Self-Help Gurus Don’t Always Want to Help You

Caroline Egan
7 min readJun 6, 2023

And the dangers of putting your faith in pseudo experts

Photo by Shiromani Kant on Unsplash

First of all, let me say there is nothing — absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to invest in yourselves. We can all identify areas that we could improve on or even have areas that we feel our life is completely deficient in. Be it relationships, money, work or how we carry ourselves, sometimes changing this can seem like it’s out of our control.

Before I begin, I would like to state, although I feel that I probably shouldn’t have to, that this does not apply to all self-help writers. Many are professionals, many have the adequate credentials or serious experience to dole out valuable information and plans of action, and many of them are brilliant people who genuinely want to help and share their expertise.

These, however, are not the ones that I am describing here. These are the ones that are, at best ripping people off to make a quick buck and, at worst, selling you a very muddled and misleading view of reality.

It’s quite insidious, and for this, I won’t mention any author’s names, but you can draw your own conclusions as to who I may be talking about.

These personalities are quite prolific today, more than ever before, and their ideologies and ease of accessibility are, as far as I am concerned anyway…

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Caroline Egan

Nerdy, freelance writer, feminist, horror/sci-fi enthusiast, mother, big child. Support me and become a member here: https://eganc3.medium.com/membership