From Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs:
A little self-discipline builds character, but too much self-discipline breaks it.
Self-improvement must be borne out of wants and not should’s. It must stem from the intrinsic desire for growth, not a sense of inadequacy.
Compulsive self-improvement can turn into self-exploitation.
When was the last time you felt like you were enough?
We are always striving to do more and to be more, to always be improving ourselves. … this cultural emphasis on self-improvement that leaves us so fundamentally burnt out and depressed … we embrace hyperactivity, finding ourselves in a state of compulsive striving. We have little time to connect with both ourselves and others. We are steeped in the normalized myth that we are mere individuals striving to attain private goals. The more we define ourselves that way the more estranged we become from vital aspects of who we are and what we need to be healthy
This compulsive drive to improve ourselves under this idea of our self as a project can now take over our entire lives. This pressure to achieve to be more and do more leads to a sort of culturally induced narcissism.
In contemporary society it is effective for us to be constantly focused on ourselves and monitoring our performance and self-image. To be so fixated on promoting ourselves is to never let our guard down, to compulsively market and improve ourselves in the hopes of one day perfecting our self-project.
This constant self-reference develops into a rat race within oneself and eventually it could lead to burnout, or what Byung Chul Han describes as I-tiredness – the ego grows exhausted and wears itself down. Such tiredness stems from the redundancy and recurrence of the ego. We exhaust ourselves with ourselves.
The depressed individual is unable to measure up. He is tired of having to become himself. It is this voluntary self-exploitation that gives rise to a fractured soul. We experience severe dislocation - a loss of connection with ourselves and others as we compulsively strive for self-perfection.
Alienation is inevitable when our inner sense of value becomes status-driven, hinging on externally imposed standards of competitive achievement and acquisition and a highly conditional acceptance. In others eyes, we struggle to answer the question “who am I”, and this is an important question to answer if we wish to ever truly improve ourselves.
Is your obsession just an escape from feeling directionless? From the reality that there is no meaning in life except what you give it? As if creating motion gives it meaning?
Soon your sense of self-worth gets completely bound up with how you’re using your time: it stops being merely the water in which you swim and turns into something you feel you need to dominate or control, if you’re to avoid feeling guilty, panicked or overwhelmed.
— Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks - Time Management for Mortals
The cure:
Simple spontaneity seen in both artists and children spontaneous activity does not abide by rigid self-optimization and Improvement. Instead it is an embrace of activity for the sake of the activity itself. Art, play, time with friends, and a gradual slowing down flies in the very face of the sorts of self-improvement that lead to burnout.
Spontaneous activity is the one way in which man can overcome the terror of aloneness without sacrificing the integrity of the self, for in the spontaneous realization of the self man unites himself anew with the world.
Our world has made us increasingly focused on ourselves as a project. This has made us rigid and incapable of spontaneity. It is only in those moments of intrinsic focus where we are doing things for themselves in which we can escape the burnout society. Call it a flow state, spontaneity, or resonance, we find ourselves alive only when we risk destabilizing our journey towards self-perfection.
You’re allowed to just be. Slow down. Do things for no reason.
See also: you need to do nothing