI.
It's risky to learn a new field as you often just fall for a superficial, glib explaination and just nod along without learning. AI will do that because humans will train it to - everyone likes a pop science style easy and fake explaination.
OTOH if you just want advice, the AI will need context. Advice is worthless without context. And the AI will use the context to tell you what the dumb human (you) will agree with - that's implicitly what humans want it to do, it's how we will train the AI.
I don't see it getting better either - as long as a human in the loop fine tunes the AI, the smarter the AI the better it is at telling the human what the human wants.
Scary stuff if a major current use of AI is self help.
1. Guy I know who is an exec coach says that a chatbot can do a lot of what he does. 2. I am absolutely seeing lots of people asking ChatGPT a question and treating its answer as the truth.
So I can well believe that, in an age where you can get a quick answer to anything for free, that the market for books is collapsing.
Having said that, I also suspect that many of these self-help books are effectively a blog post stretched out over hundreds of pages, so maybe a decline in their sales is no bad thing.
You suspect right. I usually compare them to a pamphlet, but a blog post works too. They’re mostly one core idea padded with interminable stories to illustrate the point. Instead of wasting your money and time on the book, search YouTube for a talk the author has given about it (the more popular the book, the more of the same talk there will be) and watch that. It’ll hit all of the major points.
So I always wondered how they stayed in business and that they seemed at risk for disruption if anyone cared about their market.
So I guessed that maybe they’re for people who don’t want to spend time finding and reading.
I also was only spending $250/hour so maybe the really good ones cost much more.
Perhaps there is a business opportunity for a "rigorously fact-checked" chatbot? You can test chatbot to see if it gives "correct" (according to the author's opinion) answers on a topic of your choice and fix errors through prompt engineering, RAG (or other "memory" techniques), fine-tuning the base model if previous two approaches didn't work.
You can also probably teach it to use your own voice instead of dreaded LLM-isms, to make it sound less like typical AI-slop. This potentially can attract people, who are annoyed by the typical AI voice.
Perhaps, people who wrote self-help books should craft bespoke, custom-made chatbots instead?
AI is likely correlation not causation. The generation that resonated with the self-help books has aged out. Short form vids on YT, TT, IG taking mind-share is likely the bigger cause.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZVWIELHQQY
Yes, of course you need to put in work to enact change. The bigger the change, the more work you need to put in.
That desire for a quick and easy solution to hard problems is exactly what lead to the proliferation of scams.
The first self help book that actually helped me was How to make friends and influence people. It was hard for me to overcome my shyness and look people in the eye and smile, but with constant practice I got better at it. Taking an interest in people or being agreeable these are all basic principles that genuinely good communicators use, the book just points you in the right direction you have to apply the hard work and courage.
Good self-help books are rare but they do exist.
My favorite advice (and central message I think) from "how to win friends" is to really have the other person's interests at heart, not to try to scam or game them.
Some of my other favorite self help-ish books - a guide to the good life - thank you for arguing - algorithms to live by
Maybe if someone put together a list of fiction books that correlate strongly with self-help categories, it would be immensely useful.
A great fiction book helps you vicariously experience a character's life while self-help is an instruction manual which sadly does not provide the same form of connection.
[1]: https://bloomsburyliterarystudiesblog.com/2022/02/i-always-s...
At some time, the market has been satisfied.
I read fewer blog posts, fewer newsletters, fewer “10 lessons from…” articles, and fewer productivity videos than I did three years ago.
But I still buy books.
The first casualties seem to be the intermediaries, not necessarily the original sources.
Makes me wonder what’s going to happen to AI’s results if all these content streams dry up.
I suspect that's not always true. There's so many self help books out there from totally unqualified people that I suspect an AI commingling data from multiple reputable sources may beat some of the most inappropriate books
Now most are just a 300 page self pitch for some subscription or another product.
Most self help books are too general to be useful to anyone. You're writing your own guidebook for an audience of one.
I can think of many subjects which are not well served. Scottish history certainly isn't. The only suggestions it tends to give are Scotland History Tours (who is quite good but surface level) and commentators like BBC (who are often way off the mark and have their own agendas)
Printing books wouldnt make sense anymore except for "Traditionalist who love feeling a crisp page between their fingers"
Self-help as a domain is absolutely stuffed with this sort of behaviour, where 300 pages just repeat and spin variations on an extremely simple premise, again and again. The reader tags along, sure there's going to be a twist or next level, but in reality it's just trying to justify this being sold as a "book", when at most it could be a single blog entry.
And yes, every single one of Tim Ferriss' books follows this principal. Entire books can be condensed into one page summaries and absolutely nothing will be lost. Nothing. In many cases one paragraph. Sometimes a single sentence.
This problem afflicts all media. There's a "Glucose Goddess" woman who has made an endless series of videos after she had a book do numbers about reducing glucose spikes. She's spinning four bullet points into endless content and it's just a perfect example. Nothing new or revelatory is being shared, but someone made a whole grifting career on this, all to pitch overpriced vitamins and protein powders.
It's actually interesting that someone mentioned YouTube replacing documentaries because people don't have time for that, so to speak, but YouTube is an absolute scourge of time wasting bullshit. I remember years ago one Apple-sphere guy posting a 10 minute video to answer the question "Should you get 8GB or 16GB in your Macbook". Ten minutes of yapping -- apparently ten minutes was the baseline for getting some monetization metric -- and the answer was an unqualified, worthless "get 16GB", because feels or something.
YouTube recently added an "Ask" AI button, and it includes generating extremely good summaries of videos. So many videos propose some clickbait headline with a clickbait graphic proposing some novel revelation, and in the first few seconds I've seen the summary, see that they have added absolutely nothing new or of value, and click back.
Will these people also post complaints about the drop in viewership about worthless, time inconsiderate content dragging not hitting like it once did? Probably. "Back in my day you could make a career by posting shocked-face thumbnail, a Betteridge's law of headlines question that you promise to answer, and then meander for twenty minutes. Kids these days just don't have the attention span anymore!"
That said, a lot of it is really filler.
Self-help is not the canary for other genre. Self-help doesn't comme with significant art. Their consumer gets a better experience through LLM that extracts the substance and contextualizes it.
It doesn't tell what will happen at scale regarding fiction and other content where people tends to expect a genuine human contribution. Sure you can get success with AI-written or AI-assisted writing, but it doesn't mean human written books will no longer catch interest.
-Before the internet, space to publish anything was scarce (and so were methods of finding specific information if it did exist), so newspapers/magazines were valuable and textbooks/guides were great media.
It was difficult to find extremely specific information because a lot of information was so niche it wasn't worth publishing, or because it wasn't worth the effort to find something SO specific.
-The internet made publishing space infinite and search easy, so specific information became super valuable, e.g. "how to do x in 5 steps" blogs. They architected information in ways that wouldn't have been worth publishing in a regional newspaper or small-circulation magazine, but was economically viable at worldwide scale and when publishing was free.
This is the era this article describes.
-Then everything went mainstream and the above production of content was often more frequently done by large companies, with bloggers and other individuals filling even smaller niches
-Now that LLMs have vacuumed all of that up and you can create even more specific content for free, instantly (e.g. you no longer need a generic tutorial on "how to start a business" but summon one that already knows your prior skills etc.)
This has made the previous era of "how-to" content less useful because you can decide whether you want expert/beginner/intermediate level content and what personality etc.)
Now the frontier is first-person narratives and opinions, because even specific information is no longer the constraint.
Self-help books are absolutely worthless if you don't internalise their insights, practice applying it into your life on a daily basis until it becomes muscle memory, and actually spend time on it. The insight is never actually the bottleneck.
AI can surface insights better and faster than any book. But speed is the problem, not the solution. Books are on the contrary slower, and slowness is the point. Without discpline, AI might be a worse choice.
For deeper topics, I don't think books are going away anytime soon.
In the first end - short-form content: yt shorts, tiktoks, tweets, ig posts - "authors" have interested to just have more engagement, so we end up with ragebait, fringe ideas, etc - everything for just viewers count go up, the substance doesn't matter at all.
In the other end - "long-form" content: books (usually thick ones), writers for some reason need to fill extra content alongside the substance, some off-topic stuff, I'm not professional writer/editor, but I suppose it's protection from some nitpickers, adding some scientific basis to look more solid (don't know why: author can pick any research that support's book idea, even already debunked), maybe there is requierement from publishers, editors, etc.
The sweet spot here are thin books here, but even that case they cannot help much, because even a therapy sometimes cannot help for someone (heck, there is a real person trying help, not just text with ideas!)
From a new language to public speaking to media training.Some books need more than structure by AI, that is professional knowledge and real-life experience. AI has a vast information ocean, yet a travel book helped me prepare my underwater kit because WiFi does not work underwater, saving me a lot of money I could have wasted on wireless kit.
Take AI apps for teaching languages,Langua is a good example, I think the most successful ones combine human instructors for insights and guidance with AI for drills prescribed and calibrated by the tutor. AI drills are not the same.
I’ve always found that most books within or similar to Ferris’ genre hold a nice message but are 90 fluff.
He picks on summarization as the sort circuit and claims the lived experience imbued within his books is the real draw. Not disagreeing here. LLMs unpack the intentional content stretching rigmarole authors go through as a function of publishers requirements to produce something that is minimally viable to publish.
Some seemingly important questions that come to my mind in a future where LLMs, ad-based revenue, and attention-as-currency prevail:
how do you create a knowledge-based product valuable/compelling enough to make people want to pay for it? And what is the best value-prop way to monetize it? (For BOTH producer and consumer)
Is length a necessary requirement for substantiveness?
If so, where on the spectrum of long-content_vs_short-content should it live?
Unfortunately, I im not confident the internet can fundamentally diverge from an ad-based or subscription monetization model in its current form. IMO, Michael I Jordan has a lot of refreshing ideas on how to build better marketplaces that sustainably benefit producers and consumers (as opposed to mostly just platform-maintaining-rent-seekers).
AI can never touch the human interest angle of authors, the best it can do is hope to trick people temporarily, and that doesn't last long.
Ask yourself, how many "self-help" books are published by Anonymous?
I say non-technical because the ones about specific subjects like "What to expect in the first year" etc. can be pretty good, but the more general "improve your life" ones are usually awful.
Some of this probably isn't just "AI" but the quantified/journaled lifestyle trends. Do Oura rings and Apple watches impact self help as much as basic health questions on Google and routine doctor visits?
It feels more like a broader information abundance and a more educated consumer base that started over at least a decade ago. AI's impact is hard to measure since it's just the hot feature resting atop existing tech. It certainly did none of the heavy lifting to nudge people this direction.
It’s not an electronic problem but an human first IRL interface problem. A shining example to the contrary is meditation practice like Vipassana. Saying you can kill that with AI is like saying “Gandalf is here and he explained to you the meaning of life and said now you don’t have to live or learn lessons anymore because you know I can always ask him”. Of course living the actual life is the whole point! It’s also why IRL experiences like classes and communities tend to work better when structured as lived experiences.
If this industry of self help books dies I won’t shed too many tears.
AI is better at personalized information, short-form content offers a snappier and more "real" point-of-view.
What I find most interesting is the appeal to authority aspect. Self-help always has had its gurus. If self-help is getting hit harder than other genres, I wonder what that says about brand trust.
EDIT: could also be that these books are kinda fads. I would expect them to have a shelf-life.
However, that doesn't mean AI is useless for this type of thing. Its very, very good at acting as an "expert" to answer questions you may have after reading the book.
I'm also in an actual informal bookclub with a few friends. It started in the AI era, all nonfiction books and is still going strong.
Depending on the model and size of the book, its also possible to load the entire book into the context window and ask questions.
It does disappear. There is already much less expert knowledge shared after the breakdown of those platforms that used to be so good at encouraging it. Both what the clankers can regurgitate and what humans can find themselves on the internet is increasingly stale and thinned. My GPU can generate fairly good content now.. 2023 content.
What you needed was a survey.
If you really like to do the things, you will spend many hours on it.
Only mental health and longevity remain outstanding.
Obviously this is mean but I do think "self-help" has been incredibly inflated by these people who think there are some sort of magic answers out there to solve everything about their life. And those people are now moving to short form redpill content and / or llms that gas them up.
> Let that sink in for a minute.
Jesus Christ. Here is how AI relates to me—ooh, with suspense-driving one-sentence paragraphs and reflective commandments. Come on, in Q2 2026 this is still a thing?
The self-involved industry is in shambles.
> What’s actually going on?
Need the meander headlines. I told you what is going on. Now. Let me interpret what I just wrote for you.
It would be just boring if self-help books were down because people believe less in astrology and affirmations or something. Couldn’t write about the Zeitgeist that way.
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I’m not just a cynic. I lived a former life as well. And self-help is something ranging from entertainment to fantasy to small chance of personal transformation. And for books, it’s a cheap hobby compared to one-on-one pscyhology. So would it make sense to replace that with a language soup? Not really. The idiosyncracy is the whole point, jesus.
People might get taken in by it. That doesn’t mean that it will work in the long run.
To be fair, some people probably do benefit from, or at least enjoy, the history, examples and stories used to pad out the length. But in my career I've had to constantly learn new domains to varying depths at high velocity. A good LLM, properly prompted, can be an amazing self-learning tool. Before LLMs I'd often hire an expert, usually a post-doc or professor to spend 2-3 hours one-on-one answering my questions - and those sessions would move at very high-speed, making the investment worth it. For those who are experienced self-learners, an LLM can deliver 60-70% of that value. And, frankly, extracting the relevant knowledge out of the average self-help book is a vastly easier task than that.
Looking at the author's books, they're full of healthy living and optimistic narratives. In my view, maybe the problem isn't the old approach itself, but that we need to answer new questions. Like, 'How do I survive in an era where AI takes away jobs?'
And I think the most critical point in this post is this passage:
'What happens when 99% of the rigorously fact checked media is behind a paywall? The short answer: people skip it and ask the AI.'
We use AI for things we don't consider important. If that's the case, I think the key is to convince the public that what I do is something AI cannot replace.
If Famous Athlete/Entrepreneur writes a self-help type book, people will buy it, because the fame lends legitimacy. Even if the book itself is obviously written by AI.
With an additional caveat: the person needs to have some real, demonstrable authority. Tim Ferris doesn’t really have authority in the sense of “I am a professional athlete” or “I am billionaire startup founder” does. He does have authority as a podcaster and digital products / books creator, but that isn’t what the 4HWW is about.
The vast majority of self-help books out there are ghost-written upsales trash.
> Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no
Afaik Tim Feriss hasn't done anything notable in the past decade. No surprise that his one best seller is finally dropping off the cliff.
Without some incredible developments in AI, and as long as competition and desire for a better life still exist, I see no future where self-help books go away.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Remember, Tim Ferris scammed his audience with NFTs lmfao.
Self help being generally part of a larger grift pipeline for authors (for selling overpriced courses, seminars, retreats, infoproducts etc.), this is an actual positive silver lining for AI in society.
but how is everyone missing the enormous amount of self published slop released since 2022?
that stuff actually is selling, diluting the interest in the rest
its the law of diminishing returns
this may coincide with people also realizing they bought slop, as well as all the other distractions and ways of consuming that people identified
but just like software is experiencing this year, the same has been occurring in writing for 4 years
There's no life lessons you'll learn reading self help-books that you won't get by just reading the classics.
Literary slop being replaced with AI
Before we dive into my dirty laundry,
dude, why would i want to dive into your dirty laundry man?