Improving Ourselves to Death
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
The problem isn't self-improvement. The problem is typically you get deluded about your own magnificence, and you refuse to pop this delusion.
Rip the band-aid off, once and for all. Here and now.
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'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.
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.
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.
Again, rip the band-aid off. Right here and now. If you do it slowly like most people do, you'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.
What helped for me (though I'm not sure how realistic I currently am - but surely more than before) is not to realise how amazing the people around me are, but how ordinary the people I look up to are - specifically, not locally.
For example, I'd like to be a good programmer. There are a few "big names" online that people listen to; that I listen to. At a certain point, you realise they too make mistakes, they too don't know things that you do, and they have sacrificed some things to get where they are that I am simply not willing to sacrifice - but if I were, I might make it to the same place. But I'm not, and that's fine - now I know what I get back for not being where they are.
This sentiment has very little actual substance to it. I'm dissatisfied because I want to do something meaningful. I want to leave behind tools that will better my species. I don't want my legacy to be solving a few bugs in obscure proprietary software. Why would I want to emulate people who are satisfied with a meaningless existence? I would much rather rage against the dying of the light.
> 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.
In a very literal sense, we trade life force for money. Money is life force. Telling people to work for free is doing them a disservice.
What exactly are you saying? Rip off the band-aid of ambition and stop trying?
That's something 1 in 10000 or even less do. Why it would be you (or me for that matter)?
>What exactly are you saying? Rip off the band-aid of ambition and stop trying?
If you're not getting results, and spend year after year on "self improvement" skills to get to be Musk or whatever, why not? Enjoy life, nobody signed any contract with the universe that they'll be the "inventor" and "great artist" and so on.
What are you saying, the rest several billions that will not "leave behind tools that will better their species" are useless waste of potential, or just normal people living their lives, and it's the idea of this unlimited potential that is a dangerous and damaging americanism peddled by snake-oil self-help gurus?
(Heck, if the regular life of the species is meaningless in itself, then inventing tools to improve it, wont add meaning to it, just some conveniences).
> That's something 1 in 10000 or even less do. Why it would be you (or me for that matter)?
One: because you think it will be you. 1 in N people do something meaningful. 1 in M people who think they will do something meaningful, end up doing so. M < N.
Anecdotal, of course, but so is everyone else here, so I'm not going to bother with proof. If you want to see what I mean, take a cue from what is presented as such sage advice upstream: look around you. Not many people are ambitious on a grand scale.
Two: out of the people who did something meaningful, few of them were helped by a "can't do" attitude. Even if not grounded in reality at all, you still need to have amibition, for that rare case where you do end up being the 1 in a million that does something meaningful.
Personally, I'm not a fan of this nihilist attitude so pervasive in cynical ex-geniuses. I encounter it a lot among formerly precocious children in compsci. It's negative, demotivating, and I regret ever taking this seriously.
So let me go on record to anyone who feels OP was talking you: the mere act of yearning to have a lasting effect on the world and on humanity makes you special. Forget the naysayers and the cynics. Leave the bitter undisciplined geniuses to their sour grapes. Go into the world and do what you can.
We need all the help we can get!
>Two: out of the people who did something meaningful, few of them were helped by a "can't do" attitude. Even if not grounded in reality at all, you still need to have amibition, for that rare case where you do end up being the 1 in a million that does something meaningful.
Who says living your life, with its common challenges, etc, is NOT meaningful?
And that meaningful/happiness/success require some "superhuman" feats, millions in the bank, or whatever?
>Not many people are ambitious on a grand scale.
So? If I could change people's attributes on a grand scale, ambitious is not what I'd made them. More compassionate, more altruistic, more vigilant against BS, less polluting, more skeptical, etc -- there are tons of things I'd rather people be more than "ambitious".
If anything I'd say ambition is a surefire way to make people uglier, greedier, less tolerant and caring, more "me me me" (which in turn, hurts them too, because others are more "me me me" as well), less present for their family and friends, and ultimately (since only "1 in M people" end up really doing something meaningful), ambition makes them bitter, unhappy, depressed, and so on.
In fact the perfect recipe for the kind of self-absorbed and unhappy society we have now.
In the words of Radiohead:
Ambition makes you look pretty ugly
Kicking, squealing Gucci little piggyOn top of that, many of those we consider great did so in retrospect or late in life. I say, follow their example and enjoy the journey. Maybe you'll find that after you die you managed to do something important. Maybe not, but you'll have died doing something that's meaningful to you.
> and it's the idea of this unlimited potential that is a dangerous and damaging americanism peddled by snake-oil self-help gurus?
Whoa, whoa, whoa! You're down-playing one of our main exports there, buddy!
I will say, there is some wisdom in some of the those "self-help" ideas. They just beat you over the head with the same wisdom until you can't take it anymore and submit to their will.
a cowardly way to live with no ambition
If you don't accept this is what you are, then the day that reality spits in your face the truth that you are stumbling amateur who has been totally confused about the right thing to do, you will be crushed.
If you accept this is what you are, then the day that reality spits in your face the truth that you are a stumbling amateur who has been totally confused about the right thing to do, you will laugh and make the proper adjustments.
Few people actually help humanity forward in any significant way and thus you are likely setting yourself up for disappointment. I'd even argue that setting more realistic goals makes you more happy and this simple fact increases your odds of helping humanity significantly forward. Think about it, when is your energy level highest? When do you wake up with that sense of wonder and awe and motivation? What are you telling yourself every day, is it truly constructive or just demotivating?
I will be happy when I can choose to work on what I want to work on, rather than what society tells me I need to work on in order to be able to continue feeding and sheltering myself.
In a sense, financial independence is what I seek, because only financial independence will allow me to put 100% of my energy into improving my community via endeavors that otherwise would not pay a dime.
What then?
You'd spend all your life miserable because of it?
You won't divert the "self-improvement schemes/self-pity" effort towards whatever percentage you are left with for improving your community (even if it's like 20%)?
Isn't this whole thing really about managing your own emotions? I'm reminded of Carnegie's "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living", and the underlying theme that whatever you want to do, worrying more than necessary to inform your actions is definitely not helping your chances of success.
Few people do, but also few people even try. Do we have any estimate of the ratio between those two groups?
I'm strongly with 'jniedrauer here. I feel the same dissatisfaction. There are well-known open problems the world has at all levels, large and small. I would like to spend time working on those in a meaningful manner. I hate the standard life advice of "work your job, marry, have kids, enjoy yourself". It does not resonate with me, and never did.
> I'd even argue that setting more realistic goals makes you more happy and this simple fact increases your odds of helping humanity significantly forward.
That's a fair point, and I find even Tomminn's words about "not being a special person" right. Something I've been coming to grips with. Being the person that makes a direct, huge and positive impact on the world is mostly a matter of luck. But setting smaller goals should still allow to contribute with effort instead of just luck, and maybe even "create" some of that luck.
> Think about it, when is your energy level highest? When do you wake up with that sense of wonder and awe and motivation?
Not OP, but for myself - it's when I dream of Star Trek-level world. A world of honest & good-faith cooperation, of mastery of the environment through science and technology, a world that expanded to space. Correspondingly, my energy levels are the lowest whenever I have to grind out code for another CRUD app that exists mostly in a large-scale gambling that is startup industry, and that does not address any problem standing between us and the dream utopia.
> I guess the question is: When will you be truly happy? Will you be happy when you have helped humanity forward in any significant way? Or, will you be happy when you have good relations with the people around you and a generally fun existence?
That's a good question, but I think that it's not either-or. Seeing that you helped make a world even a tiny bit better is a long-term satisfaction thing. "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die" is fun in the moment, and definitely makes going through life much more pleasant. But - at least for me - it also seems incredibly empty.
Isn't the goal of making the world a tiny bit better about having more of the world be able to "eat, drink, and be merry"?
When I say "it feels empty", I say that about my own feelings, and in the context of current world state. But I recognize that the ultimate goal is for more and more people to be able to just enjoy life.
Given a hypothetical button which could perfectly simulate the chemical conditions of self-actualization, do you think everyone would be content to use it every day and do nothing else for the rest of their lives?
No, I was making a general statement that is tautological, and thus applies irrespective of any person.
>Given a hypothetical button which could perfectly simulate the chemical conditions of self-actualization, do you think everyone would be content to use it every day and do nothing else for the rest of their lives?
That would just mean that self-actualization for them involves struggle, and they don't want it in ready made form. But they still want their self-actualization (just not a pre-packaged medically induced one).
I already mentioned that for some self-actualization can even include being executed for a great cause -- you think those types would be the ones to content with medically-induced feelings of self-actualization?
Tons of people that are ridiculously successful and achieved a lot on the outside are deeply dissatisfied inside, and so far I haven't heard about a single case where this can be really fixed and they can just sit back and enjoy the life (for more than a passing moment). I would feel bad about those unfortunate souls with this constant drive, but that would require ignoring much worse things in this world.
So thank you all of you crazy overachievers. And go take a break and enjoy the sun and the breeze for a moment.
Life is way too short to actualize all the improvements you can learn, the speed disparity between learning and executing can be just downright atrocious.
Unpaid work is not ok for a vast majority of humanity, lest we forget that what still kill most of us is not disillusion pain but the lack of basic needs, and that kind of stuff kills you way faster, yes money robs most of us of life, and most of us simply do not have the time or mental space to ever come close to realize it, since we're either strangled by basic needs or entangled in a web of distraction/disinformation.
While information has been made widely available to almost half of humanity, the power to act on most said information is still in the hands of a pretty darn small minority.
Sorry for the rant :E
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 'perfect'. 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.
Some of them fought to prevent us to have what we have today. Many fought for bad causes, many fought essentially for nothing or because things were shit for no gain. There were two sides to every war. Many fought over which autoritarian will controll that village.
There is not reason to struggle unless you really struggle, through learning is good.
Related point is that it matters what one works hard towards and why, not just that one do.
"Millions have died in wars for us to have what we have today"
is problematic. I think a lot of the replies interpret it as a case of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc
Even if that's not what you are thinking: sure, people die fighting for particular causes, but people also die fighting to oppose those causes. The history of war doesn't confer any intrinsic moral value on fighting. What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is–ought_problem
"There has been a ton of conflict and struggle for our species"
This is more ambiguous. What does the "for" mean? Could it be replaced with "in"? (i.e. it has just been endured) Or do you mean that the conflict and struggle has all been directed towards the furtherance of the species? (e.g. "it's been a tough two millennia for our species")
This is not simple stuff from a philosophical perspective.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/meditation-modern-li...
I don't think it's a good idea to take Psychology Today or any other pop psychology writing too seriously. Science doesn't have the answers yet in this area.
a) There has been a lot of progress over the millennia (in many ways, from higher life expectancy to less violence)
b) Many people have sacrificed a lot to bring that progress about
c) We ought to be grateful and c2) struggle on.
I think a), b), and c) are uncontroversial, c2) needs to be argued for.
What we have is going to vary from person to person. I have no thanks to all those people for giving me a life filled with discontent and conflict.
This is no way to live. I don't have any idea how to solve this problem but I would be glad to see a discussion.
As an aside, I think one of the points of that article was the the parents were inflating a bunch of achievements.
No doubt the effort to solve problems and improve one's self and circumstances have been powerful forces behind progress. But arguably, a focus on optimization and perfection can be forces that prevent the kind of progress you praise.
Similarly, I feel comfortable treating a drive towards improvement the same I do a drive towards perfection, since without an end goal (perfection), you can't have improvement, since you cannot say if what you're doing is bringing you closer or farther from 'good'.
I do agree with you though that an individual can focus on hyper optimizing their personal life to the point where it is not good from a societal perspective; however, that's is not what I gathered the article was arguing ("Enough of our mania to be the best and the most, he says. It’s time to content ourselves with being average.")
Optimiziation may be a subset of problem solving, but surely you'd agree that a problem can be solved even without the situation being brought to optimality?
It's easy to find examples of both: some great historical figures had rigorous programs of conscious self-improvement; others became great by immediately engaging with some problem entirely outside themselves and if any self-improvement resulted, it wasn't a primary or conscious goal.
That's the wrong question. That depends entirely on who you ask about yourself, and whether you believe their answers. The right question is "when should you feel good about yourself?" and the answer to that is "when you have your life put together and are moving towards meaningful goals and keeping chaos under control".
That's a big assumption with no evidence to support it. Depending on who you ask, people might say that the global optimum is Jesus, or Buddha, or Superman. People can instinctively think about the people they admire, abstract out the things these admirable people have in common, and strive towards (and worship) that ideal.
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
Living this way takes determination, persistence, and hard work. We need to know when to rest and recharge because fatigue makes us ineffective and error-prone. For me, that includes both rest and exercise.
I find it helpful to discuss my plans with those I trust to refine the plans and projects I undertake. It is too easy to be overly ambitious/optimistic and start more projects than I can finish. Good counsel helps us to evaluate what we do and focus on what best supports our long term goals.
We all make mistakes. I find it better to learn from them and try not to repeat them rather than engaging in self-pity or trying to cast myself as a "victim." Sometimes life is just hard and we need to be thankful for and encouraged by the "wins" we get. Living that way is far more pleasant than being constantly negative and critical of ourselves and others.
I'd venture to say more human progress is attributed to warfare than anything else.
I find the concept of anomie useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie
We aren't making the world or ourselves better by striving towards intense and unrealistically optimistic goals all the time. Our unbound desire to maximize growth is psychotic, and after all we're very much on track to destroy the biosphere if we keep behaving the way we are. Probably past the point of turning back, in fact.
What's the point of all our progress if we end up making ourselves miserable and eventually eradicating ourselves?
1: That our goals are unrealistic and therefore lead to less 'good' (in the utilitarian sense)
2: Progress without happiness isn't 'good', since we all will die
To the first point, part of striving for perfection is realizing that we are biological creatures, not robots. To be the perfect version of ourselves is to accept that we cannot stay awake in a lab forever, that we need to eat, sleep, and enjoy ourselves in order to be the most productive version of ourselves. Death camp laborers are noticeably less productive than free laborers.
To the second point, I'd ask "What's the point of happiness if we will all eventually be eradicated, regardless?). Humanity, in our current state, cannot last forever. Whether we die from global warming as you presume, nuclear armageddon as others do, or the heat death of the universe, we will all eventually die so long as we are stuck in this universe, and at the point that we all die and all encoded information is lost, it doesn't matter if we were happy or sad.
I feel like our best and only bet at living past the universe is to be as productive as possible, create as much technical knowledge as possible, and see if we can eventually live past what seems to be certain extinction, and to do that requires striving for perfection.
I don't think that progress is meaningless because we all die. I don't think it's necessarily a bad or unhappy thing that everything will eventually end. What I'm specifically saying here is that our unrealistic goals are themselves the cause of our extremely likely and credible demise in the near future. We are doing immediate damage, and it is not some hypothetical or philosophical curiosity. It's extremely dire.
It's virtually certain we won't live past the heat death of the universe. I don't think that's a concept even worth humoring. Nuclear armageddon, for what it is worth, was always an exaggerated risk. It would have perhaps ended western civilization, but even at the height of proliferation it was far from being able to knock out our biosphere. Which is somewhat controversial, I think most people still buy into that myth.
Climate change, though, is horrendously close to being the final word on whether all our aspirations were worthwhile or whether human industrialization was the most evil mistake to ever happen in the history of life on Earth. It's very likely that the next few decades to a century will make all the crazy people advocating for mass suicide or Luddism or other extreme measures seem like they were onto something. Nobody likes to even hypothetically consider it, but if we're intellectually honest with ourselves there exists out there a gruesome threshold--a point beyond which it would have been better to trade back every bit of our progress to remain hunter-gatherers without civilization or technology.
To think that the way around this is to be maximally productive or develop ever more powerful technologies isn't at all rational. Those elements of our nature are themselves the sole cause of this crisis in the first place. Climate change isn't some vague possibility; it has already started and caused enormous damage. 60% of all animals since the 1970s are dead. The oceans are acidic wastelands and are rapidly worsening. Almost zero reefs left. We're on the verge of runaway greenhouse gas accumulation, and we're utterly ruined if the methane clathrates go off. Make no mistake--this is a great filter. It's not coming. It is already here.
We block it out in order to survive in the short term. Nobody likes to take all this gloom and doom seriously. It's unproductive. But this is precisely where all our productivity has gotten us. It has all been in error; there's a fundamental flaw in our psychology. Even our mundane daily lives are extraordinary damaging, not only to ourselves but to all life. We owe it to ourselves to admit it if our own existence has proven to be evil. There was once a time we should have admitted that it was an option to stop all this, to turn back--but we won't do that. And it's likely too late anyway.
So yes, it was two different points. Our obsession with self-improvement and growth is personally damaging, but it's also damaging us all as a whole. It has damaged everything in a profound way. Our whole paradigm is likely flawed. We hope that we will figure it out, improve, and overcome--but that very hope might be a driving force in perpetuating our industry which has only pushed us to the verge of extinction.
Sorry for the big depressing tirade. I swear I'm not Ted Kaczynski, I just want to face this issue without deceiving myself or irrationally believing that positivity will fix everything. I know that soldiering on can overcome some problems, but I want to acknowledge that there are circumstances where that will never work. Where our human drive to normalize and persist through adversity are a death sentence instead of an advantage.
On a more serious note, I agree most with your point around digging oneself out of complacency and moving towards a better future — if not for you, for someone else.
If enjoying life is the popular thing to do, the well connected, high IQ and high-grit people will succeed even more dramatically, assuming that such people are often less affected by cultural norms than the modal person.
If your talking about the 1%, this may be true, I don't know.
But there are hundreds of millions of people in the middle/upper middle class brackets who I would argue are successful due to their hard work.
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?
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.
Wouldn't you say that all of those improvements have partially led to the predicament we're in today? An unsustainable drain on the planet's resources and unchecked climate change?
Sure we got better at making iPhones but that meant we had to get better at strip mining, shipping things around the world on freighters, and driving to the mall, too.
>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
I'm sure consumerism has a role in this but I'd guess that increasing childhood obesity and decreasing levels of testosterone in men are a more obvious reason for these.
a) no real counterclaim had been made yet, and b) I was only 1/4 of the way through this article
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.
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.
Like a novel, the reading of an article is meant to be an experience. It follows the "show, don't tell" dictum pretty well. The critique of perfectionism hits at you viscerally, instead of being an academic argument. That good writing necessarily requires a more productive use of audience's time (or follows some economics of the form of insights communicated/time spent), is the optimizing/perfectionist thinking that Ms. Schwartz has taken aim at in her content. So the form follows content in a way. The writer feels that in today's self-improvement culture, we do not appreciate something for its own sake. For example, when we read, we think of "what is it saying? Why does it not say it quickly?", rather than imagining possibilities, chewing on the words of a sentence, or relish the turn of phrases, or appreciating the metaphors employed to communicate a feeling.
You do seem to be right in suspecting that you are wrong about the article. Her concluding paragraph, for example, states that the one should be able to enjoy experiences for their sake alone, rather than the sake of self-improvement. "Things don’t need to be of concrete use in order to have value." This is contrary to the assumptions shared by the two self-help books you allude to: The Shallows and Deep Work. These argue for disconneting FOR the sake of having some value in the dimension of self improvement: for being able to improve the quality of your work (Deep Work), or increasing reading comprehension, e.g. (The Shallows).
I have 50 years at best left to live. This isn't competing with self help. This is competing with the best books of all time so it had better be good.
There are some rare exceptions when I actually finish the article, but it's rare.
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.
[0] https://poetrydispatch.wordpress.com/2009/01/16/lydia-davis-...
I'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
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.
You may think that about the books you read, but that's not true about a genre in general. It's useful to discriminate sources and figure out whether the author has particular credibility in what she is talking about.
>This self help obsession especially among urban professionals is pretty amusing
I think it's pretty telling that you think it's funny that people are spending time thinking about how to make their lives better. What would be a better use of time? Americans in particular used to habitually think about how to change their habits for the better when they went to church every week. Now that people don't do that anymore, something else fills that need. If you're reading material written by someone who actually knows what they are talking about (e.g. a doctor or respected psychologist) that is arguably analogous to and better than attending church weekly.
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've ever heard.