Investing in yourself

When people are asked to introduce themselves, they often categorically go through the things they do. We talk about our careers, social capital, skills we are trying to build, sports we play, food we are consuming and so on. There isn't an issue with this at all, but naturally, this had me thinking about the way we define ourselves, and more specifically, the need many of us feel to allocate time towards doing things that have the highest return (i.e. being productive).

We all carry our own system where our decisions are directly evaluated by our mind and placed into their own bubbles that are supposed to reflect optimums for who we want to become. And yes, we do a very good job of defining these bubbles and evaluating their benefits. However, we are much worse at defining the person those bubbles are supposed to serve.

Simply put, I believe many of us do not truly consider our own values in daily life, or whether those values are actually reflected in the areas we spend so much time improving. Yes, we know why going to the gym, saving money, building skills, maintaining friendships, or eating well may improve us in their own isolated categories, but we rarely ask whether the person being produced by all of those improvements is actually aligned with our principles.

Immediately, I know some of you are thinking: "Well, can't many of these things be what defines our values?" To which I say, yes, 100%. BUT, I think the distinction is that something can reveal a value without being the value itself. Going to the gym may reflect that you care about health, saving money may reflect that you care about security, and spending time with friends may reflect that you care about connection, but if you never ask why those things matter to you specifically, you may end up treating the action as the value instead of treating it as evidence of one.

All of this is to say, yes, our behaviors should be 'optimal', but currently, many people have the wrong idea of what behaving 'optimally' means.

I believe that the cause of this phenomenon is a lack of defined ideals, and I think the root causes (in order) may be:

• The perceived benefits of making certain decisions (many of which are objectively true)
• A fear of falling behind
• Insecurity

Whatever it is, the effect is that we put in all this extensive work towards 'optimizing' our lives prior to truly understanding how to do so, and in that process, we start living blindly. A person can wake up earlier, get stronger, make more money, meet more impressive people, read better books, eat cleaner food, become more attractive, and still feel lost because they never took the time to understand what any of their actions meant to themselves.

More so, those root causes are not separate from the environments that produced them. We learn what seems beneficial and what parts of ourselves we need to “fix” from families, friend groups, schools, (sadly) social media, and all the other places that shape our concept of an admirable life. By the time someone decides they want to start “investing in themselves,” the idea of what improvement looks like is likely already based on other people’s decisions.

This is very human of us, and I do not think environmental influence itself is an issue. Who you surround yourself with is extremely important, and they can, and do, make you who you are. I've been extremely blessed growing up in this facet - always having been surrounded by amazing, ambitious people - and it makes perfect sense that I want to be seen accurately by these people and respected by their judgement.

The hazard is when your environment entirely determines your value function. So many people are driven to work incredibly hard and unintentionally end up doing clerical labor for someone else’s idea of a life. Health goes into this character bubble, money becomes reflective of intelligence, a friend group validates someone’s status by association, and eventually this person will start improving their evidence of a good life with more care than for the actual life the evidence is behind.

Again, this is not a rejection of ambition. As mentioned before, many of these decisions’ perceived benefits are objectively true. People should take care of their bodies, learn things that make them harder to fool, manage their money, protect their attention, and generally speaking, improve their lifestyles if they feel like doing so. I am just emphasizing that if the purpose of self-improvement is to build a life you actually want to inhabit, then it seems the most important thing you can do is figure out who you are, who you would like to be, and why.

Remember that a decision can be defensible, admirable, measurable, and easily described as growth while still doing very little for your own experience of a life you would actually endorse. Someone may get real utility from status, and pretending otherwise would just be moral vanity, but someone may also confuse the relief of being approved of with the deeper satisfaction of living by a value they actually chose, and those two feelings are probably similar enough that people undermine themselves their entire lives. At the end of it all, it is really just about asking, repeatedly and honestly, whether the things you are working on in life are aligned with what you actually care about.

Once one has a set of values, the work is to actually move toward them and for them, all the while acknowledging that they may change. So, when setting goals or creating resolutions in the future, I urge you to think about your values, and why your values exist. Think about the utility you'd gain in the long-run from abiding to these values, and compare them to instances of relatively instant gratification from decisions that don't truly align with who you are. Don't let these occurrences hold you back. Treat them as information about where your values are still weaker than your impulses, acknowledge the person you are in the present, and then make the next decision with clearer intentions. Investing in yourself means something, but it means a lot more when the self being invested in has some say in what the investment is for.