Читать книгу F*ck Feelings: Less Obsessing, More Living - Sarah Bennett - Страница 8

Buying a self-help book is usually the second-to-last step to surrendering to a crisis of self, the last step being therapy and the first step being a gym membership, or at least a Zumba DVD or a pamphlet for the Learning Annex.

Dedication to improving yourself is admirable—and if you’re Oprah, unbelievably lucrative—but what separates this book from your average work of Deepak Chopra is that we can tell you, up front, that being prepared to make whatever sacrifice is necessary to improve yourself doesn’t mean you can do it. You can’t somehow get taller once you’ve stopped growing; there are limits to your physical strength and intellectual ability, no matter how rigorously you train; and, odds are, you have done too many drugs to ever be president.

Eventually, striving to improve yourself brings diminishing returns and prevents you from accepting yourself and living with what you’ve got. That’s one reason self-improvement efforts have to take into account your limits and competing priorities. Otherwise, it’s less self-improvement, more self-sabotage.

The same principle applies to controlling bad habits and other weaknesses. The reason twelve-step programs urge people to accept the uncontrollable nature of addictions is not because they’re never controllable but because, given human weakness, they’re never fully controllable. There’s always something that can, at least temporarily, overwhelm human control and cause us to do things we’ll regret, and believing otherwise only makes us more foolishly vulnerable to that possibility and more self-critical when it occurs. Life sucks, our control sucks, but it’s not personal. There are limits to what you can do to change yourself, and recognizing these limits is essential to managing bad behaviors, bad pieces of your personality, even bad taste in shoes.

Indeed, the more you study dysfunctional behaviors, the more convinced you become that most of us have weird brains, and those who appear not to just haven’t exposed their own brains to the kinds of stress, relatives, or Japanese animation that will reveal their mental dysfunction. The prevalence of unique, genetically associated dysfunctions is certainly consistent with Darwin’s theory that individual differences, even dysfunctional ones, improve genetic diversity for the species and enhance its chances of surviving unforeseeable future threats. If genetic diversity is a good thing for the species, however, it’s often a disaster for the individual, who gets to carry all kinds of odd instincts and impulses in his DNA that cause trouble and are hard to bear.

Neuroscience seems to show that many emotional and behavioral problems we thought were caused by bad parents or trauma are also caused by wiring that isn’t reversible. This explains why self-improvement is hard and sometimes impossible, even when we’re strong-willed and well guided. In other words, we’re often fucked.

On the other hand, while there’s much pain in incurable dysfunction, the joys of self-improvement are overrated. Strength and confidence may give you a wonderful feeling and a license to walk around in a cape and tights, but big fuckin’ deal. Real confidence comes from knowing you’ve used what limited strength you have to do what’s important. If your strength isn’t great, and as a result you have to strain harder, you deserve even more credit, assuming you’ve got the values to do something worthwhile.

If you accept that self-improvement has its limits, then you can begin to discover the nature of these limits, which you need to know if you’re going to manage them well. So the goal of pushing your potential isn’t just to improve your performance but to improve it as much as you reasonably can, given your resources, while discovering what your limits are. That way, you’ll know how much help you need and how much to compromise when you can’t do everything yourself.

Addiction isn’t the only self-destructive behavior that seems like it should be controllable but isn’t. Eating disorders, hair picking, hoarding, and procrastination are similar in that they seem like bad habits that should improve with steady effort and strong willpower, but are actually very hard to change. It’s no one’s fault, not even your mother’s. The only conclusion to draw is that many people have less control over their basic behavior than they deserve, and that it’s often hard to know how much responsibility they should bear for their actions.

Of course, just because you can’t always make yourself stronger or even correct your weaknesses, you still have to try. If your goal is to be a good, decent person who carries out his responsibilities, you’re never off the hook. The fact that you’re flawed and have limits to how much you can improve or even control yourself means that you just have to work harder to get as close as you can to where you want to go. You should never hold yourself accountable for results you don’t control, but always for the strength of trying.

Many requests for help spring from an expectation for self-improvement and a denial of the fact that it hasn’t yet happened in spite of many failed previous efforts to get help. This chapter—and really, life—is about how to realistically assess your ability to get better, cope with the pain of accepting what you already know, and turn your knowledge of your limits into a useful plan of action. No matter what shape your life is in, what step of the ladder you’re on, or what drives you to buy this book.