/ 存档- the Myth of Self Improvement

The Myth of Self-Improvement

We seem to be more free than ever before. We can order whatever food we'd like, we can travel almost anywhere and pursue any career that our heart desires. And yet, depression and burnout are also everywhere.

The mental health crisis has only increased. Why is this? 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.

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.

'The Myth of Normal', Gabor Maté

Our culture is not good for mental health. And this shouldn't be shocking news.

Researchers like Tim Kasser have found the four principles of American corporate capitalism:

self-interest, a desire for financial success, consumerism, and competition,

consistently lead to poor mental health outcomes. Why then do we continue to endorse and embrace such a culture?

//intrinsic versus extrinsic aspirations

Michel Foucault wrote extensively on the disciplinary society. This form of social organization tells people what they should do through surveillance and monitoring. Interestingly, in his later years, Foucault wrote about a more specific form of discipline that he 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.

Michel Foucault

Such individuals might abide by a strict morning routine, practice cold showers, and subscribe to a set of self-improvement and self-help podcasts. And they will likely feel a sense of freedom and pride in doing so.

Such an individual appears to stand in contrast to the fearful subject of the disciplinary society, as they aren't being compelled to follow such a strict routine by some authoritarian observer. They are free to become who they've always wanted to be. Interestingly, as Byung-Chul Han argues,

a society that normalizes this technology of the self is actually more effective in extracting resources from its members than the surveillance methods of disciplinary societies.

Instead of a society that runs on telling people what they should do, this new form of control tells people what they can do. 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. Motivated by the need to improve ourselves, we use apps, ranking systems, and health data to determine if we are self-optimizing enough.

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.

Byung-Chul Han (Author of 'the Burnout Society')

This is far more efficient than the techniques used in a disciplinary society. 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.

As an entrepreneur of himself, the neoliberal achievement subject engages in auto-exploitation willingly and even passionately. The self as a work of art amounts to a beautiful but deceptive illusion that the neoliberal regime maintains in order to exhaust its resources entirely.

Byung-Chul Han

We are then capable of unlimited self-production, making ourselves into better and better marketable commodities by making sure we are, for example, in shape, have an attractive partner, and are making enough money. And this involves more than mere career aspirations.

Physical optimization means more than aesthetic practice alone. Sexiness and fitness represent new economic resources to be increased, marketed, and exploited.

Byung-Chul Han

This compulsive drive to improve ourselves under this idea of ourselves as a project can now take over our entire lives. This pressure to achieve, to be more, and do more leads to a sort of culturally-induced narcissism.

As Stephen Reisner writes, narcissism and sociopathy describe corporate America...But it's flat out wrong to think in 21st century America that narcissism and sociopathy are illnesses. In today's America, narcissism and sociopathy are strategies, and they're successful strategies.

Steven Reisner

In contemporary society, it is effective for us to be constantly focused on ourselves and monitoring our performance and self-image.

To be so fixated on promoting ourselves is to never let your guard down, to compulsively market and improve yourself in the hopes of one day perfecting your self-project. This constant self-reference develops into a rat race within oneself, and eventually, it could lead to burnout, or what Byung-Chul Han describes as I-tiredness.

I-tredness: The ego grows exhausted and wears itself down. Such tiredness stems from the redundancy and recurrence of the ego.

Byung-Chul Han

We exhaust ourselves with ourselves. Evidently, burnout is more often than not treated as an annoyance or a failure in mastering oneself fully.

It is seen as a weakness and should be treated immediately lest we run the risk of falling short of our journey towards self-optimization. But I think burnout and depression should be seen more as the very symptoms of this compulsion for achievement. In Weariness of the Self, Ehrenberg points to this achievement society as the root of this rise in depression.

Depression began its ascent when the disciplinary model for behavior broke against norms that invited us to undertake personal initiative by enjoining us to be ourselves. The depressed individual is unable to measure up. He is tired of having to become himself.

Ehrenberg

It is this voluntary self-exploitation that gives rise to a fractured soul. We experience severe dislocation, a loss of connection with ourselves and others as we compulsively strive for self-perfection. Depression and burnout are simply the canaries in the coal mine in terms of demonstrating the destructiveness of such an achievement culture.

This is not to suggest that self-improvement or the striving to be a better person is inherently maladaptive. Such a journey is healthy and often beneficial. However, we should pay close attention to when such a process collapses into a hellish cycle of excessive self-reference and exhaustion.

It is more than likely that such an outcome is the result of self-exploitation rather than healthy, intrinsically motivated self-improvement.

Alienation is inevitable when our inner sense of value becomes status-driven, hinging on externally imposed standards of competitive achievement and acquisition and a highly conditional acceptance in others' eyes.

We struggle to answer the question, who am I? And this is an important question to answer if we wish to ever truly improve ourselves.

Eric Fromm's Escape from Freedom is a masterful exploration of how freedom alone can nonetheless leave us unhappy, alienated, and vulnerable to authoritarianism. Negative freedom, the absence of constraints, does not bring us closer to solving the question of who we are. We live under the illusion that we know what we want, but, as Fromm argues, the sad fact of the matter is that we want that which we are supposed to want. This, I would argue, is at the root of compulsive self-improvement.

We have become automatons who live under the illusion of being self-willing individuals. He lives in a world to which he has lost genuine relatedness and in which everybody and everything has become instrumentalized, where he has become (10:31) part of the machine that his hands have built.

Erich Fromm

Fromm's cure is simple, Spontaneity. Seen in both artists and children, spontaneous activity does not abide by rigid self-optimization and improvement. Instead, it is an embrace of activity for the sake of the activity itself.

Art, play, time with friends, and a gradual slowing down flies in the very face of the sorts of self-improvement that lead to burnout.

As Fromm writes, spontaneous activity is the one way in which man can overcome the terror of aloneness without sacrificing the integrity of the self; for in the spontaneous realization of the self, man unites himself anew with the world.

This partially relies on truly giving attention to the moment through active listening and observing.

The gift of listening, as Byung-Chul Han observes, is entirely inaccessible to the hyperactive ego, which must close itself off in order to constantly measure and optimize itself. Any disruption from the outer world is considered to be a threat to achieving our potential. To listen is to open oneself up to themselves and the world around them.

Our world has made us increasingly focused on ourselves as a project. This has made us rigid and incapable of spontaneity. It is only in those moments of intrinsic focus where we are doing things for themselves in which we can escape the burnout society.

Call it a flow state, spontaneity, or resonance, we find ourselves alive only when we risk destabilizing our journey towards self-perfection. Here, I think Bertrand Russell gives us the most succinct path forward in combating self-absorption.

The secret of happiness is this. Let your interests be as wide as possible and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile

Bertrand Russel

早上听到这个视频，感觉过去两年的疲惫和抑郁被一语道破。不想再仔细剖析在这场情绪浩劫里，“我”到底是主谋还是从犯，但是我属实想重新赋予自己这份被剥夺了的Spontaneity。