What Comes After Self-Improvement?
The inner rat race, reacting against the outer rat race, is …. still a rat race.
I vividly remember the first self-help book I ever picked up. I was fifteen years old. It was a handheld quote compendium entitled 1001 Ways to Self-Confidence.
I thought I had struck gold.
At that young and impressionable age fresh from the idyll of childhood, I took an earnest interest in finding out what my education and family members didn’t seem to be able to imprint on me. What were the reasons people succeeded so meteorically in life? What would it take for my accomplishments to really make a big impact in the world? Classics such as How to Win Friends and Influence People and Quiet: The Power of Introverts lined my shelves, underlined and full of notes.
It’s been ten years since then, and I avowedly stand firm against the worldwide self-betterment craze.
It’s clear in this era that living even a comfortable material life is tough. Americans are so debt-stricken that 40% of them wouldn’t be able to cover a $400 emergency bill. In major U.S. cities, only 14 affordable housing units exist for every 100 low-income households. The situation isn’t any better in Canada, where nearly every major city battles a homelessness crisis while 1.34 million homes are empty — a rate 5 times that of the U.S.
All this easily overwhelms anyone who isn’t in line to inherit multiple generations of wealth, which is probably a sizeable number of us. Add to it a newly minted globalized digital workplace on account of continued lockdowns, and you’ve got yourself a prime opportunity to prey on people’s innate desires for more stability, more meaningfulness, and more direction.
It becomes easy to see your circumstances in life and wonder, how might I be able to make this better? In fact, not doing so would probably be considered complacency, laziness, or defeatism, especially when we’re constantly bombarded by messaging telling us how easy it is to become richer, fitter, or more creative.
The question arises, once one has gone through the 12-month weight training programs, the leadership workshops, and the character-building experiences of life that can’t be bought or sold — what comes next?
What is that force that keeps us yearning to experience better, whether on the material, mental, emotional or existential planes? How do we use it to our advantage?
Chances are you’ve probably seen this hierarchy of psychological motivations at some point. You might even assume, given the clean, polished presentation of discourse on the subject and all those that have built entire academic careers off the above model that it is tried and true, universally-applicable theory.
Looking around, however, and it becomes clear this model needs a little expansion.
Americans are running around without masks citing their individual rights when asked to consider public health. It’s even been said in the popular adage that Americans see themselves not as broke, but temporarily embarrassed future millionaires. Decencies such as stimulus cheques higher than $2000 or housing relief for the poor, “unproductive” members of society would elicit gasps. Did someone say the s word?
It’s clear that the gist of our values lie with trying to give each individual the best possible life materially and socially. Anything that might hamper this pursuit, say, for the sake of the common good, is quickly de-prioritized.
This is where the popular tendency of blindly and dogmatically seeing our needs as a one-way ladder up Maslow’s pyramid falls short.
This is the missing puzzle piece.
It turns out Maslow based his theory on only the initial segment of a much more comprehensive system of Indigenous philosophy. In a worldview where ecology, economics, social bonding, spirituality, aesthetics, and history (among other fields) are intertwined and deeply understood both in themselves and in relation to all the rest, it seems almost absurd that we’re out here running around trying to clutch reductionist Lockean social formulas way past their expiry date.
Community helps individuals achieve their highest callings. No one is an island. Cultural continuity supports character building and timeless, universally-applicable values encouraging human excellence. These truths have rung through the ages. What makes us think we’re suddenly any different?
Let’s consider now the reasons why so many self-help endeavors to pull ourselves up a myopic one-way ladder fail: lack of discipline (which, traditionally, would be a product of living in a culture that enforces it in some form) lack of motivation stemming from a lack of positive feedback (again, an external factor) or simply put failure. These are all sobering reminders that the people trying to embolden us to “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps” probably didn’t have any idea what they were talking about.
What might happen if we started caring about community actualization as much as we did self actualization? For starters, we’d be much richer economically, culturally and socially. Orienting our goals explicitly around our interaction with others rather than an endless ego-building exercise of self-betterment could pay out in dividends. The biology of our brains is literally hardwired to respond to social gratification, after all.
Imagine if your next new year’s resolution was something that intrinsically felt meaningful because your neurology responded instantly to whatever striving you made toward your goal. No more needing to whip yourself into shape — because you are simply an agent for a higher good trodding along at your own pace.
Some ideal examples: not building a company in order to be someone who’s “making a huge impact,” but simply to provide wholesome and humane employment that makes it a joy to be a part of something bigger. Becoming financially independent so you can live a simpler, more spiritual lifestyle. Learning a skill which you might be able to use to bring benefit to others, rather than advance your career prospects or employability.
Might your perseverance toward your goals be given the battle armor it needs to reach success, keeping in mind that your striving is nourishing others as much, if not more, as yourself?
The challenges we face will take all of us to solve. Paradoxically, we all need to be pursuing self-betterment. The difference is in the details, the effects of the causes we build, cascading upon one another to produce the surroundings we call home.
The Blackfoot paradigm informing Maslow’s pyramid isn’t closed at the top. It’s a teepee, opening to the vastness of the cosmos. The vision is one of infinitely expanding human thriving, so long as the foundation is ever more balanced. Thriving individuals oriented toward making contributions to their greater human community. Thriving communities creating sophisticated and ingenious cultural innovations. And cultural innovations being perpetuated across generations — for the sustained vision of human thriving, not just our individual betterment.
