From the days of Ancient Greece and Socrates, there has been a valorisation of self-discovery: finding the person you are deep inside you and developing greater parts of you.

The modern emphasis on self-improvement and self-development has self-discovery at its foundation. But, whereas self-discovery was about finding who I am originally, the modern approach to self-improvement is finding how I can be better.

At the core of the modern approach is to improve or develop a person so they are happier. But it is clear how this approach has now become detrimental in itself. Happiness feels one more podcast away, one more book away, one more 1 hr affirmation youtube away.

In effect, the process of self-improvement and self-discovery has become addictive in itself such that there is little discussion about what the point of self development is anymore. To be better – Better for what? for who? by what standards?

Contra this with self-discovery practices which are not so addictive – anyone who has undertaken difficult self-inquiry regarding shadow work or emotional feeling knows that they can be extremely fatiguing to do constantly. You have to put them aside after a while given how tiring it is for the emotional system to be confronted with its shadow. Regardless, we find ourselves constantly listening to more and more information about self-improvement techniques, as if the issue was that we didnt have sufficient knowledge to do it properly.

From my perspective, any improvement or development practice should have a goal in mind – I am improving myself so that I can achieve XYZ. This forces us to place a limit on what we are doing and why we are doing it. And the answer to how to achieve XYZ is usually a simple process becuase we almost always know what we have to do to achieve it but are too afraid to do it. In large part, all self-improvement practices should then be aimed at the emotional/identity work required for you to do the actions that you know to be right.

Once you have a goal in mind, there eventually comes a part where you have to surrender your practices and wait for fruition. Because ultimately, there is no real alternative to patientce. Action is not an alternative to patientce. And in that silence of surrendering (ie. swapping control for faith), there is a real tendency to become obsessed with the process (ie the activities of self improvement). In that time where you are waiting, where you have to exercise patience, is the time when it is easy to continue chasing after more knowledge because the lack of achievement of our goals seems an indicator that we do not know enough instead of accepting that we have done everything we can and it is now up to complex system to render us our results.

And so self-improvement quickly becomes a substance abuse process. The anxiety that arises from pursuing goals in life forces us to confront our inherent lack of control over outcomes. The shadow of the control anxiety renders itslef in an obsession with gaining knowledge and to attempt different practices to improve the self. Soon, we lose all meaning of the outcome and the process of self-improvement becomes an end in itself – I am improving for the sake of improving. But this is an endless race with dissatisfaction in each way because there is no measure of success. You can always improve and change in one way or another so how can you ever be satisfied.

Underneath that extremely wired and hyper-attachment to self-improvement is a fear of giving up control. Instead of becoming obsessed with more knowledge, can we look our shadow in the eye and say that I do not need to control the process or the outcome. That I am giving up my control, knowing i have made all reasonable attempts. And now I will wait for the complex systems external to me to render goals upon me, with faith and belief that the goals are coming.

When you give up control, you are forced to wait and accept your life as is. When I did that, I had an intense realisation that:

1. the problems in my life were problems I had created;
2. the problems in my life were actually attempts at solutions at other underlying problems;
3. the attempts at a solution were perpetuating the problems I had created myself.

In practical terms, I had to realise that my obsession with self-improvement made me constantly have a sense that I was ‘missing something’ or that I was incomplete and not adaqutely fixed enough to achieve my goals. This created a sense of anxiety and a feeling that I needed to rush through time to get to the end.

When I stopped obsessing over self-improvement, I was forced to confront the underlying problem. The anxiety and rushing were in fact my self-created solutions to the problem of feeling not enough by others’ standards.

The more I tried to improve my self, instead of making me feel ‘enough’, it kept reminding me of how I was not enough – because there was always a way to improve.

This is what is at the heart of Chesterson’s fence thesis – that the problems should not simply be removed because it is likely that they were serving a purpose in themselves. Perhaps the problem was/is a solution to a greater problem.

I was obsessed with moving out of my parents home because I felt a societal pressure that it was inappropriate for me to be living at home. No matter how much I tried to move out, I could never find the means or resources to do it. But I am now considering that the feeling of living at home and feeling guilt are in fact solutions to a greater problem I feel. I still have to figure out the greater problem but in the meantime, it also means not rushing to get rid of this problem. Not forcing events and bearing stress and failure to deal with a problem which is actually helping me in a way.