Let's be honest. The things the article is talking about are largely a reflection of people's demands. The type of people who are looking for self help are clearly not looking for lessons in humility. There is a type of person who would experience problems in their life from not having enough humility. Maybe the number of these people who experience enough personal problems to seek self help has gone down. Perhaps this means that our society has actually become more humble, since there isn't a demand for the value anymore. Or maybe it means that people without humility simply don't experience as many problems anymore? Or maybe a lack of humility would prevent you from seeking self help in the first place. You see these statistics could go many ways depending on how you want to interpret them.

The reduction of 'humility'/'humbleness' was across a broad sample of books, not only the self-help section, and was part of a broader study [1] describing the down-trend in many words associated with virtue.

You can indeed interpret these statistics in many ways, but you first need to know the statistics.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254336923_The_cultu...

Thank you for pointing this out.

The article doesn't demonize anyone, or say anyone is "automatically bad". Nor did the author suggest that people should avoid change. In fact, he's proposing an alternative view, not a traditional view.

He's also not making statements about the superiority of anyone. I think he's trying to encourage less focus on superiority in the first place.

What's really bothering you about this article? You seem really frustrated.

I understand what you are trying to say. But the author does point out that having a quiet ego is associated with many positive life outcomes. He links to this paper - http://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/2003_BrownR...

I haven't gone through the referenced paper but I think it should answer your question to an extent. Also, I feel that the author has been quite diligent has linked to multiple papers to back up his points.

Also in 1900s people had less stuff in their houses, even the middle/upper class ones. I think a big change in 'industrial' countries since then has been mass production and the proliferation of things, so most people now are surrounded by new stuff. I think this must have altered our sense of ourselves in some way.

Social change has occured as well of course, hugely, the availability of information about other countries and other ways of living have contributed to that.