Wellness
Why we want to change is just as important as what we want to change.
Its the earliest example we have of New Years resolutions.
At a moment of renewal and reset, people swore to do better next time.
Since then, resolutions have appeared throughout history.
Why do we want to be better at all especially when we knowour ability to keep resolutionsis limited?
And on an individual level, it can reveal your own assumptions about your true self.
Goals around losing weight could be connected to desires for more love, respect, or freedom.
The larger the gap is between our actual and ideal self, the more negative emotions we feel.
Are you becoming more or less yourself when you improve?
But its a powerful feeling that we cant seem to shake.
That urge can easily go into overdrive.
There is this intuition that theres this even better version of me within, Schlegel says.
But there are crucial differences between the self-improvement in the past and today.
Its a virtue unto itself to look a certain way.
Its not at all what we have traditionally thought of as self-improvement.
This is paired with a more narrow and globalized ideal of what that body is supposed to look like.
Even though, when you look at the connections, it doesnt really work.
We might blindly feel that our resolutions are going to put us on a path to get to ourselves.
But asking why and what you want to improve can expose surprising feelings about the self back to you.
Self-realization is one of the biggest cultural values of our time.
How do you see your self?
Is the self seen as atomistic or relational?
Schaffner wrote in her book.
As fundamental good or bad?
As primarily rational or emotional?"
This embeddedness was really crucial to the understanding of self, she says.
This is in line with what the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in his 1930 bookThe Conquest of Happiness.
Interest in oneself on the contrary leads to no activity of a progressive kind, Russell wrote.
She even called it noble.
Importantly, improvement should be a gradual process.
Shes a fan of the Japanesekaizenapproach, a philosophy of gradual, incremental, transformation that is gentle.
I see it as a lifelong learning process.
