"self-improvement" and capitalism

troubled by this New York Times article on Zuckerberg as self-improvement lifestyle guru, in ways i can't quite put into words, but here's my best shot at it:

1. beyond the (obvious) objection that this notion of self-improvement as a project is incredibly classed - the Silicon Valley resident who has the money, leisure, and health to pursue self-improvement as a structured idea is not your average American, i'll put it that way - this article evokes a deeply-rooted insecurity in me about the type of person everybody needs to become in order to survive in a contemporary capitalist economy. there is something very, very intentional about Zuckerberg's planning and execution of his yearly projects, and many of them are things that are easy to capitalize on. wearing a tie on a daily basis (his 2009 project) builds a sense of ease around corporate culture and attire; learning to speak Mandarin (2010), as opposed to any other language, is an in-demand skill.

2. even the goals that seem to be more (for lack of a better word) spontaneous, like learning how to juggle in 20 minutes or meeting a new person every day, might fall under the professionalization of "being an interesting person," therefore being deserving of the attention, respect, or opportunities one has received/is receiving. take this quote:

“I think taking on self-improvement projects outside of work is part of the zeitgeist of Silicon Valley,” said Mr. Biewald, 34. “People expect you to have things that you care about outside of work.”

so now your coworkers get to judge you for what you do outside of work, too? awesome, thanks for letting me know, Mr. Biewald!

3. another bizarre thing about the self-improvement project is how it locates and organizes other people's humanity for the benefit of oneself. take the goal Zuckerberg set for himself in 2013: meeting a new person every day. what does it mean to categorize that as a self-improvement project? where are you finding these people, how are you interacting with them, and where are you locating the value in your interactions? is a person just a sum of the experiences they can conjure in an one-hour coffee chat, or are they something else? where does that leave the person who cleans your bathroom, or pours your coffee for minimum wage? do they get to have interiorities, too, or at least better pay? i mean, i think there is certainly value in expanding your worldview and hearing from those who are silenced, but if your idea of meeting people is sitting down and extracting as many of their values, beliefs, and experience as you can in the space of a day, i'm not sure your and my views of humanity align. (and this is not a criticism specifically of Zuckerberg, but a pattern of interaction i have noticed in a lot of different spaces.)

4. i read the self-improvement ethos as part of a broader movement towards knowledge as an optimizable source of capital, meaning that 1) one can more or less efficiently attain knowledge and that 2) knowledge is part of a larger project of building capital, be it social, economic, or intellectual. the self-improvement ethos is deeply tied to trends like life-hacking, which purports to optimize one's lifestyle (as long as you're white), or the growth of educational apps like Duolingo and online course institutions like CourseRA, which include in their ranks many students who are likely cramming these in on their morning commutes. what all three of those things have in common is that they fall largely under the purview of the already-privileged (while still being demanded of the lower classes), and that they restructure our conceptions of time and self, towards an optimized ideal in which every second and every intention serves the mission statement of one's life.

*on a related note, Alfie Bown had a great essay on capitalism and enjoyment i'm going to link for your benefit here: the idea of unproductivity as the contemporary cardinal sin is certainly connected to the overarching cultural anxiety around optimizing productivity, which is itself a big part of the self-improvement ethos.

5. and i can hear the objection in my head already, that i'm overanalyzing this, that i'm (irony of ironies) wasting my time, why does this even matter? yet the more i think about capitalism and the lives it asks us to live, the more everything makes sense: the sense i'm around people yet not quite connected, the disconnect i see in a generation of overachievers perpetually told they're not achieving enough, the double consciousness of seeing all of the world's problems and not knowing how to untangle a single one. 

but here's the thing: the world keeps asking us to be better people, improved people, and all the while corporations still get to destroy our Earth, millions of people still live in squalor, riots erupt over the immigrants responsible for taking all of your jobs, and the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter still can't take in all of the people who need warm beds. and i encourage people to continue thinking about these problems, these contradictions, these things that trouble them; but i also want people to know that the world has been troubled for a long time, and perhaps we'd be better to redirect all the anxiety, stress, and effort we put into improving ourselves and challenge those most responsible for the complacent destruction of our world instead.

we are good enough. we always have been.

"Don’t go because you’ve fallen in love with solvability. Go because you’ve fallen in love with complexity."

A very good look at how "save the world" rhetoric often plays out into exotification and power fantasies for the young (and usually wealthy and white) students who go for them, even as there remain pressing issues in the United States that aren't as "sexy" to solve. Best quotes below:

There is a whole “industry” set up to nurture these desires and delusions — most notably, the 1.5 million nonprofit organizations registered in the U.S., many of them focused on helping people abroad. In other words, the young American ego doesn’t appear in a vacuum. Its hubris is encouraged through job and internship opportunities, conferences galore, and cultural propaganda — encompassed so fully in the patronizing, dangerously simple phrase “save the world.”

A bit of credit for all of the people who seek complexity over prestige, intentionality over "impact":

For some, there’s less learning to do. For ten million American kids whose parents have been incarcerated at some point while they were growing up, choosing to work on this issue is more about linking policy and programmatic learning with personal experience — a hard-earned, shorter road to enlightened action.
The activists, entrepreneurs, advocates, designers, and organizers that I admire most these days are up for that kind of investment. They seem to lean in to systemic complexity with a kind of idealistic sobriety.
They seem to hold a precious paradox at the center of their work — on the one hand, newbies have to acknowledge how much they don’t know and cultivate a tremendous amount of patience and curiosity. On the other, they have to hold on to their beginner’s mind that leads them to ask the best kinds of questions and all that fresh energy for change, which veterans so desperately need. They are people working on the least “sexy” issues imaginable: ending homelessness, giving more people access to credit, making governments work better.

Notes on bullshit, trauma, privilege, elites, and...well.

If anyone was able to discover something "hidden" within the curriculum at St. Paul's it was Carla; she was able to understand the unwritten rules of the school, translate her own understanding of things into these rules, and excel. Carla's experience at the school tells us that this is not enough. To her, the mere act of learning the hidden curriculum feels forced; her resistance to the school's lessons is apparent to the faculty and influences her interpersonal relationships. Because she did not believe the curriculum was legitimate - but just a different form of bullshit - she was unable to interact in ways that made the organization of the school, and her success within it, seem natural.

Won't speak for the entire book until I've finished it, but three chapters in, Shamus Khan's Privilege is hitting very close to home, one of the most nuanced yet biting deconstructions of new elite ideology and what it means to attend an elite institution I've ever had the privilege (hah) of reading. On the other hand, there's this piece from Harvard alum Due Quach on being poor and traumatized at the wealthiest, seemingly most well-adjusted undergraduate institution in the nation:

To me, Harvard was a place where people put on a politically correct face. It wasn’t normal to be real or to be vulnerable. Even if you didn’t feel like an overachiever, you still had to fake it because everyone expected you to be one. I learned that if you didn’t fit in, it was up to you to change to adapt to Harvard. Otherwise, the options available to you were to take a year off to think things through, to self-medicate your way through to graduation, or to have a shrink prescribe anti-depressants to numb your disgruntlement.

Quach's experience both mirrors and deepens what Carla (and Khan's interpretation of her words) says: that elite institutions have a persnickety way of making their small world feel like the truest iteration of the world there is, that resisting the conventions and expectations of that world is a numbers game against a population disproportionately inclined towards it, that self-medication is often the only option most have. She also offers some great perspective on the ways in which these institutions fail traumatized students, and perhaps fail to honor the experience of trauma as well:

The most frustrating thing is that the people who treated me didn’t focus on helping me learn effective methods to handle the circumstances causing my high stress: that my family still lived with extreme financial hardship, that I didn’t want to be a burden on them, that I felt responsible for helping them and guilty for not being there to help them, and that going to Harvard did not directly translate into putting me in a better position to financially support them.
What I needed was mentorship and coaching to build the life skills I didn’t learn at home, to address my trigger-defense mechanisms that were locking me in negative spirals, and to become financially secure. Since there was no way that Harvard was going to hand these things to me, I realized I needed to figure out how to do these things on my own.

As somebody who's often heard about how Harvard University Health Services is centered more around helping patients function in the short-term than on the long-term project of healing and reclaiming one's life, Quach's words resonate. I myself realize the tension I feel when imagining my near future. I'm worried about food, housing, and employment, things I can take for granted as a student on full financial aid but need to consider in the next two years. Those questions have no easy answers, but they are not questions anybody - especially not in an educational community - should have to face alone.

To add onto all of this, there's another issue here: the way that the underlying assumptions of the elite institution (and, more broadly speaking, neoliberal capitalism's conception of human worth) depoliticizes the question of trauma, centers all human experience through the lens of productivity, and isolates individuals who need support the most.

I'm trying to argue this in straightforward terms, but...well, look, here's the pithiest way to put it. Somebody at my school just made a potentially game-changing discovery in the cure for cancer (which even Chip here on my shoulder would concur is a fantastic, important thing completely worth celebrating). I know this because there were articles about it. ON THE INTERNET. "Harvard kid makes breakthrough in cancer treatment" is a headline for the ages. "Harvard kid manages to wake up without crying despite recurring nightmares about parents literally slitting his throat upon his coming out" is the title of a poem I needed to write, like, yesterday. (Hilariously, combining the two - Atlas-sized accomplishment meets past personal tragedy - makes for even better neoliberal inspiration porn, porn with titles like "Harvard Prospect Zach Hodges Overcomes His Painful Past," as if one's economic and cultural success was the end-all of one's trauma*.)

For me, there's a more fundamental frustration at the way in which people are talked about - and valued - within the context of meritocracy. The classmates I've met in college are almost always identified by their best accomplishments (note how Quach, too, centers the overachiever as a hegemonic Harvardian identity): the Olympic-level figure skater, the published author, the mathematics whiz. Even when personality traits come into the picture, they feel positioned in a way suggesting that they are only valuable in relation to aforementioned accomplishments**. (As in: "I can't believe she has a 4.0 and still manages to be so nice!") There is no room for trauma here, unless we're talking about an ~inspirational story~, a story about overcoming great personal hardship against the odds to make it.

Look, I've met some of the most purely good, noble, and respectable people of my entire life at Harvard, only their goodness and nobleness and respectability has jackshit to do with what their GPA is, how many courses they're taking, how much their start-up idea sold for, or how many Forbes' "20 Under 20" lists they've been featured in. It has to do with the way in which they navigate the world with a grace I search for in my own life, a grace that is open to injustice and pain without hardening. If anything, I respect them all the more for the thoughtfulness I see in their approach to school, work, and life: that is not something that comes without a lot of effort, self-awareness, and willpower in being good to others. Many of these people have experienced pain and loss that I cannot fathom the depth of, yet they endure, they survive, they continue to move through the world and fill it with their presence.

But on the whole, I still struggle to reconcile meritocracy and trauma/healing, especially when the former too often refuses space to the latter. Quach, on her end, has founded a business venture to increase access to educational resources and training for traumatized students (and good on her for thinking about socioeconomic inequity in all of this, too). I haven't yet figured out how to work through my own trauma, but I think I need to think first about what all of this means to me. It's a tightrope, being critical about what isn't working without lapsing into bitterness or futility; I am still grateful to be where I am, and I still want to make sure that I leave my school with its arms a little wider than when I entered it. 

Concluding thoughts for today:
1. Trauma prevents people from access to economic opportunities that subsequently connect to systematic power. This is true at elite institutions and probably also true outside elite institutions, too.

2. Yet it's this same trauma that is either denied space to exist - even at the level of helping people function, much less heal - even as it gets fetishized in New York Times rags-to-riches stories and Lifetime movies on the human will to endure (to make lots and lots of money!)

3. One, it's obviously important that people in a just economic system are given equal opportunity to participate, and that equality extends into the ways in which people are and aren't functioning due to their trauma. More importantly, though, trauma survivors are worth more than their salaries, just like all of us; I speak only for myself, but I think there is more worth living for than succeeding in the eyes of my classmates, and I think that those who opt out of a destructive economic system do not deserve to have their political and economic power stripped by the elite, and I think that it is okay that all of us think critically about those things and feel comfortable about asking for what we deserve.

NOTES:
*While I hope I expressed myself clearly there, I'll note that this argument is not about either my classmate or Zach Hodges; their achievements are valuable things. I'm making an argument about seeing humans through the lens of their achievements, especially when it intersects with the experience of trauma in ways that don't quite ring true.

**Worse is when all of this work (not always done by the student but by their wealthy and, ahem, invested parents) that goes into making the perfectly affable, intelligent and interesting wunderkid looks effortless, that this is just the way that these people are - that they were born with a copy of The Economist in their perfect jazz hands and a dream of bringing clean water to Africa, supposedly the biggest country in the world or something. To paraphrase Khan's argument in Privilege, the underlying premise of an elite institution is that where you come from doesn't matter; it's what you do within the ivory walls that make you somebody. Unfortunately, within this framework, "Your past doesn't define you" becomes a trap of sorts (I hear "your abuse doesn't define you" a lot, much to my consternation); noble in intent and expression, it denies the material and psychological inequalities that differentiate people's choices and options from birth. When all that matters is what you do, what has happened to you, shaping you for worse or better, is never acknowledged or honored.

And when, subsequently, our elite end up looking very similar to the elite of 40 years ago, they have been legitimized in a way that the old elite was not. The old elite protected their status through entitlement and exclusionary culture, both things that are rightly pooh-poohed today; the new elite just kind of collected in Harvard Yard like a big slithering mob of snake people and naturally came to be, and if there aren't a lot of women, queer folk, or people of color (tying this back to the first half of this essay, people with traumatic experiences) there, well, they just must not have worked hard enough to deserve power.

Lastly, I acknowledge that I'm mad about all of this, by the way, and that's fine, too. I try not to let it cloud my judgment, at least not any more than these ideologies cloud other people's.