YOLISA MKELE

Self-improvement is masturbation. It says so in the bible — or at least in Chuck Palaniuck's Fight Club. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the two apart. Much like masturbation, self-improvement isn’t inherently bad. Too much masturbation turns you into a wheezing cretin who isn’t allowed around children. Too little of it turns you into one of those Amish style patriarchs who also isn’t allowed around children. The same goes for self improvement.

No one wants to be the person who’s so uninterested in bettering themselves that they eat fast food overseas. Likewise, no-one wants to be around the friend who’s so vapidly obsessed with self improvement that they walk around sounding like Edgar’s version of Jay Shetty. You’ve got to strike a balance.

Here’s an experiment that’s always fun. Remember your New Year’s resolutions? What were they? Chances are they were pretty grand. You started the year declaring, “New year, new me,” and perhaps really did power through those 57 books you said you were going to read this year. If that was you, well done. Find your favourite vice and celebrate. For the rest of us, chances are those resolutions are gathering dust somewhere. Apparently 80% of them fail within the month and by the time we get to May, most of us are more interested in a French lady being scammed by a fake Brad Pitt than cutting carbs. Maybe you joined a gym in January, feeling righteous and full of purpose, only to end up watching YouTube tutorials on how to do the perfect squat... while sitting on your couch. Self-improvement mania is real. It’s everywhere. It’s like everyone you meet is part of some pyramid scheme where the end goal is enlightenment, but only if you buy the right snake oil first.

I was complaining about this with my therapist and, like a wise, rather eccentric owl she looked at me and said, “Just do 10 minutes. If you can’t do the entire thing, do a little bit every day”. So I went home wondering where I would find the time and then it hit me: screen time. On average, South African adults spend nearly 10 hours a day staring at their screens.

So, in the spirit of self-improvement, I decided to take a deep dive into my own screen time habits. I discovered that I spent about nine hours a day on YouTube (looks around sheepishly). In my defence, a lot of this is because YouTube plays in the background while I work. But it turns out there’s a lot of time being wasted on what those who’ve been through many winters would call “faffing”. You know, that thing you do when you open WhatsApp for a quick scroll and next thing you know, time has marched on without you. Three hours on WhatsApp? Check. A couple of hours on Apple Music? Sure, why not. One hour on LinkedIn for reasons I still can’t explain? Yep, that too. It’s the modern equivalent of flicking through a magazine in the waiting room, only this edition has “health experts” eating slabs of butter.

What my wonderfully eccentric owl was trying to say was that self-improvement doesn’t have to be some grandiose, vanity-driven project where you overhaul everything at once. Instead, pick one thing you want to do better. For example, walking. Withdraw 10 minutes from your TikTok bank and walk. Stroll around the office, perambulate in your garden, saunter in the streets. Wherever you do it, just do a little bit. Then a little bit more. And before you know it, you’ll have made the long walk to wherever Nelson Mandela was going. If you’re spending hours scrolling through Instagram try cutting that down by 36 minutes. Use that 36 minutes to listen to a podcast about something interesting to you, like the history of underground metal or how to become a better podcast bro. Maybe you’ll even learn something. Or not. At least you’ll sound clever the next time you’re at a party.

Bear in mind, if you start to feel like a changed person after a while, my invoice will be in the mail. On the other hand, if nothing changes and you’re still scoffing down Nik Naks while watching Temptation Island, pretend you’re embracing “radical acceptance” and enjoy yourself. Life is yours to do with as you please.