non-self improvement

exiting teleology

Once upon a time, I had imagined better versions of myself. More disciplined, leveraged, able to move wonderful resources and channel many more energy on many more things at the same time like they’d unlocked New Game+. Had thought if I burrow and ferment with those blurry images of what-can-be, then I can slowly crawl to where their abodes are.

This was around the more ambitious college days, where I’ve made — among other things — spreadsheets tracking which of my character and habit can be iterately improved, asked for formal feedback from friends, and made DIY stickers commemorating achievements that I then slapped on my apartment furniture, all in the service of awakening unrealized potential; summoning those better-mes (I KNOW, I KNOW…)

Nowadays, though, those arch-selves are mostly a mood, an aesthetic. Why? It was the realization that I wasn’t getting decent skills (per “skill issue”) by visualizing successful mes. Instead, skills are borne out of contact with the thing-in-itself; not strictly in the Kantian sense but more like whatever that is here and now. Cooking. Cleaning the room. Doing problem sets. Taking photos. Working.

…doing the motions through and with the thing. Touching its edges. Immersed in its mechanics; how it felt, rotate, connects with other things.

…and there is no better mes inside the thing. Those future-selves don’t contain the knowledge of any thing. They’re not even a map.

And this is what I try to practice: doing not in the service of becoming someone or getting something, not doing things for a goal. Instead, it’s about itself. Its logic, its doing in the world, its shapes. I don’t ask how it feels about me or how it relates to me, because asking that is to (more often) obscure the thing-in-itself.

Letting go of goals

Why not for accomplishing goals? Well, doing things in the service of a goal works pretty great until it’s not. My current understanding: goals are tightly interwoven with self-models, and self-models are largely just mood, plus stories, and momentum as their icing on the cake.

I aim at something and in doing so, backfill a story about the kind of self who would aim that way. Then I chain myself to that fiction, creating a mood. I optimize not just for the outcome, but to not betray the person I imagined myself to be when I started. Which is to say: identity management.

And again, that’s fine, until it isn’t. Until I or my situations change, or more importantly, until the world reveals more of its details… but the goal doesn’t update. Until I find myself mid-trajectory, faithfully executing a plan authored by a self and a world that no longer exist.

Goals, then, are useful mostly as scaffolding for attention. Once they fossilize into obligation or an existential kind of scaffolding, they start producing suffering. So yes: have goals. Just don’t forget what they are: a shape to throw present experiences into, not a debt to a past or future self. And that not all forward motion is toward.

Letting go of the grind

I used to love grinding, or maybe still are. But nowadays I think of it as a way of being in contact with the world, of letting it say what it has to say. To grind is to meet reality not as a story but as material; to engage with its roughness, to go from guessing at outcomes to wrestling with constraints.

John Salvatier wrote about this in his story about building stairs. In the context of that post, when we build a stair, what do we actually do? We aren’t building a stair, per se. What we do is to learn that wood warps, screws wander around, angles betray visual intuition, and that hands are clumsy in ways that our ego can omit.

Thus the grind give lessons in spite of whatever we think of ourselves.

It’s tempting to think ‘So what?’ and dismiss these details as incidental or specific to stair carpentry. And they are specific to stair carpentry; that’s what makes them details. But the existence of a surprising number of meaningful details is not specific to stairs. Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.

Grind is best understood not as hustle, but as revelation. To stop being a person who thinks they know something and become the person who listens to the world and what it has to say. To do this, I need to let go of the semantic/emotional connotations of grinding: the sleepless nights, the shiny pain, the martyrdom, etc.. that’s just theater, that’s just mood. Real Grind is constant contact. Grind is being here. I feel like it’s about sanding down the parts of my mind that flinches when something is way more complicated than i had hoped. When i watch the same error for the fifth time and still trying to understand it, instead of blaming the tools or make up some story about it, coping, to recalibrate my self-image. Make up another twist and turn in my autobiography. The opposite of grind, then, isn’t rest, but fantasy. The fantasy that the world owes me clarity. Fantasy that meaning comes pre-packaged, somewhat. Fantasy that there is a magical Theory of All, panacea for every problem; that things aren’t interdependent and interwoven in complex, irreducible ways. Fantasy that says “to be succesful, i gotta do X with Y and through Z”

Coming back to the first part: no version of those better-future-selves can reach back in time and hand me what the grind will reveal, because those selves are the imagination of my now. They don’t have it either, because how do they know what I currently don’t know? They’re a barrier in Seeing directly.

So recently I’ve been doing these slow, patient, enjoyable erosion of all the facets of what I thought I am, in the endless textural joy of things that are here and now.

Is that better? Is that giving up? In this frame for thinking, the notion of “better” or “worse” is nowhere to be found.

*

*

*