Self-Development today is around $13B industry.
Spirituality, Emotional, social, behavioral intelligence, etc promise to make you a better version of yourself and to help you grow.
Is there a dark other side of this promises of bed of roses?
Table of Contents
What is meant by Self-Development?
Self your ability to distinguish yourself from anyone and everyone else. In very simple language, if you can understand and clearly state how you are different from others, then you know yourself.
| Example Parameter | The Problem | What is so unique about you(with example) |
|---|---|---|
| Hair | Everyone has hair | (my hairs are so strong in the root that if someone pulls them even with 25Newton force, they won’t come out) |
| Eyes | Everyone has eyes, some green, some blue, some dark, some small, | My eyes are deep, so deep that dark personality people can’t look into my eyes for more than 10 seconds. |
| Nose | Everyone has a nose, of different sizes and can smell. | My smell sense is so good that I can identify people just by their smells, even when they have put fragrance. |
| Internal(mind) | ||
| Stress | Everyone has stress. | I can survive for 70 days without food and another 70 days with just 500 cal/day. So I can take more stress |
| -or- | I cannot handle stress well. Others are so good. But whenever the market falls even a little, I become down. | |
| Pleasure | Same go to a bar, some to the pub, some watch sports, some movies, and most celebrate the festival | I am not much pleasure seeker. I derive happiness when I learn something new. |
| Pain | Some are good at tolerating mental pain, some emotional pain, and some physical pain. Different people can tolerate a different degrees of pain. | I can tolerate any amount of mental pain, but I am vulnerable to emotional pain, |
Now, there are over hundreds of such aspects of our life that we need to understand. We need to experiment, observe, think, learn and understand. Of course this process of knowing ourselves is so hard that it is easy to learn MBBS than ourselves.
However, without a deeper understanding of our self, we now have a perception of the self. This perception is about the image. How I appear, how I feel, how others see me, my status, and almost everything about our interaction with the external world.
Therefore “self” development becomes improving that perception. Say building muscles, or winning business deals, winning the heart of females, better cars, better watches, perhaps better behavior. Therefore the self-development industry helps one to feel better by giving the individual a superficial satisfaction that the individual is growing.
This growth, however fake or skewed, is still better than one that is not growing in any dimension, is losing money, going to casinos, having a deformed figure, and so on.
So, however vague of surface level the self-development may be, it is far better than no development. Everyone must start their growth journey, even if it is superficial initially.
The Valid question about the dark side of the self-development industry
As everyone must and should aspire to become a better version, how come Self-development has a darker side?
As we learned, self-development is better than no development and it takes you through the journey of improvement; then, we discuss the negative side. Because unless you know what you are getting into, you may get into severe trouble. By the time the trouble manifests itself, the damages are unrepairable.
The objective of the article is, therefore, not to tell you whether self-development is bad for you or not, it is going to be told by your life to you, but to make you aware. With that awareness, you can probably take better decisions.
The 5 Darker Sides of Self-Development
1. Bonding:- We always like and bond with people like us. As you have committed to keeping growing, you will face far more problems in managing long-term relationships. Expectations will keep jumping.
2. Trust:-You will find it hard to trust people. You will observe more body language and microexpressions. As everyone has some drawbacks, you will find it hard to believe people.
3. Superficiality:- Any changes you do to your personality will make you a different person than you are. Over some time, you will hate this false self.
4. Emotional imbalance:- You will be more measured; smile, and cry; and be optimal. You will have more control over anger and frustration. But slowly, the inability to feel your true emotions will hurt you.
5. Loneliness: Because the self-development industry thrives on making you believe that you deserve more than what you have and you must keep developing yourself, which is an isolation from the rest of the world, after a certain period, you will realize that you are remaining more lonely than ever before. This will slowly start bringing frustration into your brain, and eventually, you will become hateful.
Conclusion
You, your lifestyle, social position will all improve, but at the cost of the true “you.” You would enjoy the improved status but won’t “feel.” This lack of feeling will slowly turn you hateful and envious against others, and you will be back to exactly the position you started from, or at times even a well far deeper.
Know the self you want to improve, before you start improving the outer mask of your self
(Select the text in the box to see the text).
Sometimes, it is important to see beyond the obvious, just like in the above text. Select the life before start improving on the life.
Additional Resources
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