The following article, Why You Can’t Fix Yourself, was first published on The Black Sphere.

We live in the golden age of the better you. A multi-trillion-dollar global industry thrives on a single, renewable resource: your own perceived inadequacy.

This isn’t just about vague aspirations; it’s a fully militarized campaign against your own personality, armed with productivity apps that guilt you for sleeping, mindfulness gurus who sell serenity on a subscription plan, and a firehose of life-hacking content that makes you feel inefficient for not optimizing your breathing.

Welcome to the Self-Improvement Industrial Complex.

It’s a masterclass in business, where the product is a destination called “Better,” but they never have to deliver you. The moment you arrive—you finally become productive, you lose the weight—the finish line simply moves. Now you’re not just productive, you’re mindfully productive. You’re not just thin, you’re toned. It’s a subscription service for your soul, and you’re on a perpetual free trial.

Historically, this terrain belonged to philosophers and priests.

Today, it’s been co-opted by tech bros in Patagonia vests who’ve rebranded ancient Stoicism as a tool to crush your Q4 earnings, conveniently ignoring that Marcus Aurelius wasn’t journaling to increase his market share. Now, any hack can make himself into a yogi or guru.

Benjamin Franklin, one of America’s original self-help geeks, famously kept a virtue chart to achieve “moral perfection.” He publicly admitted to failing, particularly at “Order” (organization). The key difference? Franklin’s system was free and self-reflective. The modern industry monetizes the journey itself, selling the map while carefully omitting the fact that the treasure might not exist.

The numbers don’t lie. The global personal development market was valued at a staggering $41.71 billion in 2022 and has not grown to over $67 billion. That’s a lot of money for the promise of a fix that, for most, never truly materializes. For those in business, think “DEI” or “ESG” and you get the same results for your business.

Consider These Factoids:

• The word “procrastination” comes from the Latin procrastinare, meaning “to put off until tomorrow.” The ancient Romans were apparently too busy building aqueducts and empires to coin a word for “scrolling on your smartphone for three hours instead of folding laundry.”

• A classic study from the University of Scranton suggests that roughly 23% of people give up on their resolutions by the end of the first week, and only 19% stick with them for two years. The most common resolution? You guessed it: to get fitter or lose weight.

• The “Diderot Effect” is a social phenomenon of consumerism, named after the French philosopher Denis Diderot. He wrote an essay lamenting how a new, fancy robe made all his other possessions look shabby. This is the psychological engine behind many self-improvement purchases—the belief that a new yoga mat, a new journal, a new course, will be the magic catalyst that finally makes you click. Fat chance…{chuckle}

If you tallied all the money you’ve ever spent on self-help books, unused gym memberships, and productivity apps, what genuinely useful skill could you have mastered by now? Is the relentless pursuit of “optimization” just a socially acceptable form of self-loathing?

Your Brain is a Saboteur in a Skin Suit

You’ve decided to change. You bought the book, downloaded the app, sworn a blood oath to your bathroom mirror. By Tuesday, you’re back to your old tricks, feeling like a biological failure. Here’s the liberating secret: you’re not weak-willed. You’re just up against 200,000 years of shoddy neurological engineering.

Your brain is not a sleek supercomputer; it’s a kludged-together museum piece running legacy code from when our biggest concern was not being eaten by a saber-toothed cat. The part of your brain (the prefrontal cortex) that loves long-term planning is a delicate, energy-intensive intern.

The part of your brain that wants that third doughnut and to binge-watch the entire season of Landman right now (the limbic system) is the tenured, lazy employee who controls the electricity and knows all the shortcuts. Trying to “just use willpower” is like sending that intern to fight a gorilla. The outcome is never in doubt.

This is why your brilliant plan for discipline collapses the moment you feel stressed, tired, or bored, or that hot model hits on you at the bar. Your brain, in its infinite wisdom, has decided the easiest way to deal with discomfort is to trigger the same ancient pathways that once helped us find calorie-dense berries. Congratulations, your anxiety-induced online shopping spree is just a modern, poorly-adapted foraging (or other) behavior.

This is all governed by the habit loop—a neurological circuit of Cue, Routine, and Reward.

This pathway becomes more entrenched with every use. Changing a habit isn’t about deletion; it’s about hacking the loop. You can’t just stop; you have to replace the routine with a different one that delivers a similar reward.

Compounding this is the fact that willpower is a finite resource. Studies on “ego depletion” show it acts like a muscle that fatigues. Making countless decisions throughout your day drains this pool, which is why you’re far more likely to cave and order pizza at 9 PM after a long, difficult day than you are at 10 AM on a quiet Sunday.

Consider These Factoids:

• Neuroscientists have found that the brain’s basal ganglia, a key region for habit formation, is also central to the development of both Parkinson’s disease and OCD. This highlights how deeply ingrained and neurologically powerful our automatic behaviors are.

• A study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology found that it takes, on average, 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic, not the mythical and often cited by me, “21 days.” The range was from 18 to 254 days, proving we must be patient with our own glitchy hardware.

• “Akrasia” is the ancient Greek philosophical term for a lack of self-control or the state of acting against one’s better judgment. Even Aristotle was wrestling with why we knowingly do the wrong thing. You’re in good, historically confused company.

What if your most annoying flaw—your procrastination, your impulsivity—wasn’t a bug, but a feature? What is it trying to protect you from? (Boredom? Failure? The effort of focus?)

If you could get a safe, FDA-approved pill that would instantly rewire your brain to eliminate your single biggest flaw, but it would also slightly alter your personality, would you take it?

The Hypocrisy Engine: Why Your Mirror Has a Blind Spot

It is a universal law of humanity that your coworker’s constant interrupting is a glaring character flaw, while your own habit of “enthusiastically building on ideas” is a sign of passionate engagement. We are all master architects of our own moral high ground, and the foundation is pure, unadulterated hypocrisy.

The human brain comes pre-loaded with cognitive biases designed for one primary purpose: to make you feel okay about yourself without the hard work of change. The king of these is the Fundamental Attribution Error.

When you snap at a barista, it’s because you’re stressed and running late—a situational excuse. When a stranger snaps at a barista, it’s because they are a fundamentally terrible person. We judge others by their actions, but we judge ourselves by our intentions. This is why it’s so effortless to spot the splinter in your brother’s eye while ignoring the redwood tree lodged in your own.

We all have a full-time, internal public relations team spinning our failures into noble struggles and other people’s failures into damning indictments of their core character. This is exacerbated by the Blind Spot Bias—the maddening inability to recognize your own cognitive biases. Everyone else is biased, but you? And while Leftists have used blind spot bias to declare all white people, particularly conservative whites are racists, that’s a misuse of the concept. This bias develops when one lives in an echo chamber of ignorance, ergo Leftism.

Next, there’s the Dunning-Kruger Effect, where people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. It’s why the person who most needs to change is often the one most convinced they don’t need to. You can’t fix a problem you’re not aware you have. Add in the curated perfection of social media, where we compare our messy behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel, and you have a perfect storm for making our own flaws seem uniquely monstrous. Again, not generally a conservative flaw, because we tend to recognize what we don’t know.

Consider These Factoids:

• Still, a classic study by researchers at Cornell University found that most people rate themselves as above average in driving skill, leadership, and getting along with others—a statistical impossibility known as the “Lake Wobegon Effect.”

• Our “psychological immune system” is a set of unconscious processes that work to protect our self-esteem. When we fail, we instinctively search for—and find—explanations that let us off the hook.

• The modern political term “whataboutism” is just a new name for an old logical fallacy called “Tu Quoque” (Latin for “you also”). It’s the ultimate hypocrisy deflector: “How can you criticize my lying when you lied that one time in 2007?” It’s a pre-installed defense mechanism to avoid accountability.

What is one negative trait you easily spot and criticize in others that you are almost certainly guilty of yourself? Be brutally honest.

If your internal monologue—the constant, critical voice pointing out your every flaw—was a person standing next to you, how long would you tolerate their company before you told them to get lost?

Kintsugi for the Soul: The Case for Embracing the Glitch

After all this—the failed apps, the neurological sabotage, the blinding hypocrisy—where does that leave us? With the terrifying, liberating notion that maybe the goal isn’t to become a perfectly optimized, flaw-free productivity robot. As I say often on my radio show, perhaps the goal is to achieve a state of enlightened coexistence with your own beautiful mess.

Consider the Japanese art of Kintsugi. When a pottery piece breaks, it is repaired with lacquer mixed with gold, silver, or platinum. The flaw isn’t hidden; it’s highlighted, becoming the most beautiful and unique part of the object’s history. What if we treated our personal cracks the same way? Your anxiety might be the flip side of a deep empathy. Your procrastination might be your brain’s way of forcing you to incubate ideas until the last possible, most creative moment.

This isn’t an excuse for destructive behavior, but a plea for a more nuanced view.

The people we find most magnetic, most human, aren’t the ones who seem perfect. They’re the ones who have made peace with their quirks and learned to wield them as strengths. The relentless drive for change implies there’s a finished, perfect version of you waiting at the end. But you are a process, not a product.

This is where concepts like self-compassion, researched by experts like Dr. Kristin Neff, become critical. Treating yourself with the same kindness you’d offer a friend is a far more effective motivator for change than self-flagellation. Beating yourself up for a failure uses up the very energy you need to try again. As I learned long ago and have said many times, the biggest form of abuse is self-abuse.

Another powerful framework is the “Stockdale Paradox,” named after Admiral James Stockdale, a POW in Vietnam. It involves retaining absolute faith that you will prevail in the end, while simultaneously confronting the most brutal facts of your current reality. This balance—between hope and clear-eyed realism—is essential for any lasting change. I feel this paradox embodies a core principle of Conservatism.

Consider These Factoids:

• The Japanese concept of “Wabi-sabi” is a worldview centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. It finds beauty in the rustic, the asymmetric, and the aged. It’s the aesthetic philosophy of accepting the messy, imperfect journey of life.

• Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, have found that people who practice gratitude regularly show significantly lower levels of stress and inflammation. Shifting focus from what you lack to what you have can be a more powerful transformation than any direct assault on a flaw.

• Investor Nick Maggiulli popularized the idea of “anti-goals”—defining what you don’t want in your life. Sometimes, knowing what failure looks like is a more powerful and sustainable motivator than a vague goal of “success.”

If you knew you would never, ever be able to change this one thing about yourself, what new strategy would you develop to manage it, work around it, or even weaponize it for good? As you reflect back at your life, what’s one “flaw” or past mistake that, in a strange and roundabout way, led you to something important or someone you love?

The pursuit of self-improvement isn’t futile.

But perhaps the most profound improvement we can make is to stop fighting our own chemistry and history. There are no final “Patch Notes for Your Personality.” You are in perpetual beta, gloriously unfinished, and maybe that’s exactly how you’re supposed to be. As God intended.

Continue reading Why You Can’t Fix Yourself …