The Downside of Self-improvement

Talking to an old pal last night about “Now What,” I started getting clearer on the parallels between what Louisa is interested about (“natural” movement vs. disciplined exercise) and what I care about: extending the meditation/mindfulness process into all of life, see my latest entry on my other blog

http://chsz.blogspot.com/2008/11/i-like-itbut-is-it-meditation.html

It all comes under the heading of, “Lighten up, people!” That this culture is brilliant at providing opportunities to beat ourselves up for never quite being good enough. Life is often presented as one long challenge--when we’re small, we learn how to add, but that’s not enough, next up is subtraction. When we get that, no time to rest on our laurels, it’s multiplication. And on and on, right through school, degree (maybe), job-career, engagement, marriage, home (good luck, these day), kids…one challenge after another to be overcome.

Life was more of a challenge, back in the paleolithic age, when the architecture of our brains was being tested against real-world conditions. What worked and what didn’t work was simply a matter of (in the long run), which design was most successful at passing genes on to the next generation. That’s when (I assume, it’s all anyone can do) the “life as challenge” model presumably got embedded in our brains, and here we are today, 21st century bodies with paleolithic brains. More or less--theories abound about how much brain modification has been possible, especially since the two big events of the last few million years, (1) tool use and (2) language. (Brain size has actually decreased slightly during the last 35,000 years.)

Whatever. Seems to me we sure have taken the self-improvement message to heart. I’m all for it, but not at the expense of the corollory, that if I need to improve myself, I must be inadequate now.

More later…