Dear Reader,
Do you ever get curious about certain types of thoughts that come up over and over again? I noticed over the course of a few weeks that I kept having recurring thoughts about “what would make my life better.” As in, I’d be in the middle of a task and some difficulty or roadblock would lead me to think, “My life would be better if I did XYZ thing.” After a while, all of these thoughts felt a little overwhelming and even contradictory, so I decided to pull out my *eyeroll* bullet journal and keep a list of every time one went through my mind. Even though it compulsively cycled through my head, it turned out to be a fairly short list once I got everything down on paper.
My Life Would Be Better If I…
drew more/every day
meditated more/every day
wrote more/every day
went to the gym 3-4x a week
cooked more
practiced gratitude (keeping a journal, saying grace)
did yoga more regularly
practiced somatic centering regularly
ate more green vegetables
ate less processed food
It was hard for me to understand the nature of this list until I actually wrote it down. When I finally did, a few things stood out to me, the first being that this list did not come from nowhere. I have probably read numerous news articles, blog/social media posts/newsletters about the benefits of each of these practices. The second is that this list shows the kinds of messaging that have gotten under my skin over the years. I don’t identify fully as a woman, but most of these lifestyle recommendations are targeted at women. At least 5 of these items could be incorporated into weight-loss culture. And most are Instagrammable.
But the biggest thing that struck me about this list is its fundamental orientation toward life and what makes life “better”. Conspicuously absent from this list are social things like, “have more fun,” “spend more time with friends and family,” “volunteer and do activism.” According to the world view of this list, “making my life better” is a self-improvement regimen that I do alone by sheer force of will (and by spending money.)
Zooming out further, I also noticed the significance of where I ended the prompting sentence and began the list items. It’s not “My Life Would Be Better If…”, it’s “My Life Would Be Better If I…” took some sort of action or created some sort of habit. This wasn’t about the conditions in which I and others live; instead it was about what I as an individual do. What’s absent from the list is anything that implies a collective responsibility or a collective benefit. I can imagine that a very different sort of list could have arisen if I’d ended the prompt one word sooner:
My Life Would Be Better If…
I didn’t have to worry about climate change
Racialized trauma weren’t a substrate of all communal life where I live
I didn’t have to navigate expectations around gender
I didn’t have to plot escape routes from public places in case of an active shooter
There was a social/financial safety net for all people
Perhaps the original list had a more powerful hold on my mind than this one because I have control over how much kale I eat each week but it’s much less clear if I can control how others believe I should behave based on my gender or the racial bias in my local police department. Nonetheless, the world envisioned in my second list entirely true and is much more nourishing than doing more yoga or cutting back on processed food.
I’m not saying that self-improvement/self-care/self-maintenance practices don’t matter. For instance, I know that my life has been both easier and more meaningful because I put in the effort to meditate. I’m more attentive, less reactive, and less prone to believing in negative self-talk than I was before I started meditating. But my self-improvement mindset has eroded a lot of those same benefits. Since the day I started meditating, I have been dragging around Meditator’s Guilt: the notion that I should always be meditating more and that if I don’t live up to some arbitrary gold standard—say, a habit of meditating for an hour each morning—then I need to improve. Hence why I’ve been meditating for a decade and meditation is STILL on my “My Life Would Be Better If I…” list.
Yes, each thing on the first list list could improve a person’s life, but approached the wrong way can also be a distraction from what matters. It is very uncomfortable to look at that list because it surfaces what I’m really focused on when I think about creating a better life: myself.
A few days after I drew up my list, I came across this quote by therapist David Defoe:
Don't be so overly involved with your self-improvement. Accept the gifts and abilities that you have, and don't spend so much time trying to develop new ones that you sacrifice your gifts. Be yourself.
I appreciate Defoe’s perspective because he sees how self-improvement can help us share our gifts with others, but if used the wrong way it can also become a hindrance to that. Perhaps there’s a self-improvement treadmill effect similar to the hedonic treadmill: as long as a sense of inadequacy remains default, no amount of self-improvement can improve us to the point where we don’t desire self-improvement anymore.
As for me? I’m not going to abandon everything on my list. (Well, except one thing that I have decided to stop chasing after years of trying to improve at it and incorporate more of it into my life.) But I also need to catch myself in the habit of believing that eating turnip greens or lifting weights makes my life better. What does that even mean? Perhaps quieting the self-improvement compulsion in my thoughts would, in fact, make my life better.