stop improving yourself

the myth of becoming your “best self” is costing you your real one

Koketit, As I Lay Me Down

We’re reading the books. We’re listening to the podcasts. We’re doing the work.

We’re becoming our best selves, right?

RIGHT?!

I write this post with trepidation and a healthy dose of self-deprecation because I’ve been there. Fully subscribed to the gospel of self-optimization and all of its latest scripture.

It started in 2019. Reeling from a painful breakup that wasn’t quite a breakup (read: situationship), I came across the book Attached. I devoured it. Diagnosed myself as an ambivalent avoidant—prone to sabotaging healthy connection out of fear it won't last, wanting closeness but pushing it away once I got it. And I thought: okay, I’d like to fix this. I’d like to stop icing out the men I actually wanted to be with. So I started therapy.

And then it snowballed. Desperate to heal emotionally and physically—broken heart, wrecked back—I tried everything. Therapy led to ketamine sessions. Then micro-dosing psilocybin. Then ayahuasca. I learned my Enneagram type. My Human Design pattern. I tried somatic therapy. I went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. I even let a woman sting me with bees (yes, really—it’s called apitherapy).

Somewhere along the way, I found myself in a “dark night of the soul,” then a “spiritual awakening,” and eventually, a “kundalini rising.”

Let me be clear: I’m not mocking any of this. Many of these things helped. Sometimes the more unconventional the method, the better the result. The bee stings did more for my back pain than steroid injections ever did. I am a different person than I was before. I’m closer with my family, I’m a better friend, I’m more secure in romantic partnerships, and I’m way nicer to myself.

But—like training wheels on a bike—these tools are helpful only to a point. Eventually, they stop moving you forward. At some point, they start keeping you from the very thing you were after all along: simply living a good life.

It’s not that these things aren’t useful. They are. It’s just that it’s easy to get stuck there.

There are two metaphors I keep coming back to.

First: the wound.

When a wound is fresh, you treat it. You clean it, bandage it, give it the best conditions to heal. But once it starts to scab, you leave it alone. You don’t keep picking at it. And you definitely don’t grab a knife and start digging into old scar tissue.

Trauma is the same. When you’re in the thick of it—a breakup, a loss, an identity crisis—you do what you can to heal. It doesn’t matter if it’s a new wound or one that’s been re-opened. You use every tool you’ve got. But once the healing begins, step back. Let your body do its thing. Trust the process. Don’t keep poking around looking for something else to fix.

Second: the sewer.

The dark recesses of our minds are like sewers. Mine was filled with depression, anxiety, ruminating thoughts, and maladaptive daydreams. I spent most of my life down there, not even realizing where I was. Then, one day after that breakup in 2019, I looked around for the first time. It was dark. It stank. There were rats. Why were there so many rats?

Suddenly, I needed to get out. And all of those therapies and modalities and experiences—they seemed like the way up. And like rungs on a ladder, some of them really did help me climb toward the light.

Until they didn’t.

Because the goal isn’t to stay in the sewer forever, talking to your therapist about how bad it smells. Or naming and labeling every rat and setting boundaries for where they can go. The goal isn’t to build a cozy little home down in the dark and call it growth.

The goal is to leave. To get out into the light.

And the only way to do that is to stop treating yourself like a project. To stop believing you need to be fixed or improved or optimized. Immersive reflection is good. Hyper-fixation on improvement is not.

We don’t need to go further in—we need to go out. We need to make mistakes. Be messy. Get our hands dirty.

Because who decided that the point of this whole human experience was to become the “best version” of ourselves? What if the point is just to feel it all? To make someone smile. Sometimes, to piss someone off. To know what a bad day feels like so you can appreciate a good one.

It wasn’t until 2023—four years into becoming my “best self”—that I realized I hated it all.

Even researchers who spent just one year trying to optimize their lives came to the same conclusion. In Improving Ourselves to Death, Alexandra Schwartz summarizes the findings of Cederström and Spicer:

Where success can be measured with increasing accuracy, so, too, can failure. On the other side of self-improvement, Cederström and Spicer have discovered, is a sense not simply of inadequacy but of fraudulence.

In December, with the end of their project approaching, Spicer reflects that he has spent the year focusing on himself to the exclusion of everything, and everyone, else in his life. His wife is due to give birth to their second child in a few days; their relationship is not at its best.

And yet, he writes, “I could not think of another year I spent more of my time doing things that were not me at all.” He doesn’t feel like a better version of himself. He doesn’t even feel like himself. He has been like a man possessed: “If it wasn’t me, who was it then?”

He’s right. It is like possession. One day you’re just trying to feel better, and suddenly you’re not allowed to rest, enjoy, or simply be. There is no finish line to self-improvement. And in trying to optimize ourselves, we often stop living altogether.

Here’s what I think is really happening: we spend years—decades—building an identity around what we think we should want. A good job. Money. Marriage. Kids. We check the boxes. And then. . . we realize we’re still not happy.

I’ve written about this before—how we’re like those wacky inflatable cartoon characters. You know the ones wildly flailing their arms outside car dealerships? The ones full of hot air. All movement. No substance.

Eventually, some of us pull the plug. Or stab a hole in the damn thing. Anything to deflate the character, stop the performance, and hit reset.

But that deflation, and the emptiness that follows, is just as uncomfortable as the false life we’d been living. So we panic. We rush to build a new identity. This one is better. More self-aware. More healed. More secure. More optimized. We’ve done the work. We yell: “I’ve evolved!”

And for a while, that might feel true. Until we realize, it’s still hot air. Eventually we see it for what it is: another identity we’ll have to shed.

This is what happens any time we deconstruct a belief or leave a system—we rush to fill the space. Instead of letting something real emerge, we swap one illusion for another. And in that rush, we look for guides.

Which explains the explosion of coaches, gurus, and mentors. People selling us the upgraded version of ourselves. But I don’t think the answers live in any of their programs. There is no path to “better.”

I don’t have answers. No one does. I just have a lot of questions and a growing comfort with the in-between, unknown parts of life. For now, I’m giving myself permission to just exist. To be unfinished, unsure, imperfect. To write before I’m ready.

And from that place, maybe life stops feeling like something to fix.

And starts feeling like something to live.

I’ll probably be shouting about David Whyte from the rooftops for the rest of my life. His book Consolations is one I return to often—short essays (or are they poems?) that unpack the hidden meaning in everyday words.

Last year, I wrote something in a similar spirit. While I don’t believe he’s ever written about self-help directly, the tone and structure of this piece are heavily influenced by his style. I was consciously drawing from his rhythm and cadence while experimenting with poetry for the first time. I didn’t originally plan to publish it, but it came back to me while writing this post. So here it is:

self-help

/self’help/

noun: a hamster wheel

Self-help is a noble, but seemingly endless pursuit
that offers minimal gains in exchange for a lifetime of work.

We spend our most valuable currency, our life force,
improving ourselves to death.

Each era of self-help has its own flavor,
and the particular gospel of the moment
encourages us to put down the fluffy prayers and instead,
worship at the altar of human optimization.

We set resolutions, we define metrics of success,
we measure KPIs, we recalibrate our progress,
we go to therapy, we seek out the advice of self-proclaimed gurus,
we manifest and meditate, we heal our trauma, we reparent our inner child.
And all the while, we prop up a $10B industry.

We try countless means for an unjustifiable end.
For the result we seek is not satisfaction
or contentment or happiness or enlightenment.
It’s the perpetual pursuit of perfection.

Once we improve one aspect of ourselves,
we find ourselves readying to fix another,
previously unknown to us, ‘problem.’

We are, in effect, gamifying our own lives
without realizing we are the ones being played.

This pursuit doesn’t place us on moral high ground,
it puts us in a prison of our own making.
One that tells us we need to be a better version of ourselves.
Freedom from that cage is our natural right,
but we won’t find it by painting the walls of our cell with accomplishments.

We find it by leaving.

Truly helping ourselves means using our own resources to accomplish things.
In its very essence, self-help demands us to stop outsourcing,
to remove the intermediary—the therapist, the coach, the guru, the data—
and asks us to become our own authority.

The very act of quitting self-help
is the first step in truly helping yourself.

The beautiful gift is that, ironically,
in the process of extricating ourselves from self-help,
we become less selfish.

When we turn our relentless gaze of inner reflection outward into the world,
we see that there’s much more there than us.

This newsletter is where I make sense of the world and the things I’m thinking about—culture, technology, esoteric rabbit holes, and the future we’re headed toward.

Right now, it’s free. If you want to support my work, the best way is to buy my debut novel, Dark Days Ahead. It’s a magical tech thriller—think Black Mirror meets Charmed—and explores many of the same themes I write about here, just through fiction.

P.S. This post was inspired by Sinem in Flux, who shared The Self-improvement Lie video by Anna Bocca. I’m not fully sold on the concept of neoliberalism as the core issue, but the idea of turning ourselves into products—and the implications of humans as commodities in the era of AI—is something I can’t stop thinking about. I plan to dig into this in future posts.

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