Peruse the self-help aisle at your local neighborhood bookstore, and you’ll likely find tomes giving you all kinds of advice. Titles that tell us to “let them” or develop “atomic habits” or offer an expletive-laden guide to caring less.

For all the critiques of the multibillion-dollar self-help industry, it sells, launching the high-profile careers of authors and influencers and ways of life for its followers. What is it about self-help that we find irresistible?

That’s the question author Jessica Lamb-Shapiro set out to answer with her book Promise Land: My Journey Through America’s Self-Help Culture. It’s a topic she has personal investment in. “My dad was a child psychologist, and he wrote parenting books. And I later found out that he used me as an example,” she says. Her experience left her skeptical of self-help culture, so she set out to explore it by trying the guidance in several self-help guides.

Though her experience was unique, she says it’s not all that different from the culture of self-help we all interact with. “That kind of stuff percolates, even if you’re not reading self-help books,” Lamb tells Vox. “It’s so woven into the fabric of our experience that I think everyone grew up with self-help, even if they didn’t grow up reading self-help books or having a self-help book writer for a dad.”

It seems that when it comes to self-improvement, we just can’t help ourselves. But is this attempt at optimization actually leading to our isolation? That’s what we discuss........

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