Blog Post: The Problem with Self-Improvement

I have always been fascinated by the world of self-improvement. For a long time I was deeply enmeshed in it, and found it genuinely helpful. A few years ago I was at a very low point. I did not enjoy who I was, and really needed a kick up the backside in order to change this state. And the standard dose of self-improvement wisdom: equal parts gym, discipline, and work ethic, was really what I needed in that moment to get myself out of a rut. I still think that self-improvement occupies a potentially very helpful place in our cultural milieu. Its value is often just in setting someone (who otherwise feels rather aimless) a set of tasks to complete. If you are in total disorientation regarding what to do with your life, and this causes you misery, then it can be handy to have a very large man on your phone screen tell you to get into the gym. I think this generalised sense of activation energy is as important, if not far more so, than whatever arm of self-improvement you choose to embark upon.

However, many people (including myself) have an uneasy feeling about the culture of self-improvement. There is something vaguely unsettling about the degree to which someone can become obsessed with the need to constantly better themselves. On the face of it, this is quite confusing. Is the idea really that someone is “bettering themselves too much”. Good Heavens! Let’s have a moral panic about how someone is spending too much time striving to be the person they desire most to be. Nonetheless, although I have not been able to really justify this uneasy feeling, the feeling has remained.

Which is why I was shocked when midway through a philosophy book on the value of privacy, someone put their finger on exactly my concern with a certain attitude to self-improvement. That person was Lowry Pressly, and in his book The Right to Oblivion, he argues that part of why we value privacy so highly is because we desire a space where we can temporarily be unaccountable (I will make a whole video on this book at some point, it is brilliant).

Many of us think of accountability as an unalloyed good. We want our politicians and public figures to “be more accountable”. We often describe a moral reckoning as “holding someone accountable”. We encourage people to “take accountability”. And Pressly does not question that accountability in the public realm is often a very good thing. However, he also states that we need times (in private) where we are unaccountable. Both for general wellbeing, and to figure out who we want to be.

Pressly argues that if we are being watched, even if we do not know we are being watched, the set of our biographical information changes. To use his example, imagine if a man, Bob, was being watched in his hotel room by the owner, Foo. What is lost when this private space becomes public. Well, many things, but one of those things is that Bob is no longer unaccountable. He can no longer act, speak, and think, safe in the knowledge that these facts can never be known by anyone. No one will take those things, and add it to their characterisation of Bob. If he is not being watched, Bob is an unknown entity. He is free to experiment with his character as he pleases, because no one can find out what happened in any case. In private, Bob (as far as anyone else is concerned) is a fluid entity. I am somewhat simplifying Pressly’s point here, but you get the picture. The fact that Bob is being watched creates information about Bob and his character, that did not exist before.

However, Pressly extends this point by arguing that there is value in time spent not just being unaccountable to other people, but being unaccountable to ourselves. Think of it like this. We have a whole range of things about our behaviour, some of which we endorse, but other aspects of which we might reject as not in line with our values, and who we want to be. But there are moments where Pressly argues we can and should let go of this constant evaluative process, and simply allow ourselves to be. This will, necessarily, have to take place in private. But privacy is not sufficient for this. We also need to be in a certain frame of mind where we give up this evaluation of ourselves. In effect, we behave as if we are not watching ourselves. We don’t come to any conclusions about who we are in this circumscribed setting. And Pressly is pretty stark about what might happen if we never get into this kind of state, which he calls “repose”:

“When there is no quarter from striving, persistence turns inward; self-direction becomes self-torment and depletes what it had hoped to sustain. Any picture of well-being ought to include, in addition to the importance of agency and moral responsibility, a space and time to shrug off the persistence that it takes to live a life. Such repose would not consist in the abandonment of one’s ends and values, or caring about different things or nothing at all, but simply in not being definite, one way or another, for a little while. In other words, it would look like a period of not being accountable for oneself, to oneself and to others”

Pressly is talking about privacy, so he is largely concerned with scenarios in which someone else intrudes on this private, potentially unaccountable space. However, he also toys with the idea that someone can deprive themselves of this unaccountability by constant monitoring. About these types of people, he says the following:

“[these types of people] insist too much, we want to say - a phrase, like the line of thought I have been developing here, underwritten by a picture of well-being that includes a time and space for letting go. This is the aspect of well-being that the monomaniac sacrifices in the relentless pursuit of what appears to be of higher value. This is what, in the domain of privacy, those who live in the public eye sacrifice for fame.”

This maps almost exactly onto some of my uneasy feelings about excessive self-improvement, and also tracks my own experiences.

For instance, there was once a time where I was totally unable to stop judging myself. I would walk around each day, all the while a part of my mind was dedicated to tracking just how well I was fulfilling my obligations towards self-improvement, and dispensing emotional rewards and punishments in response. In effect, I deprived myself of any real feeling of privacy, because I was always watching myself.

Suffice to say, this had absolutely disastrous effects on my emotional state. At the time I thoguht it was because I was a harsh judge, and that I was being too hard on myself, and certainly that was part of it. But it wasn’t just that. Having an inner judge that was less harsh, but still omnipresent, would be slightly better, but it would still come with the constant sense of evaluation. What I needed was privacy from myself. I needed to be sort of “transparent” to myself in a way that is quite difficult to put into words. Not “transparent” as in being an open book, but being invisible or see-through. To blend into the background of my experience. In other words, I needed to forget myself. I think it is this self-forgetting that promotes the sense of personal oblivion that Pressly talks about, and is also the very thing that an excessively self-improvement-obsessed approach deprives us of.

As Pressly also points out, the value of this sort of unaccountable self-forgetfulness is difficult to get across, because it seems quite scary. When we hear that someone is temporarily “unaccountable”, we think this means they will give their worst impulses free reign. But this is a slightly different, and more modest idea of unaccountability. The two things to bear in mind here are as follows:

This sort of unaccountability is only temporary. Just as we become neurotic with too much self-evaluation, we become disoriented with too little. We still need self-accountability to give us some direction in life.

For Pressly, this sort of unaccountability is primarily private, and also largely epistemic. It is less “I can do whatever I want” and more “I have no fixed conception of who I am in this moment”. By its very nature, it will only ever occur alone, or with a few select people.

Pressly’s point here perfectly explains why an excessive focus on self-improvement made me less happy and more anxious. Once it had tipped over from a healthy “direction setting mechanism” to a sort of obsession, I turned my own mind into a kind of mini surveillance state.

However, Pressly’s observations are not at all limited to simply “self-improvement” as we understand it today - as a kind of social and social media phenomenon. It applies to any kind of evaluative standard that we can never let go of, even for a second. I see no reason why this would not apply just as easily to people who consider themselves highly principled, but come to use those principles more like a straitjacket than an orientation. This idea of a kind of medicinal nihilism, of just “letting things go” from time to time, seems like an important counterbalance for the kind of overanalytic person who finds themselves obsessed with things.

The thing is, I am genuinely not quite sure how to do this. It’s kind of embarrassing to admit, but I can quite easily reason out why letting things go and embracing this sort of temporary, unaccountable privacy is a good thing, both philosophically and psychologically. But it is really bloody difficult to actually do it.

Nonetheless, having been convinced of the importance of Pressly’s position, I am going to give it a good go. I do, however, immediately encounter a tension in my plan. If I am trying to enter this unaccountable state because I think it is a good thing to do, in what way have I left the mode of evaluation I am trying to escape in the first place? Will this performative contradiction get in the way of my goal, since I am thinking about a state of goallessness and epistemic obscurity precisely in terms of goals and definite aims?

It’s almost like I need to get out of my own head. But at least now I know why it’s worth doing so.