Self-Improvement is Violent

Self-improvement isn’t bliss. It’s sacrifice. Every “productive” choice replaces something easier: scrolling, streaming, escaping.

Forget the Hollywood version of personal growth. You won’t be draped in the emerald hue of a banker’s table reading lamp as you pore through a business plan scribbled on the back of parking tickets. Filmic ideas of betterment are make believe. More often, your lighting will solely stem from the LED of an Excel spreadsheet. Not sexy.

Meanwhile, your phone is face down vibrating with distractions. Your brain tempts you with Minstrels in the cupboard, the new episode that just dropped or the jacket you don’t need but crave anyway. Giving into this passivity is the opposite of violence as we donate our time, attention and willpower to someone else.

Each time we avoid whatever soma takes our fancy, we fight against the person we don’t want to be as we hone the character person we want to become. 

Steven Pressfield is King in this arena. In The War of Art he speaks of resistance as a compass: what we avoid is what we need to do. Whether that’s changing utility providers, or a two-hour run in the rain, the pull of something unsatisfactory is exactly where we need to push. 

Overcoming that resistance is violent.

The Pain of Pleasure

Name the last five things you saw while scrolling. Tough, right? Even if you can recall them, if you had to consume without algorithms, would you pick them? 

Using the Internet used to be a conscious act. You’d head online to find specific places for specific things–a running forum for racing tips, or a recipe website for dinner ideas. In recent years, though, we’ve passed that agency onto algorithms which decide what we see, when, and for how long.

It’s called a feed for a reason: we’re foie gras birds with funnels down our throats.

Every time we choose something boring or hard over a reflective black screen, we commit an act of positive violence.

Because violence isn’t only defined as damage. It also describes extreme force... Tell us it doesn’t take all of your might to pause a Netflix binge at 10pm because you forgot to put the washing out.

The Pressure Cooker

That’s where ZAAG comes in. That’s why you’re here. We think pressure is good. Not to raise lines on productivity charts, but to build capacity. Aspiring for self-improvement is a form of self-respect. The best days are never the easiest. They’re the ones where you hit the pillow knowing you did the uncomfortable things you could’ve avoided. That is fulfilment.

These won’t be every day. Nor should they be. Negative internal chatter wins sometimes. Life is hard. But the gardener who waters the grass they stand on, rather than daydreaming of how green it is elsewhere, is the happier one.

Jonathan Haidt wrote in Coddling Of The American Mind that, in modernity, we’ve embraced two fallacies:

1. What doesn’t kill us makes us weaker
2. We must always trust our feelings

Two Birds One Moan

#1 is a reversal of Nietzsche’s famous line - "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger - and rings true for the way many act today. But it's false.

Anyone who trains knows this universal truth: Stress, applied properly, builds strength. Self-improvement through fitness is invariably violent. But outside of the gym we forget that. Progress arrives via friction. Persistence is built through repetition. Just like muscle.

We build momentum by stringing moments together, wrestling each one from our hedonic pocket into our eudaimonic one.

The second fallacy, #2, that our feelings are paramount, is an overcorrection after centuries of repression. It sounds liberating, but feelings are fickle. Teenagers don’t like doing homework. Adults don’t like sorting invoices. Tough. Children have somebody to enforce discipline. When we grow up, we no longer have someone to peer over our shoulder, forcing us to take our medicine.

We have to do that for ourselves.

That too is violent. It’s telling yourself “No,” when nobody else will. It’s saying: I didn’t do what I said I would, so now I can’t do the fun thing. 

We’d never reward those we love for bad behaviour, but we let ourselves off the hook. All. The. Time.

Because wisdom isn’t as certain as crow’s feet. Everyone ages but not everyone matures. We curate self-improvement in the whirling mosh pit of feeling, thinking and not knowing.

A Message From The Great

Epictetus told us two thousand years ago that “it is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.” 

Self-improvement is both self-care and violence. When we choose graft over glee, friction over passivity, that is the ultimate act of agency.

So, the next time comfort compounds too quickly, choose violence. It expands your capacity to perform.