Self-improvement is embracing your messy, imperfect life
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
What I've learned about procrastination and escapism is that a lot of it is driven by neurotic feedback loops involving some meta-narrative I have about myself. But narratives are not reality, and while I'm busy overthinking those things I'm no use to myself or anyone else. Some of these tendencies are hard-wired in me, but by recognizing the pattern I can nudge myself back towards the present moment in which I am not perfect, but occasionally do good things.
You only get so much time. Inertia from decision paralysis grows exponentially the longer it goes on. But you get a lot of time. The brain struggles to grasp it. If you're 55, you could have as many years left as I've had in total, and I figured out in my 30s what most people only figure out on their deathbed.
The best time to make a call is now. My call was to focus on music around 2017, and the last 5 years have seen more progress than the 15 before it. I was doing CI/CD on my life without even realizing it with similar results. As with software development, there are mistakes, but I'm practiced at and confident with fixing them and getting on with it.
I was responding to a sub-thread but it got deleted before I could finish. This is what I think about this:
Someone said: >> it could be hurtful to people to attempt to archive by getting sucked into cycles of attempting to break a neurological predisposition
That's rather well put.
From the outside, some people are an abyss, permanently dominated by this type of cyclical thinking, in which getting out of the abyss creates new and interesting forms of drama. And the attraction of that gravity well to newbs who haven't e.g. been long-term alcoholics or locked up for suicidal tendencies, is precisely the fact that it gives one a temporary satisfaction (even worse, maybe, a way of lording it over others) of having addressed a particular neurotic trait, while substituting a load of other negative traits in exchange.
Nothing good ever comes out of the speech where one has repressed a particular neurosis by coming to terms with it in some crystalline fashion. It's a speech either designed to scam others, or to scam oneself.
Personally, I got married and had kids. It's great. Has been for over a decade.
Never needed any far-flung travel plans or ayahuasca or Eastern religious philosophy.
I’m not sure I get you. There are certainly ingenious speeches but there are genuine ones, too (probably not speeches but genuine acceptance). See “Radical Acceptu” by Tara Brach.
If you feel that's empowering losers or whatever, feel free to continue your judgement of them. I am not here to tell anyone what will work for them, we're all individuals so YMMV.
The times when I experienced the most drastically successful change when I realized that there really is nothing stopping me from entirely changing my identity and self if I so desired.
Obviously, this only works for things actually intrinsic (you cannot hit your target weight over night, but you very much can be a person who cares about their body starting right now and never go back) but holy shit, if you actually believe in your ability to do this, it is god damn effective.
Again there are shitty strategies for this (extrinsic goals, perfectionism, diet books, goals without systems) and it requires a healthy foundation of internal self-confidence that might take half a lifetime to build, but I still don't see the kind of defeatist attitude of the article helping anyone.
However, how can we be sure that a person can actually change even some parts of ones identity?
It seems to me that most people assume that our brains can be molded at will, simply by repeating some intended behavior. I'm not saying that this is impossible, but I highly doubt the extents to which this works.
There are so many variables at play, that it is unlikely for any mechanism to simply pick up the "good parts". At most, I would assume that we can learn things cognitively, and some muscular patterns.
Being able to change wants and desires at will however seems almost unattainable.
Doesn't keep me from experimenting with it, though :) And I'd love to hear others opinions on this!
Operant conditioning makes this very attainable. Depending on how long you've had these exact wants and desires, how much you've thought of them, and what exact conditioning program you design, you may even get results in a matter of hours (unlikely though without spending a ton of time on it, it usually takes me at least a week). Keep up (and space out) conditioning and you eventually won't need it.
Initially you probably won't go from "I always would/wouldn't want to do this" to "I always wouldn't/would want to do this" - typically, you'll have super short periods where you have your old want/desire, and then you rapidly switch to your new want/desire. But it doesn't feel disingenuous or anything - it's a natural switch due to the conditioning. Over time the period with your old feelings shrinks. Combine that time with varying conditioning (maybe a different-feeling conditioning program, or even something random that happens in your life and conditions you), and you may be able to entirely eliminate those short periods.
Here's an intro: https://www.verywellmind.com/operant-conditioning-a2-2794863
> Being able to change wants and desires at will however seems almost unattainable.
I don't think you need to change them. If I'm addicted to video games and wasting my life my root want and desire usually isn't "I want to play more games". It's "I want to feel I'm good at something" or "I don't want to think about myself as a failure anymore" or "I don't want to think about my life falling apart". These are all good things. You don't need to change the desires, just the way in which you achieve them.
The desire will rise and fall away as you focus on it. Your mind will move on to other things.
You may come back to the same desire in an hour or the next day, but my point is that you can see this desire leave you as you focus on it.
You can’t get rid of desire permanently, but you can recognize that you are not the one in control of your desires. They rise and fall on their own. This is liberating because, with practice, you can lose attachment to these desires when you feel them.
This is one of the goals of certain types of meditation.
You ask how you can be sure that a person can change their identity? Your question already presents a mechanism that naturally doesn't work. What is implicit in what you're saying is that changing somehow involves taking something out and putting something completely different in. As in taking out one set of desires and replacing them with some other desires. That is certainly not what happens.
To change some of your desires is to understand them and understand how they arise. That's very related to how you talk to yourself and what expressions you use and where they implicitly lead you. That is the way you speak imposes a certain view of the world, what it consists of and what is possible within it. (That's not to say that you would suddenly be able to fly but there is a whole human domain that you might start discovering from the inside as a human being rather than looking at yourself from the outside as a collection of organs).
Knowing about your short comings is the key. Knowing you are lazy will help you be more productive. Knowing you’re depressed will help you break the cycle.
People typically say they wasted certain years of their lives. I would also say the same thing. I was stuck in terrible loops of internet addiction and playing too many video games while doing the bare minimum at work.
These cycles didn’t break themselves because I embraced my mess. They broke because I became aware of them in comparison to my larger life goals of getting married, having kids, getting a prestigious tech job, and retiring early.
Many of those behaviors still cast shadows of my life many years later. But the secret to it all is that I can become aware of them when they happen and disrupt my pattern to put me back on track towards my life goals. That way I’m not a total waste man most days, and do something worthwhile instead.
As the article tried to explain, this is about making peace with ourselves and handle feelings of self-rejection, guilt, shame and so no.
Then the healing begins.
You can't fix what you don't know. Once you find out what's holding you back, you can put a plan in place to address it. This is a slow , iterative process - but it works.
Shameless plug, but this is my free program to cultivate regular reflection: https://themoai.org/intentionality
One of the main points I took from it is that a failure to acknowledge your limits can actually undermine what you’re trying to achieve. For example, deferring the things that truly matter to you (personal projects, time with family) until you’ve got a hold of your endless todo list will lead to a life perpetually yearning for a fantasy future where everything is somehow under control.
Similarly (my example), fixate on finding a romantic partner to the point where you make yourself miserable until you succeed and you may find your despair makes it harder to connect with new people.
The key message for me is that this day today is your life. Work hard towards your goals but remember to enjoy that journey.
I read a similar line during the first lockdown. It was some random comment on reddit but it made a strong impression on me.
"This is also life". Perhaps it's not the ideal version of it, but you can't just sit there and wait for the planets to align. I ended up having many good moments in 2020 and 2021. I didn't get to do what I planned, but it was just as well.
Milan Kundera had something similar to say about this in his novel "Immortality" (1990). There's a difference between a road (used to go from point A to point B, e.g. a highway) and a path (inviting to self-reflection, philosophy, and mindfulness). Most people live their lives going from point A to point B to point C, etc. Spoiler alert: don't think you're immortal. Be mindful. Enjoy the path.
It’s easy to get into a cycle of constantly pushing things off in the hopes of a future where everything is fixed.
If you take time to take care of yourself now, you’ll be much more efficient in the long run.
In my own life, I’ve had to accept there are things I can’t control and I have very real limits on what I can do. I want to be better than I am now, but the pace will always be slower than I want. If I remember where I was before, and see where I am now, I know change and progress looks different up close and it does in hindsight.
Nah. The author clearly thinks everyone lives a shitty life where he/she is being looked down on all the time. Life doesn't work that way, we aren't living in the 16th century anymore.
You pick your place in this world or someone will do it for you. Accepting your flaws is good, but you also have to accept your virtues. If you aren't aware of them, then how will other people be?
I realize that this article is written for people in first and second world countries. But for someone who lives in a third world country, "the struggles" mentioned here will be either laughable, or downright discriminatory.
Quotes:
“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”
Paradoxically, accepting that you’re just not a confident person and you’re always going to feel a little off around other people will begin to make you feel more comfortable and less anxious around others.
I am anxious around people who I don't trust. Accepting that will not change how I feel around them.
But perhaps accepting the fact that you're more innately less trusting than the average person could (assuming that's true, of course)?
I wouldn't advocate for specific strategies or methods to other people, but I've found combinations of mindfulness, therapy, and support groups to be the most useful for me. It's all about building healthy habits and honesty about the parts I want to change.
Nowhere in life change happens without trauma. Get good at trauma and you'll get good at life.
I suggest to learn one's own limits through suffering and systematically repeated failure. It's the only way to build not only a map of current yourself, but also a trail towards your future self.
Time is ticking, memento mori, the beatings will continue until morale improves.
I found that shocking to read. It's a million miles from my experience of life. That sounds horrible. Perhaps you've found it true, but please stop saying it like it's true for everyone, a fact of life. I can't even imagine how you could believe such a thing, well, it works for you or something, I guess. Also, saying that then complaining in the same breath that someone else is defeatist! is hard to swallow. That sounds a cold, hard world that you live in. Good luck. I don't think it's the only world, by any stretch, though. Although I'm sure I misunderstand you - that's a very foreign language to me, everything about it is strange. Beatings, suffering, trauma.. :-(
We don't make progress unless we take risks and move outside of our comfort zone. Sometimes, those risks don't pay off, and the result is painful in some way. Maybe that pain is "traumatic", maybe not. Certainly, if the risks don't pay off, then we need to be willing to live with the painful result. This necessarily requires an understanding that pain is OK, and that accepting the risk of pain is a necessary part of growth.
A lot of people like to fantasize about being on the other side, about having already undergone that personal growth. Fantasy is easy, but it's not a replacement for the real thing, and engaging in too much fantasy will give you feelings of guilt and/or resentment for not actually being on the other side. There are two healthy directions to deal with this: you either give up on the fantasy and accept being where you are (i.e. what the article advocates), or you fully accept the costs and risks that are needed to get there, so that you can actually start on the journey to get there.
"Fully accepting the costs and risks needed to get there" sounds like you're preparing for a hike to the antarctic or something. Not all changes have to be this dire.
Deciding to get fit is not really a sacrifice. Rather, it is turning certain disciplines into habits. If you have enough leverage to force you to do that, there is no pain or trauma involved.
I think you're downplaying what it's like for many people to start making fitness a larger part of their life. It might as well be a hike to the antarctic. In the beginning, the costs can seem very, very high, even if they get easier with time. What makes those costs bearable is a genuine acceptance of them, and what oftentimes triggers that genuine acceptance is a health scare that shows people what the alternative is.
It is still unrealistic to say that they are “very very high” though. The main barriers imo are not the perceived cost of exercise but the lack of perceived benefits. Certainly a health scare can make exercise seem more appealing.
The benefits of exercise are only seen over time. In the short term, the benefits may not outweigh the efforts so those seeking instant gratification will find it difficult to justify expending the effort. I don’t think it’s the costs being “very very high” that prevent most people from exercising.
I see it daily in some of my former peers - literally frozen in space and time. By all means if that's your goal go for it, but when these folks are confronted with somebody more active, somebody who steps out of that comfort zone when needed (or cca lives there semi permanently) their reactions tell a different story.
When I was climbing Matterhorn, (or even Mont Blanc on skis in some places) there were certain times I was shitting myself from fear of the abyss and clear and present danger all around me. When I decided to get into paragliding, first solo flights were not so much different - 1km vertical drop just below your ass is something one can't prepare oneself beforehand. Those memories, and many many more are part of my core and will be there till I die, putting a slight smile on my face whenever I remember them or see the spot from afar.
Heck, being next to my wife when giving both births was not comfortable at all, seeing all that suffering and uncertainty and being able to do very little to alleviate it, but its one of those few moments that define me as a parent and human being.
True. A life well-lived requires courage. Courage in means risking trauma.
Yet if you don't distinguish between trauma and daily hard work, that sets you up to either:
A. Avoid hard work... possibly while fantasizing about overcoming trauma.
B. Create for yourself a life of trauma. This is not growth. It is just self-harm.
My real luck came along when someone gave me a chance to get back on my feet and start afresh with the benefit of all that experience and the knowledge of what can happen. I realised that, previously, I was just unmotivated to do what was necessary to achieve anything in life, I was coasting along and not really trying.
I do OK now, I work hard and make sacrifices, don't waste money and invest all my spare income. Not exactly rocket science, I just wish I had started sooner.
The article just states that to actually be better, a good starter is to remove the useless comparison with an idealized future self, because it brings no good and it’s actually harmful.
At no point to actually stop trying to be better
But this is not always the case. The impetus for change spans the spectrum of human emotions including dissatisfaction, pleasure seeking, existentialist realizations and envy/peer influence.
Trauma is definitely not a pre-requisite for change. It may be the most observable external cause to the effect, but that doesn't mean it is more useful than the rest.
The people I know who reinvent themselves the most are those driven by joie de vivre and a sense of self-expression.
This is (one of) the core ideas of buddhism-related philosophies. I suggest you give those a chance!
>Nothing in life happens without trauma. That’s Not True. If you accept reality and see that some change is Right, you Do it. No trauma. This is a Fact, and again, dealing with facts and accepting what is true is very liberating.
And look man, I’m in a pretty confused situation myself right now, but we all trying to figure out what’s best!
Yes someone else makes more, has a bigger house, etc.
But someone else has less.
As long as I have a safe place to live, I can't ask for more.
Depending on where you are, a positive habit may be useful for getting you out of a hole but ultimately consciousness is not about acting or reacting stereotypically. It's about having the option to do things differently.
Consciousness, or self-awareness, is the real key to improvement, and it's actually an anti-habit.
e.g. rather than relying on the force of habit for daily exercise, one eventually comes to realise and to experience repeatedly that being fit is not only better than being unfit but it feels better too. No self-coercion is then subsequently required to maintain fitness
The character of Levin earlier has an epiphany about his faith how he should live life. He later realizes that the epiphany didn't change him. He's still a messy, imperfect person.
> "I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions tactlessly; there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go on scolding her for my own terror, and being remorseful for it; I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying; but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it."
It's mostly about faith, but the aspect that resonated the most for me was acceptance that no epiphany will change who you are. Once you accept that and your flaws, you can focus on the good in life. It can help attention to not be bothered by flaws that can't be changed in an instant.
It's the closest I've ever come to an epiphany in my personal life. Too bad it didn't change me.
A simple way of describing one of the core teaching of buddhism is one of the main reason we suffer is: We are constantly neurotically pulling for what we want, and pushing away what we don't want.
It means as a juggles we are constantly trying to juggle our live into a state from where we think will be fullfilled. For example once I create this successful company, not feel hungry, then I will experience meaning satisfaction. Or when Im loved, or when I have a beer etc...
It's a never ending neurotic cycle. And the West is especially good at it by being extremely success focused.
Buddhism gives you tools to break this habit, and allows for meaning to be experienced in every moment (without this forced concept of YOU HAVE TO BE MINDFULL).
This doesn't mean you don't have all these personal things that should and can be improved, but the neurotic unhapiness leaves the experience of it.
It's often interesting to see intitially buddhist techniques, like meditations, being only used in a success/goal oriented mindset: will make you more productive, succesfull etc. where only a small benefit of the initial exercise remains.
The way I see it, life vacillates between peaks, plateaus and valleys. I assure you I and most other people can very much feel 'fulfilled' by reaching an oasis of a good meal, a relationship breakthrough, a milestone accomplishment or finding the right medication for an ailment, and be fully present & immersed in that moment-by-moment experience of fulfillment, meaning and satisfaction, while it lasts. But for reasons that I think boil down to biology and possibly even physics, you cannot continue experience that depth of meaning or fulfillment when having extreme back pain while driving in heavy traffic to an unpleasant job that must be done when your dog just died. It's a pipe dream.
On the contrary, one of the points of Buddhism is exactly that pain and suffering are not the same thing (and this agrees very much with modern neurology and psychology).
Also, your self-worth should never be based on your social skills or personality, and this is where many quiet/introverted nerdy/smart young folks end up suffering alot in middle/highschool/college. I'm sure many of us realize how artificial the societies of school are after we enter the adult 'real' world. Your popularity seems like everything in highschool, and it may very well be, but you learn real fast how little it matters when you leave school. PG puts it well here in his essay "Why Nerds are Unpopular": http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
In terms of self-improvement for things like your habits and work ethic where your self-esteem/confidence/personality isn't at play, and isn't the 'thing' you are trying to fix, I generally think it's not that big of deal to dislike your current way of life and not embrace yourself. Accepting laziness or whatnot is probably too compassionate for your own good.
But fighting to change yourself and improve may not be something people can or should just give up on if the consequences of not changing are sufficiently serious.
The times I changed the most were when I moved somewhere else.
Your friends usually like you for who you are and will amplify your behavior.
This is good, because you feel save with them.
But they can also prevent you from becoming a better person, because you fall back into old habits.
Quotes:
“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”
Paradoxically, accepting that you’re just not a confident person and you’re always going to feel a little off around other people will begin to make you feel more comfortable and less anxious around others.
Highly recommend his latest book four thousand weeks, which is refreshing in the current world of productivity advice.
So thanks a lot, Guardian, for telling us how embracing my messy life is a form of self-improvement. Seriously, go fuck yourself.
That seems a bit… extreme? PTSD is pretty serious. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-traumatic_stress_disord...
I know the pandemic is stressful, but to the point of flashbacks, nightmares, intrusive thoughts, panic attacks, significant avoidance behavior, etc. That’s a pretty tall claim.
What has helped me is to first, try to be compassionate to those around me.
And second, it's a little weird, but I try to wish others well and feel compassionate towards them, even those who are far away and who I haven't met. It would be like "praying" for their well-being, even though I'm an atheist and don't think there's anything mystical about it. But if I do it for others, then I have a rational basis for thinking someone else might be doing it for me.
People who are striving for self-improvement are just trying to get some control of their out-of-control lives. It's just one of many possible coping mechanisms.
The common misconception is that you clear your mind of thought when meditating - the reality is that you "watch the thinker", noticing when you have become captured by thought, and then attempting to spot how these thoughts make you feel.
What has this got to do with embracing an imperfect life? Well, everything - the aim of the practice is to be more in the moment, less about what has happened or will happen, less about memory or projection, and instead being in the only thing which is actually real - which is this moment right now. Further down this path is then attempting to spend less time striving, which of course sits centrally to Buddhism.
As humans we spend so, so much time away from now. We're literally "lost in thought" - chewing through old issues and "what if's", or striving to be That Other Guy, or just down an endless rabbithole of internet. Rationally and based on past experience, we know that we won't actually be happier if we get that new job / salary / wife / house - or we might be briefly, but the pleasure goes so quickly.. But: emotionally we're caught up in it all the time, and it takes practice to be just here, content with what we have, ok with all the rough bits, the gnarly bits, the unfinished to-do's, the fat stomach, the imperfect fitness habit, whatever.
Where it gets even more intense is that literally everything we see out there in the "modern" world is built precisely to make us more unhappy and less content. Less contentment creates more consumers. My car is fine, but I saw that ad and man, that thing is SO spangly, maybe I NEED IT... Your feeds are rammed to the hilt full of people posting about their perfect lives, their perfect meals, their perfect pets. No-one posts anything when they're miserable, covered in vomit, feeling sad. Everyone is head-down on their phones looking at "perfection" and failing to see the beauty of the sun setting right in front of them. And so it goes on - feeding an already in-built tension into an endless pressure to Be That Perfect Person.
I've found that taking a mindful approach doesn't negate ambition or personal development. It's just that if you feel content in your heart, in your core (which is what you start to get from a solid, self-aware, centred meditative practice), then those things are just waves - you can catch them and ride them as much as you want but the "ocean" - a feeling of centre - is always there to support you.
This also doesn't suggest that everything is perfect - it isn't. Some things need to be changed. Sometimes jobs are crap, relationships aren't worth saving. Sometimes you have to move on, and need that tension to impel you in a direction. But as an endless life force, seeking perfection (particularly through endless consumerism) is clearly the path that fools take. If we spend time practicing - through meditation, prayer, or whatever your contemplative medicine is - we can become more aware of how little time we spend just being, here and now, and when you notice that you can gently start to remedy things.
There are benefits from being 'disciplined' and correcting your flaws for sure.
But sometimes you just want to let go, not have your entire life be something you must do or must correct. You won't be good at everything and you will have certain bad habits and things about you and while it's good to try to improve and work on yourself, it's also bad to just live in a state where you are constantly trying to discipline yourself and improve because you are somehow not worthy of the one life you have to live and therefore have to spend it entirely trying to be someone else, someone better.
Come on.
> “There’s a quiet power in forgiving our flaws, missteps and perceived shortcomings,” says Madeleine Dore, author of I Didn’t Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt, out this month. “Often when we accept ourselves, we’re more likely to get the best from ourselves, because we’re better placed to look at what we need to thrive, rather than change.”
You think about what would improve your life instead of focusing on own flaws. Then do the baby step of improving something in your life and if it feels better, then you succeeded. You end up doing steps to change and liking the road.