The Self-Help Paradox

Cosplaying Self-Improvement

Gentle Reader,

Something which has been running in the back of my mind for a little while is the modern take on the idea of self-improvement.

At a certain point in time, social media became saturated with the mimetic motivational idea of constant grinding and development, an idea which caught fire very quickly in a society which was eagerly looking for ways to feel better about itself.

Initially, this mainly took the form of memes about getting up at 5am to go to the gym, Jocko Willink style, but gradually became more pervasive and subtly integrated into more general self-development, in both professional and personal realms.

This concept more or less morphed into the idea of grinding, the ‘grindset’, or always working hard on yourself. Nowadays, it’s common to hear young people talking about developing their side-hustles, working hard on their 5k time, or building towards ‘financial freedom’ and, even more recently, this attitude has now permeated so deeply into society that ‘doing therapy’ is now regarded as a basic tenet of self-care.

These goals and ideals, although not problematic in themselves, do speak of a limited worldview. Although the core idea of self-improvement, across all domains, is a good one, there is another side to the story.

Insidious Baggage

Many of the goals and processes which are top-of-mind in society have only flourished because they were allowed to grow in a soil which was rich already in self-doubt, feelings of inadequacy, and low self-esteem.

Along comes somebody successful who tells us we need to work one hundred hours a week, setting up our own business, in order to become rich and successful, and who are we to say otherwise? Even better, we now have a pathway to follow, something which gives hope and a sense of trajectory.

Similarly, this exists in our personal lives, where we are sold the idea that working out 7 days a week, getting big muscles or stretchy hamstrings will give us the body which our would-be dream partner craves. Therefore, we must be productive in order to live up to this ideal.

These goals, although sounding realistic and positive, can come with insidious baggage, especially when given free-reign in the developing mind.

Heavy baggage

Being productive without the appropriate contexts of what life can actually offer us, however, essentially amounts to self-productisation. A person is not a GDP-machine, and even though we sometimes look at countries by their output, we should not be doing this to human beings.

The other unfortunate sequel is that the essence of striving is dissatisfaction. If you decide that you will be happy when you get a promotion, bench two plates, or find a perfect partner, then you tacitly make an agreement with yourself to not be happy in the present. Stated otherwise: we stop accepting and liking ourselves for who we are in this moment, which is corrosive in itself.

Not only this, but many who are really out there in the trenches, who are following all the rules to get rich or attractive or to guarantee that they will find the one, are often disappointed for three reasons.

1. They have deviated from what actually interests them in life.

2. They have productised themselves and, like dementors, sucked the soul from their own bodies.

3. Life in fact is random, stochastic, and shit happens all the time that can’t be predicted or engineered, regardless of how hard you did or did not work.

The sad truth is that even if we achieve these vaunted goals, this rarely results in the slow-burning contentment which is hoped for. Remember, reader: the game is rigged, and the goalposts will always shift.

That is not to say that having goals and achieving things is not important. Following the opposite approach to its ultimate conclusion would mean that we end up as cave-dwelling Buddhas who have no need to enter society, which is not realistic either.

Remember: at the end of the Hero’s Journey, the Hero, having found salvation, atonement, the elixir of life, must re-enter society again, now possessed of a new awareness: freedom to live.

We, as people, should still work on ourselves, but not at the cost of everything else.

Commodified self-help & cosplaying self-development

Ask yourself: why is the self-help industry such a thriving one? Why are there so many self-help books and articles and videos? Because it’s big business and because we have become a society of voyeurs and dreamers: by reading about the day-to-day grind, we allow ourselves to imagine that we will become what we have dreamed of and, since these books spoon-feed us what these dreams should be, it then becomes unnecessary for us to expend precious energy sitting with ourselves and deciding what we really want. Even when we participate, it is in a perfunctory fashion, going through the motions of what society has prescribed for us.

In this world, doing the vaunted thing is as important, if not more important, than the outcome (which will probably not be achieved anyway). The end which will not be reached, justifies the means, which are unpleasant and tiresome, but which provide the ego with a reason for existence.

Get that promotion if it’s what you really want, as long as you know that it is not salvation and, if you are getting up every morning at 5am to sculpt your body for your wife-to-be, just remember that the woman who could love you the best might value you for something else entirely.

But by ‘larping’ these roles, we allow ourselves to participate in the fantasy that we are approaching happiness and contentment, as if such a state of mind were really to be found in a monthly budget or a 19 minute 5k, or by reading the next self-help book.

Is it really self-development, or are we cosplaying self-development? What do we really want?

It’s difficult to disentangle true desires from those of social media, society and, perhaps most difficult of all, those foisted upon us by our parents. I don’t have the answers, but I know that the flame within, the pilot light which truly never goes out, is burning in there somewhere, behind all the Crossfit, holidays to the Maldives, promotions, and all the other ways to hide in the world.

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Thanks for reading. The present writer will be on holidays for the next 2 weeks, and so do not be surprised if the next couple of newsletters are infused through with the bright optimism of an Irishman who finds himself in a sunnier clime.