Better Self-Improvement through Intentional Self-Undermining

Pure self-improvement is not robust, flexible, and intelligent. Intentional self-undermining augments self-improvement with these qualities.

Self-improvement has relatively self-evident virtues: you gain capabilities you want, you become more the way you want to be, perhaps you are relieved of something. All of these are enjoyable.

Less self-evident are the risks of successful self-improvement: narrow optimization that is not robust, over-allocation of attention/resources to one aspect of life, and righteousness.

Diet is a common area of self-improvement, so I’ll use that domain to explore these ideas.

There are many posited ideal diets. Let’s say I am engaging in one, for example, raw veganism (which I did engage for a few years). What I observed in myself and in a community of like-minded people was a tendency for the quest for an optimal diet to consume attention: books read, discussions had, laborious food preparation.

That energy and attention was not free. There was an opportunity cost for attention and energy that could be deployed elsewhere in life. Here is the first possible valuable use of intentional self-undermining (in this case, via the consumption of cooked meat) it bakes in imperfection, causing the falling away of the perfect orienting ideal as an attractor for energy and attention.

Note: intentional self-undermining is not the same as “falling off-the-wagon”. It is done with full self-knowledge of the capability to be “on-the-wagon”.

A side-effect is that losing purity opened things up for holding two apparently mutually contradicting ideals. For example: always eat raw vegan, and always eat what a host serves you, accepting their gift graciously. Without notions of perfection, the judgement as to which principle to bring forth becomes intuitive, with the principle not adhered to causing neither regret, nor a sense of non-progress towards an orienting ideal.

Secondly, intentionally adding noise to one’s self-improvement practices strengthens the muscle of returning to the practice. Instead of arbitrarily falling off the wagon willy-nilly, one jumps off the wagon and then jumps on again. This builds the capacity to get back on the wagon and makes one practice more robust when confronted with adverse circumstances. For example, I traveled for a couple of weeks in a foreign country where all fresh fruits and vegetables were likely to cause bacterial unpleasantness until one had adapted for a month…so no fresh fruit or vegetables for me. In this case, because of familiarity with re-establishing the pattern, it was quite easy to reinstate the raw vegan pattern.

Finally, righteousness is the greatest poison of self-improvement, especially when you are successful at it! You lost weight. You made money. You are a compelling public speaker. Whatever you did, you succeeded. A danger arises, the delusion of thinking you are existentially better than those who have not gone through the same process. This righteousness corrodes the very being.

Intentionally being less-than-perfect in one’s patterns immunizes oneself from the greatest danger. It also means that kindness towards yourself is more available if you should suffer a reversal of fortune!

Self-improvement can be a very fulfilling activity. It also has potentials for consuming an excess of energy and attention; fragility to adverse circumstances; an inability to be part of a gestalt way of life that also contains orthogonal principles; and the terrible poison of righteousness. Intentional and dose-limited self-undermining is the remedy to all of these.

Always add a spot of self-undermining to your self-improvement, for best results!