A book, a podcast, and one very smug reaction to my siblings taught me why trying to become a better person keeps us exactly where we started.
I recently went back and reread some of the essays I wrote when I was deep in what I now think of as my self-acceptance phase. Enough time has passed that I could read them almost like a stranger would, and what struck me was how much of that writing was still aimed at a finish line. Accept yourself, yes, but accept yourself so that you can finally get somewhere. I did not see it then. I see it now, and I suspect that if awareness meditation is good for anything, it is this: it makes you painfully, repeatedly familiar with your own neuroses, on a loop, until you cannot pretend they belong to someone else.
I want to be upfront that this realization did not arrive as a bolt from the sky. It arrived through Chögyam Trungpa, whose writing on self-improvement finally made something click that my own teacher, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, had been saying in every teaching I had ever sat through. He had been saying it for years. I simply had not been ready to hear it from him, and I am fairly sure the readiness had nothing mystical about it. My mind had softened enough, after enough studying and sitting and failing and sitting again, that I could finally hear the same truth alight differently coming from someone else. The rigid loyalty I had to one teacher, one voice, had loosened. It turns out you can love your teacher and still need Trungpa to say the thing plainly.
Around the same time, I caught an episode of Adam Grant's podcast where he spoke with the novelist Fredrik Backman, and something in that conversation worked on me the way water works on stone. It was not dramatic. It was just another version of the same idea descending from a completely different direction, secular this time, no incense involved, and somehow that made it stick even harder.
Here is the version of the idea I eventually arrived at. Most of my self-improvement, if I am honest about it, was never really about becoming a better person. It was about being liked. And underneath that was a piece of circular logic I had never bothered to examine: I do not like who I am right now, so I will change enough of myself to like who I become, and once I like myself, other people will naturally like me too. It sounds almost reasonable when you say it fast. Said slowly, it falls apart. My being liked by other people was never actually dependent on my liking myself. It was dependent on how present I was able to be with them, and presence is exactly what self-improvement crowds out.
This is the catch. The more inwardly focused I became, the worse my actual social interactions got. Fewer of the good exchanges, more of the strained ones. And the feedback I got back from the world, unsurprisingly, was not encouraging. Which made me feel even more convinced that I had further to go, more edges to file down, more work to do on myself before I would be fit for company. Round and round. It is the old parable of the two wolves inside every person, one vicious and one generous, and whichever one you feed is the one that grows strong enough to survive. I had been feeding the wrong wolf for years and calling it discipline.
“I had been feeding the wrong wolf for years and calling it discipline.”
What I have found instead, in the small amount of acceptance I have managed to build, is that the moment I stop working on myself in the middle of a conversation, the conversation actually improves. It has everything to do with finally listening instead of auditioning, and nothing to do with becoming more likeable. Deep listening lives there. Holding space lives there. Presence lives there. None of that has anything to do with being a better version of me. It has to do with getting out of my own way long enough to notice the person in front of me.
I got a very concrete lesson in this recently, and it was not flattering. Both my siblings are diabetic and have recently been put on the newer GLP-1 medications. My first internal reaction, which I am only slightly ashamed to admit, was a kind of quiet superiority. These drugs are new. The long-term side effects are still being studied, and only some of what is emerging has made it into public conversation. I am the kind of person who researches things thoroughly before trying them, and clearly my siblings were not being that kind of person. I could hear the self-improvement identity narrating the whole thing in real time: I do things properly, they do not, and that gap is the point.
Then it occurred to me that they simply do not have the time, the inclination, or the bandwidth to read the volume of material I read for fun. So instead of quietly judging them from my little research pedestal, I started doing the reading myself and sending them what I found, so they could stay informed without doing the work themselves. The shift felt almost too small to matter. I stopped being the person who had done more homework than they had, and became the person helping them make sense of what they were taking. The self-improvement identity loosened its grip by exactly that much. The self-absorption thinned out. What was left in its place was connection, and the strange part is that I felt better about myself immediately, as a side effect, not as the goal I had been chasing.
Trungpa has a phrase for what I had been doing to myself for years, which he calls self-aggression, part of what he named spiritual materialism: using a spiritual or self-improving vocabulary to keep beating yourself toward a finish line that keeps receding. My logic, before any of this sank in, was embarrassingly simple. Work harder, get better, arrive somewhere. The idea that fruition could be the path itself, rather than a reward waiting at the end of it, was completely foreign to me. I did not even understand the sentence the first several times I heard it.
George Orwell, of all people, gave me the clearest picture of what that conditioning looks like from the outside. Boxer, the horse in Animal Farm, works himself past the point of collapse for the promise of a better pasture that never actually arrives, believing every extra hour of labour is bringing him closer to it. Society is remarkably good at doing this to our appetite for self-improvement too. It quietly turns the whole project into another form of compliance, dressed up as liberation, and most of us never notice the substitution because the language sounds so much like growth.
Just seeing this clearly has been its own kind of relief, even before anything about my behaviour changes. We are not meditating so that we can like ourselves more. We are not meditating to become better people, or to reach some tidier version of who we currently are. In fact, in the moments that count, we are not really meditating toward anything at all. We are just being, and there is something almost funny about how light that makes everything feel, once you stop treating your own existence as a renovation project. Milan Kundera named this feeling decades ago, in a title I always found strange until now: the lightness really is unbearable, right up until the moment you stop resisting it.