A very very wise woman once said:
I think we fail to see how we contribute to the things we dislike by never holding ourselves accountable.
We’re ever-increasingly egotistical. We’ve removed the ‘I’, the individual, from all our negative experiences, so that what once was ‘I didn’t enjoy that club/bar/party’ now reads: ‘I am perfect and flawless and that club/bar/party was terrible and immoral and objectively wrong. Hamlet’s mother Gertrude said:
Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul; And there I see such black and grained spots as will not pardon me.
Perhaps we all need to be a little more like Gertrude (without suffering Gertrude’s fate). We need to turn our eyes inward, and stop projecting our incompatibilities and quirks onto unchanging experiences. It isn’t the party’s fault, just like it isn’t the fault of the decor in the restaurant that you didn’t like it. That it didn’t fit your particular aesthetic. We don’t recognise the very active role we play in deciding whether an experience is enjoyable or not. In deciding whether we have fun. In times of inconvenience, we can choose to be grateful. ‘What a privilege it is to feel full. What a privilege it is to be stuck in traffic’. A rarely prophetic trend.
Similarly, despite this egotism, we fail to recognise the agency we have in bettering ourselves either. We don’t take charge of our situation, of chasing the dream of who we want to be. We know who we want to be, and we often know what we need to do to get there. And we just choose not to, citing tiredness or lethargy or illness or ‘rest days’ or it’s just too late at night now so I’ll start in the morning. Or everyone knows you can’t start making meaningful changes on a Thursday. Next Monday will be the beginning of the rest of your life. It never is.
Let’s say you want to work on having a typographic mind, one nourished by reading and learning and writing, not by scrolling. You know what needs to be done. You know you have to delete social media, put the phone down and pick up a book. Ask questions, be ruthlessly curious, read everything. But you choose not to. We choose not to. And we choose not to for no apparent reason.
We often have the resources, the time, the inclination, just not the… will?
I think it’s rooted in fear, in our fear that we won’t be able to explain our own unhappiness. When you have the perfect version of yourself in mind, and you haven’t yet achieved it, you can at least explain your current unhappiness.
You can claim that, well if only I was that person I want to be, then my unhappiness would be gone. It’s explainable, it’s understandable.
I think the real roadblock to self improvement is the fear that, even after achieving this ideal version of yourself, you still might not be happy. And that’s scary, because it would mean that your unhappiness wasn’t rooted in tangible means and measurable virtues. It means that there’s a deeper unhappiness, one you’ll have to do real work to solve. One that getting in shape or getting A*s won’t fix. We continue to prevent ourselves from improving so we can at least explain our current misery. So we feel in control of it all.
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