The Myth of Self-Improvement

I have spent much of my adult life trying to “fix” things about myself: from my body and the way I dress, to my innate shyness and sensitive nature. When I was diagnosed with depression at age seventeen, I convinced myself that if I just patched up all my imperfections and painted over them, then I would be alright. I just needed to be a ‘better person.’ Then the depression would go away.

For years I would read countless self-help books, devour the biographies of successful artists and entrepreneurs, and listen to podcast after video after audiobook, all in the hopes of understanding how to become ‘better’.

Better at what, exactly? I don’t know. I never stopped to question it, really. Better is just better… right? That’s what I thought.

But this desire to be better—the lust for ‘self-improvement,’ as some people call it—came at a great cost, and I came to realise that self-help is a double-edged sword. As much is it may empower you with tools to help you better your life, if left untamed, it can also perpetuate a very dangerous idea. An idea that will poison you, and laugh as it watches you wilt away: the idea that…

You are not enough.

Not-So-Great Expectations

Much to my therapist’s delight, and to my own dismay, I’ve been doing a fair bit of self-reflection in recent months. I came to observe a pattern that has appeared throughout my life since adolescence, of gravitating towards activities that initially seem healthy, but somehow end up becoming self-destructive.

It would start out innocently enough. “I’d like to go to the gym three or four times a week,” so I told myself earlier this year. It sounded reasonable. It was reasonable, and in the beginning, I generally looked forward to working out.

But then, ever so slowly, expectations would creep their way into the mix. “I have to raise my max deadlift by 5kg every week. I have to eat a perfectly optimised diet, count my macros and take supplements. I need to feel incredibly strong and powerful after every session.”

Soon, a reasonable, healthy behaviour would blow out of proportion and become loaded with expectation. I began to dread my workouts. If I pushed through the dread and showed up, then I would often feel ashamed of not meeting my ever-elusive standards. Or if I let it overwhelm me and skipped a planned workout, I would feel incredibly guilty. Either way, I’d end up with shame or guilt, and I would spend my evening trying to numb out; either binge-eating, drinking, doom-scrolling, pleasuring myself, or some abhorrent mixture of those addictive behaviours, until I would eventually pass out.

Soon, a reasonable, healthy behaviour would blow out of proportion and become loaded with expectation.

I would feel so miserable and drained the next day from my indulgent behaviour, that a workout would require even more energy, and I would drift further away from my already-impossible standards. Unsurprisingly, I eventually gave up on regular workouts altogether.

And it wasn't just fitness where I had this problem. This happened with almost every new goal I tried to pursue.

It was driving me crazy.

Why do we try to ‘improve ourselves’ in the first place?

It begged the question: why did I perpetuate this cycle? Why was I so obsessed by self-help and the idea of improving my life? On the surface, self-improvement seems logical: set a goal, progress towards it, and life will get better. But it never worked like that for me. Something always got in my way. Often, I got in my own way.

It was infuriating. Humiliating, even.

Self-improvement seems logical: set a goal, progress towards it, and life will get better. But it never worked like that for me.

So I decided to do some digging. It took longer than I expected, but through sheer, stubborn perserverance, I eventually reached the point where my shovel struck something impenetrable. This was it, I knew it; I could feel it, the marrow in my bones growing hot with anticipation. I had reached The Bottom of It.

I knelt down to scrape away the dirt, and when I stepped back to take a look, I was horrified by the deep-seated belief I had uncovered:

My spine stiffened and I jolted upright. I stood there slackjawed, staring at the words etched into my soul, my breath growing shallower. "I am not enough." This was the message at the root of all my self-destruction. It was so perfectly, abundantly clear, and it was impossible to unsee it. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I came to see various offshoots of this belief that meandered their way up to the surface of my life, like weeds.

• Why do I buy new clothes? “Because I’m not fashionable enough.”
• Why do I work out? “Because I’m not attractive enough.”
• Why do I go to therapy, participate in coaching programs, and try to improve my life? “Because my life is not good enough. I am not enough.”

What a load of horseshit.

Rotten to the core

As it turns out, my desire for self-improvement was motivated by insecurity. I would hear those voices in my head telling me “I am not good enough,” “I should change.” Those voices drove my behaviour. I would obey them frequently, often without question.

Perhaps I would make progress. My external situation would change. I would increase my bench press, get a good haircut or buy some nicer clothes. But internally, I would eventually return to that same default state of dissatisfaction and misery. Like that miserable drunk Churchill—who spoke of the black dog of depression that chased him through life—my own black dog would always find his way back to me, wet-eyed and whimpering, his tail between his legs, desperate for something to chase.

In truth, my suffering wasn’t caused by being ‘unfashionable,’ or ‘too unfit,’ or whatever the day’s insecurity was. It was caused by the misleading story I told myself; that this particular insufficiency of mine was the cause of my unhappiness, and I deserved to be alone until I strapped up my boots and ‘worked on it’. This train of thought would drive me to compulsively seek to be ‘better’ at all costs. I could make ‘improvement’, but the underlying belief would remain simply sprout up as a new insecurity.

In fact, if I found any evidence of my success, I would discount it. My immediate response to a compliment was to think, “they’re just being nice,” or “they don’t really mean it,” or “they don’t know the real me.” Or I would trivialise it. “Yeah, I have an organised calendar and long, dainty eyelashes. Maybe I had a date on the weekend. Who cares?” Whenever I’d achieve a goal, I would usually move onto the next one quite quickly without taking time to celebrate, or move the goalposts so that I could keep up with the anxious need to feel progress.

If I found any evidence of my success, I would discount it.

The problem is that, with this mindset, with insecurity as my underlying motivation, driving everything I do… I will never become enough. Because, for starters – what the hell is “enough”, anyway? Enough for what, for who? The more I asked myself, the more the answer seemed to elude me.

Perhaps there is no answer.

But if Self-Improvement is a false god, to whom should I pray instead?

The solution is simple. Just tell yourself: “I’ve got enough, I am enough.”

Repeat this mantra seven-thousand times a day, and give up on trying to improve your life. Detach from ego, and reject all worldly possessions. Listen to David Sylvian albums—or just imagine them, since, you know, you don’t have Spotify anymore. Surrender completely. Place faith in the Universe. Live out your days on a park bench, staring off into Infinity, in some transcendental state of eternal bliss and total acceptance of Life As It Is. That should do the trick.

Except… well… even Eckhart Tolle, the Messiah of the New Age, worshipped by Oprah fanatics and Goop gals across the galaxy, eventually became fed up with his poverty shtick, went and wrote the wildly successful The Power of Now, and made yacht-loads of money. Maybe life on a park bench isn’t wildly fulfilling. (Shocker.)

If that doesn't work, maybe you could try the opposite.

Strive further, work harder, capitalise on every ounce of your energy and then some, perhaps in the hopes that one day you will finally reach Enough, with a capital ‘E’. That sounds good, right?

It did to me, at least until I realised: the ceilings for self-improvement are staggeringly, infinitely high.

You can, in theory, become ruthlessly fit, relentlessly efficient, or terrifyingly wealthy. Big house, fancy car, nice watch, all the rest of it. But if, at the end of the day, the belief that drives your behaviour is that you aren’t enough… then you will never be enough. There are always more goals to achieve, more problems to face. There’s always room for improvement. We’re imperfect; it’s a defining aspect of the human condition.

So whether I improve myself a little, a lot, or not at all, it doesn’t matter, really. There is always room for the ever-elusive ‘better’. I will never be all that I can be.

But maybe I don’t have to be. What if I were to change the underlying motivation, to cure the poison at my roots, instead of feeding it? Rather than being driven by insecurity, what if I found… no, it can’t be… self-acceptance?

“Wait, self-acceptance? Shirley you’re joking?”

No, I’m not. And my name’s not Shirley.

I realised I need to accept myself. And, in my vote for 'Greatest Irony of the Year', I must admit that I find this rather difficult to… er… accept.

To me, self-acceptance is much more challenging than self-improvement. At least if I’m progressing towards something, I can see some momentum, some results—even if they don’t meaningfully impact how I feel in the long run. But God, self-acceptance? What even is that? Don’t even get me started on self-love. How do people just love themselves? The audacity. How dare they!

Accepting myself as I am feels like a loss. It feels like I’m giving up on improving, and saying to myself, “you’re perfect just the way you are.” I mean, hey, if you’ve got a nice voice, a lot of people will eat that message right up. Billy Joel certainly cashed in on it. Bruno Mars, too. But part of me thinks it’s utter bullshit.

Accepting myself feels like a loss. It feels like giving up.

My big, fat, ugly insecurity

If I’m brutally honest, here’s the big insecurity; the biggest weed that sprouted from the ‘I am not enough’ message: ‘I’m not attractive enough to find a romantic partner.’

I mean, yikes. Not a great belief for a person to have. Worse still, is that it echoed throughout my mind constantly for months on end, until eventually, it became indistinguishable from absolute, certain truth.

During my self-reflection I finally paused to unpack this belief, and understand that it was not based in reality. I’ve had girlfriends before, and I look basically the same, if only very slightly older. I actually dress better, and I’m more emotionally mature. And even if I’d never had a girlfriend, there could be plenty of reasons for that outside of attractiveness or personal insufficiency. (For example: how extroverted you are, or how often you meet new people.) Therefore, my insecurity about being ‘too unattractive’ for a partner simply wasn’t congruent with reality.

Which led to my next question: if this belief isn’t logically coherent, where did it come from? There must have been an emotional reason why I kept coming back to it; a purpose for its existence.

And there was. This belief served as an ‘explanation’ as to why I’m single; and rather than to realise that it takes a lot of patience and some good luck to find love, at some point, I began to believe that I have total control over my life, and therefore mysteriously find a romantic partner. I wanted a guarantee. Become big stronk hunky macho man, get gorl.

At some point, I began to believe that I have total control over my life.

If I just get the right skincare routine, and the perfect cologne, and great style… boom! Girlfriend. But it doesn’t work like that.

(It would be funny, though slightly terrifying, if it were that easy.)

Instead of realising that reality and circumstance don't bend to my will, I began to accuse myself of having some insufficiency, which was somehow to blame for me being single. I thought I wasn’t fit enough, or fashionable enough, or that I needed clearer skin, or I should wear a nicer aftershave… or whatever Bullshit Flavour of the Month I was feeding myself… and THAT was to blame for why I was alone. I would ping-pong from one insecurity to another. It drove me to misery.

In a Nutshell

Self-improvement is dangerous, because it perpetuates the idea that you aren’t enough. But "enough" does not exist, and you cannot ever entirely “fix” yourself. You will always be, by some standard, imperfect.

I know that all sounds trite and cliché, but somehow, it eluded me for a long time.

I thought I was single because I was smelly, unattractive, or just plain stupid. But this was an unhealthy coping mechanism, which deluded me into thinking I could control when a chance encounter would happen, like some puppet-master of life. If I just resolved my insufficiencies, the Universe would bestow upon me The Holy Right to Have a Girlfriend.

But I can't just "resolve my insufficiencies." It's an impossible goal, it's anti-human, and it won't magically force Life to just hand over whatever I want. I’m not in total control of the circumstances of my life. No one is. And we don’t have to be.

I’d like to think that there is a solution to much of our spiritual suffering. Perhaps it’s acceptance. Or perhaps we need to search within and understand what our deepest beliefs are, and fix them at a root level. But much like your average self-help guru, I’m probably grossly oversimplifying things, and making leaps of logic towards shiny happy conclusions that don’t always work in the real world. You’ll have to accept that I just don’t have the answer for you, and you might just have to do your own digging.

Or maybe I'm missing the point entirely, and suffering is just part of Life's Bag.

Either way, I just wanted to share this because I know that self-improvement can become a crutch. It’s a safe way to justify how you’re spending your time, to present yourself as a Human Doing, instead of a Human Being.

But life doesn’t have to centre around productivity, or the compulsion to constantly self-actualise.

The self-help industry has borrowed its model from advertising, which offers a century-long masterclass in predatory behaviour. Self-help largely preys on our deepest insecurities, like my insecurity about being too unattractive to deserve love. It’s caused me to chase my tail for years, bouncing from one source of life advice to another, and I’m just exhausted.

It’s time to stop and sit with my reality. It's time I learn to accept myself.

Wish me luck. It's a long road ahead.