There comes a point, usually somewhere between burnout and clarity, when the need to improve oneself begins to feel vaguely violent. By then, the slogans have expired. The podcasts sound hollow. The promise that one more habit, one more insight, one more healed wound will finally deliver peace begins to feel like a scam.
What remains instead are recognitions that are not flattering.
People will disappoint you. Not occasionally, but reliably. They will forget what mattered to you, choose themselves when you hoped they wouldn’t, and fall short in ways that feel personal but rarely are. This is not a moral failure. It is structural. Humans are faulty machines with in-built limitations. Love survives only when stripped of fantasy. Expectation corrodes affection. Low expectation does not make you bitter. It makes you functional. And sometimes, in that space, people surprise you.
Against this backdrop, self-preservation begins to look less like narcissism and more like dissent. Protecting peace, attention, intellect, time, and company is often framed as indulgence, but it is closer to refusal. Refusal to be endlessly available. Refusal to leak energy into systems and relationships that drain without nourishing. Preservation is not selfishness. It is stewardship. Only what is intact can be offered.
Solitude becomes central here, not as loneliness, but as calibration. Eating alone at a restaurant. Sitting without distraction. Walking without documenting. These acts feel transgressive because they remove the audience. Alone, there is no performance, no bargaining, no need to be interesting. Only appetite, preference, and the unfamiliar experience of liking one’s own company without justification.
A simple rule follows. Do things that make you like yourself. Not respect yourself. Not improve yourself. Like yourself. There is a difference. Many socially rewarded behaviours quietly produce self-contempt. The cost of that contempt is cumulative and steep.
Self-reliance is often mistaken for emotional coldness. In reality, it is agency. If you cannot drive, literally or metaphorically, someone else will always be in the driver’s seat. And drivers choose routes. Dependence transfers direction. Learning basic life skills, emotional and material, is not about pride. It is about consent. You cannot meaningfully choose a life you do not know how to sustain.
Forgiveness, when it works, must be brisk. Forgetting even more so. There is a persistent confusion between processing and dwelling. Dwelling rehearses injury and builds identity around harm. Processing leads to understanding, boundaries, and eventually disinterest. Healing is unspectacular. It does not announce itself. It simply stops demanding attention.
Desire, too, needs re-education. The urge to possess, objects, people, certainty, often masks fear. Participation is healthier than ownership. Experiences are meant to be entered, not stored. Relationships are meant to be lived, not secured like property. Enjoy fully. Release cleanly. Hoarding, of love, of things, of stories, hardens the spirit.
Solitude also sharpens discernment. It clarifies who deserves access. Some people observe closely, consume updates, absorb energy, yet never pause to ask how you are. Attention without care is not intimacy. It is extraction. Distance, in such cases, is not punishment. It is hygiene.
Then there are ties that cannot be managed gently. What is consistently harmful does not heal through patience alone. Sometimes the body must choose survival over sentiment. An infected limb is not saved by hope. Certain endings are amputations, and they are necessary.
Perfection, thankfully, is exposed as unnecessary. The self-improvement treadmill eventually collapses under its own cruelty. Accepting fragility, emotional, psychological, human, is not resignation. It is humility. And humility steadies where ambition exhausts.
Still, withdrawal is not wisdom. Life requires practice. Relationships, skills, courage all demand repeated entry into the arena. Falling does not disqualify participation. Staying engaged after loss is not bravery. It is a commitment to being alive.
Perhaps the most counter-intuitive lesson is this. Doing less to prove worth creates more room to live. And forgetting the self, not through erasure, but through absorption in work, learning, and play, often brings more relief than endless self-analysis.
These are not solutions. They are notes, provisional, earned the slow way. A pilgrim does not optimise the path. She walks it, intact if possible, awake if lucky.
(The writer is a mental health and behavioural sciences columnist, conducts art therapy workshops and provides personality development sessions for young adults. She can be found @the_millennial_pilgrim on Instagram and Twitter)
