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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Last week, we did a segment trying to figure out if we're all getting ruder. The verdict for many of you was, yes, we are. Since that segment seemed to really strike a chord, today we're diving into maybe one of its causes: self-help books. You might have already heard of the kind of trendy advice we're talking about: set and enforce boundaries. Well, that's good advice. Don't be afraid to be the villain. Sometimes good advice. Stop trying to please everyone. Put yourself first. Has it all gone too far? More importantly, is it making us treat each other worse?

Joining us to discuss is Emma Goldberg, feature writer for The New York Times, reporting on political subcultures and the way we live now, and the author of Life on the Line: Young Doctors Come of Age in a Pandemic. Maybe you've seen her writing about this. Hey, Emma, welcome back to WNYC.

Emma Goldberg: Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to talk about jerks and how to not be one.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we will take your calls about jerks and how to not be one. If you think a self-help book or a piece of advice meant to be constructive has ever turned you into a jerk or someone you know, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text. Should we define the term first? When we say self-help advice, what are we talking about?

Emma Goldberg: We're talking about what's kind of a juggernaut in the publishing industry. It's this empire of books that all give you bite-sized pieces of advice on how to live your life, how to be more productive, how to be more mindful, and how to have etiquette or not, as it were.

Brian Lehrer: I will just say, so people know the context of your using the J word, that some of our listeners have seen the article by Emma in The New York Times last week called Is Today's Self-Help Teaching Everyone to Be a Jerk? Some of these pieces of advice, the classic ones that I ran through a little bit in the intro, don't sound so bad. Setting boundaries, for example, sounds like a good, healthy thing to do. How does it go awry?

Emma Goldberg: Well, I was struck by the fact that when I was looking at the shelf of self-help books in the airport or at Barnes & Noble or even looking at the list of best-selling self-help titles, they all were starting to have a similar tinge to them. There are these titles like The Courage to Be Disliked, or Fawning, which is a book about how not to be such a people pleaser.

There's just a huge array of books right now that are all basically advising people not to worry so much about being a nice person. What I wanted to do in this article was, first of all, talk to people about how is that actually affecting them when they put that into practice or when people around them put it into practice. Then I also wanted to get into the history a little bit and say, "What does the self-help industry look like over time? Has it always been telling people to basically screw people that they don't really want to talk to, or are we often coming up with self-help titles that meet the needs of a particular moment?"

Brian Lehrer: In your article, you write that self-help authors "tend to urge readers not to become so invested in being liked and instead focus on being satisfied themselves." Where do these books draw the line, if they ever do, between being self-satisfied versus being self-centered? Because that's an important distinction, right?

Emma Goldberg: It's a really important distinction. I would say the flavor of self-help advice that's become uberpopular today boils down to the idea of boundaries. It kind of comes down to the idea of putting your own needs above other people's. That can take all different kinds of forms. It can look like, in the extreme, going no contact with friends or family members because you feel like they put you in a bad mental health space, or it can look like, very simply, basically, deciding not to go to a social engagement that you feel like you don't have the energy for.

It feels like it's a very simple nugget of advice, but the way it ends up applying in people's lives can spread a really wide spectrum. When I started reporting this article, it was months ago, and I decided I would put out a call to try and talk with as many people as possible who were self-professed self-help addicts, so people who just love reading self-help and love putting it into practice.

By having a lot of those interviews, I spoke with dozens of people. The goal was, I really wanted to hear what did it look like when you put this into practice. What I found is that for a lot of people, it basically meant starting to let go of relationships that they felt like were kind of a drag.

Brian Lehrer: Craig in Riverdale, you're on WNYC. Hi, Craig.

Craig: How you doing? First of all, the king of self-help, Tony Robbins. What a bunch of claptrap. Second of all, I think most of these self-help books don't really explain how you put those tools into practice, how they affect the outside world. Some of them are very good, and a lot of them, which are not, are being written by people who love to hear themselves talk or let to hear themselves talk through the print written word. They're really not explaining how to implement it. It's more about how you look at it for yourself, and don't describe how you really implement those tools. I think that's a big problem.

Brian Lehrer: Craig, thank you very much. I don't know if you want to weigh in on Tony Robbins, a very popular self-help author, obviously, and if you're as critical as the caller is. I think the caller's main point is about looking for that balance between things we can do to put ourselves first that are important, and not dropping the whole idea of moral and ethical interactions with others, and being kind and being considerate. How do these books, I realize that's a big generalization, or any of them that you want to cite, grapple with that tension?

Emma Goldberg: Well, this is something interesting about the self-help industry is that publishing analysts actually believe that these books have the lowest completion rate of any books on the market.

Brian Lehrer: Really?

Emma Goldberg: A lot of people are buying them, paying maybe like $25, $27 if it's hardcover, reading maybe the first chapter, and then they're like, "Okay, I kind of get the idea." Then, a month later, maybe they buy another self-help book. You might even think of it as like, it's almost like buying a membership to the really cheap gym in your neighborhood. You're like, "Okay, I spent the money, I took a step toward becoming that better me. Does it matter if I actually go every day or every week? Can I just go once and then say I got my $10 for the month worth of a membership fee?"

It's a little bit of an industry where they really do believe, I think, that a lot of people who buy self-help are doing it because spending that money makes them feel like they took a step toward unleashing the power within or having the courage to be disliked. Are they actually finishing the whole book and thinking about how to integrate it in their lives? Not so clear because a lot of those people are then buying the new self-help title of the day a couple weeks later.

Brian Lehrer: $10 a month. I think I know which gym you belong to.

Emma Goldberg: [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: Dominique, in River Edge here on WNYC. Hi, Dominique.

Dominique: Hi. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good. What you got?

Dominique: It's wonderful that you're paying attention to this. I think there's a couple of factors that go into it. I think maybe with COVID, you had a lot of young people that were-- their mental health is being affected. You have now with the advent of AI, you have a lot of more people self-publishing. Once a trend starts, everybody jumps in. With that being the case, as the author was saying, that, "Okay. I'm just going to grab a little tidbit, and then I can use my buzzwords."

I do just want to point out that there are very distinct areas, like there's very distinct mental health disorders that are necessary to use those words like villain and going no contact and setting boundaries, and so forth, and being discarded. That's separate, I think, from the general terms of somebody not talking to you or what have you. I just want to point that out because it's important that we don't lump it all together, because then it does a disservice to victims of certain abuse and so forth, and the ones that are striving to bring awareness to it. Then it all gets meshed like anything else, which you have the downside of.

That's all. Maybe you could speak to that so that we can keep the importance of that without weakening what all of that means. Thanks.

Brian Lehrer: Dominique, thank you very much. Good comment. Emma, a listener texts simply, "Can your guest please explain what setting boundaries means? I hear this a lot, and I don't understand what it means in practical terms." What would you say either to that texter or that caller?

Emma Goldberg: These are great questions. What I would say is that, as therapy of all forms, whether it's in-person therapy or even AI and online and mental health apps, all these kinds of therapy have gotten far more common. People have taken some of the language, as the caller mentioned, used to actually be much more specific to clinical settings or to real psychiatric settings, and they've started to apply it very, very widely to their social lives.

People are talking about going no contact, even when what they actually mean is that they're just ignoring texts or not engaging with a friend who they're upset with for some reason. Boundaries is another term that becomes so common and so widely tossed around that it's almost been drained of its meaning a little bit. It can mean anything from articulating to a friend that you were mad at them because they wanted to have pizza for dinner when you wanted to have Chinese food, to actually telling your boss that you don't want to answer emails after 8:00 PM. It basically can mean a little bit of anything and everything. People are taking this term that came out of the therapy and mental health world and applying it to all kinds of social situations.

The other thing I would say is that, to me, a lot of this is related to the history of self-help. What I found in really digging into this and in reading a great book about it called Asking for a Friend by Jessica Weisberg, is that at every different moment in American history, we basically cooked up a form of self-help that felt like it met the needs of that moment.

Right now, people feel, I think, a little bit overwhelmed by the state of crisis in the world, by the very visible forms of cruelty and infighting that they're seeing online, and even seeing the richest man in the world and the president lob insults at one another. They're taking that to heart with saying that they're going to put themselves and their own needs first.

In the same way, during the Great Depression, Dale Carnegie was preaching that anybody could be rich and powerful as long as they learned how to smile and compliment people. During the 1950s and 1960s, Dear Abby was responding to the culture wars and counterculture by preaching etiquette and traditional family norms. I think we often have a self-help response that puts certain terms out, like boundaries, like no contact, in response to what feels like the needs of a given social and political moment.

Brian Lehrer: That's so interesting, all of that historical context. So interesting. Let's see if I can sneak Joe in Westchester in here, who says he's a practicing psychologist. Joe, we're coming toward the end of the segment, so can you do it in 30 seconds? We don't have the full 45 minutes.

Joe: I think I can. I think the last points that were just made are really good ones. I review a lot of self-help books for my patients, because I know that they read them. I think you have to really look at the idea that people are looking to be empowered and especially given the circumstances today. Self-help books have a part in that. I always ask them to really look at their own temperament and personality as to whether the suggestions made in those self-help books are really things that they can employ. Do they really fit them? Because you're really looking to get somebody to be authentic and genuine.

The other thing I think you have to think about, too, is that the publishers, this is what they want if you try to sell a book to them that doesn't have a catchy title, Five Ways to Improve Your Life in Some Magnificent Way.

Brian Lehrer: Joe, I have to leave it there because, I don't know, maybe some of you always wanted to say this to a therapist. I'm sorry, but our time is up. [laughs] Joe, thank you very much. I appreciate that 360 take. We do have to leave it there for today with Emma Goldberg, feature writer for The New York Times, reporting on political subcultures and the way we live now, author of the book Life on the Line: Young Doctors Come of Age in a Pandemic. Her article that we've been discussing, published in The Times last week, Is Today's Self-Help Teaching Everyone to Be a Jerk? Not you, Emma. Thank you very much.

Emma Goldberg: [chuckles] Or you. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Stay tuned for Alison.

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