I, like many others, feel a constant need to improve myself. When many kids hit puberty, they hear a voice in the back of their minds telling them they can be smarter, funnier, cooler, more cultured, and more attractive. This voice says there are endless possibilities regarding what they can achieve. One must only set their mind to it, and it can be theirs. For the past 10 years of my life, I and some of my friends have lived this way. We find something we don’t like about ourselves and work obsessively hard to change it, and then the cycle repeats itself. What’s more, this obsession has infiltrated our leisure time. We’ve been living as machines, by treating ourselves as some kind of software that we can endlessly update—but that is not a sustainable or enjoyable way of living. True growth and self-love arise when people embrace their limitations as human beings and accept that they are good enough as they are. 

Living in a cycle of self-improvement makes people unhappy because they always feel like they’re falling short. Many over-achievers and academically curious people on university campuses such as McGill have a drive to acquire enormous amounts of knowledge. However, these endeavours often stem from a place of insecurity of not being “intellectual” or not sounding “smart enough,” rather than a genuine pursuit of truth. Compulsively listening to audiobooks while cooking and podcasts while working out for the sake of being productive evoke a sheer sense of shame regarding the pursuit of guilt-free pleasure. People watch classic movies and read classic books because they find them beautiful, but also because they know they’re acquiring cultural capital while doing so. This mindset diminishes the simple pleasures of daily life and fosters a sense of constant inadequacy, making it difficult to truly relax and savour life, generating a deep-rooted feeling of dissatisfaction. 

However, this dissatisfaction evaporates once people come to accept their own limitations and allow themselves genuine pleasure without the constraints of self-optimization. On a recent podcast episode of The Ezra Klein Show, the host grapples with the idea of pleasurable entertainment and educational value. In the episode, Klein and author Jia Tolentino discuss the kids’ show CoComelon. CoComelon gets a lot of scrutiny from parents because the show essentially does not provide any educational value to its viewers—mostly kids ages 0 to 4. Tolentino suggests that while parents’ concerns might be well-intentioned, they externalize their obsession with self-improvement onto their children. Consequently, kids grow up believing they must optimize their free time, which leaves no room for simple pleasures such as CoComelon. Demanding this sort of productive leisure from children leads them to grow up thinking they will never be good enough, and therefore, must keep improving themselves even in their spare time.

McGill students can reap enormous benefits from adopting a healthier relationship with pleasurable leisure time. Full-time students have always been at a high risk of burnout, but those risks have skyrocketed ever since the COVID-19 pandemic. Juggling five classes, a part-time job, working out, and a social life is no easy task; so, adding a self-imposed pressure to remain productive during our spare time is a refusal to attend to our human needs. If you feel like binge-watching Bridgerton instead of reading Dante’s Inferno because you are too mentally tired, your body’s signaling to you that it needs that. It is not an act of laziness to occasionally succumb to pure pleasure and self-enjoyment. In fact, it is a political act by refusing to equate an individual’s self-worth with how productive they can be. 
Self-improvement is not a bad thing. There is value in growing and bettering oneself, and having this collective growth as students benefits our community. Nonetheless, this behaviour becomes destructive when it becomes so pervasive that it dominates every aspect of our lives. Let’s embrace a kind of fun that is unconstrained from 21st-century capitalist pressures, and accept that we are good enough as we are.