This post might be the sort of post I come back to and/or rewrite over the next little while, because I believe strongly in its thesis, but don't want to spin my wheels or rant about it.

There's a couple themes in relation to self improvement that can be touched on. One is whether trying to be a better person makes you a better person. Another is questioning how one might better spend their time in pursuit of bettering themselves. There's also the question of what actually makes someone 'better'.

Thesis: In most cases, for most people, self help is an inefficient use of time and energy.

Before we get started, a quick bit of background. I was defininetely someone who drank the self help kool-aid. I read a reasonable portion of the self-help cannon, obsessively watched Ali Abdaal, Thomas Frank and Matt D'Avella and was overall pretty focused on optimizing my life around improving myself. So it is with compassion and comraderie that I plead a case against such obsession.

Firstly, pursuing personal improvement broadly is less fulfilling than pursuing a more concise or tangible goal. This we know intuitively. It feels better to have planted a garden or studied for a test than it does to watch YouTube videos about how to improve as a gardner or listen to a podcast about improving study habbits. We come up with heuristics and values we wish we embodied, but 'actually doing things' is always of more value to ourselves and our communities than a) being the emodiment of some random quality we deem valuable or b) being seen as someone who embodies that quality by others.

Secondly, I make the argument that time spent chasing the self-help/self-improvement dragon could be better spent. The obvious alternative would be spending that time doing something more tangibly 'bettering' for ourselves or those around us, like volunteering or learning. But there's another alternative, which is doing nothing. Well, not literally nothing, unless something like contemplation or meditation counts as nothing. But I mean nothing as a placeholder for leisure. The pursuit of high quality leisure can be so much more fulfilling than neurotically obsessing over improving one self. High quality leisure is really anything but scrolling which is generative or stimulating. This could be reading, playing a sport, calling your mom, cooking a meal. A better word for nothing would of been anything.

This line of reasoning is why I believe reading fiction is more valuable than reading non-fiction. I could probably write a whole post about this, and it isn't a very popular opinion. But to keep it brief, fiction can teach us all the valuable lessons in life. Lessons about love, pain, ambition, struggle, friendship, family, suffering, etc, that self-help books can only offer tiny doses of. Secondly, I think fiction is actually more stimulating than self improvement content, and empathizing with a character does more for the soul and mind than reading an anecdote being stretched into a argument in favour of some stupid life-hack. Lastly, alot of self-help/improvement books could be an essay. Some could be a paragraph or a sentence. But these books are artifacts of greed, whereby a common-sense piece of life advice is stretched into a 200 page bog of self indulgence. I'm a big fan of the If Books Could Kill podcast, and one of their criticisms of these sorts of books is that they're really all sort of the same. Michael and Peter, the hosts, call it the 'One Book Theory', and I think its hilarious and true.

Lastly, I'll touch on the pursuit of being 'better' itself. In most cases, this ambition to improve is selfish, or at least vain. I think alot of people interested in self-improvement, particularly men, are doing so as a proxy for pursuing status. Striving to be better than you were yesterday seems reasonable, but that ambition exists in a self-obsessed vaccum. Strength of character comes from so much more than grindset, getting in shape and reading stoic texts. A lot of the culture and talking points around self-help/improvement really takes place in a small corner of the vaste expanse that is being good and becoming better. Particuarly, a lot of it just centers around very material goals of earning more or being more attractive. That narrowness leaves so much to be desired; I wish these people obsessed with self improvement, as I once was, were more keen on being better to those around them, doing what makes them happy, and were kinder to themselves along the way. Those people would live more virtuous and rewarding lives, which should be the ultimate goal of someone attracted to the idea of 'improving'.

I am going to stop it here. You can probably tell why I aimed to keep it short in the first place. There's a reason so many people become interested in self-help and self-improvement. There's nothing wrong with those goals in general, and some of the most admirable people in history seem to have reflected/written about those goals throughout their lives too. I guess I'm speaking to the current 'meta' of self-improvement content and how it affects our society, particularly young men, and I just sought to elucidate an alternative to that never-ending pursuit.

Thanks for reading!