Badrinath: Welcome to Ideas and Insights, a show devoted to exploring novel perspectives on contemporary issues.

I am Badrinath Rao, your host.

Self-improvement, a quintessentially American preoccupation, has now transcended borders to become a global phenomenon.

Its based on the notion that we are imperfect and inadequate, driving us to relentlessly pursue perfection for a competitive edge.

In the United States alone, self-improvement is a staggering 11 to $13 billion industry.

The global wellness economy, reflecting this worldwide pursuit, is currently valued at $4.5 trillion.

We have internalized the idea that, like computers, we must be constantly updated.

This obsession fuels the proliferation of courses, workshops, training programs, self-help books, videos, life coaches, and social media apps all aimed at producing a better version of ourselves.

If you are not part of this global movement, you might be considered lazy, dumb, or both.

The advent of digital tools and AI has only augmented this craze.

But amidst this brouhaha, a fundamental question remains is our self improvement mania healthy?

Does it truly make us better human beings or are we becoming unwitting victims of a culture of narcissism?

If so, are the simple ways of improving ourselves?

These are the questions I will be exploring with professor Mark Coecklebergh, Professor of Philosophy of Media and Technology at the University of Vienna in Austria.

He is the author of Self-improvement technologies of the soul in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, published by Columbia University Press in 2022.

Professor Coecklebergh joins me now to discuss his ideas further.

Welcome to Ideas and Insights, Professor Coecklebergh.

Thanks for joining us today.

Thank you.

It's a pleasure.

Badrinath: Your book offers a searing indictment of this whole idea of self-improvement.

You say that self-improvement is a personal and cultural disease in our times, that it is, a relentless quest for perfect action and a phenomenon that leads to self-loathing and frustration.

We will come to these criticisms in detail momentarily.

But let me ask you, preliminary question, as you know.

Well, all of us have imperfections that we are grappling with.

Some have the problem of procrastination, some cannot focus, some others have relationship issues.

And the preferred antidote to these personal inadequacies is self-improvement.

My question to you, Prosecutor Coecklebergh is you do not have a problem with such innocuous forms of self-improvement.

Do you?

Mark: No, I don't.

I mean, I don't have a problem with self-improvement as such.

I think it's, it's a great idea to try to improve yourself.

And, generally many people around us, are always ready to remind us of our, imperfections.

And I think it's it's a good thing to work on them.

I think what I, what I really am against is a particular form of some improvement, which I think is, today very problematic.

And that's what the book is about.

Badrinath: We will get to the problematic aspects of self-improvement that you discussed so elaborately in your book.

In a little while.

Let's begin first with the concept of self in self-improvement.

You, have traced the evolution of this term from the earliest times to our own, age.

And you have discussed the ideas of the Stoics, the Greek philosopher was the social theorist that came much later.

Marx, Max Weber.

You also discuss, Rousseau, the existing socialist Jean-Paul Sartre.

And you end by talking about how this notion of self got crystallized in our own time and has now become mediated by AI and technology.

The upshot of all of this, you point out, Professor Coecklebergh, is that we now have an understanding of the self that, requires us to upgrade it every so often.

Self is something that needs to be maintained, upgraded, constantly.

My question to you, Professor, is how did we get to this understanding of the self and what are its implications.

Mark: Yes, that's a long history.

Of course the history of thinking about the self.

In the book I I briefly sketched out this story and it starts with the ancient Greeks in Western culture.

And the ancient Greeks have the idea that you have to know yourself.

And so then what they were after was the good life.

How can live a good life and, meaning life that's, good for yourself.

And also, that is ethically sound.

And, they ask the question like, how can we know ourselves?

But they didn't really mean what we in modern times mean.

By self and by by, self improvement.

For that, it was a little better knowing what humans are known, knowing human weaknesses, trying to perfect oneself also later in the Christian times, and yeah, having all kind of techniques for, dealing with the self, for example, the ascetic techniques to try to or not desire something, or at least to deal with your desire in such a way that you control yourself.

And then later, in on, in modern times, people got really interested in, who am I?

What kind of individual am I?

What kind of person am I?

And, Rousseau is an important figure there who, for the first time, wanted to be himself, wanted to, attain authenticity.

This is a very modern thing to do.

It wasn't very fast.

And that has influenced and shaped our our contemporary culture very still.

Try to be authentic.

Still look for, who we are, what we are, or, and who we want to be.

And, that is in turn influenced by, people like Nietzsche, Sartre who said, like, don't look at tradition.

I mean more for what you are, who we want to be.

You have to make yourself and by itself.

That was an interesting idea.

And there is a lot of value in it.

But this was then used and misused by what I call the self improvement industry, which tries to sell us all kind of commercial and technological solutions to shape that self.

And it's I, it's that kind of self conception, the self conception of shaped by those particular technologies and by those commercial interests.

It's, that's, self-perception to criticize.

Badrinath: Badrinath: I will come to, the, issue that you flagged, just now, namely the exploitation of this idea of self, improvement by big business.

But prior to that, I have a quick follow up to the earlier question I asked, from the trajectory that you have, delineate it in your book, I get the impression that we sta with a focus on one self, which was what the Stoics were, known for.

They said, look inward.

Do not concern yourself.

Anything that's outside your, scope of influence.

In other words, there was a solipsistic, element at play where you first said that the self alone is true and all else is false.

Now, if we look at how this idea has evolved, we have come to a neo stoic perspective, as you point out.

And that to me is very interesting that we are, again, at the point where we are saying that we should focus exclusively on ourselves, albeit for very different reasons.

Now.

But, the focus is nevertheless the same.

You look inwards, but you say that one must look outward in order to, improve oneself in a genuine manner.

Is that a fair characterization of what you're saying?

Mark: Yeah, I think that's fair.

It's, it's a marked term, but not an inward turn like the ancients state.

Because even that term was still connected with the outside, which, what they thought was the to the world with the divine and so on.

And what we have to in modern times.

Today we have this, turn to the self again, society, a society which is since so seeing this as threatening as, a kind of harsh world.

And we have, a disinterest in matters that, are common, a disinterest in collective, issues.

And, towards the end of the book, I read According to Science.

This.

Yeah.

Turn away from politics.

Turn away from from the wider world.

And the focus on the self.

Now, on the one hand, I understand the kind of turn because, we are in sort of multiple crisis, right?

Fully crisis.

And we are in a, in a world that is sometimes difficult to understand and definitely difficult to influence, at least as an individual.

And so I understand the stern, but at the same time, the stern also, that leads to, very concrete political consequence to us and, to a situation where we are too individualist, I think, too much, concerned with ourselves and too little with others, and a situation where we deny that the who and what we are is a relational matter is actually something that depends on others.

So others are not necessarily how Sartre said, but others, and also are there to support us, to share who we are.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Badrinath: You are absolutely right.

We will come to this, notion of the relational self, in a little while.

Let us stay for now on the aberration that have come in the wake of a distorted sense of self.

And one of the aberrations that you flag, which to me is an interesting part of your book, has to do with this idea of wellness capitalism that you discuss in your book.

Now, wellness capitalism is a reference to the ploy by capitalists to monetize the inadequacies of people and say that there are strategies to fix your inadequacies.

And in the process, of course, they are diverting attention away from the larger socio economic, cultural and political challenges that people are engulfed with.

More importantly, you say that all of this I e the machinations of wellness capitalism has led to the commodification of the self.

Tell us how wellness capitalism emerged and why has it become so very po in terms of the awesome profits it generates and the success it has had in getting people to, accept its ideology, if you will?

Mark: Yeah.

So what happened is that, in industrial society, basically the focus was on, trying to monetize goods, producing goods and monetizing them.

And so one could say that there was some kind of interest in the bubble and external aspects of the human, you know, trying to, to make profit of that.

But then, gradually, through the development of the human and psychological sciences, but but also, through gathering lots and lots of data about people, especially with the contemporary technologies, it's now possible for that, for commercial culture and the capitalist culture to innovate also the self and to use our insecurities, use our, most secret desires, to, try to sell us products and to try to, yeah, make profit of us.

And, this is also, this is true for consumers.

But it's also true for workers.

The idea is that there's, there's some kind of paternalistic idea that, Oh, you know, to take care of yourself.

But taking care of yourself is not for the sake of you, but for the sake of you being a good worker and a good consumer.

And and so we are given some superficial means of, achieving wellness.

But we are not really improving ourselves.

We're just, becoming the ideal consumers and the ideal producers of data for the new economy.

Badrinath: If wellness capitalism is one of the aberrations that have emerged in the wake of our quest for self improvement, the other, equally disturbing challenge, you point out in the book, comes from the advent of digital technologies and artificial intelligence.

You have eloquently argued that these technologies quantify by our self.

They continuously assess, evaluate, quantify all our attempts to, improve ourselves.

They collect data about our activities without our knowledge, and they monetize, these, assets to great advantage.

So the idea now is that we have a quantified self coming to us in the wake of, digital technologies.

How has this idea of a quantified self distorted our understanding of who we are, and what can we do to set right this anomaly?

Mark: That's a very good question.

So we have the new information technologies, data science, AI and so on has enabled, to analyze a lot of data about us and to penetrate in depth psychology.

And in that intimate world, of us in this way, found new ways of making money, and new kind of capitalism and, this means that today, the, although we are giving the impression that we're improving ourselves, for example, through devices that, track our heart rate, and, our, roots when we are sparking, or devices that, follow up our, our medical condition.

At first sight, these devices, they seem to, give us some more information about us.

At first sight, they seem to be helpful in and, supporting, getting better and getting better shape, monitoring our health.

But at the same time, those data are taken from us, and they used for all kind of purposes.

And they're especially used to make money.

They're sold to third parties.

They're all kind of surveillance issues related to deaths.

All these big companies know a lot about us.

And so without that, we realize this.

We're really, Yeah.

In a, in a kind of, nearly totalitarian, system, where we, also at the same time do not really know ourselves, but only have those, patterns in data.

So what we get then is the time we come to understand ourselves in this way, as, Yeah, produces of data as a collection of statistics, basically.

And we forget that there is this more deeper, ancient quest which we can, connect to by, reading books by going back in time.

Also by by listening to, you know, sources of indigenous knowledge, and, in other ways, but unfortunately, this is seriously not happening.

We are, in this kind of you know, new economy.

We're we're we're used and we, we, you know, get more and more tired and burned out, without having a chance to really, find self-knowledge and find ourselves Badrinath: a related challenge that you flag, in the context of the rise of, digital technologies, is this subtle shift from self-improvement to self enhancement with the rise of biotechnologies and AI, the new focus now, as you point out in your book, is toward self enhancement.

And you also posit that we will soon get to a point where using AI, we can resort to moral enhancement.

To me, this is quite intriguing because, what's started out as humanistic self-improvement has, morphed into something completely different.

It has now become, technology driven transhumanism.

How did this, transition occur?

And where do you see this going?

Mark: Yes.

In the in a humanistic culture, for example, in the Renaissance and also later, when books became, more democratized, more available to everyone.

Did you also have to work on yourself to read in, reading, also talking to other people?

And nowadays what's, what's happens, is that, you get more and more of this, culture of, yeah.

Not only you're not good enough, but also you have to improve yourself by using the technologies or other other technologies.

So I would say that the book is a kind of technology, a medium.

But nowadays the new technologies I and others are used to, improve ourselves.

And this is, quite different from how, how we use technology, because technology used to be applied to that external relation we have towards nature.

But now the technologies are applied to the human minds are applied to the self, are applied to the quest of self-improvement.

And by always, stressing that we are not good enough, as individuals, and as humans, the technology is presented as, as the only way out.

So also as a, as a species, we're seen as, it's not good enough.

Humans are instead of in humanistic finance, were there was this idea of the human becoming fully human perfect yourself in that way was the idea now that the human is not good enough anymore?

And the idea is rather that we should, schematically, morph into something superhuman, something transhuman.

And that's, that's quite a shift from accepting the human condition to basically, radically changing, so let's start to, you know, as I said, like to making ourselves, I think has been radicalized, and interpreted in a very technological way, in a very sort of impoverished, way.

Badrinath: Let us now turn to the last part of your book, where you offer solutions to the challenges that have come in the wake of our obsession with, self-improvement and interestingly, after having provided, a masterful critique of, all the issues that have emerged in the wake of distorted, narcissistic self-improvement, you still affirm your faith in it, albeit, qualifying your faith by saying that we must have self-improvement, but not in the form in which it is today.

On the other hand, I mean, you provide, an alternative, and you make two interesting points.

You say that we must develop a more nuanced idea of the self and understand it as relational, something that is not static but is a story and it's part of what you call the narrative identity.

So that's the first thing.

The notion of a of, relational self, which I thought was very interesting.

And then you say that you don't have to, focus morbidly on your self.

You want to enhance your self, improve your self, change society.

Can you please briefly tell us why you think changing society is important and why you think that developing this idea of relational self is critical for changing how we view self-improvement?

Mark: Yeah.

As you said, I'm not against self-improvement as such.

And so what's needed is rather to, to leave that narcissistic focus and, and in order to do that, I think there are two parts.

One is to, yeah, to, to acknowledge, the relationality of the self, acknowledging that we are always dependent on others and also dependent on, our natural environment from ecosystems on this planet.

That's, that's, one way of, you know, instead of turning inward and outward, and a second way, it has to do with, yeah.

Turning towards those political and social issues that, shaped this whole situation in which we are and which, yeah, gives this toxicity to self-improvement.

And so that means that, yeah, that I argue for, for social and political change, as the only way to, make sure that we are in an environment that shapes us in a different way.

Because if you really take seriously that relational self, it means that what I am is also what the environment is and vice versa.

So you can't change the parts if you don't change the whole, so if we work on changing the whole also, on political and social change, then then there's more chance that we, can arrive at a better form of, self-improvement and a form that, that, that that is in line with our humanity and our deep relationality as humans.

So if I understood you correctly, professor Coecklebergh, but you seem to be suggesting that this, pursuit of self-improvement has to go on at two levels.

One is the individual level where you pursue self-improvement in meaningful ways and in ways that can have political, significance.

And then there is a larger, more, diffused form of, self-improvement that is anchored in political, social and cultural challenges of our times.

Thank you so much Professor Coecklebergh for spending time with us and sharing your views.

It's been a pleasure talking to you.

Thanks a lot.

Mark: Thank you very much.

Was a pleasure.

Badrinath: That's it for today.

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