What would your life look like if you did not care about furthering yourself, optimizing yourself, advancing yourself, or improving yourself?
I think you would realize that you actually have nothing to do with yourself—because everything you do is in this quest or pursuit of perfection. You need to lose a few more pounds. You need to make a few thousand more dollars. Everything needs to somehow fix the “not enoughness” that you feel.
When Self-Improvement Becomes a Trap
You have a free moment to yourself? Well, you need to spend that learning—reading a book or something. I’m not demonizing wanting to learn. I’m demonizing what motivation is actually backing that action.
Are you pursuing that action from a sense of “I’m not okay as I am. I’m not enough. Therefore I need to fill this gap with more knowledge, information, or dollars”?
Because that is not self-improvement. That is self-abandonment disguised as growth. It looks productive from the outside, but on the inside, it’s driven by the belief that you’re fundamentally lacking—and that if you just fix enough things about yourself, you’ll finally be worthy.
The Perpetual Chase of the “Ideal Self”
I realized a few years ago that this is how I was living my entire life. Every single moment was being used for self-optimization. My ideal self was always in some ideal future—which, by the way, never came, because the future is imagination. I was essentially just perpetually unhappy. Nothing was ever enough for me. It was always that I needed more money, more time, or more knowledge. It was never allowing the current, present self that I was being to be enough. And if I wasn’t enough, then I obviously couldn’t be happy.
The Paradigm of Fixing Yourself
Until I realized I was in this pattern, I was stuck in what I call the paradigm of fixing yourself. You can’t fix yourself to a perfect version when you are still stuck in the paradigm of fixing yourself. It is only through leaving that paradigm that you become “fixed”—which isn’t actually really fixing at all, because it’s realizing that nothing ever needed to be fixed. But you can’t realize that in a paradigm where you constantly need another fix.
How to Leave the Fixing Paradigm
Think of it like an addiction. Imagine I said, “I’m going to take away your drugs.” Now you don’t get to experience them. And you say, “But wait, how will I ever feel good again?” And I say, “We’re going to detox from this. And you’re going to realize that you don’t need them anymore.”
But at this point, you have been completely convinced that you cannot live a life that feels good to you at all without the drugs. From a higher perspective, you know that there is a reality beyond drugs—and you know that you can restore your original positive state. It really is quite the same with exiting the paradigm of fixing yourself.
You Were Never Broken
When you came into the world, you were unfixable—because there was nothing to be fixed. You were literally a perfect, whole, creative, beautiful being. You were just convinced of imperfection. We are playing the game of imperfection. And leaving the paradigm of fixing yourself is essentially saying: “I will no longer play that game.”
