The Myth of Self Improvement

Source: The Myth of Self Improvement, Sisyphus 55, 12:49, uploaded 2024-02-23, category Other / Unclear, playlist index 1151.

The video opens with a strange measure of freedom. People can order almost any food, travel widely, and pursue the careers they want. Depression and burnout have spread alongside that freedom. Sisyphus 55 connects the two through the demand to keep improving. A person who must always do more and become more has little time to meet other people or attend to their own life. The self becomes a project with no finished form.

From private goals to a shared condition

The argument begins with Tim Kasser’s research on the mental-health effects of American corporate capitalism. Sisyphus 55 names self-interest, the pursuit of financial success, consumerism, and competition as four principles that Kasser associates with poor mental-health outcomes. The video uses this research to question why a culture that produces distress continues to present its values as ordinary ambitions.

The pressure works through a narrow picture of the person. Each individual appears as an isolated agent with private goals, responsible for designing a life and raising its value through effort. The more a person accepts that picture, the further they can move from their needs, their relationships, and the parts of themselves that do not fit a measurable goal. Hyperactivity then looks like virtue. Compulsive striving fills the space in which connection might have formed.

Discipline taken inside

Michel Foucault’s account of the disciplinary society gives the video its first model of power. A disciplinary institution tells people what they should do and watches them closely enough that they adapt their behaviour. Foucault’s later writing on the technologies of the self describes a different practice. People set rules for their own conduct and transform their lives according to chosen standards.

That practice can look like freedom. Someone who follows a strict morning routine, takes cold showers, and listens to self-help podcasts appears to have chosen a life that an authority has not forced upon them. The video follows Byung-Chul Han in arguing that this voluntary discipline can extract more from people than direct surveillance. A system that tells people what they can do gives them a private reason to keep working. They submit to its demands through self-optimisation.

The achievement society moves surveillance inside the person. Han calls this form of control smart power. Apps, rankings, fitness measures, health data, and professional goals offer instruments for checking whether the self is improving. A person who treats themselves as an unfinished project can always find another task. The same logic turns the body, the relationship, and the career into resources that must be made more attractive and more useful. Fitness becomes an economic asset. A partner becomes part of a self-image. Money becomes another measure of the work performed on the self.

The video calls this voluntary self-exploitation. Its subject markets and monitors themselves in the hope of becoming perfect enough to stop. That end keeps moving because the project depends on continued comparison. Han describes the digitalised subject as an internal panopticon that carries its own surveillance. Self-reference becomes an internal race in which the person performs the role of both worker and supervisor.

Burnout as a symptom of achievement culture

Burnout usually enters this system as an interruption. A tired person is expected to repair their routine, regain their focus, and return to the work of self-optimisation. The video reverses that diagnosis. Burnout and depression can signal the damage produced by a culture that makes achievement the measure of a life.

Alain Ehrenberg’s The Weariness of the Self supplies the history behind this claim. The video describes a movement from a disciplinary model, which tells people what they must do, towards a model that asks them to become themselves through personal initiative. The demand sounds permissive because it removes an external command. It also leaves the person responsible for every failure to measure up. The depressed person grows tired of having to become themselves.

Han describes the resulting exhaustion as a weariness produced by the repeated return of the ego to itself. The self keeps checking its performance, correcting its image, and demanding another improvement. That repetition can produce a loss of connection with other people and with one’s own experience. The video treats depression and burnout as warning signs of this achievement culture rather than simple weaknesses in personal discipline.

Sisyphus 55 keeps a qualification in view. An attempt to become a better person can be healthy when it comes from an intrinsic interest or a real need. The danger begins when improvement becomes an endless circuit of self-reference, external status, competitive acquisition, and conditional acceptance. At that point a person struggles to answer a basic question: who am I when I am not measuring my worth against a standard supplied by other people?

Freedom without a self-chosen desire

Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom extends the question from achievement to freedom itself. Freedom from constraint gives a person room to choose. It does not tell them what they want. Fromm argues that people can live under the illusion of choosing whilst their desires have already been shaped by the surrounding culture. They want the things they are supposed to want.

The video treats this confusion as a source of compulsive self-improvement. A person may call themselves autonomous whilst turning their body, work, social life, and public image into instruments of a system they did not choose. Fromm describes the loss as a loss of genuine relatedness. People and things become useful for the project of maintaining the self, and the person becomes part of the machine they have helped to build.

Fromm’s answer is spontaneity. Artists and children can act for the sake of the activity itself, without converting each action into evidence of progress. Art, play, time with friends, and a slower pace interrupt the pressure to make every moment productive. Spontaneous activity lets a person meet the world without abandoning their own integrity. It joins the self to other things through attention rather than control.

The video connects this account to listening. Han describes listening as a form of openness that the hyperactive ego cannot sustain. A person who must keep measuring their potential treats any interruption from the world as a threat to the project. Listening requires the opposite movement. It lets something outside the self arrive without being turned at once into a task or a score.

Interest beyond the self

The closing movement gathers these ideas around intrinsic focus. A person can enter a state of flow, spontaneity, or resonance when they do something because the activity holds their attention. The activity does not need to improve their market value. The person becomes less rigid because they have stopped watching themselves from outside.

Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness gives Sisyphus 55 the final formulation. Happiness grows when a person’s interests reach outward across a wide field and their responses to the things and people that interest them remain friendly. The proposal is modest. It asks a person to make room for subjects, places, activities, and relationships that cannot all serve the same self-image.

That wider attention also changes the meaning of improvement. A person can still learn, practise, and change. Their life gains room for actions whose value appears in the doing. The self becomes one participant in experience rather than the object that every experience must improve.

Limits

This note reconstructs Sisyphus 55’s interpretation. The video attributes claims to Tim Kasser, Michel Foucault, Byung-Chul Han, Alain Ehrenberg, Erich Fromm, and Bertrand Russell, yet it does not test their arguments or provide full citations on screen. The description lists the books used as sources, although it contains transcription errors in Han’s name and omits publication details for some entries. The automatic English captions also render several names and terms imperfectly. The note normalises those names where the intended reference is clear and keeps the claims attached to the video rather than presenting them as independently verified findings. The Brilliant sponsorship is omitted because it does not form part of the argument.

Further reading / references

• Gábor Maté and Daniel Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture (2022).
• Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society (2015).
• Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (2017).
• Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (1930).
• Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age (2010).
• Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (1941).