The Hidden Burden of Self-Improvement: Why We Are No Longer Allowed to Simply Be

There was a time when the search for the self was a journey of shadow and light. A journey of wanderings, of silences, of slowness. A journey where one did not “become” someone — but instead gradually shed one’s illusions.

Today, that path has been mapped, paved, charted. It has been turned into a startup. It has been sold through monthly subscriptions, thirty-day challenges, and endless webinars on “optimizing your inner self.”

Personal development, in its contemporary drift, no longer heals. It demands. It performs. It transforms inner life into a permanent construction site, an investment project, an emotional yield operation. Under the guise of well-being, it perpetuates a silent commandment: never stand still.

Never consent to the moment. Never inhabit the fracture without sealing it. Never simply be. The self has become raw material, endlessly refined. Every vulnerability is an opportunity for growth. Every silence, a wasted chance. Even meditation — that ancient discipline of erasure — has now been recycled into a stress management tool for executives.

It is the superego of wellness: Nietzsche remixed into a guru, selling “personal power” to the exhausted of the modern world.

Other traditions had warned us. Ancient Buddhism spoke of radical acceptance, not as failure, but as a way out of the infernal wheel of craving and aversion.

Ibn Arabi and Ibn Sabʿīn, at the heart of Andalusian Sufism, taught that everything already exists within God, and that the desire to become something other than what one is, is merely the persistence of illusion. Spinoza, in his Ethics, whispered that true freedom does not lie in the ability to change the world, but in the ability to understand the necessity of what already is. And Saint Augustine, that mystical and tormented heart, wrote his Confessions not to glorify having changed, but to bear witness to the slow, inexorable work of grace on a stubbornly human nature.

These traditions do not celebrate change. They celebrate reconciliation. With shadow. With limits. With being. But in the contemporary world, standing still has become suspect.

In my clinical practice, I encounter this mutation: no longer simple anxiety — but the anxiety of anxiety. I call it: meta-anxiety.

The silent fear that stillness signals collapse. The confusion between slowing down and regressing. The suspicion that staying still would betray the sacred mission of personal progress.

Under the invisible influence of the capitalist ideological model, time has been monetized. Then inner life itself was stormed. It is no longer enough to produce: one must also become a perpetual self-optimization project. We no longer work to live. We work on ourselves to survive. The quest for self has morphed into the management of self.

The profiles I encounter bear all the marks of this mutation. They are:

• Performers,

• Anxious,

• Ultra-competent,

Minds over-equipped, yet bodies on the verge of collapse. Nervous systems deregulated, trapped in fight-or-flight mode, unable to return to rest. Minds locked in permanent hypervigilance, as if the slightest inertia could precipitate their obsolescence.

And always, the same phrase: "I can't afford that."

• That — taking a day of rest without guilt.

• That — choosing a path without immediate financial payoff.

• That — listening to what calls, rather than what reassures.

Often, all we need is actually nothing.

Because beneath it all, the message is clear: what cannot be monetized has no value.

In my work, sometimes I confront. Sometimes, I remain silent.

Because intervening too early is still a form of violence. It is still the imposition of a timing foreign to the slower, more subterranean rhythm of inner awakening. And above all, I stay silent to guard against my own sufficiency, my own biases, my own ideologies or visions of the world.

I let their own words resonate fully. I let their own metacognition stretch, open, perhaps even fracture.

Through this tension, an incongruity emerges: it is not they who are defective. It is the entire system that has inoculated them with the shame of imperfection.

We must also talk about this misunderstood acceptance, this watered-down version of transformation.

"Letting go" is used as an alibi for no longer feeling anything.

"Resilience" has become a rallying cry to endure the unbearable.

Yet to integrate is not to give up.

It is to digest what tore us apart.

It is to make inhabitable what once seemed uninhabitable.

This work is demanding.

It is emotional, cognitive, somatic, spiritual.

It is not about beautifying the fracture, but about building a shelter inside it.

I remember a client — brilliant, admired — who had never experienced true mental silence.

For her, stopping was not the recovery of life: it was the anticipated death of her value.

I have seen that same absent smile on the faces of fellow entrepreneurs, athletes, humanitarians.

When asked: "When was the last time your mind was truly at peace?", there was no answer.

The burden of self-improvement, when expanded to the collective level, has become a new agent of alienation. We speak of inclusion, balance, mindfulness. But behind the polished words, the logics of exploitation remain intact. The command "be productive" has simply been replaced by the command "be authentic and resilient." And the injunction to "well-being" has itself become a new instrument of submission: the emotional management of late capitalism.

As Eva Illouz (Emotional Commodities) and Byung-Chul Han (The Burnout Society) have shown, our interiority has become the final battleground. Our own well-being, the last imperative of productivity.

Yet, other memories persist. Those of the so-called "primitive" peoples, those who never separated being from doing, nor nature from spirit. They knew:

• To stop.

• To be silent.

• To be.

• To do what is just and essential.

• And to let the rest unfold.

Not out of incapacity. But out of an intimate knowledge of life's rhythms.

This is the path my journey has led me to. A path of physics, of slow meditations, of initiatory traditions, of sacred clowning. And today, I try to bring it humbly into my practice, my retreats, my words. Not to lead toward another inner achievement. But to reconcile.

To allow the natural order to shuffle its own cards.

Toward a reconciled spirit, a rediscovered nature, an assumed interdependence, and a death welcomed — rather than technologically, viscerally, and spiritually fought against.