The Authentic Eclectic
What if the Goal of Life Isn’t “Self-Improvement?”
Perpetual personal growth is a life-sucking trap
The origins of never-ending self-improvement
Try to trace back to the first time you were conditioned into the collective belief that the goal of life—whether from a standpoint of our professional, relational, or spiritual identity—is constant, steady, upward self-improvement.
You probably can’t find it. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t taught to you, though. And it doesn’t mean that there wasn’t at least a brief span of time in your life that you went without it. There was a period of time in your life before the world got its grubby paws on you and stopped letting you just be. You might be able to remember that feeling of freedom from expectation. That sense of just being.
It never takes long before we all see a picture of someone standing at the top of a hill as the primary metaphor for the goal of life.
