Self-Improvement Is Driving Us Crazy
How to stand firm in the accelerating culture
18 min read
When was the last time you said to yourself “I’m good enough” and actually meant it? If you’re like me, then you probably don’t remember. I’m sure most of you don’t literally hate yourself (I did in the past, but that’s another story), but you do feel like there’s always room for improvement, right? You’re always catching up — to your colleagues, to your friends, to the person you admire in your field and to the “ideal” version of yourself.
Maybe I’m wrong, maybe you’re not. In that case, congrats! You’re an alien! You can skip this article (I envy you, you perfect specimen).
For the rest of us, we’re sort of in big trouble, because that feeling — of not being good enough — is not entirely our fault. That feeling comes from an innate insecurity we’ve inherited from our ancestors — the insecurity that comes from comparing ourselves to our peers in our tribe to see where we’re standing in the social hierarchy. In other words, like most things in our “lizard brain”, feeling not good enough was all about survival.
That feeling is normal, however, in the age of social media, it seems to be emphasized and even aggravated for some people. That “local tribe” we were supposed to compare ourselves to has extended to — more or less — the whole Internet; way more people are visible to us now, and naturally, most of them post the best highlights of their lives, so we end up having skewed and unrealistic views about life in general.
Where am I going with this, you ask? Well, I believe we should reconsider our relationship with self-improvement, and we need to develop a more nuanced and — dare I say — a more pessimistic view.
Svend Brinkmann, a psychologist and philosopher from Denmark, has a similar view, which he expresses in his 2014 book called Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze. I will now highlight and summarize some of his views for you — the ones that I consider relevant.
Get your latte or your martini or your gluten-free-smell-free green tea — or whatever you’re into — and relax. It’s going to be depressing. (yay!)
The Wellness Syndrome
Brinkmann argues that our modern culture (he calls it “accelerating culture”) is too obsessed with “the self” and “self-improvement” and criticizes its main virtues like flexibility, mobility, the over-reliance on positivity and the demonization of negativity, the myth of “finding an authentic self by looking inside” and the whole movement of positive psychology, life coaches, self-help gurus etc.
Basically, he’s trying to play the role of Socrates — he’s trying to be an annoying gadfly, annoying us with his skepticism and negativity. Ugh, get a life, Svend! Do you even watch YouTube motivational videos before you workout bro?
Be it as it may, he does have a valid point. “The Wellness Industry’s” net worth was estimated at 4.5 trillion dollars in 2018, and the numbers are only growing. (click here for full stats)
My point? The Wellness Industry is highly-influential and it permeates our lives. And by that I mean the ads — the damn ads, are haunting all of us. Want it or not, it influences and shapes our perception and our relationship with ourselves for the sole goal of selling more stuff to us. It’s how the free market works, demand and supply baby! — or in our case, create and over exaggerate the demand and them supply us baby! YAS! Gimme that sh*t, gimme that juicy motivational stuff, I just can’t get enough! I can’t stop! (okay, no more music references, I promise)
To quote Brinkmann,
“It seems that we — and I’m not afraid to count myself among the collective ‘we’ — lack purpose and direction, and run around looking for the latest recipe for happiness, progress and success.”
I think he’s onto something really important here. At least culturally, we live in “a state of dependency”, we seem more and more dependent on coaches, self-help gurus, positivity seminars, and so on.
The psychologists Carl Cederström and André Spicer call it the Wellness Syndrome.
“Just look at the bestseller list,” says Brinkmann, “it always includes books about food and health, self-help books and celebrity biographies.”
He argues that there are a lot of problematic aspects in this “accelerating culture” that we underestimate, and he intends “to counter all the terminology of incessant development and change.” He wants to show us how to “stand firm”. To do that, he uses the example of the ancient Stoic philosophy, with its emphasis on self-control, peace of mind, dignity and reflection on death.
“Looking inside yourself” is overrated
When you have doubts over a major decision in your life, what’s the most popular advice you get? Let me guess, is it “follow your heart”, or “use your gut feeling”? (maybe it’s “ go f*ck yourself Steven, no one cares”, in this case, I don’t know what to say…tell them to f*ck off too maybe?)
This may sound counter-intuitive, but Brinkmann argues that it’s common sense,
“If somebody is in trouble and needs help, there’s no point in basing your reaction on how helping them would make you feel. What you need to think about is the other person. You need to base your reaction on the idea that it’s important to help others per se whenever possible — regardless of how it makes you feel [..] You need to learn to look outwards, not inwards; to be open to other people, cultures and nature. You need to accept that the self does not hold the key to how to live your life. The self is merely an idea, a construct, a by-product of cultural history. As such, it is by its very nature more external than internal.”
In other words, “stop navel-gazing” — you need to look outwards sometimes; in fact, looking outwards is probably a more logical long-term strategy than trusting your “gut feeling”. But as in most logical things, people are not as good at it as they think they are. We still base most of our decisions on emotions.
Just look at what a 2014 article in The Telegraph said: “New study finds that executives will question data that contradicts their intuition.” Data? Nah, data is boring. Intuition though, mmm…gimme that intuition. Yes, Mr.Self-help guru, you are right! I need to trust my gut more!
So even if data shows that white is white, and your gut tells you that white is black, you’re still more inclined to trust your gut. Damn you, gut! You influencer! You evil demon! (as my brotha’ Descartes once said)
“According to a survey, only 10 per cent of executives said that if the available data contradicted their intuition, they would follow the data rather than their gut. The remainder would either reanalyse the data, ignore it or collate more information.”
That’s nuts! Logic? I don’t even…
Brinkmann goes on and satirizes the lifestyle advice you often get in magazines, like “observe what’s going on inside you. All of the answers are already within you. Begin to act on what you feel. You will no longer have to adapt to the rest of the world.”
He points to the absurdity of these statements,
“Society sets objective standards for what constitutes a good engineer (technical skills, mathematical understanding, etc.), and they have nothing to do with how you feel inside. These are abilities that other people are capable of assessing.”
Hard to argue against that. It’s strange that common sense like this is being forgotten or misused. The pendulum has swung too much to one side, and it needs to be re-balanced. Although there are some real answers and there is some use in introspection, you can’t live in La La Land and ignore the outer world and the feedback from other people. We have lots of blind-spots when it comes to self-assessment, and more often than not we lie to ourselves in order to feel better.
This reminds me of the story of two french philosophers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his friend Denis Diderot.
TL;DR — they were tight, but then life happened.
Rousseau was one of the first writers in the western world to claim that your inner feelings show more about your true self than external factors. He wrote a lot of stuff, but the one work he considered the most important was his book called Emile, or On Education (1762), which is a treatise on the nature of education and on the nature of man, and it’s sort of a big deal because During the French Revolution, Emile served as the inspiration for what became a new national system of education.
Emile is scarcely a detailed parenting guide but it does contain some specific advice on raising children. You want to know the plot twist? Rousseau abandoned all his five children to an orphanage (it was called “a foundling hospital” in those days). Yes, you heard it right, he abandoned his own children while writing a book on raising children!
Crazy, right? I bet he didn’t look inside himself enough, or maybe he did it too much, and ignored what the “corrupt society” told him (you know, things like “yo Rousseau, why the hell are you lecturing me on educating my children while you abandoned yours; you on drugs or what?”).
Now, his friend Diderot called him on his bullsh*t and told him to grow up. To keep the long story short, Rousseau was trying to romantically pursue Sophie d’Houdetott, who was the cousin of landlady Madame d’Épinay. There was some three-way quarrel going on between Rousseau and the landlady; her lover, the journalist Grimm; and their mutual friend, Diderot, who took their side against Rousseau.
Diderot later described Rousseau as being “false, vain as Satan, ungrateful, cruel, hypocritical, and wicked… He sucked ideas from me, used them himself, and then affected to despise me.”
LOL, needless to say, sh*t went down. Diderot became the opposite of Rousseau, he believed that actions > feelings. In other words, authenticity is more about what you do than what you say.
To quote Diderot, “our real opinion is not one in which we have never wavered, but the one to which we have most regularly returned.”
The Health Paradox
Dr. Philip Cushman once argued that the depression epidemic in the West is explained by the fact that “if you look inwards long enough — if you dwell on how you feel, and use therapy to find yourself — then depression will descend the moment you realise that there is, in fact, nothing there.”
In other words, by spending enough time “looking inside” you may end up more disappointed than you were before. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, you know. There’s more darkness within us that we’d like to know.
The famous psychiatrist Carl Jung describes in his work the concept of a “shadow” — which is the dark side within each one of us that is unknown to us,
“When and individual makes an attempt to see his shadow, he becomes aware of (and often ashamed of) those qualities and impulses he denies in himself but can plainly see in other people — such things as egotism, mental laziness, and sloppiness; unreal fantasies, schemes, and plots; carelessness and cowardice; inordinate love of money and possessions — in short, all the little sins about which he might previously have told himself: ‘That doesn’t matter; nobody will notice it, and in any case other people do it too.’” (Man and His Symbols, p. 174)
This obsession with our inner feelings may be dangerous. Excessive self-analysis “brings with it a genuine risk of feeling something that is actually meaningless, but that assumes meaning through the very process of feeling it.”
Brinkmann expands on this idea,
“Since the 1980s, doctors have been referring to this as the health paradox. More and better methods of diagnosis and treatment have led to people becoming trapped in a cycle of perpetual self-diagnosis, resulting in widespread discomfort and even hypochondria. In short: the more advanced medical science becomes, the sicker people think they are.”
There’s an argument from a German sociologist, Axel Honneth, who implies that we are still living the effects of the counter-culture movements of the 1960’s, when “there was no shortage of good reasons to throw off the shackles of a rigid society that placed unnecessary restrictions on personal and human development.” However, he argues that while this inward turn may well once have constituted a legitimate form of resistance to ‘the system’, it has become as a result the basis upon which the very same system now legitimises itself.
Brinkmann’s main thesis in the book is this:
“In short: the idea of transforming society by breaking down oppressive traditions and liberating yourself is now ingrained in society’s oppressive reproduction of itself. Soul-searching as a means of self-development or even self-realisation has become the key psychological driving force in the accelerating culture and all the problems it generates. So, not only will it make your own life better if you drop all this malarkey, society will benefit too.”
What can you do about it?
Brinkmann’s solutions aren’t perfect, but they’re a good start. At least they’re arguments which have the potential of swinging the pendulum closer to the center, where I (and Aristotle) believe it needs to stay.
To summarize, here are his (“anti self-help”) solutions/conclusions:
1) Doubt as a virtue — “It is better to be in some doubt about what your gut feeling means — and about whether you have found yourself — than to follow your gut feeling and pursue the elusive self in a blinkered fashion. Once we accept that the self is impossible to pin down and gut feelings are unreliable, this very doubt becomes a virtue in itself.”
2) Do something that you don’t feel like doing — “Don’t throw yourself into all sorts of silly things, but practise doing something that has ethical value. Even if it doesn’t feel good (because acting ethically doesn’t always). Apologising to someone who deserves it even if you feel a bit ashamed to be doing so. Or perhaps donating more to charity than you really want to. If the upshot, in the longer term, happens to be that this gives you a good feeling inside, so much the better. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, because now you know that it isn’t a feeling inside of you that determines whether you are doing the right thing. A Stoic is, of course, allowed to feel good — including about their own actions. It isn’t ‘how-you-feel-about-it’ that serves as the measure of whether you are doing the right thing.”
3) It’s OK to complain — “Learn to focus more on the negative aspects of your life. This has multiple advantages. First of all, it allows you to think and speak freely. A lot of people actually enjoy a good moan. Petrol’s too dear, the weather’s foul and OMG is that a grey hair? Complaining about anything and everything won’t help you find the meaning of life, of course, but it is frustrating if you’re not allowed to get things off your chest. Secondly, focusing on the negative is the first step in dealing with problems. There may be little you can do to improve the weather on Saturday afternoon, but if you aren’t allowed to point out woeful conditions in the workplace — and you are only allowed to focus on success stories — then you’ll end up frustrated and resentful. Thirdly, reflecting on all the negative things that might happen to you — and inevitably will happen to you (even positive psychologists die eventually) — will lead to greater appreciation of the life you are leading now. This is one of the main ideas in the Stoic philosophy of life, and the primary reason why the Stoics were interested in the ultimate negative: death. I’m not saying that they romanticised death, or thought it deserved to be celebrated. For the Stoics, death was something we ought to think about — but exclusively in the service of life.
We need to reserve the right to moan, even if it doesn’t lead to positive changes. But if it can lead to positive changes then it is, of course, important. Usually, kvetching is directed outward. We moan about the weather, politicians or football teams. It’s always about something else — not us! By contrast, the positive attitude is directed inwards — if something’s wrong, we are required to work on ourselves and what motivates us. Everything is our own fault. Unemployed people aren’t entitled to complain about the benefits system. They just need to get their act together, think positively and find a job. It’s all about ‘believing in yourself’ — but that’s a totally blinkered concept. It reduces important social, political and economic problems to a matter of individual motivation and positivity.”
4) Don’t always look on the bright side — “Countless self-help books and misery memoirs by people with both physical and mental illnesses talk about how glad they are that they went through a crisis because they learned so much from it. I think that a lot of people who have been seriously ill, or found themselves in some other kind of existential crisis, find it galling that they’re expected to look on the bright side. Very few will say out loud that their illness has been awful from start to finish and that they would rather not have had to go through it. A typical book title might be How I Survived Stress — And What It Taught Me, but you’re unlikely to find a book called I’m Still Stressed — It’s an Unending Nightmare. Not only do we suffer stress or illness and eventually die, we’re also supposed to think it’s all so enlightening and rewarding.”
5) Positive psychology is not as objective as you may think — “Positive psychology can be seen as a scientific reflection of the accelerating culture’s fascination with positivity. It really took off in 1988, when Martin Seligman became president of the American Psychological Association. Seligman built his reputation on the theory of learned helplessness as a factor in depression. Learned helplessness is a state of apathy, or at least a lack of will to change painful experiences — even in situations where you actually have options that would allow you to avoid the pain.
Seligman had developed the theory via experiments that involved administering electric shocks to dogs. When he (understandably) grew tired of torturing man’s best friend, he decided to focus on something more life-affirming, and threw himself into positive psychology instead. Positive psychology rejects the focus on human problems and suffering that previously epitomised much of psychology (Seligman sometimes calls standard psychology ‘negative psychology’). Rather, it is a scientific study of what is good in life and human nature. In particular, it asks what happiness is and how it is achieved, and seeks to identify positive human personality traits. As president of the American Psychological Association, Seligman used his office to promote positive psychology. He succeeded to such an extent that there are now study programmes, centres and scientific journals dedicated to the subject.
It is, of course, perfectly legitimate to conduct research into factors that enhance well-being, provide ‘optimal experiences’ and improve performance levels. However, in the hands of consultants and coaches — or enthusiastic managers who have attended short courses in ‘positive leadership’ — positive psychology is rapidly reduced to a blunt tool used to stifle criticism. Some sociologists go so far as to talk about positivity fascism, which they identify in both positive thinking and appreciative inquiry. The concept describes the kind of mind control that can arise if you only ever look on the bright side of life.”
6) Sometimes you need to suppress your feelings — “It’s an illusion to believe that delving deep into your inner feelings is the path to authenticity. There’s nothing desirable about exploding in anger at a fellow motorist driving too slowly in the fast lane, even if it’s authentic, even if you really are angry about it. In essence, the worship of authenticity in the pursuit of true feelings infantilises us. The toddler who is swaddled in his feelings — who smiles when happy and cries when frustrated — is therefore implicitly presented as the ideal. Such children may be sweet and delightful, but this cult of the authentic and the childlike is highly problematic in adulthood. As an adult, you should instead admire those who are capable of controlling — even suppressing — negative emotions.”
7) Focus on the negative without being angry — “And remember that being angry isn’t the same as focusing on the negative. The goal for a Stoic is precisely the ability to focus on the negative without being angry — and either just accept it as an aspect of life, or try to bring about positive change if there’s something you can actually do about it in practice.”
8) Use laughter instead of anger if possible — “According to Seneca, laughter is a helpful response to that at which we would otherwise be angry. For example, if someone insults us, humour is a far better response than aggression. Recently, the singer James Blunt was praised for having responded to various highly provocative comments on social media with very amusing responses that made the ‘haters’ seem extremely small-minded. To quote one of the more innocent from Twitter: in response to ‘James Blunt just has an annoying face and a highly irritating voice’, Blunt just wrote ‘And no mortgage’.”
9) Life-coaching has replaced religion — “Coaching has become a key psychological tool in a culture that revolves around the self. As such, coaching is part of a more wide-ranging worldview that we might — slightly provocatively — dub the religion of the self. The religion of the self has taken over many of the functions of Christianity: the role of the priest is now played by a psychotherapist or coach; religious denominations have given way to therapy, coaching and other techniques for personal development; grace and salvation have been replaced by self-realisation, skills enhancement and lifelong learning. And finally, perhaps most importantly, where God used to be at the centre of the universe, now it is the self. Never before in history have we talked so much about the self and its characteristics (self-esteem, self-confidence, self-development, etc.). Never before have we had so many ways to measure, evaluate and develop the self — even though we basically have no idea what it is.”
10) Read more novels instead of self-help books — “Biographies always top the bestseller lists, but often they just celebrate the trivial lives of celebrities and reinforce the idea that life is something we control. Self-help books do the same. Ultimately, they leave you despondent at your failure to realise their myriad promises of happiness, wealth and health. Novels, on the other hand, enable you to understand human life as complex and unmanageable. Read at least one a month.
Unlike self-help books and most autobiographies, novels present life more faithfully — as complex, random, chaotic and multifaceted. Novels remind you how little control you have over your life, and also show how it is inextricably entangled with social, cultural and historical processes. Acknowledging this endows you with a humility that might help you to do your duty in life, rather than constantly honing in on yourself and your personal development.”
11) Sometimes there’s nothing to learn from the negative — “Autobiographies rarely describe crises that have exclusively negative outcomes. Far more often, crises and adversity are presented as opportunities for personal growth and development. And this may sometimes be the case. However, after reading this book, you also know that crises and adversity can also be just what they appear to be — horrible situations from which nothing good will ever come. More often than you might think, the best thing to do is to strive to live with dignity, by looking the negative in the eye and accepting it. But you won’t learn that from typical self-help books or autobiographies (instead, look to Seneca and Marcus Aurelius for inspiration).”
12) “Balance on the edge of the box” — “Concepts like innovation and creativity float around in all sorts of discourse about organisation and education, in which any sense of the value of repetition and the tried and tested has been lost. We are forever being told to ‘think outside the box’. Fortunately, less excitable creativity researchers have pointed out that it only makes sense to think outside the box if you know that there is a box (and what it’s made of). In most cases, it’s probably wiser to balance on the edge of the box, only tinkering around the edges and improvising around tried-and-tested themes. The new only makes sense within a horizon of something known. If you know nothing of the past and its traditions, it’s impossible to create anything new that is useful.”
13) Dwell on the past (respect traditions) — “The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has developed a concept of ‘living traditions’, which suggests that traditions are entirely distinct from consensus and a simple repetition of the past. He defines a living tradition as ‘an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition’.
Traditions aren’t monolithic and unchanging (apart from dead ones, of course). They are living, dynamic and in constant motion. It is when we participate in such traditions — in family life, education, work, art, sports etc. — that we become people. We only understand ourselves when we know the traditions from which we stem and within which we live our lives. This is quite banal, but we often overlook it in our enthusiasm for the future: without traditions and their history, nothing is meaningful. Any meaning and significance that an action or a cultural product may have draws on historically developed practices. You must therefore dwell on the past to understand yourself as a cultural and historical being or entity. Only then will you find something on which to stand firm.”
The author does conclude with some skepticism over his own solutions:
“My hope is that by inverting the logic of the self-development mania, the book will highlight its absurdity. It’s a fairly safe bet that positive or negative thinking alone won’t solve the big problems the planet faces. Nevertheless, I do think that Stoic reflection acts as a refreshing tonic when confronted by runaway consumerism and coercive development. However, to use a medical analogy, this is just addressing the symptoms. Other types of discussion and action (political, economic, etc.) are needed if we are to cure the major ailments of the day (e.g. global environmental and economic crises) and the growth paradigm associated with them.”