I read your letter with great fascination, especially about your attempts at improving your conversational skills, because it taps into something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’d write that linked piece differently now, and get deeper into the ways that the aspirational nature of self-improvement narratives are deployed to capture the attention and money of more privileged people (who should all be reorganizing our closets to create a perfect capsule wardrobe of 33 flawless clothing items) and to oppress and shame less privileged people (Why don’t you just grow your own food, poor people? Why do you “waste” your money on expensive clothes, poor people?).
There is nothing wrong with wanting to improve yourself, get better at things, make your life happier and work better for you. And readers, I want that capsule wardrobe like burning. I want to be the kind of person who can curate a personal style and be effortlessly put together, and I think the author of that piece is fly as hell and is doing the same exact thing I am here – sharing some cool stuff she learned with the world in the hopes that it will help someone, somewhere.
But, I also think that “self-improvement” as a dominant cultural narrative and as a product means that we’re drowning in “tips” and “lifehacks” and ways to “optimize” our shit in ways that distract and separate us from deeper engagement with the people and the world around us. And I think that the people who rule this Late Capitalism/Disaster Capitalism/Crony Capitalism/Corporatism/Rule By and For the 1%/Austerity/Eroding of Safety Nets and Public Institutions Like Schools and Roads & Shit What Helps Society Work – whatever you want to call what’s going on in the current political and economic landscape - prosper at our expense when we turn our gaze all the way inward toward what we can do to change & improve ourselves. Because if we blame struggling people solely for their own struggles, and insist that they just need to try harder in order to succeed, we don’t have to face the idea that our own successes were built on more than just our personal exceptionalism. We don’t have to engage with the fact that certain basic shared assumptions about how the world should work are unjust and unsustainable.
-Captain Awkward
