What's "Better" Than Self-Improvement
How a human is naturally designed for personal evolution
Q: "So if I shouldn't improve, then am I supposed to sit on the couch all day?"
A: Well, let's question what you mean by Improve.
Q: Improve at a skill?
A: That's fine. There are better and worse race car drivers. OK, so you're better. Now what?
Q: Improve on lots of skills. Make a repertoire.
A: What about this? Does it make your self any better?
Q: Because now you can help people.
A: Help them how?
Q: Save their lives, possibly. Indeed, is a world-class pediatric surgeon better than someone leeching off social welfare?
A: Do you think someone becomes a world-class pediatric surgeon through self-improvement?
Q: Perhaps not. Plenty of good people recognize the value of saving children's lives and do hardly anything to equip themselves to do it.
A: A "Should" that claims the capacity to produce a world-class individual is leeching credibility from a purer energy source. A human is naturally meant for greatness, meant for evolution, and encounters a Should that becomes like a Remora fish flaunting its conquests on top of the spine of a Great White Shark.
Q: You mentioned an interesting word there: evolution. It takes the place of Improvement.
A: The problem with Improvement is that it requires an outcome. It requires one to say, here is how I improved, and here is how things were better. But since you cannot multiply yourself and test a counterfactual approach in the setting of your life and your mind, it's only possible to know how things would have worked out with your Improvement. Additionally, an outcome requires time to stand still. Absent this criterion, any result can be overturned five seconds after measurement.
Q: This makes nonsense about self-improvement.
A: Self-improvement is founded on shame. The idea of a "better" vs. a "worse" can only sprout in the soil of self-deficiency. You will eventually discover that no one cares about gaining Improvement anyway.
Q: What do they care about?
A: They care about being able to move away from where they currently are.
Q: Movement over Improvement, haha.
A: Ironically, the concept of self-improvement, with its standards of propriety in relation to the destination, freezes humans in their place at the starting line of the journey.