On Self-Improvement

The longer I live, the less zeal I find I can scrounge up for the project of improving myself. Maybe I've tried too many times and fallen short of the goal (who likes to fail?). Maybe self-improvement is for the young, a club in which I no longer qualify as a member. Maybe too though, there are good reasons not to pursue that will-o'-wisp.

Now, one thing I can promise: I'm not claiming to be beyond improvement! Here, in fact, is a brief list of my faults, as I view them. I'll leave it as a bullet list, since numbers in this context would depress me.

• cynicism 
• dilettante-ism
• a habit of dangling my participles 
• a tendency, when in the midst of a project, to forget, even with my wife, how to converse or even note that others are present in the home.
• a general lack of willpower to follow through on my ambitions.
• a habit of failing to thank people adequately.
• et cetera....

Sigh. 

So, again, I don't deny room for improvement. I'm not even claiming improvement is impossible. I'm not even claiming I haven't, at least in some areas of my life, improved. No, I'm saying this: 

To improve the self is not enough. As a goal it's too shallow. It ends at the mere edges of the skin. Why not choose instead just do the right thing for the world? Wouldn't that be better? Isn't that hard enough?

I'm not saying, "trade in your desire to perfect yourself for a desire to perfect the world." I'm not really talking about end-goals at all, and I'm certainly not talking about perfection. I'm talking about doing the right thing in the moment, and day by day, to answer to the needs of those around you and of the place around you. I'm saying maybe this is the best any of us can do, and maybe more than enough to expect of ourselves, given the not-so-terrific state of the world and our relative powerlessness as normalizers.

You can get started right away. There are no prerequisites to doing the right thing. Oddly enough, too, once we've placed ourselves in the forum of useful action, many of the goals that improvers of the self seem to fixate on, prove to be beside the point. 

To do the right thing, you don't have to have traveled widely.
To do the right thing, you don't have to be organized.
To do the right thing, you don't need to be the perfect body weight.
To do the right thing, you don't have to be learned and informed.
To do the right thing, you don't even have to be a pleasant person to be around.

Conversely:

You might be a cultured person, accomplished and graceful in society, and still be leading an extremely selfish life.

You might have trained your memory and mind to do all sorts of amazing feats, and still on balance be giving very little to the world. 

You may have developed a willpower so muscular as to accomplish almost anything; you may have choreographed your daily schedule like a gold-medal-winning synchronized swim; you may have authored six and a half self-help books, and still be doing the wrong thing for the world. Still be a burden to the present and a curse to the future.

Skills are not the same thing as virtuous action, nor are smooth habits of social interaction going to guarantee it. Knowledge of self does not necessarily lead to virtue either; sometimes the two don't even seem correlated.

There was a time--a time so vivid in the memory that many still believe we haven't left it behind--when energy was cheap, and progress seemed limitless, and it was at least excusable to think that human beings could do whatever they wanted, and spend whatever resources they wanted to spend, in improving themselves according to their own definitions, and the world would prosper anyway. After all there would still be enough to go around, right? After all, whatever got wasted in the process could just be buried or burned, or simply forgotten, right?

But clearly the world in the past ten to twenty years has become a much more thorny, crowded, and limited place. Just listen to the news, and it becomes clear that every move we make nowadays as individuals and as communities has consequences for others. Therefore our choices have to be made with others in mind. With the living systems of the planet in mind. With the poor in mind. With the future in mind. With relationship in mind. With action in the improvement of all of these in mind. 

Given the situation then--given our predicament of surreal complexity--what's the right thing to do? 

My guess is that this is usually a ruse-question. A feint. A pretense. A pose. At least when it comes to doing the right thing by the earth, the answers are all right there before us. It's only a matter of following through. Of translating perception into action. We have to make do with less. We have to do more with our own hands at every level, and stop expecting machines and poor people in other places on the globe to do the work of sustaining us--as though we were babies too weak to do anything but recline in place and be spoon-fed. We have to stop trying to improve ourselves in all sorts of largely fictional ways, and instead get down to work improving the real situation of our homes and our communities: by means of zealous protection of what remains of our natural heritage. By means of actively loving where we live, and what we already have. By means of the strengthening of family and community relationships. By means of the local resurrection of once-universally practiced skills--gardening, food preservation, carpentry, baking, sewing, playing the piano to entertain the family...  

Heck, maybe raising our ability to do the right thing whatever the cost, ought to be the very definition of self-improvement, and nothing else. If so--if the increase of virtuous action ever becomes our definition of self-improvement--then I'm all for it. Until that happens though, count me out of the camp that pursues it. I consider it a distraction.

HB