The Self-Improvement Hamster Wheel
We’re absorbing social messaging that makes us constantly consume and strive with no end in sight. We can never be or achieve enough to arrive at the point always dangling on the horizon.
What I watched: “The Myth of Self Improvement” by Sisyphus55. Posted February 23, 2024.
Beginning in my early youth and throughout most of my life I’ve been obsessed with what’s generally called self-improvement. Sometimes I feel like that’s not a bad thing, but honestly, over the past few years I’ve come to believe it’s perhaps a net negative for me overall.
I distinctly recall my father handing me a copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People (paid link) when I was about eight years old. I was encouraged to read as a child and began to devour books of all kinds. This was the first of the self-improvement genre I would read.
Despite some people not being fans of the book, I got quite a bit out of it. Sprinkled throughout are some decent insights and tips that I still utilize to this day. But, for better or worse, it set me on a path of consuming self-help and self-improvement books at a rapid pace that lasted for much of my life. I still read and consume self-improvement material, but I’m far more discerning than in the past.
Between my father’s upbringing that encouraged me to constantly strive to improve and achieve and society’s messaging to do the same, I would often feel like I wasn’t enough or hadn’t achieved enough.
When was the last time you felt like you were enough? We are always striving to do more and to be more, to always be improving ourselves. I would argue that it is this cultural emphasis on self -improvement that leaves us so fundamentally burnt out and depressed. In such a culture, we embrace hyperactivity, finding ourselves in a state of compulsive striving. We have little time to connect with both ourselves and others.
The video quotes Gabor Maté from their book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture (paid link).
We are steeped in the normalized myth that we are, each of us, mere individuals striving to attain private goals. The more we define ourselves that way, the more estranged we become from vital aspects of who we are and what we need to be healthy.
That sums up the core root of much of the anxiety and sometimes depression I would feel when I didn’t think I was improving enough, achieving enough, or being productive enough. It’s a hamster wheel with no end because we shouldn’t simply be creatures on a never-ending quest for improvement, especially externally influenced improvement which I contend is from where most such messaging emanates. It’s not our natural internal processes nudging us to constantly consume the next self-improvement book, finally get those six-pack abs, or buy the massive luxury home. Most often it’s outside influences making us do those things.
This is not healthy. It’s bad for our mental health. It’s a no-win proposition. It’s not a good mindset to arrive at any kind of internal peace, calm, happiness, or contentment.
Our culture isn’t supportive of mental health. I’m probably stating the obvious, but the incessant messaging that we must constantly be better tomorrow than we are today wreaks havoc on our mental health. Researchers like Tim Kasser have found what again might be obvious to some but clearly needs to be pointed out more.
The four principles of American corporate capitalism, self-interest, a desire for financial success, consumerism, and competition consistently lead to poor mental health outcomes.
I’ve read some of Michel Foucault’s writings but don’t recall being exposed to the concept of a disciplinary society. What the video highlights is a specific form of discipline that Foucalt called the “Technologies of the Self.”
Intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria.
The gist of the effect of Technologies of the Self is that people will on their own, and with great pride, do all sorts of things to align with what society telegraphs should be their ideal self and ideal life. The skyrocketing number of self-help and self-improvement books, articles, podcasts, and so on are indicative of this effect. It’s controlling of the masses in the guise of individuals believing they’re becoming what and who they always wanted to be.
Byung-Chul Han argues that when a society embraces and normalizes Technology of the Self, that society is amazingly effective in extracting resources from people. Rather than a highly dogmatic disciplinary society that tells people what they “must” do and who they should be, this approach exerts a different form of control by telling people what they “can” do. This lulls the population into thinking that what they’re consuming and striving for is in their best interest when indeed it may not be and might instead just be more efficiently feeding into the capitalist agenda.
This is Smart Power, a power that compels people to subject themselves to power relations completely on their own accord. Rather than inhibiting or repressing, Smart Power motivates us to self-optimize. Rather than a disciplinary society, we now live in an achievement society. Instead of the tireless surveillance of disciplinary societies that measure and observe their subjects in order to optimize productivity, we have now taken surveillance into our own hands.
This part was rough for me to watch. I’m so guilty of exactly the kind of self-surveillance alluded to in the video. Far too often I’ve bought into the promise of countless apps, self-improvement methodologies, exercise regimens, ways of eating, and other ways to place myself on the hamster wheel of self-improvement and self-optimization.
Byung-Chul Han put it this way.
The auto-exploiting subject carries around its own labor camp… As a self-illuminating, self -surveilling subject, it bears its own internal panopticon within. The digitalized networked subject is a panopticon of itself. This ensures that each and every person has now taken on the task of conducting perpetual auto-surveillance.
I’m going to let you watch the video the get the entirety of its message. It’s a short 13 minutes and worth a watch. But I feel this sums up the crux of what the video is trying to drive home.
If we see ourselves as a project that can always be worked on, there is always more for us to do. Not only do we take on the task of monitoring and measuring ourselves, we also feel compelled to constantly improve ourselves under the idea that this is fundamentally good for us.
We willingly buy into such auto-exploitation assuming all that we’re doing to improve is good for us.
Sure, some of it is. Exercising is good for us, but attempting to achieve what is perhaps an unachievable physique is not. Putting a part of our income into rainy day and retirement savings is wise, but believing we’re only truly successful if we’re awash in millions of dollars is not. Buying a nice car to get us from point A to B is good, but spending more than we can afford on an expensive luxury car is not. I could cite countless examples of things we all do, myself included, that make no real sense except that it’s participating in one big game of keeping up with the Joneses. Not helpful and possibly leading to some serious mental health issues.
The video goes on to contend that this all feeds into a version of culturally induced narcissism. When I read that, I balked. Me, narcissistic? But the video argues strongly that modern corporate America, for example, is indeed narcissistic and sociopathic.
I’m going to let you watch the video because I’ve already written a lot here.
The bottom line for me is that it opened my eyes to the downside of so much of what I placed great value on in the past – the constant striving for self-improvement and self-optimization. I catch myself on the hamster wheel often, but I’m trying to jump off. Maybe you’ll want to jump off too.
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By any chance did you read my not exactly this but nearing this in my latest repost of my rant from 2 years ago… this is also heavily leaning into my next book project coincidence 🤣🤣 or is it “the universe “ 🤣🤣 so good to see this being written about more. Woot!!