Or, do self-help books actually help?
Can books make you happy? The short answer is yes. Books certainly contribute to my happiness — I love to read. Can books teach you how to be happy? There is no definitive answer, but it seems like people have been writing instruction manuals on how to be happy since the printing press was invented, and probably before that. Do self-help books actually help? It is hard to say, but many of them have had a major impact on the society in which they are written, and some beyond that. Gretchen Rubin wrote her first book on happiness in 2009. Since then, she has turned her happiness projects into her own industry, including six books, a weekly podcast, online classes, a virtual happiness swag store and her sister’s spin-off of the original podcast, Happier in Hollywood. (Rubin’s sister, Elizabeth Kraft, is a writer in Hollywood.)
Gretchen Rubin was not the first author of a book on happiness, and she is not the last either. Her 2009 release, “The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun,” ushered in a new wave of self-help philosophy that extended to tv, movies, podcasts and social discourse on the meaning of life.
Americans spent $563 million dollars on self-help books in 2000. (Paul, 2001). What are we buying? Rubin boasts a large array of disparate sources she tapped into to boost her own happiness, then wrote her books to inspire others to make create their own happiness projects. Her method of reading the history of happiness efforts in order to inform her own left me both inspired and excited to explore the intersection of both history and happiness. While conventional wisdom dictates that self-help books are a mid-20th century phenomenon (Arbib & Kvity, 2004), the sources Rubin draws on go back millennia. I am fascinated by the gamut her inspiration runs, so I am taking a deep dive into some of her favorites.
