WANT TO
TRANSFORM YOUR LIFE?
STOP
CHASING PERFECTION
Give up
the rat race, accept reality and have the courage to be disliked – the latest
self-help trend is not about self-reinvention but finding contentment in the
life you have
The Guardian
Sat 12 Jan 2019 03.59 EST
By
tradition, this is the season for personal reinvention, but these days it’s
hard not to feel cynical about the idea of a triumphant liberation from the
past. In the news, Brexit provides an hourly reminder that merely wishing to
bring about a glorious fresh start is no guarantee that calamity won’t be the
result. Meanwhile, other dark developments – from the erosion of American
democracy and the resurgence of the European far right, all the way
to climate change –
fuel a sense of foreboding that isn’t exactly motivational when it comes to
self-improvement: the creeping fear that you might be living in the end times is
a poor basis for making a new beginning. In any case, the never-ending debate
on nature versus nurture seems to be drifting toward a gloomy acceptance that
there’s much about ourselves we’ll never change. “DNA isn’t all that matters,”
writes the geneticist Robert Plomin, whose book Blueprint epitomised
this mood last year, “but it matters more than everything else put together in
terms of the stable psychological traits that make us who we are.”
Then again, the self-reinvention narrative was
always a bit suspect to begin with. For one thing, it’s by no means clear that
it’s possible to transform yourself through the simple application of
individual willpower: wherever you come down on nature and nurture, it’s
undeniable that we owe much of our success or failure in life to our
circumstances, and to luck. Then there is the infuriating psychological quirk
of “hedonic adaptation”, otherwise known as the happiness treadmill. Succeed in
improving your life, and the improvement will soon become part of the backdrop
of your days, and thus cease delivering pleasure; to recover that sense of
vitality and zest, you’ll have to reinvent yourself again, ad infinitum.
Finally, there’s the conundrum that the self being
reinvented is the same one that’s doing the reinventing – so your existing
flaws invariably get baked into your vision of the future. If you yearn to
become, say, more productive or empathetic or physically fit in 2019, how do
you know that very yearning isn’t just another expression of your tendency to
beat yourself up, which you’d be better off addressing than indulging? Or
suppose you plan to conquer your perfectionism: how will you avoid getting all
perfectionistic about that? There are no completely fresh starts, there is no
year zero. You’re already hopelessly ensnared in the only life you’ll ever get.
In response to the prevailing mood, there has
been a noticeable change of tone in the world of self-help, a publishing genre
historically dedicated to promising massive, near-effortless transformation
overnight, or in a couple of weeks at most. For a while now, that hyperbole has
been losing ground to a spirit of anti-utopianism – of accepting yourself as
you are, building a good-enough life, or just protecting yourself from the
worst of the world outside. Adult colouring books are the most easily mockable
manifestation of this urge. But it’s detectible, too, in the unceasing stream
of Scandinavian lifestyle concepts – hygge, lagom, and
the rest – with their focus on hunkering down and getting cosy; and in the
ongoing rediscovery of Stoic philosophy and the championing of “resilience” as
techniques for enduring life’s blows.
And it’s everywhere present, this time around,
in the phase of the publishing calendar irritatingly known as “New Year, New
You”. One thought-provoking example is a new edition of Solve for Happy by Mo Gawdat,
formerly a senior executive with Google X, the search giant’s secretive
research and development arm. Generally speaking, the notion that “happiness is
an engineering problem” is one to distrust. But Gawdat, far from championing
the tech multimillionaire lifestyle as the only one worth aiming for, writes
movingly of having achieved it, only to discover its emptiness. And he has
endured far worse, losing his 21-year-old son Ali as a result of complications
during routine surgery.
The hyperbole of overnight transformation has lost ground to a
spirit of anti-utopianism – of accepting yourself as you are
At the core of Gawdat’s “formula for
happiness” is the venerable observation that happiness equals reality minus
expectations: in order to feel distress because your life is lacking something,
you must first have had some expectation of attaining that thing. (My life
lacks a 70ft yacht, but this causes me no suffering, because I never imagined
I’d have one.) The argument is not, as progressive critics of self-help
sometimes imagine, that disadvantaged people need only stop expecting anything
better in order to be content. Some expectations – a reasonable standard of
living, healthcare, fulfilling work, social connection – may be entirely rational.
But seeing the truth of the formula acts as a kind of sieve, allowing you to
separate the handful of things you genuinely want from life from those you’ve
been socialised into believing you should want. The latter aren’t worth the
pursuit – and if they are the reason you’re trying to invent a “new you”,
you’re better off sticking with the old one.
One of the most rigorous articulations of the
new mood of acceptance is Happy Ever After:
Escaping the Myth of the Perfect
Life by Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioural science at
the LSE and, the publicity material explains, “an internationally renowned
expert in human behaviour and happiness”. His book is a persuasive demolition
of many of our cultural stories about how we ought to live, including the idea
that there’s anything particularly desirable about being a senior academic or a
renowned expert. In fact, his data suggests, pursuing education beyond the age
of 18 is unlikely to make much positive difference to the pleasure or sense of
purpose you experience in life: on average, after secondary school, “happiness
decreases as education increases”.
As Dolan concedes, it can be notoriously hard
to pin down the direction of causation in wellbeing research: it could be that
gloomier people are more prone to doing university degrees, rather than that
degrees make people gloomy. Yet either way, the belief that more education
equals more fulfilment is a clear example of what he calls a “narrative trap” –
a socially imposed message about the ideal life that doesn’t match real
experience. This ideal often ends up doing more harm than good, either by
propelling people into lives they don’t enjoy, or by wrongly convincing those
who don’t make the grade that they are missing out on a more satisfying
existence. Another trap is the belief that higher-status jobs reliably bring
more satisfaction (in fact, florists are generally much happier than lawyers),
or that a larger income necessarily buys more happiness (it does, but only up
to about £50,000 a year; beyond that, tasks related to earning more money
squeeze out more enjoyable ones).
These sorts of findings are increasingly well
known, but where Dolan excels is in drawing attention to how stubbornly we
resist their implications. If happiness and a sense of purpose are your goals
in life, then a “good job” or education or salary that fails to deliver them
isn’t really “good” in any meaningful sense of the word – which makes it a
strange thing to strive for, or to encourage your children to strive for. Oh,
and speaking of children, the evidence is that parenthood won’t make you
happier, either. (It does boost people’s sense of purpose, although apparently
not more than various other things.) Likewise the dedicated pursuit of physical
fitness, which turns out to lead to less happiness than you’d think. And
marriage: it’s true that married people tell researchers they are happier than
when they were single, but only if their husband or wife is present in the room
during the interview.
The message of self-reinvention is never relax, since you could
always benefit from acquiring more money and status
What makes Happy Ever After somewhat
radical, at least by the standards of popular psychology, is its recognition
that these narrative traps aren’t simply inexplicable mistakes we happen to
make, but the products of ideology. They may not serve us, but they certainly
serve the system in which we find ourselves embedded. The pursuit of wealth or
social mobility might not bring happiness, but it does fuel economic growth –
while marriage, parenthood, fitness and the rest keep the whole operation
running smoothly into the next generation. Dolan focuses on how uniquely
detrimental such messages can be for children from working-class families.
Stereotypes about appropriate accents and lifestyles may deter them from going
to university at all; those who make it into middle-class professions then face
self-consciousness and insecurity about fitting in. Dolan, raised “lower
working class” in east London, writes that he still struggles with the cultural
codes of academia: “I weight train with bodybuilders. Seeing a blazer or a pair
of loafers at a bodybuilding competition is as rare as rocking-horse shit.”
The new crop of anti-perfectionist self-help
books are an important counterweight to the conventional message of
self-reinvention, which is that there’s no point at which it makes sense to be
satisfied with your situation and finally relax, since you could always benefit
from acquiring more money, status, education, and so on. What’s less clear is
whether this humbler kind of advice is any easier to implement, on a practical
level, than the old sort. Apart from anything else, our narratives about the
perfect life aren’t just beliefs we can choose to jettison by a mere act of
will, after reading about research that refutes them. They are deeply
entrenched in the culture, reinforced by the media, inculcated in us as small
children, not to mention in our genes. (There are some obvious evolutionary
advantages to constantly craving more resources, and never feeling as if what
you’ve got is sufficient.) Moreover, no research finding about the average
happiness of the general population can decisively prove that a given lifestyle
choice is the right or wrong one for you, with all your idiosyncrasies. One
chapter in Happy Ever After gamely makes the case for
polyamorous relationships as a path to increased happiness, but whatever your
reaction to that prospect – thrilling erotic adventure, or indescribable
hassle? – it’s not clear that you should try to override it based on the
results of academic studies.
There’s another, more mind-bending problem with
using this kind of research to direct personal change, which is that many such
transitions are what the philosopher LA Paul calls “transformative
experiences”: they turn you into a person so different that you’re unable, from
the vantage point of the present, to imagine what that future person will make
of them. To pick the most obvious example, becoming a parent might transform
you into the kind of person who adores having children, even if beforehand you
weren’t. But it might just as easily work the other way, turning someone
enthusiastic about the prospect into the kind who’d never have chosen to do so.
Nonetheless, it’s psychologically freeing to
be reminded that there is no single path to satisfaction – and that if
circumstances or personal preferences disbar you from following the herd, you
still have a good shot at fulfilment. “Quite a lot of what passes itself off as
dialogue about our society,” the essayist Tim Kreider has written, “consists of
people trying to justify their choices as the only right or natural ones by
denouncing others’ as selfish or pathological or wrong. So it’s easy to
overlook that hidden behind all this smug certainty is a poignant insecurity,
and the naked 3am terror of regret.” Much of the time, when it comes to building
a meaningful life, you’re flying blind. But the comforting truth is that so is
everyone else.
Then again, judging by its continued dominance
of the self-help shelves, you’d be forgiven for concluding that the key to a
perfect life was indisputable: lots and lots of Buddhist (or at least
Buddhist-inspired) meditation. This is ironic, since Buddhism embodies one of
the earliest confrontations with the truth about the perfectionist standards by
which we judge the world and ourselves – that this is a recipe for permanent
dissatisfaction. The basic situation, Buddha famously said, is that life is
suffering. Everything is impermanent; old age, sickness and death are our
inescapable human fate. And your philosophy of happiness had better acknowledge
these realities, otherwise the only possible result is even more suffering, for
you and everyone around you.
While he probably wouldn’t put it so bluntly,
this is the spirit that imbues a new work by the South Korean Zen writer and
former monk Haemin Sunim, Love for Imperfect
Things: How to Be Kind and Forgiving Toward Yourself and Others.
In these snark-saturated times, it’s cheering that a voice as quietly friendly
as Haemin’s can make you a mega-celebrity: he has a combined social media
following of around 2 million people, plus a previous global bestseller, The Things You Can See Only When You Slow
Down. (In Seoul, where he lives, he presides over a Zen-infused
therapy centre, the School for Broken Hearts, but the primary vehicle for his
teaching is Twitter.)
Haemin is especially eloquent on life’s
smaller dissatisfactions, and how they can sometimes be trickier to deal with
than the bigger, more dramatic ones. For example, though it’s a good thing that
we talk so much more openly today about mental illness, one perverse
consequence is that it can actually be easier to admit to a serious depression
than to a milder, pervasive sense of disappointment in life. “Unlike other
emotions, disappointment is very tricky to express: it comes out as petty and
small-minded,” Haemin writes; it also tends to sound like you’re blaming other
people for failing to measure up. Yet of course it’s a far more widespread
problem than severe suffering. It has been argued that Buddha’s observation
that “life is suffering” might be more accurately translated as something like
“life is bothersome”. (With luck, extreme agony will be very infrequent in your
life, but a background sense of things being not quite right may be truly close
to universal.) The first step towards relieving this kind of discontent, Haemin
suggests, is to recognise the untenability of the demand that you, or anyone
you encounter, should demonstrate perfection to begin with. Much of the
bothersomeness of daily life arises not from circumstances themselves, but from
the insistence that they ought to be other than they are.
Having not yet attained Haemin’s tolerance for
other people’s flaws, I can’t resist observing that his wisdom all too often
comes across as platitudinous. The book’s prose passages are interspersed with
sections laid out as blank verse, inadvertently demonstrating that mundane
reflections aren’t transformed into profundities merely by centring them on the
page and inserting a few line breaks. (A typical example: “If someone did not
ask for your help, / do not try to solve her problem for her. / Though your
intentions may be good, / You risk taking control away from her / and injuring
her self-esteem.”) Still, he’s not wrong. And behind the sporadic banality
lurks a bracingly hard-headed world view: reality is what it is, and a lot of
unnecessary misery arises from demanding that things shouldn’t be the way that
– as a matter of stubborn fact – they are. This is not a counsel of
resignation; having accepted the reality of your situation, it may well be
appropriate to try to change it. But not denying how things stand is the
essential first step. Or, as the psychotherapist Carl Rogers put it: “The
curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”
It can be easier to locate fulfilment in the future, rather than
run the risks involved in trying to achieve it now
Ironically, if not very surprisingly, the
wellbeing industry has proved adept at turning this new spirit of modesty and
acceptance into another expensive consumerist pursuit. Those Scandinavian
“secrets of happiness” are a case in point: “hygge” may evoke contended
relaxation around a familiar fireplace with old friends, but that doesn’t mean
you can’t spend almost £200 on a specially hygge-appropriate plant-dyed pillow,
or £80 on a set of candle holders, at the website hyggelife.com. (And while “lagom”
may mean “just the right amount” in Swedish, there are at least six recent
books in English on the subject, which isn’t just the right amount, but too
many.) Your effort to become the sort of person who finds happiness in what
they already have can easily become its own interminable quest, in which
success – and therefore happiness – always lies in some fantasy of the future,
rather than in the here and now.
As always, this is capitalism’s fault. But
most of us are complicit: we chase unattainable fantasies of self‑reinvention,
rather than confronting reality, at least in part because life is easier that
way. This is one of the lessons of an absorbing recent addition to the
anti-perfectionist self-help subgenre, The Courage to Be
Disliked, by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, published in
English last year. (By then, it had reportedly already sold more than 3.5m
copies in the original Japanese and other translations.) Despite all the “new
Japanese phenomenon” marketing – the book was described by one critic as “Marie
Kondo, but for your brain” – it is primarily an accessible exploration of the
work of the Austrian psychotherapist Alfred Adler. He held that we frequently
cling to our problems, no matter how much we complain about them and claim we
want to eradicate them, because overcoming them necessitates an encounter with
fear. It can be easier to locate fulfilment – and fulfilment in intimate
relationships above all – in the future, where we never quite have to do what
it takes to attain it, rather than run the interpersonal risks involved in
trying to achieve it now.
The problem, as Kishimi and Koga make clear,
is that this only makes for more suffering in the present, by systematically
biasing you towards taking the kind of actions that postpone, rather than
build, a meaningful life. In this way, fantasies of total self-transformation don’t
simply fail, they also block change of the more modest – but real – kind. And
in any case, the future never seems to arrive: the truth is that the present is
the only time it’ll ever be possible to make a change. Transformative
self-reinvention may be an overoptimistic dream, but defeatism about change is
its own kind of false comfort, too: both are forms of absolutism that serve to
justify passivity. We will fail to reinvent ourselves this January, or next
month, or next January, or ever. But once we finally get that fact into our
heads, we might at last be able to start making a few improvements.
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