Have We Reached Peak Self-Improvement?

Whether it’s meditation, documenting your 5-to-9 routine, or the rise of apps helping us ingest entire non-fiction books in just minutes, it feels like we’ve reached peak self-development. After having three years of young adulthood basically robbed from us, many people turned to self development strategies and gurus and self-care tactics to get them out of their slumps. In fact the industry grew so much that in 2020 the self-development industry was worth $10.5 billion. It’s estimated that it will grow in the future, reaching $14 billion by 2025.

But what started as journaling prompts and goal setting to clear one’s mind, has now turned into a universally prescribed antidote for life. Feeling down? Try self-improvement. Got fired? Here’s a self-help book for that. Boyfriend left you? There’s this girl on YouTube that gives advice about improving your relationship attachment style, all while trying out different face masks.

While the core message of learning to put yourself first is an important one for young people to learn, focusing too much on constant self-improvement can actually be harmful to you.

Self-help locks you in a progress loop 

Although self-development courses or books can be great to kickstart improvements in your daily life, the impacts still seem to be short term. Particularly when it comes to building ‘better’ habits, often the consumption of self-improvement content simply takes place of the ‘unhealthy’ habits you were trying to eliminate. Because it is impossible to resolve feelings of inadequacy or lifelong habits in a weekend or a couple of months, after riding the high of your new and improved self, the negative feelings inevitably come back again.

The only solution seems to be constantly improving yourself at the hands of these gurus, theirs courses, and books. Obviously looking after yourself is important. But the idea that we need to be constantly improving to the point where we don’t have to deal with life’s struggles or negativity anymore, and that personal growth is the answer to everything, sounds unrealistic and frankly exhausting.

As the quest for self-acceptance and growth often feels like a hard-fought battle, we can find ourselves in a toxic cycle that ends by reinforcing the shame and inferiority we might have felt to begin with. Because what is ‘better’, really? When will you have arrived there?

It’s unsurprising there are so many ex-personal development and care fans are now speaking out to talk about the burnout and unrealistic expectations they experienced. KC Davis, a therapist and TikTok creator, summed it up perfectly, explaining: “It was always just some extra task that I was going to need time and energy to complete… When I feel like I’m drowning and I’m overwhelmed, the last thing I need is something else on my to-do list that I’m going to feel like a failure when i don’t get it done.”

Self-development is lonely work

A favourite line of the personal growth evangelists is that you are “the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” Everyone from Will Smith to Tony Robbins to Tim Ferriss insists this is true. Whether or not this claim is valid (we’re leaning towards not), one thing is for sure: it can make things very lonely for you. This mindset encourages you to drop friends you don’t think are ‘good enough’ for your circle or align with your goals, in the name of protecting your journey of self-improvement.

Popular self-improvement-hustle-culture bro, Gary Vaynerchuck, sells a similar-yet-different sermon, encouraging followers to squeeze the juice out of every second of their time, like he does. Not a drop or a moment ‘wasted’. But when you act like your time is worth more than gold and treat others poorly if they ‘waste’ a second of it – that’s just rude. And it can isolate you even further.

Even the mindsets that encourage you to learn from everyone, no matter how rich or poor, influential or not, makes you view others as assets that can give you something – an insight, or a life lesson. There is a fine line between having genuine curiosity about other people, and mining others for your personal gain.

Self Care vs Community Care 

The concept of boundaries taught in self-help books can definitely help you live a better life and protect your peace, but where things get blurry is in the promotion of hyper-individuality. We use them to push others away from us, rather than bring them closer and build a community of trusted people.

Unlike some the toxic self-help gurus would have you believe, leaning on your community and people around you does not make you codependent. It means that instead of only improving yourself as an individual, the entire collective can improve with you. The reality is that a lot of the issues and trauma that we turn to self-development to deal with stem from institutional and collective problems. To find long term, sustainable solutions to these issues, we need community care.

Jeff Guenther,  a licensed counsellor more commonly known as @TherapyJeff on Tik Tok describes community care as “using our power, privilege and resources to help people around us. It can be as small as making a meal, sending a care package or being really nice to your server or as big as speaking up against injustices, voting and running support groups.” Asking for help is inherently an act of self-care.

Ultimately, we’re not suggesting that you should never try to change or grow or avoid personal development entirely. But self–help is not and should not be entirely about the self. It’s important to inspect the theories served up on a silver platter to see if they’ll improve not only your relationship with yourself, but the people around you too.