In Which I Talk About Self Improvement

Is it just me, or are all self improvement posts (not only on medium, but across the internet) aimed at one specific fraction of humanity that is those tech savvy millennials that aspire to sell their start up / Fortune 500 company by the time they are 22?

Somehow I turned 25 this year (!), and far from feeling self-improved, I feel, on behalf of basically everyone my age, horrified at our apparent lack of achievement. But that’s not really true, is it? We are achieving really well!

One of my favourite parts of Christmas in recent years is getting together in the pub on Christmas Eve, which is now the only evening in the year when my old school friends and I can be relied upon to be out in our home town. Many of us have had very interesting years. We have lost some of the angst we had in our early twenties. We are living with partners now. We have quit the jobs we didn’t like and looked for ones which suited us, because this year we worked out what that meant. And, inevitably, one of us moved to San Francisco to work at start up, because we can’t have a blog without me being contrary or contradictory.

So, well as we are doing, why do we turn to the internet for the lack of comfort evoked by this world of having to catch up, always, with articles on Pocket on our iPads? Why are we concerned that if we didn’t read industry relevant content on the bus or train, we’d fall behind? Not all of us aspire to the same things! We’ve learnt that this year, we did what we were told at first, but now we have changed our minds. Maybe we need to put down our ghosts of Christmas future, and go to the internet, and tell it that we know they are just ghosts?

I can’t claim this is my own brand of internet self improvement, because it was heavily inspired by Catherine’s recent post, as well as my conversations over German lager. But, I am happy to join the cause. Self improvement begins with its first word: self. What have you achieved? What did *you want* to have achieved? How can you reconcile the two?