"A bull's eye with legs running on a treadmill, digital art"
Do you ever find yourself competing not with others, but with your past self?
There are times when I don't feel like writing because I'm tired, but I do it anyways because I know it's for the better – for my future self. I work out and cook healthy food and start that new side project because I convince myself that it's good for future me.
In my pursuit to make tomorrow better than today, I find myself 'competing' with a past version of myself that could do what I'm doing now effortlessly. I think back to that one month I went on runs every day and was in the best physical shape of my life. Or when I took language classes for a summer and felt like my mind was the sharpest it's ever been. I've done this for every domain of my life – health, eating, reading, and whatever else pleases my constantly unsatisfied self-improvement addict.
Sometimes I remind myself of this past just to push myself to keep going because I hate feeling like I'm regressing away from my 'best self'. Like when you eat a slice of cake an hour after a strenuous workout. Some people relish eating it; they earned it, after all. Others – like me – hate themselves and immediately plan out the next week's workouts.
It only makes things worse, because it makes me yearn even more for that time when I was the 'best' I have ever been at something.
This happened to me with writing over the past few months. I read some great pieces by other writers and tried to emulate them. I cut out as much as I could from my drafts, tried to sound smart, and threw out anything that seemed 'averagely written'. I even started writing one-sentence-per-line, because that's how one of my favorite writers wrote.
The result was choppy, dry writing.
And then I'd go back to some of my early posts and reminisce about the days when I "used to be better at writing" as I admitted defeat for the day.
I don't think I'm alone in this. I've met other people on the self-improvement grind who often compete with their past selves. They think back to a phase when they experienced "personal growth" and compare it to the present with a heavy sigh of disappointment.
But if you keep doing that, the self-improvement grind becomes more of a self-improvement 'treadmill'. You dig yourself deeper down the rabbit hole by reading yet another book and talking about it everywhere. You like a tweet that reads something like "what the smartest people do on weekends is what everyone else will be doing 5 years from now". And soon the algorithm catches on, and your feed's full of content that is constantly telling you that you need to be better.
These things take out the fun in life for me because they make me feel guilty for even thinking about doing something that's 'for my present self' and not 'for my better future self'. Weekend comes, and I feel guilty about making plans with people. "What are the smartest people doing right now?" I ask myself. "Shouldn't I be spending my weekend practicing to become an expert fire acrobat or world-class fruit juggler? Someone out there probably is...right?"
So let me be far from the first to say this to my future self, and anyone else who needs to hear this: give yourself a break.
And god forbid, don't go searching on the Internet to figure out the "best" way to do that.
Written by Aryan Bhasin