How to Be Fine

This isn't a celebration of the self-help genre. In fact, if anything, Greenberg and Meinzer run something akin to a meta-analysis of the genre and found much of it frankly to be fraudulent. The most surprising thing is how many of the self-help idols rely on self-flagellation (obvious) rather than acknowledge how issues beyond your control (less obvious: power structure, gender, race, class) are often deeply intertwined with our concerns about anxiety, health, wealth and more.

Most self-help books are, indeed as we might cynically suspect, a predatory author's (usually white, hetero, cis-gender men) attempt to exploit peoples' fears for idolatry and expensive post-book training.