The Broken Promises of Self-improvement in the Burnout Society
In around mid-2019 an acquaintance of mine decided he wanted to transfer to a German university to continue his study (and stay away from Hong Kong for good). People at my University generally have a big but also fragile ego. We long for connections and authenticity, yet all we end up having is a mixture of genuine contempt towards others and ostentatious self-branding --- "To whom then will ye liken me, or to whom shall I be equal". He is a rare exception. His goal was already set at the beginning, and he planned and executed accordingly. He even once invited me to enrol in the summer intensive German courses as a companion when he discovered the Goethe Institute in Guangzhou offered courses at a bargaining price. Shortly after, he returned from Tübingen and later transferred to Heidelberg. As for me, my life goes round-n-round in a circle, staying stuck and going nowhere. I learnt some French, Russian, Ukrainian and even German, but I can't even go past the intermediate level. Not to mention I don't even know what sort of jobs I can get simply by being proficient in these languages in Hong Kong.
His advice to me before heading to Tübingen is simple --- don't try to do everything all at once. From hindsight, I can quote many similar productivity advice from those self-improvement or productivity gurus. But all these elaborate propositions can be just boiled down to how you concentrate your maximum amount of time, mental energy and effort to complete tasks that ultimately serve as building blocks leading to your final goal. Life is sometimes too long, but time is always scarce. You can't expect yourself to always be a good, smart, strong, beautiful person who can be free from any obligations and commitments just to pursue the goal of self-actualisation in anything.
My unsolicited opinion is of course irrelevant, but life will come back to bite you if you cannot monetise all these hobbies and pursuits or find patrons to support all your ongoing endeavours. At that moment, the immediate question to you is not whether you sell yourself out. You need SOMETHING to sell. And it is up to your targeted customers to judge whether you have offered something that can add value to their lives. When you can not resist the temptation of doomscrolling, you cannot stop comparing yourself with your counterparts, who also share their lives on social media --- family, newborn babies, a clear career path with a paid-off apartment/suburban house (the American dream). Fame, maybe, material abundance, perhaps, happy faces, for sure. All of a sudden, you may not be so certain about your personal life quest anymore. Instead, you begin to long for owning something as anchors so that your life doesn't fall apart. And you will still have to come up with more things to sell, at least to avoid material deprivation crippling your will. How not to feel regret and live your own life in destitute and outside any commitment will become many people's last straw when they reach their mid-30s. After all, many people just want to own the same thing, share the same "unique" experience and enjoy similar recognition.
In some extreme cases, You may insist on following something like Musashi's 獨行道 ("The Path of Aloneness" ) or any sort of stoicism to guide your life. But I doubt whether ordinary human beings in the 21st century can deprive themselves of any emotional needs without suffering from any sort of mental and psychological problems. I doubt many still want to be a David Goggins training inside the garage/gym alone in their mid-40s, with no spouses, kids, little or no fame, decent earnings and a paid-off home. When people are vulnerable to the need for belonging, emotional support, or mentor guidance, all of a sudden, their scepticism of any organisation is overpowered by their loyalty to an imagined community -- be it an organisation/a movement/a decentralised mobilisation network. As Dostoevsky proclaims in The Brothers Karamazov , if God (the Universal Truth) is dead, everything is permitted. Human Beings can only find mental anchors and be held together by community-exclusive myths constructed as one of many truths (with a small capital t). Both the political left and right have long braced the paradigm of post-modernist truths long before people have ever realised.