Self-Improvement Doesn’t Work for Everyone

A gentle critique.

It only took a week.

My partner had to go out of town for a funeral. We decided I’d stay home with the baby, because babies on planes make everyone miserable. A day later she caught a respiratory infection from daycare, which led to a night at an emergency clinic on top of juggling a job and a side hustle. By the end of that week I was sick, tired, and cranky.

That’s when it hit me:

This is what single parents feel like…

all the time.

Since then, we’ve lost our daycare to a pandemic. It didn’t matter. Like everyone else, we were still expected to work our jobs and run our side hustles, because even dual income households walk a financial tight rope. Now when we need rest and recovery time more than ever, we’re facing an onslaught of demands from our employers, while riding along the edge of economic uncertainty. Even my school is talking about increasing our class sizes and teaching loads.

This last year hasn’t stopped bloggers and podcast hosts from cranking out endless prescriptions for mind and body, promising us a chance to make our lives better by attending to habits and attitudes instead of demanding a healthier society. The thing is, I don’t think it’s making us better people. Instead, I see a bunch of bros running around quoting Marcus Aurelius at each other while sticking their money into cryptocurrencies, ignoring current events, and trashing the environment. A lot of us have simply stopped reading the genre, for this very reason.

It doesn’t work.

We’ve maxed out on self-improvement.

There was a time when pop philosophy and psychology could give us a different perspective on our problems.

It’s over.

Sure, it’s still interesting to read about 4-hour work weeks and flow states. We’re all about practicing stoicism in our daily lives. We’re hydrating, and eating healthy. We’re mindful. We’re grateful.

It’s not enough.

We’ve achieved everything self-improvement has to offer. If we’ve failed, it’s because our environments haven’t allowed us to live healthy lives. We’ve lacked the tools and resources to implement all that great advice, and in the end that’s not our fault. What we need now is for our bosses and politicians to read all this self-improvement stuff. We need them to help us create the conditions that reward healthy lifestyles, instead of forcing us to accommodate an utterly insane set of expectations.

Right now, we’ve got half of society practicing mindfulness and gratitude, and the other paying lip service to it. And then we have the top 10 percent acting like greedy children. That’s not gonna work.

A society run like that will collapse.

It’s already happening.

Self-improvement ignores reality.

We live in a world where self-improvement addresses the symptoms of our problems, while distracting us from their causes.

It’s true, we’re tired. We’re broke. We’re lonely. We have trouble sleeping. We struggle with our emotions. We don’t get enough done. That’s because we’re overworked. We aren’t paid what we’re worth. Most CEOs and middle managers are happy to sacrifice our basic human rights in order to increase their profits. At least half of our politicians like it that way. They want to close off the remaining paths of social mobility. There’s entire industries out there dedicated to keeping us broken and destitute.

The problem isn’t you.

The self-improvement industry merely offers a set of coping mechanisms for all this. It fails miserably at attuning us to the conditions of our lives that need improvement. At worst, it teaches us to ignore these conditions and allow them to deteriorate even further.

It sends a clear message:

Don’t try to change anything.

The problem isn’t society.

It’s your attitude.

Self-improvement often likes to label people as “toxic,” but there couldn’t be a more toxic thing to tell someone who needs help. It’s nothing more than a flat refusal to acknowledge social responsibility.

Self-improvement ignores privilege.

Most self-improvement only works for a small handful of people. Their advice does wonders if you’re a dude, or a woman ensconced in the upper middle-class. These people either don’t have kids, or they can afford to outsource childcare and chores while pursuing their careers and telling everyone else they can “have it all” if they just learn to declutter.

It doesn’t work so well for anyone else.

That’s the problem.

It would be one thing if self-improvement books and articles came with a disclaimer on them, but they don’t. Even worse, these authors often claim their tricks and strategies can help anyone.

That’s a little arrogant, isn’t it?

A lot of this advice also offers strategies that are bound to backfire when used by people in marginalized positions.

For example:

Last year, there was a spate of articles ripping off ideas from Susan Cain’s Quiet, often without even mentioning her work. These articles were often written by dudes presenting themselves as introverts, praising other men who’ve earned attention for being quiet. They concluded that you could succeed in life by being quieter.

Women were quick to point out that being quiet hasn’t often served them in the workplace. They tried to add nuance to the discussion. Ironically, the authors didn’t listen.

This is the mistake self-improvement keeps making. It takes substantive ideas and then waters them down for mass appeal. It erases race and gender, because that tends to offend some people. It does all this to present a powerful, timeless message: Anyone can achieve anything they want with the right mix of habits and mindsets. This message doesn’t stack up with reality, though, and it’s damaging.

We’re tired of it.

Self-improvement breeds selfishness.

It would be great if self-improvement could ever hook up with social justice. This union makes a lot of sense. They exist on a continuum. In order to have any impact on the world, you have to master yourself (assuming you aren’t born into wealth and privilege).

That’s the first step.

And yet, mastering yourself makes little difference in a world where everyone pursues their own wealth and happiness at each other’s expense. Unfortunately, America has become a bizarre hellscape where everyone thinks they’re selfless and humble, when they’re not.

It’s almost funny.

Self-improvement stops short of embracing social justice. It talks about confidence and self-esteem, but then turns around and tells us to back down from demanding equal pay or voting rights. It draws on pop stoicism to warn us about the dangers of complaining too much, when the truth is people with power are always complaining, and people without it are always being told to shut up. It tells us to focus on the self, to the exclusion of everything happening outside of that. Finally, it encourages us to blame ourselves and each other for everything wrong in our lives.

That’s not a recipe for growth.

It bakes psychopaths.

Self-improvement recoils from talk about equity and equality. Instead, it falls back on libertarian gibberish. It clings to toxic myths about rugged individualism, making no room for collectivist attitudes or genuine rejections of materialism. So while most self-improvement might claim to make our lives better, it often does the opposite. It often works against us, seeking to rewrite our brains so we chase completely contradictory goals — like becoming a billionaire while also rejecting materialism.

The end result is that we run in opposite directions, and wind up staying exactly where we are, craving yet more self-improvement that’s not going to solve our core problems.

So, will self-improvement ever talk about race and gender? Will it ever address social class? Will it ever approve of protest? If nothing else, will it ever admit that it’s not the answer to everything?

I don’t know, but it needs to.

Desperately.