On Self-Improvement
Commonplace Newsletter #116
We draw ever closer to another new year, to another round of that post Christmas, post party masochism where the food coma clears and the hangover gloom eases up just enough for us to be seduced by the siren song of Self Improvement.
New Year, new me. This won’t be like 2024 or 2023 or 2022 or 2021.
No no, this time will be… different.
In this frame of mind, in this vulnerable, perhaps desperate, and possibly melancholic state we are easy prey for the legions of talons bared shysters who wait in the wings with their catchphrases and upsell offers and their double spaced books to sell. As the page of the calendar falls and December becomes January they sense neediness like sharks smelling blood in the water. Even the honest ones, the authentic ones, are in some ways just as bad as the obviously sleazy, slick-haired salesman types who- like all con artists- play on our insecurity, greed and vanity. See, the honest Self Improvement peddlers, the ones who are ‘just trying to help’ and ‘add value’ lend an air of legitimacy to this whole sorry business. They- whether unwittingly or not- perpetuate the lie and make people think they can change in profound ways via the mere adoption of tips, tricks, hacks, slogans, and those nebulous virtues of ‘hustle’ and ‘grit’. Like all tricks that part you from your cash they become silly when you see beyond them. Laughable even. But when you are in the Self Improvement world and in that mind space it is a very serious business indeed. And a very profitable one, at least for those who are selling the products and the associated dreams.
I need to be clear about something at the outset. When I bash Self Improvement I am taking aim at an industry, at a culture (or should that be cult?), at a way of seeing the world and one’s place within it. I am not pooh poohing the idea of people undertaking action in the hope of bettering themselves and their station in life and their relationship to the world around them. I am not advocating for bitter stasis or regression, for never doing anything or never dreaming of anything, above all for the simple fact that this is impossible. We always strive and aim and want. Even extremely anti material ‘spiritual’ paths are about wanting to not want, or rather wanting to want to not want. Desire of some sort is a constant. And this is the mechanism through which (capitalised) Self-Improvement worms its way into our lives. It highjacks the victim’s desire and steers it towards its own ends. The sales funnel begins by taking a natural human desire- to be safe, to be healthy, to be respected- and shifting and distorting and commoditising that into something that- surprise, surprise- the Self Improvement guru has just the thing to help you achieve. Wanting to be healthy becomes wanting to achieve a certain physique, a certain body fat percentage, a certain image, ideally one that is extremely difficult to achieve without committing to a whole lifestyle, dietary ideology and supplement regime. See how it works?
Take an innate human desire, subvert it, particularise it (my way is the best way, no, the only way), brand it and watch the money pour in. Use the money to buy more attention, use that attention to make more money and then use that money and attention as justification that your way is the way. Dismiss all criticism as ‘hate’, double down on the controversial aspects of your message that garner attention, rinse and repeat. The contemporary world of Self Improvement content in a nutshell.
It’s a sad state of affairs made sadder still by the fact that on some level we all know this. We can spot the most egregious, red flag waving examples of this in every sub industry and niche of the many headed Hydra of the Self Improvement industry. Or so we tell ourselves that we can as we watch another video, listen to another podcast or read another book or magazine article. The guys I follow are different, we think. And even if this is true, the problem runs deeper than this. Even those who are sincerely trying to help and are not trying to coax you out of your money are part of the problem. As astoundingly rare as they are.
Because all Self Improvement1 at root robs you of your intuition. It is a deferral of responsibility and nearly always an extremely clever and covert way of the mind playing a trick on you. The mind loves to procrastinate as a means of preventing change. And what better way to procrastinate than to wrap it up in the trappings of productivity? No I haven’t just wasted an entire afternoon reading the latest mega selling self development tome, I’ve been productive, I’ve been learning. I made notes in the margins and everything. No I haven’t actually made any tangible steps towards doing the thing that I want to want to do2 but I now know how to do that thing. And I will do it, starting tomorrow. I just need to get my morning routine optimised first.
Here’s the thing, and a lot of often painful self reflection has taught me that this is true. At any given moment we know what the next step is. We know what needs to be done and we know how to do it. We just don’t do it. Because the mind loves the comfort of the familiar, even if the familiar situation is lacklustre, if not downright slowly killing us. The amount of seriously unhealthy people who know a staggering amount about nutrition and exercise from endless sedentary ‘research’ and ‘looking things up’ dwarfs the amount of people who actually manage to get in shape through trial and error by many orders of magnitude. The same goes for the dead broke stock market experts, filmless filmmakers who have seen the complete Criterion Collection but never shot and cut a single minute of film together and yes, the novelists who have yet to write a novel. Consuming expert opinion3 to the detriment of actually participating and finding out as you go is the procrastination method par excellence for this current era. That and memes. Experts and expertise are not the same thing. At all.
We know what to do and we don’t do. I’m not looking to shame anyone here. You know enough and you are enough. If you want to do something you can do it and if you aren’t doing it then it is probably because deep down you don’t want to do it. And that’s fine. The idea of doing things is often great- or rather the idea of attaining the results is- but the reality is less so. Hence the procrastination, the endless escapism, the fantasising versus actually finding out for yourself. And that’s fine too. You don’t have to do anything, you don’t have to be anything in particular. No one is forcing you to, and in truth virtually nobody cares anyway as everyone is so wrapped up and distracted by their own goals. Goals that they haven’t really started on yet but will begin any day now.
The Self Improvement funnel is a cage, it’s a trap. But the door isn’t locked. You can just push it and walk away at any time. In fact, that is the only genuine and honest tip, trick or hack I can give you in good conscience. Just walk away. If you want to set a goal for the new year have it be that. This year my goal is to walk away. To stop with the videos and the podcasts and the non fiction bestsellers with their big promises and even bigger fonts from the self appointed experts. To stop beating myself up because I’m failing to pretend to meet a ludicrous goal that I am pretending to care about. To stop papering over self loathing with rictus grin fake positive self talk. The eyes that look back at you from the mirror as you voice the delusion of the day know that you are lying. What do you want to do really? I mean really really? What do you want to have done with your life when you are at the end of it? Will you have wished you worked harder to make marginally more money, will you regret not having ‘hustled’ harder in a draining career or not having chicken-and-broccoli’d your way through more family get togethers? Or will you regret never really knowing yourself because you filled your head with received wisdom and received desires and received opinions? Will you regret sacrificing sunrises and stargazing to the tyranny of the to do list and the pressures of conforming to the dubious compensations of consumerism?
These are the questions that matter. You can’t improve a self, not really, but you can refine the self that you are and let it shine forth. But first of all you have to know yourself, and to do this you have to accept yourself, and stop cultivating an image for unfeeling4 strangers.
The Self Improvement industry is the opposite of this. It’s escapism masquerading as productivity. And don’t get me wrong, escapism certainly has its place. All art and culture is in a certain sense escapist in nature. So the question is this- do you want your form of escapism to be a self flagellating and covertly egotistical masquerade of ‘hard work’ and joyless development, or do you want it to be a genuinely fun and meaningful diversion from a life that you actually enjoy living?
The answer seems obvious to me.
Even this essay is arguably an example of this, although I am turning myself inside out in trying to avoid hypocrisy and peddling a slightly different and more astringent brand of Gurudom myself.
This is not a typo.
I use the phrase ‘consuming expert opinion’ advisedly here. Very, very rarely do we encounter genuinely helpful expertise given by an ‘expert’. True expertise is nearly always drowned out by confident oversimplifications that sound right offered up by self declared ‘experts’. Genuine expertise usually has a hesitancy and a counterintuitive if not downright paradoxical feel to it, whereas the much more popular know-it-all yet hypothetical type of expert is not muddied by such nuance and harder to digest complexities.
And often just imagined strangers.
Banger. The following sentence hits hard, "Experts and expertise are not the same thing."
I've started thinking about it this way: people don't need self improvement, what they really need is Self Revelation.
I agree that reading or going on a course about how to do stuff is often a good way of avoiding doing it. What's needed is:
* honesty: am I doing this for genuine reasons or as an avoidance strategy;
* a marginal cost/benefit approach: recognising the point at which the potential benefit of a self-improvement activity is outweighed the potential cost, in terms of not actually doing it;
* courage: the ability to say to yourself that something done is better than nothing done while striving for perfection.