Self-improvement culture often frames its purpose as transformation — to change a person from one thing into another. The implicit assumption is that who you are is defective — and so you must become the opposite type of person in order to attain success and happiness in life.
Some examples of this “transformation” rhetoric include:
- “Being introverted is wrong, so become extroverted instead.” This is often accompanied by adopting extroverted career paths (like sales), because anything associated with introversion is considered weak or lesser than.
- “You’re overthinking everything, that’s why you’re broke. Stop thinking and just take action.” Whilst this is useful in specific situations, it often leads to the suppression of thinking altogether. The result is blind belief in guru dogma and an inability to trust one’s own inner thoughts.
- “You’re a beta male; be more aggressive and dominant if you want to be an alpha.” This frequently leads to over-correction toward brutish, overly aggressive behaviours and the suppression of one’s emotions and kindness because they believe “kindness is for pussies.”
These examples reveal the default assumption of modern self-improvement advice: your core nature is defective, weak, and inferior, so abandon it and become the opposite instead. It may produce supposedly “superior” short-term outcomes, but it never produces lasting ones — because self-abandonment can never lead to true fulfilment, joy, or peace.
The problem: Self-abandonment and the “blank slate” worldview
At the core of this dysfunction is a deeper worldview issue: many people no longer believe they have an inherent core nature or essence to themselves in the first place. Instead, they assume they are blank slates who must mould themselves into whatever the external world rewards. Once you adopt that belief, abandoning your true nature becomes almost inevitable.
This “blank slate” worldview assumes that life is 100% self-created and that who you are is infinitely malleable. It ignores the idea that you have a soul with a unique blueprint — a Telos or purpose — and a reason for existence. It replaces the notion of a Creator, of God, of a Logos, of an ordered Universe, with the idea that everything is just dumb matter with no intrinsic meaning.
Whether conscious of it or not, most people — religious or not — subscribe to this materialist, blank-slate dogma, largely thanks to the Western Enlightenment and the materialist secular worldview that followed. During this period:
- Institutions discarded God, metaphysics, and any belief in a higher order or moral hierarchy.
- Balance became fragmented and society became dualistic. Opposing forces that sustain life (yin/yang, masculine/feminine, work/rest, introversion/extroversion) were split apart. Instead of individuals embodying a full spectrum of complementary forces, people collapsed into one pole while rejecting the other entirely.
- Reductionism simplified complex systems into shallow frameworks that ignored root causes and treated only surface symptoms.
- Capitalism replaced worship of God with worship of profit, assuming that whatever generates the most profit must be the highest good.
This “blank slate” worldview assumes that life is 100% self-created and that who you are is infinitely malleable. It ignores the idea that you have a soul with a unique blueprint — a Telos or purpose — and a reason for existence. It replaces the notion of a Creator, of God, of a Logos, of an ordered Universe, with the idea that everything is just dumb matter with no intrinsic meaning.
What resulted is a highly fragmented and polarised society. A once unified cultural centre shattered into subcultures that absolutise their own partial view as the be-all-end-all of civilisation. This absolutisation appears everywhere. For example:
- Productivity influencers who preach “10x efficiency” and reduce the entire human experience to output metrics, ignoring contemplation, rest, or divine purpose
- The therapeutic subculture that reduces every interpersonal conflict to attachment styles, turning rich moral realities into one-word labels like “avoidant” or “anxious”
- Fitness culture’s reduction of “fitness” to “aesthetics”, pushing steroid use and drinking artificially sweetened poison whilst ignoring overall health, micro-nutrients, or long-term sustainability
- Academic subcultures that absolutise hyper-specialisation to the point where scholars know everything about one microscopic niche (that nobody cares about) and nothing about life as a whole
- The online “masculinity” subcultures that fixate on aggression, stoicism, and dominance while rejecting tenderness, patience, and moral responsibility as weakness
- The British managerial class that absolutised and abstract thought over engineering, leading to decades of decaying infrastructure, collapsing rail networks, and inability to build anything on time or on budget
The latter produced the predictable outcome: a hollowed-out economy built on finance, law, insurance, and retail — sectors that do not create anything the world wants to buy. Meanwhile, countries that retained the full vertical stack of economic sectors (agriculture, mining, industry, logistics, retail, technology, finance, law etc.), such as China, remained resilient and anti-fragile.
(Insert the two-pyramid diagram here.)
The Four-Step Mechanism Behind Western Dysfunction
As mentioned earlier, the Enlightenment laid the groundwork for the fragmented and hyper-polarised Western society we see today. It began with the removal of God from the centre of life and the elevation of each person’s individual preferred “thing”, impulse, or talent into a kind of private god of its own. Once transcendence was removed, everything collapsed into isolated fragments competing for supremacy.
The process unfolds in four predictable steps:
- Reductionism: misattributing the success of a complex system to a single variable
- Absolutisation: falsely believing that this variable is “superior” to all other variables
- Abandonment: disowning the other variables, especially those which are opposite to (but complementary with) the absolutised variable
- Collapse: the system runs at full steam, generating quick “success” in the short-term, but inevitably collapses in the long-term
The Enlightenment laid the groundwork for the fragmented and hyper-polarised Western society we see today. It began with the removal of God from the centre of life and the elevation of each person’s individual preferred “thing”, impulse, or talent into a kind of private god of its own.
You can see this clearly in self-improvement culture: introverts trying to act extroverted, kind men forcing themselves to be “dominant”, creative people trying to contort themselves into corporate sales roles.
Indeed, these strategies may yield short-term results — but they are always temporary. Eventually, the imbalance reveals itself, and the psyche cracks under the strain of trying to be something it is not.
The Enlightenment followed the same pattern: an explosive initial boom, followed by centuries of accumulating dysfunction. The civilisational trajectory is simply the macro version of the same psychological mistake — self-abandonment disguised as progress.
Once God and absolute morality were removed, the transcendent centre collapsed. And when you remove the centre, everything fragments into competing mini-centres. Suddenly every ideology, identity group, and activist movement appoints itself as the new priesthood, each claiming their tiny slice of reality is the whole truth — replacing what is actually true with what they think is true.
“A culture begins to die when it no longer possesses a shared vision of the good.” — Roger Scruton
This is how you get woke culture — a worldview so reductionist that it can only interpret reality through oppression narratives, yet so self-righteous that it tries to colonise every domain of life. It’s not an evolution of morality, it’s the downstream consequence of a civilisation that no longer knows what good is.
Meanwhile, secular modernity leaves people spiritually anaemic. Loneliness skyrockets, birth rates collapse, young men retreat into video games, dating culture becomes all about exploiting the opposite gender, and no one trusts their neighbours anymore. A culture cannot survive when its members no longer believe in anything beyond themselves.
These outcomes are not mysterious, there’s a clear cause-and-effect relationship which can be seen. It’s the same reductionist pattern, simply scaled to a civilisation. When you absolutise one pole and abandon its complement, collapse is not a surprise, it’s a metaphysical certainty.
Okay, enough ranting, let’s get back to the point of this essay — the dysfunction I see with modern self-improvement culture as a result of these very same four steps.
Divine telos, purpose, and social conditioning
The “blank slate” worldview I mentioned earlier assumes a sort of atheistic worldview devoid of God, vocation and purpose.
You cannot simultaneously believe in a divine purpose and believe you can be anything you want. That’s like setting a destination in Google Maps and then claiming you can drive anywhere and still arrive.
Thus you must choose:
- God is real and gives you a divine purpose (a destination, with freedom to deviate), or
- God is not real, there is no purpose, and you can be anything you want (no destination, total drift)
I believe the first — and I think it's the correct one. In my view, a God-given purpose doesn’t mean a rigid instruction manual, it means resonance. Certain paths resonate with your soul, others don’t.
Childhood often reveals these natural resonances: building, drawing, observing, exploring. This is when we act fully in alignment with our soul nature, doing what we feel called to, at every moment. But then social conditioning begins to override this. For example:
- A loud, expressive child is told to quiet down because loudness is “impolite”
- A quiet, introspective child is told to speak up because silence is “antisocial”
- A sporty, athletic and energetic child is told to read boring math books because being a professional athlete is “wishful thinking”
- A creative, artistically talented child is told to stop drawing and become a doctor because “art doesn’t make money”
As this happens, the soul gets drowned out. We shift from soul-centric living to society-centric living. When we were born, we were like nuggets of perfect, pure gold. Over time, dirt accumulates until the gold is unrecognisable. Most people pick up the gold and mistake it for merely a handful of dirt because they can’t see the gold on the inside.
Most people pick up the gold and mistake it for merely a handful of dirt because they can’t see the gold on the inside.
So they discard the gold in favour of other more appealing, shiny objects and chase lives that don’t belong to them.
But this is a fatal mistake. The answer is not to become something else — it is to recover what was always there. The answer is to clean off the dirt as to reveal the gold hidden underneath the entire time. This is what Jung called individuation. In Hermetic tradition, this is called alchemy, the Great Work.
Hermetic Alchemy: Improvement through refinement, not abandonment
In Hermetic alchemy everything moves through stages: dissolution, discernment and removal, and coagulation. Psychologically, this is the burning away of false beliefs, keeping only what is true, and then embodying the refined self in the real world.
Smelting doesn’t turn iron into gold. It purifies iron into a more pure, and stronger version of itself, capable of being used in construction, as an example. Silver ore becomes refined 99.9% pure silver bullion, not gold.
Thus, refinement reveals and clarifies essence, it does not replace it. Human beings work the same way. The goal is not self-replacement but self-refinement.
“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” — Søren Kierkegaard
The periodic table is a useful analogy: 118 elements, each with its own structure, valence, and purpose. Iron supports buildings and bridges. Gold acts as a store of monetary value. Lithium powers batteries. Oxygen sustains life. None of them are “lesser” for not being gold — they serve different, necessary functions.
Imagine if every element tried to imitate gold because it looks prestigious. You’d get a broken world: bridges collapsing because iron was ashamed of being iron, hospitals failing because oxygen wanted to be glamorous instead of useful.
In the same way, when a person tries to discard their true nature, introvert trying to become a fake extrovert, thinker trying to masquerade as a hustler — they don’t become “better.” They just become distorted, fragmented and unfulfilled. Thus, refinement means removing the distortions so your original element can function as intended. It’s never about becoming something else.
Applied to something like social anxiety:
| Step | Alchemical meaning | Psychological meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Dissolve | Ore is heated; impurities loosen | Question false identities and beliefs which are untrue | Examine false beliefs like “people don’t like me” or “introverts are socially incompetent” |
| 2. Discern & Remove | Impurities separated | Distinguish soul-traits from distortions | Keep introversion; discard the belief that introverts can’t connect |
| 3. Coagulate | Purified metal stabilises | Embody new beliefs and live them out in reality, solidifying those new beliefs into your new identity | Become a social introvert who connects deeply through meaningful, aligned friendships, not superficially |
“Dissolve and coagulate: The one process dissolves, and the other brings together. The first separates the pure from the impure, the second unites what is separated into a new harmony.” — Paracelsus
in this example, it’s clear you don’t become an extrovert, that would be self-abandonment, instead, you become whole. You integrate what was suppressed.
By undergoing these stages of alchemy, an individual is able to improve themselves, which was the original point of “self-improvement”. To improve something means to enhance what’s already there, you cannot improve something that doesn’t exist. Thus, self-improvement should never have devolved into self-abandonment.
Alchemy teaches:
- Introverts to be social, without abandoning their introspection, deep thoughts or interests
- Kind men to connect with and meet women, without becoming inauthentic, fake-dominant “alpha” males
- Creative people to monetise their gifts and make money from their creations, without becoming a lifeless corporate zombie
- Sensitive people to develop boundaries and learn to say “no”, without becoming harsh or cruel
- Ambitious people to cultivate patience and moral restraint, without extinguishing their natural drive or intensity
In the end, alchemy teaches that self-improvement is the elimination of false, inauthentic beliefs and identities, while retaining the soul-core of who you actually are.
What’s ironic is that modern self-improvement originated from alchemical ideas, yet has drifted so far from its roots that it now presents a completely distorted version of the original message.
And the reason is the same pattern you see everywhere else: the removal of God. Once God was killed off, divine nature, purpose, and soul calling disappeared with Him. All that remained were new idols — the Alex Hormozi–type figures modern people worship — who confidently proclaim, “you can be anything you want.”
Total bollocks.
Final thoughts
Modern self-improvement conditions people to abandon their core divine nature and imitate whatever the current subculture deems superior. This is reinforced by empty slogans like:
- Read a book a week
- Always be learning
- Always be positive
- Never slow down
People internalise these because they’ve never learned to think for themselves. Self-help culture encourages obedience, not discernment. It punishes questioning and rewards mindless consumption.
The fatal mistake is doubling down — reading more, listening more, consuming more. Instead, the solution is elimination:
- Eliminate self-improvement content
- Eliminate guru advice
- Eliminate peer, family, and societal noise
When the mind is clogged with input, the soul cannot be heard. Turning down the noise is the precondition for hearing the inner voice again.
Stop asking “what should I do?” and begin asking “what do I feel drawn to?” Not from impulse, but from the deep sense of rightness that signals alignment with your divine will.
“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” — Frederick Buechner
A society-centric life begins with noise and ends in fragmentation. A soul-centric life begins with silence and ends in coherence.
Coherence — alignment with your God-given purpose and nature — is what makes refinement possible. It is the anchor that prevents you from abandoning yourself in the pursuit of manufactured ideals.
Without this anchor, you drift into endless reinvention — hopping from persona to persona, self-help cult to self-help cult, skool community to skool community, business model to business model — never realising that the very act of reinvention is the problem.
But with it, you finally have something solid, something eternal, something immune to cultural noise. You move toward who you actually are, instead of endlessly running from who you are not.
In the end, the Great Work is simple: refine what is true, burn away what is false, and become the purest version of the person God made you to be. That is the real self-improvement — not transformation into somebody else, but revelation of the true self that was buried under fear, conditioning, and noise.
The alchemists never told you to become a different substance. They told you to become your substance, purified. Everything else is self-abandonment dressed up as ambition.