In an age of wellness trends and hustle culture, self-improvement becomes quantified and objectified. Cold plunges make us healthier, a side-gig will make us wealthier and becoming a content creator will let us do whatever we want whenever we want. Social media sells us the idea that if we do more, we will improve ourselves, but in pursuit of what?
Ideas of self-improvement are tied up in the notion that if we do more of the things we think are ‘good’ for us, we will be happier. Needing to improve upon oneself insinuates that our current state is not an acceptable form to ourselves. The need to improve ourselves means the way we currently are, before this ‘improvement’, is not acceptable to us. We do not love ourselves if we need to improve ourselves.
Love should be unconditional. Nobody is perfect sure, but to our parents or siblings or partners or friends, we don’t say you need to improve yourself. Truly loving someone should within itself be unconditional. Not in the sense that if a loved one betrays us, we need to still love them, but that we love them for the way they currently are, barring a change. We do not need them to be anything else to love them. The same is true in the positive case, if we look at our partner and think I love you but you need to do or be X, I don’t believe we truly love them.
To love oneself should be no different. We hear ideas how important self-love is, but it cannot be true to love yourself and then look in the mirror and say I love you but you need to lose 5 pounds, work extras hours for your promotion, try harder to be likable, etc. The self-identification of our own flaws prevents us from loving our self.
Instead, we should strive for a different practice of self-actualization. This idea was presented to me in the book Conversations with God Volume 1 by Neale Donald Walsch. I am not very religious myself, and I don’t think this seres of books requires that, but I found one concept very insightful. That is to live a ‘godly’ life, we need to live in pursuit our truest-self. To summarize the point – God is perfect, God created us to have free will so we can experience joy, God created us so God is within us and to live in pursuit of God, we need to live to be our truest-self to experience that joy. That is, living to what our heart says and pursuing the realization of what we truly are and what we desire, whatever that is.
The idea of self-actualization is a more sympathetic view point that makes no judgement on our current state. We either are living our truest-self, or we are not. The acts may look similar to self-improvement, but are far more subjective to the self than self-improvement considers them. We should strive to live to be our truest-self, not because the way we currently are is not satisfactory, but because not becoming or being truest-self is to live against God. To demystify the idea of ‘living against God’, we can consider simply as not living fulfilled. The greatest achievement in life is to be living as our truest-self.
This idea doesn’t say we should not love ourselves if we are not our truest-self. We can objectively step outside of ourselves and ask “are we living that truest-self?” without judgement, and take course-correcting action from there. Determining and knowing our truest-self is a lifelong pursuit that is hard to put into words or quantify. The only real way is to ask ourself ‘is this my truest-self’ and we often have an immediate answer to that.
That self is not as objective as self-improvement would say. There are not a specific set of steps or practices that tell us what to do. The greatest people in history and in our lives are those who achieved self-actualization. Those poeple may often go unknown or under-appreciated, but that is the point. We would not tell the Buddha himself that had he gotten 1-hour of sunlight a day and took a 15-minute sauna would he finally achieve Nirvana.
In striving for self-actualization, we are aiming to become exactly who we want to be, not who self-improvement tells us we should be. This viewpoint is more gracious to the delicate self and allows us to love ourselves in pursuit of becoming that self.
To summarize I believe:
Self-improvement says if we our Self and add positive trait X, we will become Self+X. This can be done infinitely, so there is no point of true joy or happiness. Over time, we are just self+X+X+X
Self-actualization says if we aim to become our truest self, we gradually get closer to Self = Joy, and if we live to follow what our truest-self asks for, we will achieve that.
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Back after falling off the wagon of becoming my truest-self 😉
Training for a marathon
Did not meditate
Been good following slowcarb diet
Getting back in the gym
Working hard at work
The sun is back
True self here I come!
Lucas Aikins 
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