The harder you try to improve yourself,
the less it works.
The one who needs fixing is the same one
trying to do the fixing β it's a trap.
Alan Watts put it perfectly:
it's like the monkey putting the fish
safely up a tree to save it from drowning.
Good intentions, wrong approach.
We see the same mistake everywhere β
in self-help, genetics, medicine, even politics.
We try to engineer perfect people and perfect societies, but life needs variety, not uniformity.
A million saints acting together can be
as destructive as a swarm of locusts.
As Lao Tzu said, the highest virtue
is not conscious of itself as virtue.
When you're patting yourself on the back for being good, you've already lost it.
The road to hell really is paved with good intentions. So here's the real question:
Is the whole self-improvement game actually making us worse?