There is No Free Will and No Self to Improve

Let’s face it.

Self-improvement culture is a secular cult with capitalist aesthetics and trauma-based rituals. Its high priests run overpriced and unregulated coaching programs, and sell you the fantasy that you can optimize your way out of trauma, depression, and existential despair. However, a deeply flawed and harmful worldview is underneath the motivational mantras, cold showers, and 5 AM club routines.

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Let’s start at the root.

“Self-improvement” assumes a separate, stable, and entirely in control self. It relies on Cartesian dualism (mind dominates body; makes you more susceptible to immoral acts), individualism, and the myth of free will.

It frames suffering as personal failure rather than the predictable consequence of toxic systems. It pathologizes trauma as an individual defect instead of a sacred signal.

In other words, it tricks you into believing you’re the problem, not systemic racism, capitalism, patriarchy, neurotypical supremacy, or the hollow, soulless worldview endemic to the modern West.

What does that benefit most? Status quo over your humanity.

And where did this thought that I need to improve myself come from?

A felt-sense of lack.

Lack as the Origin of Self-Improvement

The self-improvement project is born not from a genuine desire to evolve (at least initially), but from a deep, profound sense of lack. Lack is the feeling that you are, how you live, what you do (or do not do), and what you feel is fundamentally insufficient. It embodies unworthiness, often more specifically, being unworthy of love or humanity. This sense of lack isn’t random. It’s not a glitch that is just magically unique to you. It’s the POSIWID (design objective) of the world you were shaped in.

Lack is engineered. Lack is mental colonization.

In a capitalist worldview, your wholeness or “enoughness” is a threat. If you believed you were enough, you wouldn’t buy the course, sign up for the funnel, or download the app. You wouldn’t need another guru to help you hack your brain. You wouldn’t feel ashamed of your grief, your softness, your fatigue, your neurodivergence, etc.

The economy doesn’t want you healed. It wants you striving, forever just out of reach of a fantasy self, always one “transformation” away from finally being valid.

Lack is not the starting point of a spiritual journey. It is a manufactured wound.

Yurugu as the Embodiment of Lack

In African cosmology, the Yurugu is an incomplete being (initially representing the white man), a metaphor for Western civilization's disembodied, disconnected logic. Yurugu represents the mind cut off from soul, body, nature, and community (Cartesian Dualism). This is not merely a myth; it’s an ontology, and self-improvement culture is one of its offspring.

This concept comes from Marimba Ani’s book Yurugu, which critiques Western culture’s disconnection from wholeness from an Africentric perspective.

When you’re told that healing is a solo journey, that your wholeness is a reward for your grit, that suffering is your spiritual misalignment, that is Yurugu speaking.

Yurugu teaches that lack is not only real but deserved. You were born broken (heh, does that sound familiar?). Your worth is conditional. And the only way back to “wholeness” is through endless self-surveillance, optimization, and performance.

This is not healing. It is internalized mental colonization. It is becoming your warden in a prison you didn’t build.

There Is No Self to Improve

“Improving the self” assumes a stable, individualistic self isolated from the world. This is Western fiction.

Africentric, Indigenous, and Buddhist worldviews know otherwise.

In Africentric worldviews, especially from Bantu and Akan traditions, the self is communal, ancestral, and spiritual. A person is not just themselves; they are the sum of their ancestors, clan, community, and relationships with land and spirit. As the proverb goes, “I am because we are.” Your identity is shaped by Ubuntu, by relationality, not individualism. Improving oneself in isolation would be as absurd as growing a tree by watering only one root.

In Indigenous worldviews, across the Americas and beyond, the self is likewise understood as relational and emergent. Identity is formed through connection to land, language, ceremony, and kin, not through internal branding or psychological “upgrades.” Many Indigenous frameworks understand people as ecosystems in miniature: if the forest is sick, the people are sick. Healing the “self” means restoring right-relationship with the more-than-human world, not optimizing one’s habits through self-discipline and hustle.

In Buddhist philosophy, especially in Theravāda and Mahāyāna traditions, the concept of anattā or anātman (non-self) challenges the very premise of an enduring, separate ego. The “self” is a bundle of changing sensations, perceptions, thoughts, and consciousness, conditioned and impermanent. To try to improve oneself is like trying to polish smoke. True liberation comes not from perfecting the ego, but from seeing through its illusion entirely. This doesn’t mean passivity, it means engaging reality with non-clinging awareness and ethical clarity, free from the suffering of false identity.

Each of these traditions, though vastly different, arrives at a similar truth: the self is not a solo project. It is not something to dominate, fix, or monetize. It is something to honor, witness, and tend, as part of a more excellent web of life.

You are an ever-evolving process, not a fixed being with fixed traits.

Your "self" is relational, co-constructed, porous, and emergent. Ancestors, land, language, trauma, joy, and community shape it. Trying to "fix" it like a machine part is absurd and violent.

Instead of improving yourself, what if you listened to yourself? Not the self imagined by capitalism, the one who performs on cue and loves productivity, but the deep self. The animal. The sacred. The one who dreams in metaphor, bleeds, forgets, weeps, and knows.

Self-Improvement as Trauma Response

Much of what we call self-improvement is survival strategies dressed up in Instagram quotes.

Hyper-productivity? Trauma response and Yurugu.
Perfectionism? Trauma response and Yurugu.
Inability to rest without guilt? Trauma response and Yurugu.
Obsession with “growth”? Often trauma response and Yurugu.

And yet, the culture wants you to believe this is the path.

We praise trauma responses when they’re profitable. We stigmatize them when they aren’t. Either way, we never ask: what does your nervous system need? What conditions would make healing feel safe, not just urgent?

Self-Development, Not Self-Improvement

What if the goal was never to improve, but to unfold?

Self-improvement treats you like a broken machine, a fixer-upper, a problem to be solved. It demands blueprints and benchmarks. It turns healing into homework. On the other hand, development honors the truth that you are not a static object but a living process.

Improvement is about control. Development is about emergence.

Improvement asks, “How can I be better?”
Development asks, “What is asking to bloom through me?”
Improvement is capitalist time, linear, rushed, and external.
Development is ancestral, time-based, spiral, patient, and relational.

To develop is to compost what no longer serves, to root into new soil, and to be shaped by what loves you, not just what evaluates you. Development knows that the seed is never wrong for not being a flower yet.

You Have No Free Will

This is the heresy no one wants to hear.

As most people understand it, free will means the ability to act otherwise in a given situation, to have had real, alternate options, and to have chosen freely among them.

But you are not outside the web of causality.

You are not a metaphysical exception to the laws of nature.

Every thought, impulse, desire, and decision arises from an unbroken chain of conditions: your genetics, your childhood, your nervous system, your traumas, your class, your neurotype, your culture, your ancestors, etc.

You didn’t choose any of that.

Even if you can imagine other things you could have done, you didn’t do them, because the exact conditions of that moment didn’t make those possibilities real.

Your imagined alternatives are not proof of freedom. They are artifacts of consciousness, not evidence of volition.

Choice only appears free when we ignore the conditions. But when you see how profoundly everything is shaped, including your “will”, the illusion dissolves.

If you’ve ever wondered why you struggle to “choose better” even when you know better, this is why. It’s not weakness. It’s conditions.

And yet, the entire self-improvement industry treats you as if you were the sole author of your fate.

As if you chose your suffering.

As if free will is the unquestioned ground of morality, success, and worth.

It’s not.

We often call “free will” just conditioning we’ve learned to feel good about.

Our choices emerge from personal, familial, and ancestral histories and are sculpted by trauma, habit, access, and possibility.

To say you have no free will is not to deny responsibility. It is to relocate it from fantasy to reality.

Because once you understand that your patterns are shaped, you can begin to shape the conditions around you with care and intention.

But if you believe you’re an isolated agent, you’ll keep blaming yourself for what was never yours to control.

This doesn’t mean you have no say.

It means your ‘say’ is conditional, shaped by seen and unseen forces.

And that means healing is not about trying harder but changing the context.

This isn’t nihilism. It’s liberation from shame.

You are not broken. You are a system responding to other systems.

And when you truly see that, you ask better questions, not “Why am I like this?” but “What shaped this response? What conditions need to shift for something new to emerge?”

That’s not helplessness. That’s clarity.

Stop Blaming Yourself (And Others)

When you understand that behavior is shaped by context, that healing is relational, and that survival responses aren’t character flaws, you stop blaming yourself for your exhaustion, fear, or “inconsistency.”

You also stop blaming others.

Instead of “Why didn’t I do better?”
You ask: “What conditions were missing?”
Instead of “They’re just lazy or toxic,”
You ask: “What shaped them? And what could shift?”

This isn’t about letting harm slide; it’s about understanding that punishment is a dead-end. That shame won’t liberate anyone.

Self-Responsibility and Agency

Now, let’s be clear. The absence of free will is not the absence of agency.

Agency emerges when systems, somatics, community, and consciousness are coherent. It’s the space between stimulus and response. It’s the capacity to choose when choice becomes possible.

Self-responsibility, then, isn’t about blaming yourself for what shaped you. It’s about asking: What am I cultivating in this moment? Not because you should be “better,” but because you are freeing yourself, breath by breath, from inherited harm.

Acknowledging that we are shaped does not mean abandoning accountability. It means rethinking justice. We still need boundaries, consequences, and legal structures, but we need ones that understand behavior as shaped, not chosen, in a vacuum.

Justice becomes more humane when we understand that behavior is shaped. We shift from retribution to restoration, from moral condemnation to context-aware intervention.

If we don’t understand this idea of no free will, then we won’t properly understand how to become well or what to do with convicted criminals.

Whose Model of Wellbeing Are You Internalizing?

Are you chasing a body that white supremacy says is ideal?

Are you trying to be “productive” in a way capitalism deems valuable?

Are you suppressing your emotions because patriarchy rewards stoicism?

Before you call it “self-improvement,” ask: whose blueprint is this?

Genuine wellbeing isn’t universal. It’s culturally rooted, trauma-aware, and personally resonant. It doesn’t ask you to fit in. It asks you to belong to yourself, your people, and the earth.

From a Bartlettian (Steven James Bartlett) perspective, which I am biased towards, actual mental health (Not in a DSM5 or ICD-11 sense) is about walking through life with your eyes wide open, being connected to truth and reality, even when doing so leads to discomfort or alienation. Clarity, not conformity to empire or the status quo, is the foundation of sanity.

Once clarity is reclaimed, we must also reclaim language because the systems distort perception and meaning.

Doublespeak

Doublespeak is a form of language that intentionally obscures, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words to conceal truth, manipulate perception, or normalize contradictions, often to maintain power or ideological control.

Words like growth, alignment, vibration, mindset, abundance, and transformation can quickly become doublespeak.

If “alignment” means complying with the system…

If “abundance” means more money with no critique of extraction…

If “healing” becomes a commodity…

Then we are no longer speaking the truth. We are selling performance.

Liberatory language is rooted in clarity, not aesthetics. In body, not branding.

Below is a good example that shows doublespeak well.

The Death Cult of Constant Self-Optimization

Let’s name it clearly: constant optimization is not life-giving, it’s a form of spiritual death.

When your worth is tethered to your output, your sacred rhythms are replaced with calendars. Your grief becomes a “block.” Your joy becomes content. And your exhaustion becomes failure.

True liberation includes the right to be unproductive. To rest. To rot. To weep. To disappear. To do nothing and still be sacred.

No Collective Means No Liberation

You cannot optimize your way to liberation, self-help your way out of a system designed to extract your soul, or create a meaningful life without other people.

Healing is relational. Liberation is collective.

If your self-improvement journey is not rooted in solidarity, it’s just repackaged individualism. And individualism cannot carry you home.

Our ancestors knew this. They healed in ceremony, in circle, in rhythm with the earth.

What Now?

No free will. No self to improve. No more self improvement culture. Now what? What do I do?

We remember.

We return to the body. To the breath. To the land beneath our feet and the ancestors in our blood. We reject the capitalist question, “How can I be better?”, and instead ask, “What do I belong to?”

This isn’t passivity. It’s sacred participation.

It’s choosing to cultivate the soil of your life with intention, not because you believe you are broken, but because you honor the interconnected systems that shaped you. You care for your nervous system not to “optimize” it, but because it holds your story. You feed your body not to sculpt it, but because it is an altar. You speak truth not to perform “enlightenment”, but because clarity is medicine.

You build collective life. You become ungovernable by systems that demand performance, perfection, and isolation. You sit in circle. You cry when you need to. You rage when it’s called for. You protect the soft parts of you that capitalism told you were useless. You remember that healing never belonged to the market, and wholeness was never a productivity goal.

Tap Into Your Ancestral Birthright

Your precolonial ancestors, living in kin-based, cosmologically grounded, land-honoring cultures, did not wake up each day wondering if they were “enough,” if their body was “worthy”, or if they had to “improve” to earn love or survival.

They knew they belonged.

Belonging wasn’t a goal. It was a given.

Worth wasn’t earned. It was embodied.

Life wasn’t a ladder or a pyramid (scheme). It was a circle.

There was no externalized god surveilling their every thought, no algorithm rewarding their suffering with likes, no inner voice whispering that rest was lazy or softness was weakness.

There was rhythm, not hustle. Initiation, not monetization. Relational accountability, not institutional punishment.

Their sense of self was not isolated, it was woven into kin, cosmos, and land. They were not "individuals" in the modern sense, but expressions of a larger ecology of meaning.

Their body was not a project to sculpt. It was a sacred vessel. Their spirit was not a brand. It was a lineage.

Their mental and spiritual health was not measured by productivity, positivity, or personal branding.

It was measured by the right relationship to self, others, ancestors, and the seen and unseen world.

What they lived is your inheritance.

Feel into how it feels that you have been denied this. Severed from it. Colonized.

You carry their memory in your bones, even if you were severed from the names and stories.

You carry the blueprint of a life before the cult of self-improvement, internalized capitalism, and the lie of lack.

The ache you feel when you are burned out, scattered, and ashamed is not evidence that you're failing.

It is your ancestral nervous system rejecting the world you were never meant to normalize.

To reclaim your ancestral birthright is not to romanticize the past like “tradwives” or conservatives do, but to root yourself in a future that remembers. To tap into “Sankofa”, which is an African word from the Akan people in Ghana, for looking backwards to move forwards. A future where community replaces competition. Where care replaces control. Where healing is not a performance but a way of being with one another.

You don't need a ten-step plan to return to your source. You need stillness. Breath. Earth. Truth. And the courage to unlearn what was never yours to carry.

This is where the work of decolonization comes in.

Let the remembering begin.

You are not a self to improve.

You are a soul to remember.

Sit with the land.

Breathe.

Grieve.

Cry.

Begin again.

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