How to Stop Self-Improvement From Stealing Your Life

Self-improvement is hot right now.

Everyones doing it.

Everyone is journalling, creating personal mission statements and side hustles, meditating, and making it to spin class after work.

People have intricate morning routines complete with burning sage and yoga.

I’ve fallen for the dangers of seeing yourself as “into self-improvement,” and I’ve written about it from the point that all these activities can interfere with you simply sitting your ass down and getting to work.

But there is another, far worse, danger to being enthralled in self-improvement culture.

It can make you miserable.

It can prevent you from enjoying anything that isn’t explicitly linked to bettering yourself.

This happens when you see self-improvement as its own end — the ultimate goal.

Because in all the trends, habits, and side hustles, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.

Why are we all striving, working hard, building businesses, and practicing self-discipline?

What is the ultimate goal?

Freedom? Happiness? Reaching your potential?

It’s ultimately a combination of these values.

But keeping these values in mind as the ultimate goal makes all the difference.

Because when you take the naive approach that being disciplined and practicing self-development are themselves the ends, bad things happen.

Being disciplined isn’t good because “discipline is good. “

Hard work isn’t a value because “hard work is good.”

If you can’t learn to see the forest from the trees and understand that these traits are tools for the greater good, you risk making yourself unable to thrive in enjoying life.

A well-lived life isn’t one spent shunning all pleasure or enjoyment.

You need to treat pleasure with caution, as it can drag people down into vice, but it can be controlled.

Since I’ve adjusted how I perceive self-improvement, enjoyment, and pleasure, I’ve been significantly happier and made progress in my life.

These adjustments have been to integrate self-improvement properly by understanding its role: it’s not an end.

It’s a means.

This distinction makes all the difference.

Rest is Productive

When he was on the Lex Fridman Show, the writer Tim Urban brought up a concept that will stay with me forever.

The Dark Playground.

The Dark Playground is where you’re doing something intended to be fun and relaxing, but you can’t enjoy yourself.

You’re trapped in your mind, thinking about the project you haven’t finished yet, your goals for the end of the week, your new content strategy, or anything other than where you are in the present moment.

You feel like you should be working on these things, so you’re unable to be present for what you’re doing.

The activity doesn’t serve as rest because you’re stressed — judging yourself for how you should be doing something better.

The best way to avoid The Dark Playground is to understand that these enjoyable activities are truly valuable.

You can’t grind away at work nonstop and hope to get anything done; the human mind doesn’t work that way.

We’re not just algorithms to be continuously run. Not for creative work, anyway.

Focused, creative work requires that you rest and recharge. You have to disconnect to come back at your best.

Fortunately, traditional hustle culture is changing.

Successful creators and entrepreneurs at the top of the game advocate for rest and decompression as crucial aspects of productivity.

The most notable example is Mr.Beast (Jimmy Donaldson).

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, Mr. Beast is the most popular YouTuber on planet Earth.

Jimmy spoke on a podcast about how he used to be unable to take any time off from making videos without freaking out about it.

But as he’s gained experienced and matured, he’s realized that these moments for rest are not just indulgent pleasures. 

He needs them. They’re required so that he can decompress and then come back and produce his best work.

Hating yourself for resting turns into a vicious cycle:

Your best work requires you to decompress and recharge. But if you judge yourself for taking time to do this, you’ll enter The Dark Playground, where you don’t decompress and recharge at all.

The way out of this is to see these moments for rest and decompression as valuable parts of your productivity system.

Part of doing the work is making time for activities that allow you to decompress and return to create your best work.

This isn’t lazy.

Rest is productive as long as it’s real rest and not the self-loathing “rest” of The Dark Playground.

Avoiding Pleasure Is For Cowards

I’ve struggled with integrating pleasure harmoniously into my life.

My vices are sugar and (to a lesser extent) alcohol.

Because of this, I’ve been hard on pleasure in my writing. I’m all too aware of the danger of “cheap dopamine,” and my often chosen target of “Netflix and Ice Cream” isn’t random: I go to war almost daily with the part of my mind that wants to lie on the couch and binge TV armed with takeout, beer, and sweets.

Only a few months ago, I was seriously considering abstaining entirely from sugar and alcohol. But I’ve had a change of heart, thanks to Alan Watts.

This is an excerpt from “The Meaning of Happiness.” The section completely changed my perspective on pleasure.

Pleasure is looked down on because it’s dangerous: it takes skill to play “the game of pleasure” well.

But “because it is challenging” is no reason to avoid a game. The pleasures of the senses are not a small detail of life. If pleasure can be appropriately integrated through understanding that it’s fleeting, enjoyment of pleasures can enrich your life.

People’s issues with pleasure occur when they try to hold on to the sensation.

This fuels excessive consumption of alcohol and addiction to gambling, sex, and overeating.

To win the game of pleasure, you need to know when to stop. You need to appreciate that what makes pleasure special is that it is transient.

You lose only when you try to deny the transient nature of pleasure.

Another excerpt from Mr. Watts:

Pleasure is difficult and dangerous. Trying to hold on to it has dragged many people down into the dirt — great people, too (Alan Watts himself struggled with alcohol).

As with anything in life, danger comes from attachment. You lose the game of pleasure when you fall for desire and craving — when you outsource your happiness to obtaining it.

If you can view pleasure as a preference, not a desire, it can sustainably enrich your life.

It takes wisdom and discipline to do this.

Viewing pleasure as a preference instead of desire is the Stoic approach.

One of the best descriptions of the proper role of pleasant things in life comes from “On The Happy Life” by the Stoic writer Seneca.

In the following excerpt, Seneca is defending against an accusation of hypocrisy. The (hypothetical) accuser says it’s hypocritical to condemn material wealth and the niceties it provides. The accusation is:

If you hold that material possessions are essentially meaningless for a good life and that virtue is the only thing that matters for living well, then why don’t you practice what you preach and abandon all your comfort?

Enjoying the comforts of health, affluence, and pleasure doesn’t make you a fool — it’s all in how you perceive it. 

If you define yourself by your possessions or status, you give these things power over you. You become attached to them, and that’s where the danger is.

But pleasure and the pleasant life don’t have to be avoided as long as they can be held in proper perspective: they are preferences, not the condition for your happiness.

If you outsource fulfillment to pleasure, you lose.

If you try to hold on to pleasurable moments, you lose.

But if you can hold pleasure as a preference, accept its beauty is in its transcience, and allow its fleeting nature to enrich your life, you win.

Responsible enjoyment of pleasure is part of a full life.

Self-improvement and self-discipline advice that encourages you to shun it entirely is naive.

Don’t cut it out — learn how to play the game and win.

You’re Not Supposed To Live Up To Your Ideal

Living as a human is like being the donkey chasing a carrot on a stick.

The carrot is the ideal you set for yourself — you never quite reach it. 

But you make progress by reaching for it, though you perpetually fall short.

This is the beauty of being a human. You’re not perfect, and you never will be.

But you keep showing up anyway.

The problem is when you judge yourself too harshly for failing to live up to your ideal.

Let’s again turn to Seneca for some perspective.

In the same letter (”On The Happy Life), Seneca defends another accusation: “wise men do not always practice what they preach.”

He’s addressing how our realities inevitably fall short of the ideal values we set for ourselves.

When you fall short of your ideal, whether that means drinking a little too much, not getting through your entire to-do list, procrastinating on a project, or overeating — don’t hate yourself for it.

Forgive yourself.

You’re not perfect, and you’re not supposed to be.

The fact that you perceive these moments as slip-ups mean you’re striving toward an ideal and holding yourself to high standards.

This is already more than can be said for most.

If you see the purpose of “self-improvement” as the perfect execution of your ideal, you’ll make yourself miserable.

The beauty is in striving and inevitably falling short.

You’re especially susceptible to self-hatred when you focus on discipline as an essential value and not a vehicle toward a higher good.

Why Discipline?

Nat Eliason is one of the best writers online.

A few years ago, he wrote a great piece and invented an insightful term: “Struggle Porn.”

Struggle porn is:

a masochistic obsession with pushing yourself harder, listening to people tell you to work harder, and broadcasting how hard you’re working.

Nat argues that Struggle Porn glorifies suffering and failure and prevents people from seeing that quitting might be the smarter option.

He’s not saying that hard work isn’t important, but it shouldn’t be fetishized.

He’s writing in the context of entrepreneurship: The point is to create a successful business that makes money, not to suffer.

And when you glorify the struggle to the point of fetishization, it can seem to become valuable in itself (which is absurd).

The same point applies to the concept of discipline in general.

People love to post pictures of how early they wake up to crush weights in the gym.

They brag about how long it’s been since their last drink.

They take “no days off.”

This quickly turns into Struggle Porn. We glorify these practices but forget why we see them as admirable in the first place.

Entrepreneurial struggle porn is focused on the struggle instead of the main purpose of a business: being profitable.

So what’s the primary purpose of discipline?

What’s the greater good that goes beyond the glorified examples of a disciplined life?

Discipline equals freedom.

If you don’t have the discipline to align your actions with the person you want to become, you aren’t free to become that person. You aren’t free to captain the ship of your life — to live intentionally and manifest your vision for yourself.

Discipline is a means to that end, and it’s crucial not to forget the ultimate end.

Because when we fetishize discipline and see it as the goal in itself, we lose sight of the bigger picture.

Discipline is valuable because it is the road to self-actualization.

And self-actualization consists of more than robotically executing your schedule and doing deadlifts at 5 am.

It involves the full scope of living as a human: happiness, rest, enjoyment, and controlled pleasure included.

Follow the Why

Take any respected company that is making a difference in the World.

Take their mission statement and become the 5-year old who continuously asks why.

If you go deep enough on the why for any organization, you’ll get to a version of the same fundamental value: human thriving.

We value going to Mars to ensure that humans have a safety net in case we destroy Earth — it’s to continue the flourishing of the species.

We value medical advancements because they increase the number of healthy, happy people free to live and flourish.

From the mission statement of the largest companies to your personal mission, some form of human thriving is at the root of it (unless you’re sadistic).

You miss the bigger picture if you look at self-improvement and discipline as inherently valuable. You’ll make yourself miserable when you rest and have fun, enjoy pleasure, or do anything considered unproductive.

The purpose of discipline and self-improvement is so that you can be happy, fulfilled, and self-actualized. Moments of fun, rest, and joy aren’t trivial and meaningless — they’re a significant part of the point.

Don’t feel guilty for taking a rest — it’s allowing you to come back at your best.

Don’t hate yourself for indulging in some pleasure: it’s a part of living well as long as you don’t try to hold on to it.

Don’t judge yourself for failing to live up to the ideal standards you set for yourself — that’s part of being human.

And don’t think that taking moments to enjoy happiness and be content is “lazy” or “weak.”

These are some of the most meaningful moments. We value hard work because hard work is what allows us to feel these moments.

Keep your priorities in perspective. 

Don’t let self-improvement make you miserable and steal your life.