I’ve tried to improve myself all my life, and I’ve failed. Here’s what I’ve learned from it.

A demotivational speech for self-improvement

Improve yourself, you lazy less-than-perfect-version of what you could be. You could be more successful, have more time, more money and be more attractive if you only find the perfect to do-app, the perfect workflow, the perfect diet and the perfect work out-method. Surely that will you make you admired, content and happy?

Green smoothies. 4 hour work week. Inbox Zero. Paleo diet. Bulletproof coffee. Ice baths. Crossfit or yoga? Both! Speed work, speed date, speed mediate, speed workout, speed through life — but age slowly. You must improve! Optimize yourself in the fastest, most efficient way possible. Rate your Uber driver, your cleaning help, your neighbour. Demand perfection in all things from yourself and others. Make sure you only spend time and money on five star people. Ask for ratings, make sure you are a five star person, partner, colleague, friend. Make sure you optimize your quality time, so that you don’t waste time hanging out with your family and friends. Make sure you do it with your phone in one hand, be ready to document the perfect moments so that the world knows. But don’t forget to check your notifications! Somewhere, someone you follow is being better than you are, has even more quality in their time than you do, has more intense and perfect experiences. They remind you that you can and must improve, because that is how you win at life.

Measure more, quantify everything. The air quality at home, your steps, your sleep, your health, your workouts. Quantify your happiness. Find all the numbers that aren’t perfect and improve them. Once you’re operating under optimal parameters, surely then you are the best, the perfect you?

Buy the best things, and inspire others to buy them too. But buy them first, buy them fastest, because once everyone has it you’re no longer special. Happiness is just a shopping round away, and if the fix is temporary you can always get another as long as you’ve optimized your income, your credit, your savings. Be the first to break the news, to have that insight, to watch that movie, so you can feel superior to those that are behind.

You must not forget to share your success on social media. If nobody knows, if nobody is a little jealous of your achievements and confesses it with a heart or a like, do they really matter? Share it to motivate those that are less perfect than you, that could stand a little improvement and betterment — but not too much, because if they are better, then you are worse. If this achievement gets fewer likes than the last, does it mean it’s not as good? Better do it again, do more, do faster, do better.

This is what my life was. Each new method, each new thing was like starting over in the gym at New Year’s: this time it would make me happier, and better. More content. Sometimes it even worked. Like in my twenties, when I decided to become buff as hell. I worked out five days a week for a whole year. I transformed from average to muscular and fit. I got the attention of many a hot guy previously unattainable to me. It gave me a lot, but not what I wanted. I didn’t know what I wanted, I just knew that this was not it. And so I kept on searching. Always looking for new ways, methods, gadgets that would help me improve, optimize, be better. And every success was a failure, because no matter what it gave me, in the end it was never what I wanted.

The change did not come as a single flash of insight, it came as a series of questions without a final answer. Questions like “what do I have to be grateful for?”, “when do I have enough?” and “how am I making the world a better place?”

One question that I found particularly provoking was “what is the end goal of quantifying, optimizing and improving yourself ?” I thought that it was a stupid question with an obvious answer: this is what progress is. Moving forward, becoming better. I’m not bettering myself then I’m standing still. Standing still means left behind in a time when change is faster than ever. Still, that answer rung hollow. Every optimization led to more time to optimize, but I never seemed to get more time. But that was as it should be, I was busy, and busy meant important. The question became like a particularly annoying pebble in my mind’s shoe. As I was searching for my answer, I stumbled upon Alan Watts’ lectures. He said many things that made sense, things I had never heard before yet which felt familiar. It was as if he reminded me of things I knew, but had forgotten. He also said uncomfortable things, like the quote that made that pebble worse: “Improving yourself is like biting your own teeth, or seeing your own eyes without a mirror”. Did he really mean that we should stop trying to better ourselves?

The answer to that question is not words, but an experience: the experience of waking up. Or perhaps it is rebirth? No matter what you call it, for the first time I feel like I’ve found what I want. I cannot explain it better than this: I’m the same me that I was three, or ten, or twenty years ago. There’s nothing better or worse about me, the only difference is how I choose to act, think and spend my time. I feel different, yet people around me see the same person they’ve always seen. This was frustrating to me until I realized that this is why we can’t improve ourselves: we already are everything we can be, we just get lost a lot. The more lost we are, the more we feel the need to improve and so we look for help in methods and self-help books. It’s like borrowing other people’s lives and trying them on: more often than not, they will not fit. That does not mean that they are a greater success, or that you are a bigger failure. Life is not a zero-sum game.

I’m trying to stop improving myself and optimizing my time, my mind and my body. Instead, I’m trying to be kind. To myself, to others, to the world. If my inside really is my inside, then my outside must be my outside. What follows is that acting kindly towards myself means acting kindly towards my outside as well as my inside. I won’t pretend it’s easy. I fail at it daily, and will keep failing until the day I die. But the more I try, the more I succeed, and the byproduct of succeeding is a feeling I don’t know the name for yet. If feelings are colors, then this is a rainbow of contentment, purpose, meaning, self-worth, and appreciation. There’s a treasure at the end of this rainbow, and if enough of us look for it, perhaps one day we’ll find it.