Have you noticed how we’re suffocating under a tidal wave of self improvement diarrhoea?

These days such self-help manifests itself into catchy click-bait such as:

16 ways to convince yourself to eat shit, wasting your life away at a cubicle 10 hours a day, until your anal prolapse lands you in a nursing home. 18 ways to motivate yourself to be less of a useless waste of space, number 15 will really make you want to put away the noose. 33 different ways in which you can become a self made, millionaire, philanthropist that have nothing to do with your privilege.

This isn’t a phenomena that the internet can be exclusively blamed for. ‘How to make friends and influence people’ was published in 1936 and the state of the self-help world has only grown progressively worse since.

Magnanimous as I am, I’m going to provide you with some soothing messages as an antidote to this glut of self-help tripe.

You cannot improve yourself.

Let’s repeat that for effect. Say it with me this time.

You cannot improve yourself.

Feel relieved?

Think about it. If you are a flawed, miserable individual who needs the grace of a self-help guru to improve your pathetic life how are you going to improve in the first place?

If you are flawed you cannot by the nature of being flawed improve yourself because you were already flawed to begin with and a flawed being could not by its own nature cease to be flawed by its own will.

You can either accept you are flawed and move on with your life or accept that you were never flawed to begin with and therefore don’t need to improve yourself.

In either respect. You cannot improve yourself.

Here’s my second message of hope.

Everything grows worse in time, including you.

Entropy is a fundamental reality of the universe. Everything will decay into nothing, even the universe itself. You will grow old and begin to slowly watch as all of the faculties you possess now begin to erode and finally die.

All you have is the present moment.

Self improvement fundamentally sells you on the lie that you must invest in the future and so you end up living entirely within this non-existent future realm. Just visualise your success! Dream of your perfect future self! Be the best version of you you can be!

What if the best version of you existed 12 years ago? You’re never getting that shit back.

What this robs you entirely of is this present moment, which is all you really have. Yet when you buy into this myth of self improvement you spend your entire life living for tomorrow, you waste the present, the life you actually have right now, dreaming of this future self that fundamentally does not exist anywhere but your imagination.

My final message of hope.

You are not responsible for yourself.

Contrary to common belief I think we’re plagued with feeling too responsible for ourselves. As though we are gods that could carve our own beings out of clay and get a choice about the mass of flesh we call ‘I’.

Yet you don’t have any choice in a myriad of different factors that end up forming who you believe you are. You have no choice about where you’re born, who your parents are, what education system you’re thrust into, your genetic make up, your height, eye colour, the language you speak, your IQ and whatever shit you suffered in life so far at the hands of other people. None of that is in your control and most of that makes up what you consider yourself today.

How can you improve any of that? The simple answer is you cannot as you never had any control over it to begin with.

Consider an egregious example of someone born with an IQ of 60. Are you going to tell them that if only they could accept the wisdom of self improvement that they’d be able to overcome such a barrier? If only they adopted the pomodoro technique, learned to be proactive and stood up straight with their shoulders back they’d be able to be the next CEO of Google or a doctor or an engineer? And if they’re not? Well they just don’t work hard enough evidently.

That would be absurd bordering on cruelty, such a person, through no fault of their own, simply doesn’t have the ability to attain ‘success’ in the means in which our society judges it. Nor does this person need to attain such ‘success’ to have a fulfilling life, they can just be who they are which is OK. Yet this myth, that you, your ego, is the only thing possibly responsible for your life is what the self-help world attempts to thrust down people’s throats with the vigour of a serial rapist who has just heard police sirens mid coitus.

Beyond the circumstances of our birth the environments we are in every day have a massive impact on our well being.

Maybe the reason you can’t concentrate on your job isn’t because of some personal moral failing, some inability to simply knuckle down and work hard, but because your job is fucking mind numbingly boring. Perhaps you were never meant to spend your life trapped in a cubicle, staring at a computer monitor, filling in insurance reports, with the only reprieve being a Tesco meal deal at your desk and 7 pints after work.

Maybe the reason you struggle to achieve the marks you want to at school is not because you’re stupid, or lazy, but because the school you go to is a horrendous, prison like environment where you get the shit kicked out of you every day. Where you spend most of your time worried about getting your head slammed against a wall, your nose broken, or some cunt deciding it would be funny to spit on you or throw iodine over your head. This doesn’t leave much time to learn Maths.

You could improve these individual situations but it has nothing to do with improving yourself, it just means leaving the bullshit behind and doing something you actually want to do with your life.

There’s nothing wrong with you. Nothing flawed about you. You are who you are and that’s OK.

The irony of the self-help world is that it isn’t about you at all. The most honest self-help gurus are just attempting to make money for themselves by exploiting you. The more insidious underbelly of that is to force you to conform to whatever the economic reality of the time is. ‘How to make friends and influence people’ was written in the 30’s when economic success meant being able to shake hands, network, pitch business deals and generally speaking be the best used cars salesmen you could over whatever money making idea you were presenting.

A modern day self-help book such as ‘The 7 habits of highly effective people’ teaches you how to be effective in the modern day workplace where you are bombarded with an infinite amount of information that demands your attention. Learning how to be proactive, prioritise your work load and permitting yourself ‘self care’ time to ‘recharge’ so that you can go at it all over again becomes the modern means to produce as much as you can for your overlords.

Another modern example. Jordan B Peterson’s self-help book “12 Rules for Life” is a simple repackaging and selling of protestant work ethic for the ‘millenial age.’ A message to remind us of the good old days. Where a man worked 16 hours a day, owned his wife and threatened the endless cacophony of children bursting forth from her loins with the threat of eternal torture if they didn’t swallow the same shit he did. It’s no coincidence that this book has risen to prominence in a time where people are starting to question why 1% of people own 99% of all the wealth and where women are demanding equal rights to men.

Self improvement is not about you.

It is not about making you any better, happier, more knowledgeable, more fulfilled. It’s about making you a more productive cog in the work machine and perpetuates the myth that those who own wealth in our society own it because they are highly efficient, productive, workers who simply deserve it more than those lazy poors. Not because of any status, privileged, birth or simply blind luck that shot them to the position they’re in.

So the next time you consider buying a self-help book, attending a lecture or purchasing a video series. Spend that money on something more useful instead, like alcohol, cocaine, a 16 oz steak or a stack of vintage porno mags. Anything to remind you that the present moment is what exists.

Because you cannot improve yourself.