Self-Improvement

I think that it would be no exaggeration to say that 'self-improvement' has become a pressing ethical and political problem in the 21st century.Thankfully, it has also been problematized recently across numerous academic disciplines and in both specialist literature and popular writing.Mark Coeckelbergh's Self-Improvement, belonging somewhere between the latter two registers, addresses this serious and complex issue and strives to offer a clear analysis for a general public, using short sentences and simple prose. 1 The moment is right for such a work.As Coeckelbergh writes, "self-improvement is no longer optional; it has become an imperative.[...] We are self-improving ourselves until we have to give up.We are burned out by our jobs and family lives but also, ironically, by the self-improvement work that was meant to do something about that" (p.3).We seem to be at an impasse.We do not (or should not) wish to continue "improving" in this way, but we are not free simply to opt-out if we wish to remain competitive -and therefore survive -in our neoliberal economy.Quite often now, the response of our various professional institutions to a crushing work environment built on an expectation of constant and constantly improving performance is to proffer more "wellness": wellness newsletters, ten-minute chair messages for employees, meditation app suggestions, cat and dog petting sessions, etc.As it becomes increasingly clear that we are now (sometimes literally) killing ourselves in and for our self-improvement culture (p. 2), these responses seem to many to be, at best, highly ineffective and, at worst, complacent or complicit responses.This wellness culture provides something akin to food and sleep in the classic Marxist theory of labour: a merely necessary moment in the cyclical reproduction of our productive forces.Or, as Coeckelbergh puts it, wellness capitalism now "exploits people doubly: first as workers who try to improve their performance during the working hours, then as consumers of 'wellness' during their leisure time, when they try to recover from their work" (p.47)

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• The last man takes LSD

  Open Access•Nicole Yokum•Contemporary Political Theory•2022

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