Improving yourself is only painful if you lack humility. If you have an honest and realistic idea of how ordinary you currently are, and honest and realistic idea of what you can actually achieve in 5 years, then the gradual self-improvement process is pretty damn satisfying.
The problem isn't self-improvement. The problem is typically you get deluded about your own magnificence, and you refuse to pop this delusion.
Rip the band-aid off, once and for all. Here and now.
Recognize you are not the special person you thought you were. Really see how incredible all the people around you are. And I mean locally. I don't mean people on the internet. I just mean the ordinary people around you scratching themselves out lives that seem to satisfy them. Become one of them.
If you have it, keep all the ambition you have. But become satisfied with the process of becoming what you want to be. Find someone, or something to pay you to become who you want to be. This will not be easy, and the work will not be easy, but the pain will be growing pain, and not decaying pain. Decaying pain is what kills you.
Most of the work will be unpaid, this is okay. A happy little flow of money is enough, because some money is really damn useful. Some food, some shelter, some freedom. But there is much less in life that money will buy you than people think there is. And there is much more in life that money robs you of than people realize.
Again, rip the band-aid off. Right here and now. If you do it slowly like most people do, you'll mistake the slow process of becoming wise to your own ordinariness for decay. Rip it off, and then you can improve yourself without pain.
> Recognize you are not the special person you thought you were. Really see how incredible all the people around you are.
What helped for me (though I'm not sure how realistic I currently am - but surely more than before) is not to realise how amazing the people around me are, but how ordinary the people I look up to are - specifically, not locally.
For example, I'd like to be a good programmer. There are a few "big names" online that people listen to; that I listen to. At a certain point, you realise they too make mistakes, they too don't know things that you do, and they have sacrificed some things to get where they are that I am simply not willing to sacrifice - but if I were, I might make it to the same place. But I'm not, and that's fine - now I know what I get back for not being where they are.
> Really see how incredible all the people around you are. And I mean locally. ...the ordinary people around you scratching themselves out lives that seem to satisfy them. Become one of them.
This sentiment has very little actual substance to it. I'm dissatisfied because I want to do something meaningful. I want to leave behind tools that will better my species. I don't want my legacy to be solving a few bugs in obscure proprietary software. Why would I want to emulate people who are satisfied with a meaningless existence? I would much rather rage against the dying of the light.
> Most of the work will be unpaid, this is okay. A happy little flow of money is enough, because some money is really damn useful.
In a very literal sense, we trade life force for money. Money is life force. Telling people to work for free is doing them a disservice.
What exactly are you saying? Rip off the band-aid of ambition and stop trying?
People want instant gratification, they want to compete, they want to crush everyone else with how awesome they are (especially in America). None of which is necessary or desirable for most self improvement. Just consistently getting out there and doing the thing. Being mindful, being present, taking the effort to be introspective and thoughtful, and consistently making a habit of something will lead to become expert at it. Whether it's running, swimming, backpacking, sailing, biking, yoga, drawing, playing the guitar, speaking another language, cooking, or even just being able to process and deal with your own emotions in a healthy and mature fashion.
I agree. Many view self improvement as being a jacked millionaire genius or whatever. Self improvement for me is if I managed to do some small stretching routine to keep my legs a bit more flexible that day, did a small walk, had good oral hygiene, and maybe read the newspaper a bit in the evening. I was never in the running to be a jacked millionaire genius or whatever the fantasy is.
It is also incredibly painful when your conscience and your actual means to achieve what you can conceive are way too far apart, and one of your addictions is to actualize your conscience further neglecting whatever little improvements you could be doing, because not only your end but also your midgame seems hopelessly far away.
Life is way too short to actualize all the improvements you can learn, the speed disparity between learning and executing can be just downright atrocious.
Unpaid work is not ok for a vast majority of humanity, lest we forget that what still kill most of us is not disillusion pain but the lack of basic needs, and that kind of stuff kills you way faster, yes money robs most of us of life, and most of us simply do not have the time or mental space to ever come close to realize it, since we're either strangled by basic needs or entangled in a web of distraction/disinformation.
While information has been made widely available to almost half of humanity, the power to act on most said information is still in the hands of a pretty darn small minority.
Improvement is always a matter of judgement. Of course, if you are super humble everything will seem like an improvement. But isn’t that kind of cheating ?
While I agree that we (where we is a reader of the NYT or other western individuals) focus on hyper optimizing our life towards a perfect, unachievable goal, I am not at all comfortable with the authors assumption that it is inherently bad to do so, and that we should instead be happy with a life of mediocrity.
Every single time humanity visibly progresses, it is because one person (or many) found a problem with themselves or the state they were living in and attempted to remove the problem in hopes of having themselves or their environment become more 'perfect'. If people today decide to stop progressing towards perfection and just be happy with what they have, then there will still be large swaths of people living in extreme poverty, dying from preventable diseases, and suffering from human rights abuses. I really do believe that it is imperative from a humanitarian perspective that while we still have problems in the world, we strive to do everything we can to fix them—and that not doing so is horribly selfish.
Emotions and discontent are programmed in via evolution. The default state of most people is not happiness or sadness. It is discontent. If you are comfortable you aren’t going to keep trying hard. We have vast capacity and have struggled for tens of thousands of years to reach this point. Millions have died in wars for us to have what we have today. To waste that potential and settle into some adtech driven fugue state is unacceptable to me. I will keep learning, and struggling, and growing.
We can't all be Wesley Crusher. I see stories like the one about the five-year-old in China with the 15-page CV and I'm filled with dismay [1]. As a university student, I bear witness to the unbelievable pressure and stress in my peers (and much of it affects me). There's a palpable sense that school is a life raft and everyone is desperate to climb aboard.
This is no way to live. I don't have any idea how to solve this problem but I would be glad to see a discussion.
You seem to be equating problem-solving with optimization, or a drive towards improvement with a drive towards perfection.
No doubt the effort to solve problems and improve one's self and circumstances have been powerful forces behind progress. But arguably, a focus on optimization and perfection can be forces that prevent the kind of progress you praise.
You appear to conflate the absence of self-optimization with 'mediocrity', which seems ... questionable.
It's easy to find examples of both: some great historical figures had rigorous programs of conscious self-improvement; others became great by immediately engaging with some problem entirely outside themselves and if any self-improvement resulted, it wasn't a primary or conscious goal.
It is not inherently bad, but it should not control your life. You should not beat yourself up for not fulfilling an unrealistic idealization of perfection. Not everyone can be like Tim Ferris. You take 500 people who did what he did many maybe two succeed and the rest are mediocre. Luck, whether it's the birth lottery or being at thr 'right place at the right time' (such as buying Bitcoin in 2009-2015), plays a bigger role than we may want to accept.
I think there is some conflict inherent in 1) constantly trying to improve and 2) accepting ourselves for who we are that isn't expressed well in the above article. At what point are you "good" enough to be valued or loved? This is something that's never answered anywhere in our modern culture of self-help and social media, and it is this culture that makes us feel unhappier with ourselves despite any improvements we make.
It's almost religious in the end. There's no global optimum for life, even at an individual scope. That said, spending too much time trying to optimize makes you myopic, which is clearly a subpar way to live one's existence. A baby is probably near peak life.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
I think the problem is better framed as focusing on consistently making the best choices we can given information we have and the situation we face. Yes, we make these choices in a community and our choices impact one another. We should seek to help our neighbors as we can, remembering we may need their help some day.
Living this way takes determination, persistence, and hard work. We need to know when to rest and recharge because fatigue makes us ineffective and error-prone. For me, that includes both rest and exercise.
I find it helpful to discuss my plans with those I trust to refine the plans and projects I undertake. It is too easy to be overly ambitious/optimistic and start more projects than I can finish. Good counsel helps us to evaluate what we do and focus on what best supports our long term goals.
We all make mistakes. I find it better to learn from them and try not to repeat them rather than engaging in self-pity or trying to cast myself as a "victim." Sometimes life is just hard and we need to be thankful for and encouraged by the "wins" we get. Living that way is far more pleasant than being constantly negative and critical of ourselves and others.
> Every single time humanity visibly progresses, it is because one person (or many) found a problem with themselves or the state they were living in and attempted to remove the problem in hopes of having themselves or their environment become more 'perfect'
I'd venture to say more human progress is attributed to warfare than anything else.
If you can't be happy with a life of mediocrity, you are simply not going to be happy. The extreme majority of people are mediocre, and that is exactly what defines mediocre. It's a simple statistical guarantee that most are not going to win the lottery of life and be more.
We aren't making the world or ourselves better by striving towards intense and unrealistically optimistic goals all the time. Our unbound desire to maximize growth is psychotic, and after all we're very much on track to destroy the biosphere if we keep behaving the way we are. Probably past the point of turning back, in fact.
What's the point of all our progress if we end up making ourselves miserable and eventually eradicating ourselves?
On a more serious note, I agree most with your point around digging oneself out of complacency and moving towards a better future — if not for you, for someone else.
Much of post-industrial Protestantism and the 'American Dream' is predicted on the belief that individuals can redeem themselves through 'grit', determination, and 'rising above' adversity. But an increasingly technological and winner-take-all economy makes biological and economic factors possibly more important than willpower alone. As it turns out, successful people are not successful because they worked really hard (although many successful people work hard), read a self-help book book of vapid affirmations, or have a lot of willpower--but maybe due to having an high IQ, or having a lot of family connections and wealth, or just plain stupid luck. Maybe instead of trying to optimize our lives, we should try to just enjoy it.
To what extent does simply enjoying life exacerbate the problems you point out?
If enjoying life is the popular thing to do, the well connected, high IQ and high-grit people will succeed even more dramatically, assuming that such people are often less affected by cultural norms than the modal person.
If we were not to improve ourselves then it would be problematic for humanity as a whole. Think of the health professionals (such as nurses, doctors and psychiatrists) who, if had not put in their time and effort would not have helped countless people. Or what about Edison, Newton, Einstein, Stephen Hawking each of whom spent countless hours improving their knowledge to better humanity.
On the other hand, you have multi-millionaires who have hustled their way to the top but are miserable and jaded after improving themselves so much that they neglected friends and family. Is it worth it then to pursue of a life of improvement?
Ultimately, the decision to go down the path of improvement and subsequently sacrifice is up to the person. But beware, this rat-race can never be won.
Correct me if I'm off-base but it really feels like this article can be summarized with "self-improvement has its place just as recreation does, just don't overdo it." I suppose I'm just not sure what the author is arguing, just that the self-help obsession is just real super bad. For me, my attempts at self-improvement, which are admittedly many and varied and probably too frequent, aren't merely chasing solutions but venturing into others' experiences and picking and choosing which parts of their shoes I want after I've walked a mile in them.
>He cites surveys that show that adolescent girls are increasingly unhappy with their bodies, and that a growing number of men are suffering from muscle dysmorphia
I'm sure consumerism has a role in this but I'd guess that increasing childhood obesity and decreasing levels of testosterone in men are a more obvious reason for these.
Ironically I think Ms. Schwartz could stand to improve her writing, and be more productive with her audience's time. I gave up 7 long paragraphs in, after realizing that:
a) no real counterclaim had been made yet, and
b) I was only 1/4 of the way through this article
Her concluding paragraph is that you should do non-productive tasks sometimes, disconnect, and enjoy yourself. The great irony in this is that I recall being given the same advice in the last couple of self help books I read, Deep Work and The Shallows.
This article seems to be a mountain of words to broad brush a genre, but then I could be wrong, as I only read a quarter of it.
If you think this is bad writing (because it doesn't make a productive use of audience time), the article has a piece of advice for you, "Put away your self-help guides, and read a novel instead."
Like a novel, the reading of an article is meant to be an experience. It follows the "show, don't tell" dictum pretty well. The critique of perfectionism hits at you viscerally, instead of being an academic argument. That good writing necessarily requires a more productive use of audience's time (or follows some economics of the form of insights communicated/time spent), is the optimizing/perfectionist thinking that Ms. Schwartz has taken aim at in her content. So the form follows content in a way. The writer feels that in today's self-improvement culture, we do not appreciate something for its own sake. For example, when we read, we think of "what is it saying? Why does it not say it quickly?", rather than imagining possibilities, chewing on the words of a sentence, or relish the turn of phrases, or appreciating the metaphors employed to communicate a feeling.
You do seem to be right in suspecting that you are wrong about the article. Her concluding paragraph, for example, states that the one should be able to enjoy experiences for their sake alone, rather than the sake of self-improvement. "Things don’t need to be of concrete use in order to have value." This is contrary to the assumptions shared by the two self-help books you allude to: The Shallows and Deep Work. These argue for disconneting FOR the sake of having some value in the dimension of self improvement: for being able to improve the quality of your work (Deep Work), or increasing reading comprehension, e.g. (The Shallows).
I see this sort of comment on every New Yorker article posted here. The style of the magazine is not efficient, short articles. Some people do enjoy longer form, descriptive writing, even if it could be summarised in a shorter article.
I always read the top HN comment or two, then read the article for 10 seconds or so, and then usually switch back to reading HN comments. I find HN comments to be more informative and interesting.
There are some rare exceptions when I actually finish the article, but it's rare.
Yamraj in the Mahabharata asked Yudhister at the river, what is the greatest truth in life? Yudhister replied, the greatest truth in this life is, despite one having to die, man lives like he is going to live forever.
I'll take any chance I can get to up this Lydia Davis short story, called "new year's resolution"[0]:
I ask my friend Bob what his New Year’s Resolutions are and he says, with a shrug (indicating that this is obvious or not surprising ): to drink less, to lose weight… He asks me the same, but I am not ready to answer him yet. I have been studying my Zen again, in a mild way, out of desperation over the holidays, though mild desperation. A medal or a rotten tomato, it’s all the same, says the book I have been reading. After a few days of consideration, I think the most truthful answer to my friend Bob would be: My New Year’s Resolution is to learn to see myself as nothing. Is this com¬petitive? He wants to lose some weight, I want to learn to see myself as nothing. Of course, to be competitive is not in keeping with any Buddhist philosophy. A true nothing is not competitive. But I don’t think I’m being competitive when I say it. I am feeling truly humble, at that moment. Or I think I am—in fact, can anyone be truly humble at the moment they say they want to learn to be nothing? But there is another problem, which I have been wanting to describe to Bob for a few weeks now: at last, halfway through your life, you are smart enough to see that it all amounts to nothing, even success amounts to nothing. But how does a person learn to see herself as nothing when she has already had so much trouble learning to see herself as, something in the first place? It’s so confusing. You spend the first half of your life learning that you are something after all, now you have to spend the second half learning to see yourself as nothing. You have been a negative nothing, now you want to be a positive nothing. I have begun trying, in these first days of the New Year, bur so far it’s pretty difficult. I’m pretty close to nothing all morning, but by late afternoon what is in me that is something starts throwing its weight around. This happens many days. By evening, I’m full of something and it’s often something nasty and pushy. So what I think at this point is that I’m aiming too high, that maybe nothing is too much, to begin with. Maybe for now I should just try, each day, to be a little less than I usually am.
life a lot more fun if your improving at what your doing.
if your playing golf and over the course of the year you improve and hit the ball farther and more accurately - or you life weights and you get stronger, or your coding stuff and you can do it faster, whatever it may be.
I think there is a way to approach improvement, perhaps with the mindset of detached perseverance which will not only allow you to improve, but will allow you to do so without too much mental torture and will make the whole process pleasant.
I was goal-driven and discontent until the pressures of new fatherhood forced me to pause. After a few years when the kids got a little bit easier and I had no real active goals to work towards I felt content (and even happy) for the first time since I became an adult.
I'm never going back to goal-setting. Looking back at it now I see my goals as fantasies, and my efforts to make them real actively prevented me from engaging with my actual life
Wow, it took me reading this comment to realize this. I even read a piece on HN explaining this exactly is the easiest thing to make money on the internet. Write one article that ranks good in google and links to a bunch of items you get your percentage of.
People tend to ignore the law of diminishing returns, and I think in this context it's largely due to a fear of depression resulting from having the bandwidth to reflect on reality.
Yeah I realized self help books and audio books are a waste of time and money. You get the gist from the back cover. I believe in improving myself, sure, but my approach is much simpler - just deliberate practice and being a well rounded person. Being humble and realistic helps too - I’m probably not going to be super rich, wealthy, or famous but my current life is far from bad.
This self help obsession especially among urban professionals is pretty amusing. A lot of people who only read the latest self help books and listen to the same podcasts at 2x speed but don’t actually do much.
What's interesting to me is that I read the title as "Improving ourselves UNTIL death" - meaning improvement should be a life-long endeavor. I agree with that read.
The article actually argues against self-improvement.
There are issues with trying excessively too hard or sacrificing too much to reach certain goals, there are issues with trying the wrong way or towards the wrong goals, but arguing we should take a casual and passive stance towards fixing our problems and just let them be is really the most counter-productive, lazy piece of advice I've ever heard.
Tangential aside, but I have to admit that "You Do You: How to Be Who You Are and Use What You’ve Got to Get What You Want" is a perversely brilliant title: 20 single-syllable words strung up into a staccato yet cohesive whole.
[+] [-] Tomminn|7 years ago|reply
The problem isn't self-improvement. The problem is typically you get deluded about your own magnificence, and you refuse to pop this delusion.
Rip the band-aid off, once and for all. Here and now.
Recognize you are not the special person you thought you were. Really see how incredible all the people around you are. And I mean locally. I don't mean people on the internet. I just mean the ordinary people around you scratching themselves out lives that seem to satisfy them. Become one of them.
If you have it, keep all the ambition you have. But become satisfied with the process of becoming what you want to be. Find someone, or something to pay you to become who you want to be. This will not be easy, and the work will not be easy, but the pain will be growing pain, and not decaying pain. Decaying pain is what kills you.
Most of the work will be unpaid, this is okay. A happy little flow of money is enough, because some money is really damn useful. Some food, some shelter, some freedom. But there is much less in life that money will buy you than people think there is. And there is much more in life that money robs you of than people realize.
Again, rip the band-aid off. Right here and now. If you do it slowly like most people do, you'll mistake the slow process of becoming wise to your own ordinariness for decay. Rip it off, and then you can improve yourself without pain.
[+] [-] Vinnl|7 years ago|reply
What helped for me (though I'm not sure how realistic I currently am - but surely more than before) is not to realise how amazing the people around me are, but how ordinary the people I look up to are - specifically, not locally.
For example, I'd like to be a good programmer. There are a few "big names" online that people listen to; that I listen to. At a certain point, you realise they too make mistakes, they too don't know things that you do, and they have sacrificed some things to get where they are that I am simply not willing to sacrifice - but if I were, I might make it to the same place. But I'm not, and that's fine - now I know what I get back for not being where they are.
[+] [-] jniedrauer|7 years ago|reply
This sentiment has very little actual substance to it. I'm dissatisfied because I want to do something meaningful. I want to leave behind tools that will better my species. I don't want my legacy to be solving a few bugs in obscure proprietary software. Why would I want to emulate people who are satisfied with a meaningless existence? I would much rather rage against the dying of the light.
> Most of the work will be unpaid, this is okay. A happy little flow of money is enough, because some money is really damn useful.
In a very literal sense, we trade life force for money. Money is life force. Telling people to work for free is doing them a disservice.
What exactly are you saying? Rip off the band-aid of ambition and stop trying?
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mysterydip|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] internet555|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erik14th|7 years ago|reply
Life is way too short to actualize all the improvements you can learn, the speed disparity between learning and executing can be just downright atrocious.
Unpaid work is not ok for a vast majority of humanity, lest we forget that what still kill most of us is not disillusion pain but the lack of basic needs, and that kind of stuff kills you way faster, yes money robs most of us of life, and most of us simply do not have the time or mental space to ever come close to realize it, since we're either strangled by basic needs or entangled in a web of distraction/disinformation.
While information has been made widely available to almost half of humanity, the power to act on most said information is still in the hands of a pretty darn small minority.
Sorry for the rant :E
[+] [-] edna314|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rescis|7 years ago|reply
Every single time humanity visibly progresses, it is because one person (or many) found a problem with themselves or the state they were living in and attempted to remove the problem in hopes of having themselves or their environment become more 'perfect'. If people today decide to stop progressing towards perfection and just be happy with what they have, then there will still be large swaths of people living in extreme poverty, dying from preventable diseases, and suffering from human rights abuses. I really do believe that it is imperative from a humanitarian perspective that while we still have problems in the world, we strive to do everything we can to fix them—and that not doing so is horribly selfish.
[+] [-] bitexploder|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chongli|7 years ago|reply
This is no way to live. I don't have any idea how to solve this problem but I would be glad to see a discussion.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18368622
[+] [-] GavinMcG|7 years ago|reply
No doubt the effort to solve problems and improve one's self and circumstances have been powerful forces behind progress. But arguably, a focus on optimization and perfection can be forces that prevent the kind of progress you praise.
[+] [-] glangdale|7 years ago|reply
It's easy to find examples of both: some great historical figures had rigorous programs of conscious self-improvement; others became great by immediately engaging with some problem entirely outside themselves and if any self-improvement resulted, it wasn't a primary or conscious goal.
[+] [-] paulpauper|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jplayer01|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mitchbob|7 years ago|reply
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
[+] [-] johnminter|7 years ago|reply
Living this way takes determination, persistence, and hard work. We need to know when to rest and recharge because fatigue makes us ineffective and error-prone. For me, that includes both rest and exercise.
I find it helpful to discuss my plans with those I trust to refine the plans and projects I undertake. It is too easy to be overly ambitious/optimistic and start more projects than I can finish. Good counsel helps us to evaluate what we do and focus on what best supports our long term goals.
We all make mistakes. I find it better to learn from them and try not to repeat them rather than engaging in self-pity or trying to cast myself as a "victim." Sometimes life is just hard and we need to be thankful for and encouraged by the "wins" we get. Living that way is far more pleasant than being constantly negative and critical of ourselves and others.
[+] [-] ProAm|7 years ago|reply
I'd venture to say more human progress is attributed to warfare than anything else.
[+] [-] vertexFarm|7 years ago|reply
I find the concept of anomie useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie
We aren't making the world or ourselves better by striving towards intense and unrealistically optimistic goals all the time. Our unbound desire to maximize growth is psychotic, and after all we're very much on track to destroy the biosphere if we keep behaving the way we are. Probably past the point of turning back, in fact.
What's the point of all our progress if we end up making ourselves miserable and eventually eradicating ourselves?
[+] [-] gaahrdner|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ccwilson10|7 years ago|reply
On a more serious note, I agree most with your point around digging oneself out of complacency and moving towards a better future — if not for you, for someone else.
[+] [-] Pica_soO|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] paulpauper|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hydrox24|7 years ago|reply
If enjoying life is the popular thing to do, the well connected, high IQ and high-grit people will succeed even more dramatically, assuming that such people are often less affected by cultural norms than the modal person.
[+] [-] dqpb|7 years ago|reply
If your talking about the 1%, this may be true, I don't know.
But there are hundreds of millions of people in the middle/upper middle class brackets who I would argue are successful due to their hard work.
[+] [-] gurpreet-|7 years ago|reply
On the other hand, you have multi-millionaires who have hustled their way to the top but are miserable and jaded after improving themselves so much that they neglected friends and family. Is it worth it then to pursue of a life of improvement?
Ultimately, the decision to go down the path of improvement and subsequently sacrifice is up to the person. But beware, this rat-race can never be won.
[+] [-] castlecrasher2|7 years ago|reply
>He cites surveys that show that adolescent girls are increasingly unhappy with their bodies, and that a growing number of men are suffering from muscle dysmorphia
I'm sure consumerism has a role in this but I'd guess that increasing childhood obesity and decreasing levels of testosterone in men are a more obvious reason for these.
[+] [-] lihaciudaniel|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] viridian|7 years ago|reply
a) no real counterclaim had been made yet, and b) I was only 1/4 of the way through this article
Her concluding paragraph is that you should do non-productive tasks sometimes, disconnect, and enjoy yourself. The great irony in this is that I recall being given the same advice in the last couple of self help books I read, Deep Work and The Shallows.
This article seems to be a mountain of words to broad brush a genre, but then I could be wrong, as I only read a quarter of it.
[+] [-] piyushahuja|7 years ago|reply
Like a novel, the reading of an article is meant to be an experience. It follows the "show, don't tell" dictum pretty well. The critique of perfectionism hits at you viscerally, instead of being an academic argument. That good writing necessarily requires a more productive use of audience's time (or follows some economics of the form of insights communicated/time spent), is the optimizing/perfectionist thinking that Ms. Schwartz has taken aim at in her content. So the form follows content in a way. The writer feels that in today's self-improvement culture, we do not appreciate something for its own sake. For example, when we read, we think of "what is it saying? Why does it not say it quickly?", rather than imagining possibilities, chewing on the words of a sentence, or relish the turn of phrases, or appreciating the metaphors employed to communicate a feeling.
You do seem to be right in suspecting that you are wrong about the article. Her concluding paragraph, for example, states that the one should be able to enjoy experiences for their sake alone, rather than the sake of self-improvement. "Things don’t need to be of concrete use in order to have value." This is contrary to the assumptions shared by the two self-help books you allude to: The Shallows and Deep Work. These argue for disconneting FOR the sake of having some value in the dimension of self improvement: for being able to improve the quality of your work (Deep Work), or increasing reading comprehension, e.g. (The Shallows).
[+] [-] willbw|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dokem|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _cs2017_|7 years ago|reply
There are some rare exceptions when I actually finish the article, but it's rare.
[+] [-] amriksohata|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hamilton|7 years ago|reply
I ask my friend Bob what his New Year’s Resolutions are and he says, with a shrug (indicating that this is obvious or not surprising ): to drink less, to lose weight… He asks me the same, but I am not ready to answer him yet. I have been studying my Zen again, in a mild way, out of desperation over the holidays, though mild desperation. A medal or a rotten tomato, it’s all the same, says the book I have been reading. After a few days of consideration, I think the most truthful answer to my friend Bob would be: My New Year’s Resolution is to learn to see myself as nothing. Is this com¬petitive? He wants to lose some weight, I want to learn to see myself as nothing. Of course, to be competitive is not in keeping with any Buddhist philosophy. A true nothing is not competitive. But I don’t think I’m being competitive when I say it. I am feeling truly humble, at that moment. Or I think I am—in fact, can anyone be truly humble at the moment they say they want to learn to be nothing? But there is another problem, which I have been wanting to describe to Bob for a few weeks now: at last, halfway through your life, you are smart enough to see that it all amounts to nothing, even success amounts to nothing. But how does a person learn to see herself as nothing when she has already had so much trouble learning to see herself as, something in the first place? It’s so confusing. You spend the first half of your life learning that you are something after all, now you have to spend the second half learning to see yourself as nothing. You have been a negative nothing, now you want to be a positive nothing. I have begun trying, in these first days of the New Year, bur so far it’s pretty difficult. I’m pretty close to nothing all morning, but by late afternoon what is in me that is something starts throwing its weight around. This happens many days. By evening, I’m full of something and it’s often something nasty and pushy. So what I think at this point is that I’m aiming too high, that maybe nothing is too much, to begin with. Maybe for now I should just try, each day, to be a little less than I usually am.
[0] https://poetrydispatch.wordpress.com/2009/01/16/lydia-davis-...
[+] [-] smogcutter|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvn1045|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] circlefavshape|7 years ago|reply
I'm never going back to goal-setting. Looking back at it now I see my goals as fantasies, and my efforts to make them real actively prevented me from engaging with my actual life
[+] [-] mrhappyunhappy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] navane|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newnewpdro|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sotojuan|7 years ago|reply
This self help obsession especially among urban professionals is pretty amusing. A lot of people who only read the latest self help books and listen to the same podcasts at 2x speed but don’t actually do much.
[+] [-] sctb|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erik_landerholm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intrasight|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] John_KZ|7 years ago|reply
There are issues with trying excessively too hard or sacrificing too much to reach certain goals, there are issues with trying the wrong way or towards the wrong goals, but arguing we should take a casual and passive stance towards fixing our problems and just let them be is really the most counter-productive, lazy piece of advice I've ever heard.
[+] [-] kubov|7 years ago|reply
https://fryemuseum.org/exhibition/6863/
[+] [-] jpatokal|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diimdeep|7 years ago|reply