You Don’t Need to Heal. You Need to Get a Life.

P. F.
6 hours ago
4 min read

I first discovered self-improvement when I was around 16. Back then, it wasn’t as common as it is today. I remember a woman on YouTube who talked about meditation, practising affirmations, and the importance of gratitude. I was fascinated by it because it felt like a whole new life was being promised to me if I practised certain techniques. The very thought that I could change my life made me believe that I had to.

A few years later, the internet became flooded with content like “How to lose weight,” “How to be happier,” “How to be more attractive,” “How to make him want you,” “How to embody queen energy”…

Some of the advice was actually good. Every content creator who posted a video titled “10 ways to…” probably just wanted to share what they had learned and help others. What they couldn’t have known is that, for me, that was probably the fifth 25-minute video I watched that day, subconsciously reinforcing the idea that I constantly needed to work on myself. My brain got used to that kind of information, as did the algorithm, and for years, I was almost completely unaware that I was consuming content on social media that constantly tried to “fix” me.

At that time, nothing particularly dramatic was happening in my life. My life consisted of a student job as usual, attending university lectures, and almost daily coffee meetups with friends. Over time, I started to realize that I had nothing to talk about with my friends. Nothing was happening in my life, but I could always bring up self-improvement. For a while, it was almost the only thing on my mind. It felt like it was curing my boredom.

What I later realized was that this idea of a potentially perfect life gave me a false impression that my life was boring. In reality, my life was actually quite good. But because I was constantly exposed to content telling me to improve it, I started to believe that I needed exactly that, to improve it.

In the 2016 film Passengers, which I watched at home with my dad, Aurora, played by Jennifer Lawrence, says something along the lines of:

“You don’t have to do something spectacular for your life to matter.”

That gave me some sort of peace for a moment. I even think I wrote the quote down somewhere. Clearly, I needed to hear it, though I still didn’t know why.

Still, over time, I began to fall deeper into the endless loop of self-improvement content. I became overwhelmed. I was constantly thinking about myself, my life, the deepest possible questions about my desires, identity, thoughts, behavior, purpose, meaning, future…

Often in the evening, before going to sleep, I would get a sudden burst of motivation to completely change my life. By the time I woke up, it would already be gone.

For years, I was bothered by the fact that I hadn’t actually worked on anything concrete. I hadn’t become this amazing version of myself. I felt like I was stagnating, and that feeling lasted for years.

Then one day, someone told me, “You’ve gathered so much information about self-improvement that your brain froze. It doesn’t know where to start.”

That’s when I slowly began to realize that I had gone too far. But still, whenever I opened YouTube, I’d be greeted with a video with an incredibly interesting title, and I just had to click on it. At times, I would even turn down invitations because I had “something more important to do,” which was being productive, meaning working on myself. One month, it was affirmations, the next one was gratitude, then some random technique I had discovered online. And so, for years, I kept trying different methods.

Then one day I thought:

“You know so much about self-improvement, you tried so hard, you researched so much, and it got you nowhere.”

After I told myself that in the gentlest way possible, I actually felt happy and somehow free. So I thought, maybe I could have just watched a cliché romantic comedy, read that fiction book my neighbor kept recommending, or simply listened to the songs I loved when I was 14. Without overthinking, without the feeling that I constantly had to fix something, without the sense of failure because I couldn’t stick to some technique for more than a few weeks.

Maybe my friend was right when he told me a few years ago: “I don’t think self-improvement is our purpose here. I think experiencing life is.”

Of course, balance is key. I think a gentle kind of self-improvement, one that allows us to be average, ordinary, even a little boring, is healthy. And of course, it’s okay to want more from life.

But I pushed myself to the point where I felt like I would go crazy if I watched one more self-improvement video on YouTube.

So one day, I stopped. For a change, I watched a movie when I got home from work, had coffee with a friend without talking about anything in particular, and simply let things be as they were.