For a professional psychologist, Svend Brinkmann has a peculiar message to deliver: quit being so self-absorbed. It’s not that the Danish professor doesn’t want you to find your absolute best self—he just worries that the Western world’s “self-help craze, the imperative to perform and be flexible and optimize yourself all the time” has become pathological. (He outlines as much in the book he wrote last year, Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze.)

We’ve become so obsessed with looking inward and trying to achieve our ideals, he says, that it’s actually made us less equipped to be a human on the outside (you know, the type that's actually connected to other people). Oh, and on top of that, we’re supposed to be happy all the time, which, turns out, is a hard thing to do when you’re constantly being told you can do and be better, and more positive, and more productive. It’s almost like self-help isn’t always... that helpful.

Dr. Brinkmann has some alternative options for those feeling self-optimization fatigue. And if, in an ironic twist, that sounds like it’s own version of self-help, consider that his solutions have very little to do with you specifically, and everything to do with making the world a better place.

So what’s the problem with focusing on constant self-optimization?

It's a process without end. You can never say, "Now I've realized my full potential. Now I am actually the best version of myself." Of course, it's part of the human condition that we strive for things. [But] if we're only okay as long as we are striving, moving, developing, then we're never okay. Then we can never really say to ourselves, "Well, I do something valuable. I lead a meaningful life. I don't have to strive to become someone else over time." I think that is quite dangerous.

The main thought of a depressed person is, "I'm not good enough, I can never be good enough, it's my own fault why I'm not good enough." The frightening fact is [that] the depressed person is actually right. He or she is actually interpreting society's message to the individual correctly. We're never allowed to be happy and satisfied, both what we are and what we do.

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But before this constant self-optimization existed, there was still depression and anxiety.

Yeah. These are likely problems that are part of the human condition. In many ways, they are productive for us. It's rational to feel anxiety when there's something to fear. It's rational to feel depressed when something awful has happened to you, or if you have been under a lot of pressure for a long time. Then depression is the organism's way of reacting, withdrawing, and perhaps metaphorically recharging the batteries.

But now, there's so much pressure in modern society to perform and to be productive, to be efficient, that we don't have this time to recharge. We tend to pathologize these kinds of sadness or losses of energy.

"Who said that happiness is all that? No one knows what happiness is."

What's something concrete we can actually change?

I think we should stop individualizing social problems. We try to adjust people to circumstances that aren't really worth being adjusted to. So we have life coaching, we have psychotherapies, we have mindfulness. We have to work on a much more structural level. If people suffer from stress in an organization, try to look at how work is organized and change it, instead of simply referring people to stress coaching or mindfulness exercises. That might work for a short while, but it's really just treating the symptoms instead of getting to the root of the problems.

I have nothing against mindfulness. I think we should have that in our toolbox. But it's very naïve if we want to really help people with large problems in their lives by teaching them to be present in the moment.