Like many others, after a long day of working, staying across current affairs, caring for my dog, catching up with friends and family, maintaining my home, keeping up with my book club, endeavouring a grooming routine, journaling, meditating, trying to eat relatively healthily and squeezing some exercise in, I like to unwind by scrolling on my phone in the fleeting last moments before I do it all again. It’s there that I’m often greeted with a wave of content telling me I need to be doing more, better.
We’ve come a long way since Tony Robbins first took to the stage with his headset and hot coals. When we look at its previous forms, the ‘self-help’ of today is relatively indistinguishable from the rest of the content we mindlessly consume, but it still promises maximum productivity and answers to dilemmas we never knew we had. Under the guise of ‘self-care’ and ‘levelling up’, self-improvement has become a hamster wheel to which we devote our time, energy and money. But with little to show, bar a deficit of free time for all our supposed progress, what if all this improvement is just a bumpy road to nowhere?
Whether it’s someone prompting you to ‘test’ the toxic people in your life, breaking down the nail colours that’ll snag you more dates or seemingly benign ‘get ready with me’ videos edified with poignant notes on life, there’s a lot of advice out there—too much, some might argue. Much of it even contradicts itself. As I write this, a text from a friend asks if I’ve tried ‘colour analysis’ yet to ‘find my season’; TikTok is serving me with videos on how to test my partner’s dedication to me and skincare ads that feel like personal attacks flood my feed. And while I don’t feel inclined to pay to be told I look ashy in green, it’s no surprise how much we lap up this prescriptive content.
As a society, we seem hardwired to prognoses and groupings. Between zodiacs and attachment styles, to Myers-Briggs and sleep positions, we’re infatuated by the idea of knowing ourselves and giving our behaviour meaning. It’s self-awareness, bottled up and handed to us for our convenience, and this is nothing new—documentation of ‘self-help’ has been traced back to Ancient Egypt. After centuries of literature, countless documentaries, TED Talks and a boundless array of articles and podcasts on the subject, though, our quest for our ‘best selves’ has become diluted—not to mention extremely profitable. Out of the best-selling self-help books of all time, the top five alone have collectively sold over 250 million copies and counting. According to a 2019 report by the Global Wellness Institute, the industry represents a US$4.4 trillion market, leading a 2021 NielsenIQ report to declare health and wellness as “the single most powerful consumer force”.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to be better—some might even argue that it’s a noble, if not necessary, endeavour—self-improvement, ‘inner work’, or whatever else you want to call it, has a shadow side.
Just as disorders can develop from a preoccupation with health and appearance, the same phenomenon can occur within our emotional lives, where we hyper-fixate over whether we’re at our physical, psychological and spiritual prime. As Seerut Chawla, a London-based psychotherapist who takes what some might call a ‘tough love’ approach to social media therapy, notes, this fervent pursuit of inner work can actually enable emotional avoidance.
“It’s a funny dichotomy because, on one hand, we have the encouragement of a very [egocentric] way of being and, on the other, [we’re] treating ourselves like a project that must constantly be improved in order to avoid what is actually going on internally,” she writes, emphasising how easily one can form unhealthy obsessions. “Just like an over-fixation on food or exercise isn’t well behaviour, neither is an over-fixation on your feelings. You are not a project, you are a person. You are allowed to just be.”
The concept of ‘self-care’ has deep roots in history, from Socrates to the work of feminist activist Audre Lorde and the Black Panther movement of the ’60s and ’70s, but the bubble-wrapped iteration we know today was born out of 2020, a year when isolation and crumbling social structures were taking their toll on people. In a time when life itself was in flux, it was a breath of fresh air to be encouraged to prioritise our mental health. Now, though, the inundation of self-care content goes far beyond a friendly face permitting you to take a break or heal your inner child. With so much to sift through, the onslaught of tips and tricks congeals into one imposing idea: we are broken and need to be fixed.
It’s true that a core part of marketing has always been convincing people that they are not whole as they are, but where that mostly used to pertain exclusively to physicalities, we’re now coming up short in just about every facet of life. From relationships and work to diets and beauty treatments, the infiniteness of our inadequacies is overwhelming. These notes of self-improvement stop feeling aspirational and are framed more as basic measures we should already have been doing, leaving us to feel two steps behind at all times.
In the age of smartphones, exposure doesn’t always help. Between media publications, Hollywood, influencers, reality television and beyond, we’ve never had such voyeuristic access to the intimate routines of the rich and famous—people whose priorities can afford to be less about making ends meet and more about embellishment and spiritual fulfilment. Take Kendall Jenner in her at-home cryo chamber, carving out time in her day for sound bath meditation and IV drips, indirectly confusing our own needs. It’s easy to see how sitting on the sidelines of these idyllic lives may make one want to be put in the race, too. In this way, well-being at its core loses all meaning, though, replaced by a somewhat competitive insecurity driven by the need to keep up with our peers – no matter how inequitable the starting points are. But as media psychologist Dr. Pamela Rutledge explains, we have an evolutionary pull to observe and mirror.
“Humans are social animals. We are hardwired to be interested in what others do as a means of understanding where we fit in our social environments. This is natural,” she tells me. “The only problem is when you interpret virtual presentations as some measure of what you are supposed to achieve rather than take whatever inspiration you find and move on to focusing on your own life.”
According to Svend Brinkmann, a Professor of Psychology at Aalborg University and author of Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze, there is a paradox at play with self-improvement in that turmoil in the wider world can compel us to chase our own tails, but, in turn, distract us from facing the world head-on.
As Professor Brinkmann describes, we live in an “accelerating” culture, whereby things are developing at breakneck speed before we can even get a chance to understand them. This uniquely modern way of being is not built for contentment, he argues, particularly with a constant barrage of information about how others manage to get it done. We’re left to compare and critique, feeling shame for all we’re not achieving and looking at how we can be better rather than how we can do better.
In fixating on looking inward, we abandon our innate pull towards community in favour of rampant individualism.
“We forget about collective organising,” says Professor Brinkmann, explaining how our desire for personal growth can distract us from more salient issues impacting our day-to-day experiences. “We forget about improving our workplaces by restructuring, by better wages, by having a workload that is actually manageable instead of [practising] mindfulness so you can cope with something that is too hard.
“I fear that these techniques are sometimes used to allow you to adapt to circumstances that you really shouldn’t [have to] adapt to,” he notes.
Perhaps it’s this illusion of agency that keeps us hooked, though. Whether it’s spiritually or physically, self-improvement can offer us some semblance of control, putting us in the driver’s seat as if all our earthly problems may be willed away with the right routines or the idea that we can shop our way to a fully realised self. But maybe, just maybe, wellness is equal parts getting enough protein, stretching and meditating as it is pushing for better wages and access to healthcare. Sure, you could argue that you can pursue both, but only one has an end goal.
The crux of self-improvement is that it can be endlessly mined as a tool for consumerism because it has no finish line. There can be something beautiful in its ambiguity when we accept it as a process and not a measure of success, but there is also something ceaseless in this. Without limits, we could theoretically spend our entire lives figuring out what we’re lacking instead of focusing on the tangible issues in front of us.
In Professor Brinkmann’s work, he recognises this desire to fill a void as a modern faith.
“We have the idea that happiness is connected to self-development as the ultimate goal of life. It is a secular version of salvation, and who does not want to be saved by becoming the best version of oneself? However, we never reach the goal,” he says. “There is always something to improve and, like addicts, we move from one self-development concept to the next and need more and more in a perpetual cycle of optimisation.”
The hard truth, he laments, is that personal fulfilment will always be a driving force for marketers and media to sell us ideas and snake oils because people want to be happy. It’s one of the most natural impulses. Only, as both Professor Brinkmann and Dr. Rutledge urge, we’re not really supposed to feel good all the time, and as major studies have proven, we’re actually more emotionally, spiritually and even physically healthier when we’re connecting with the broader community.
“Life is a continuum of experience. If it were always ideal, there would be no way to distinguish the good from the very good and the bad,” says Dr. Rutledge. “It would all be the same and, therefore, would no longer feel ideal.”
In 2024, doing or having it all is not an ideal to work towards, but a prolific scam that keeps you a consumer. Yogalates, pricey face masks, TikTok-spruiked focus methods and pop psychology aren’t necessarily harmful to indulge in, but relentlessly tweaking yourself can distract from the real matters holding us back. Self-improvement content might feel like a quick fix for our problems, but it’s important to avoid the trap of passive consumption without any actual change.
We have one life, and it’s understandable that we want to get it right. But as the John Lennon song says, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”. My days aren’t long because of my posture or a simple skincare routine that doesn’t stop me from looking the age I am or even because of a comfy green sweater that isn’t my ‘season’. There’s more at play when you look outward, and liberating yourself from the hamster wheel of constant improvement is as good as any firewalk. Chances are, you’ll gain a lot more anyway.
This story first appeared on GRAZIA International.