Improving Ourselves to Death

Improving yourself is only painful if you lack humility. If you have an honest and realistic idea of how ordinary you currently are, and honest and realistic idea of what you can actually achieve in 5 years, then the gradual self-improvement process is pretty damn satisfying.<p>The problem isn&#x27;t self-improvement. The problem is typically you get deluded about your own magnificence, and you refuse to pop this delusion.<p>Rip the band-aid off, once and for all. Here and now.<p>Recognize you are not the special person you thought you were. Really see how incredible all the people around you are. And I mean locally. I don&#x27;t mean people on the internet. I just mean the ordinary people around you scratching themselves out lives that seem to satisfy them. Become one of them.<p>If you have it, keep all the ambition you have. But become satisfied with the process of becoming what you want to be. Find someone, or something to pay you to become who you want to be. This will not be easy, and the work will not be easy, but the pain will be growing pain, and not decaying pain. Decaying pain is what kills you.<p>Most of the work will be unpaid, this is okay. A happy little flow of money is enough, because some money is really damn useful. Some food, some shelter, some freedom. But there is much less in life that money will buy you than people think there is. And there is much more in life that money robs you of than people realize.<p>Again, rip the band-aid off. Right here and now. If you do it slowly like most people do, you&#x27;ll mistake the slow process of becoming wise to your own ordinariness for decay. Rip it off, and then you can improve yourself without pain.

While I agree that we (where we is a reader of the NYT or other western individuals) focus on hyper optimizing our life towards a perfect, unachievable goal, I am not at all comfortable with the authors assumption that it is inherently bad to do so, and that we should instead be happy with a life of mediocrity.<p>Every single time humanity visibly progresses, it is because one person (or many) found a problem with themselves or the state they were living in and attempted to remove the problem in hopes of having themselves or their environment become more &#x27;perfect&#x27;. If people today decide to stop progressing towards perfection and just be happy with what they have, then there will still be large swaths of people living in extreme poverty, dying from preventable diseases, and suffering from human rights abuses. I really do believe that it is imperative from a humanitarian perspective that while we still have problems in the world, we strive to do everything we can to fix them—and that not doing so is horribly selfish.

Much of post-industrial Protestantism and the &#x27;American Dream&#x27; is predicted on the belief that individuals can redeem themselves through &#x27;grit&#x27;, determination, and &#x27;rising above&#x27; adversity. But an increasingly technological and winner-take-all economy makes biological and economic factors possibly more important than willpower alone. As it turns out, successful people are not successful because they worked really hard (although many successful people work hard), read a self-help book book of vapid affirmations, or have a lot of willpower--but maybe due to having an high IQ, or having a lot of family connections and wealth, or just plain stupid luck. Maybe instead of trying to optimize our lives, we should try to just enjoy it.

If we were not to improve ourselves then it would be problematic for humanity as a whole. Think of the health professionals (such as nurses, doctors and psychiatrists) who, if had not put in their time and effort would not have helped countless people. Or what about Edison, Newton, Einstein, Stephen Hawking each of whom spent countless hours improving their knowledge to better humanity.<p>On the other hand, you have multi-millionaires who have hustled their way to the top but are miserable and jaded after improving themselves so much that they neglected friends and family. Is it worth it then to pursue of a life of improvement?<p>Ultimately, the decision to go down the path of improvement and subsequently sacrifice is up to the person. But beware, this rat-race can never be won.

Correct me if I&#x27;m off-base but it really feels like this article can be summarized with &quot;self-improvement has its place just as recreation does, just don&#x27;t overdo it.&quot; I suppose I&#x27;m just not sure what the author is arguing, just that the self-help obsession is just real super bad. For me, my attempts at self-improvement, which are admittedly many and varied and probably too frequent, aren&#x27;t merely chasing solutions but venturing into others&#x27; experiences and picking and choosing which parts of their shoes I want after I&#x27;ve walked a mile in them.<p>&gt;He cites surveys that show that adolescent girls are increasingly unhappy with their bodies, and that a growing number of men are suffering from muscle dysmorphia<p>I&#x27;m sure consumerism has a role in this but I&#x27;d guess that increasing childhood obesity and decreasing levels of testosterone in men are a more obvious reason for these.

Ironically I think Ms. Schwartz could stand to improve her writing, and be more productive with her audience&#x27;s time. I gave up 7 long paragraphs in, after realizing that:<p>a) no real counterclaim had been made yet, and b) I was only 1&#x2F;4 of the way through this article<p>Her concluding paragraph is that you should do non-productive tasks sometimes, disconnect, and enjoy yourself. The great irony in this is that I recall being given the same advice in the last couple of self help books I read, Deep Work and The Shallows.<p>This article seems to be a mountain of words to broad brush a genre, but then I could be wrong, as I only read a quarter of it.

Yamraj in the Mahabharata asked Yudhister at the river, what is the greatest truth in life? Yudhister replied, the greatest truth in this life is, despite one having to die, man lives like he is going to live forever.

I&#x27;ll take any chance I can get to up this Lydia Davis short story, called &quot;new year&#x27;s resolution&quot;[0]:<p>I ask my friend Bob what his New Year’s Resolutions are and he says, with a shrug (indicating that this is obvious or not surprising ): to drink less, to lose weight… He asks me the same, but I am not ready to answer him yet. I have been studying my Zen again, in a mild way, out of desperation over the holidays, though mild desperation. A medal or a rotten tomato, it’s all the same, says the book I have been reading. After a few days of consideration, I think the most truthful answer to my friend Bob would be: My New Year’s Resolution is to learn to see myself as nothing. Is this com¬petitive? He wants to lose some weight, I want to learn to see myself as nothing. Of course, to be competitive is not in keeping with any Buddhist philosophy. A true nothing is not competitive. But I don’t think I’m being competitive when I say it. I am feeling truly humble, at that moment. Or I think I am—in fact, can anyone be truly humble at the moment they say they want to learn to be nothing? But there is another problem, which I have been wanting to describe to Bob for a few weeks now: at last, halfway through your life, you are smart enough to see that it all amounts to nothing, even success amounts to nothing. But how does a person learn to see herself as nothing when she has already had so much trouble learning to see herself as, something in the first place? It’s so confusing. You spend the first half of your life learning that you are something after all, now you have to spend the second half learning to see yourself as nothing. You have been a negative nothing, now you want to be a positive nothing. I have begun trying, in these first days of the New Year, bur so far it’s pretty difficult. I’m pretty close to nothing all morning, but by late afternoon what is in me that is something starts throwing its weight around. This happens many days. By evening, I’m full of something and it’s often something nasty and pushy. So what I think at this point is that I’m aiming too high, that maybe nothing is too much, to begin with. Maybe for now I should just try, each day, to be a little less than I usually am.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;poetrydispatch.wordpress.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;01&#x2F;16&#x2F;lydia-davis-new-years-resolution&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;poetrydispatch.wordpress.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;01&#x2F;16&#x2F;lydia-davis-...</a>

life a lot more fun if your improving at what your doing. if your playing golf and over the course of the year you improve and hit the ball farther and more accurately - or you life weights and you get stronger, or your coding stuff and you can do it faster, whatever it may be. I think there is a way to approach improvement, perhaps with the mindset of detached perseverance which will not only allow you to improve, but will allow you to do so without too much mental torture and will make the whole process pleasant.

I was goal-driven and discontent until the pressures of new fatherhood forced me to pause. After a few years when the kids got a little bit easier and I had no real active goals to work towards I felt content (and even happy) for the first time since I became an adult.<p>I&#x27;m never going back to goal-setting. Looking back at it now I see my goals as fantasies, and my efforts to make them real actively prevented me from engaging with my actual life

I was taking the article seriously until I realized the whole thing is just an affiliate link piece stuffing as many books in there as possible.

People tend to ignore the law of diminishing returns, and I think in this context it&#x27;s largely due to a fear of depression resulting from having the bandwidth to reflect on reality.

Yeah I realized self help books and audio books are a waste of time and money. You get the gist from the back cover. I believe in improving myself, sure, but my approach is much simpler - just deliberate practice and being a well rounded person. Being humble and realistic helps too - I’m probably not going to be super rich, wealthy, or famous but my current life is far from bad.<p>This self help obsession especially among urban professionals is pretty amusing. A lot of people who only read the latest self help books and listen to the same podcasts at 2x speed but don’t actually do much.

Discussed at the time: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16119143" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16119143</a>.

Not improving ourselves to death is another option. The consistent part is death.

What&#x27;s interesting to me is that I read the title as &quot;Improving ourselves UNTIL death&quot; - meaning improvement should be a life-long endeavor. I agree with that read.

The article actually argues against self-improvement.<p>There are issues with trying excessively too hard or sacrificing too much to reach certain goals, there are issues with trying the wrong way or towards the wrong goals, but arguing we should take a casual and passive stance towards fixing our problems and just let them be is really the most counter-productive, lazy piece of advice I&#x27;ve ever heard.

There is an exhibition in Frye Art Museum in Seattle that somehow aligns with the article. Worth checking out if you are in the area.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fryemuseum.org&#x2F;exhibition&#x2F;6863&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fryemuseum.org&#x2F;exhibition&#x2F;6863&#x2F;</a>

Tangential aside, but I have to admit that &quot;You Do You: How to Be Who You Are and Use What You’ve Got to Get What You Want&quot; is a perversely brilliant title: 20 single-syllable words strung up into a staccato yet cohesive whole.

Yes we are Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement in age of aspirational narcissism.

(January 2018)