For the last year and half, I've been reading lots of self-help books. In terms of developing a much better understanding of who I am and what is important to me, this has been immensely helpful. On the other hand, in exploring the genre, I've definitely developed a much better sense of why people don't like these kinds of books.

The titles in the section about "success" would be enough to turn me away from the shelves entirely. It would seem that, as a culture, we're preoccupied with growing rich without having to expend any effort to do so. Whether it's about money or otherwise, it would seem that many of the titles suggest that people are looking for quick solutions to more deep-seated problems.

The books that horrify me are the ones with titles like How To Make Anyone Like You. Admittedly, I've never actually picked up one of these books, but I refuse to touch anything with a title that indicates that somebody needs to be disingenuous in order to get what they want. I was once scanning one about how to conduct yourself at social or business networking events; one piece of advice to use as an icebreaker was, quite literally, to walk up to a group of people you didn't know and pretend like you recognized someone in the group, then to play it off as, "Oh, sorry, I thought you were someone else." I hope I never get so lonely that I'm desperate enough to be dishonest.

After my girlfriend and I split in the middle of last year, I cautiously approached the books in the relationships sub-genre of self-help, in an effort to figure out who I was relative to the dating world at large. There's no shortage of these titles in that section either: How To Make Anyone Fall In Love With You, How To Have Him At Hello, and so on. Titles like The Game reminded me that I was re-entering the dating world at a time after the Internet had given rise to the loathsome subculture of the Pickup Artist.

In truth, I cannot stand a fair portion of self-help titles because they seem geared towards helping a person get what they want. Desperate to indulge yourself? Many books offer tactics on the route to getting the indulgences. I'd like to imagine a world of self-help books that shows people how to help others. Don't focus on getting what you want; focus on helping others get whatever it is they want. This is the world I want to live in, rather than a world of smiley glad-hands with faux grins trying to figure out how to manipulate me to get what they want out of me.

All truly beneficial self-help rises and falls on an accurate basis of self-understanding. In fairness to the genre, almost all of the books that stick around for the long-term embody this quality. Here's a piece of advice that gets kicked around between the books quite frequently; it originally came from a man named John Bunyan, and it's suggested as a remedy for those days when you're suffering from the blues: "You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you."