The pursuit of personal growth has, to many, become a vain desire for perfection, a chronic obsession with ”self-improvement” and a performative act of cultivating a popular persona.
In my coming book, The Age of Self-Realization, I challenge the idea of self-actualization. To me, at its worst, it is a performative act, the impossible act of cultivating a perfect persona. A narcissistic desire for superiority, importance, significance. Why not try to be what you are instead? Not a perfect god, but a beautiful human being capable of love, intelligence, and action. But this requires us to give up the idea of level-based or hierarchical personal growth.
Common theories of personal development describe personal growth as a conscious act of hard work and effort, where you are always striving upwards. It may look something like this, loosely borrowed from Spiral Dynamics:
Level 1: You are a human animal. You eat, sleep, and survive. Congratulations, you exist.
Level 2: You’ve discovered your family and tribe. You perform rituals to appease the masters. You trust the shaman.
Level 3: You’ve realized you’re powerful. You stop asking permission. You start sending aggressive emails. You are the main character.
Level 4: You’ve found the One True System — a religion, an ideology, a productivity framework. You have a morning routine. You judge people who don’t have a morning routine.
Level 5: You’ve read twelve books about peak performance. You have a vision board, a cold plunge, and an LLC. You are optimizing yourself into a spreadsheet.
Level 6: You’ve realized Orange was spiritually empty. You go to a sound bath. You cry for the first time in years. You post about it.
Level 7: You now see the whole map. You understand all the other stages. You feel a little smug about this, which is technically a Red trait, but you’re Yellow now, so you’re aware of the irony, which makes it fine.
Level 8: You’ve merged with the cosmos. You speak in metaphors. You are the wave and the ocean. Nobody at dinner parties knows what you’re talking about, but they feel vaguely judged.
Level 9: Nobody really knows what this is yet. The people who claim to be here might be Turquoise with better branding.
Level 10: After all this, you have to give it up and recognize it was all pointless.
Level 11: But then you discover a second level of enlightenment where you…
I don’t mean to dismiss some of the ideas raised in spiral dynamics, and I think it can accurately describe some different forms of consciousness and ideologies at play in the world today. It may even be that your life has progressed in a certain direction, and that you can recognize how your ideology has changed in a similar way. Something I genuinely love about spiral dynamics is that it can so accurately point out the flaws with any specific state of consciousness; it can see that every form of consciousness comes with its own benefits and limitations.
What I mean to challenge is not that. It’s the idea of levels and a linear, hierarchical system of growth. And it risks diverting your attention from what is really important to a superficial scoring model of growth.
“The great lesson from the true mystics… is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s backyard.” – Abraham Maslow,
Levels are a superficial way to describe personal growth and often paint an inaccurate idea of what is really happening when you engage in the project of personal growth. It is how the gamified brain has trained itself to think about success. It makes personal growth look like a staircase or a ladder. But what is so wrong with that, you might say? Aren’t there people who are more conscious and more enlightened than other people? And is it not fair to speak of levels of personal growth and development? Let’s talk about that.
The problem with personal growth as an act of “leveling up” your consciousness
Imagine you met a monk and you asked them how many years they’ve been meditating. Wow, 25 years, you say, you must be at least level 7 in self-actualization!
“Oh, I’ve gone even beyond that, my friend” the monk replied. “Oh, really, what level are you at?” The man was amazed, but at the same time, skeptical. “I’m over nine thousand”, the monk replies, with a wink.
The problem with ladder-based development models is that what’s really happening when you grow is something very different. It may feel as if you have grown, but at the same time, you’ve also shrunk. You see, increasing your consciousness is as much about adding things as removing things, and it could just as well be described as going deeper or lower, as going higher.
With increased consciousness comes less consciousness of other things. You may experience that you have grown to be a more present and attentive person, but you’ve also stopped being conscious of some things. For example, you may find yourself worrying less about the future, what could happen, what could be. You have gained and lost consciousness.
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” – Carl Jung
The person who sees personal growth as a matter of climbing or increasing their level is highly conscious of how they compare to other people and is constantly sizing themselves up against the world. The risk is that you think so much about what you want to become or how high you’ve climbed, you become arrogant, or jealous of those who claim to be higher than you.
The other problem with leveling up your consciousness
Ugh, it’s so much work.
It renders the act of living in this beautiful universe to something that takes effort, a climb, something forced. It makes you navigate the world using a map instead of just enjoying the world as the terrain it is. It directs your attention away from how you can love, how you can be conscious, in the here and now, and makes you think more about what you have to learn, figure out, or solve, before you can hit the next level, and for what? What’s the goal? Why are you rushing to level nine instead of enjoying where you are at right now?
“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” – Carl Rogers
What I see most of all is that people are rushing to skip ahead to the top. They’re trying to skip all the levels beforehand and go straight to the “final stage” right away. After all, why shouldn’t they? Who’s going to stop them? But it becomes incredibly performative. You’re reciting “complex” academic theories and citing vague gurus like you know exactly what they mean, but do you even have the slightest clue what you are talking about? Or are you just giving a performance of enlightenment, instead of the reality of it?
Consciousness is not meant to be a performance. It’s meant to be a daily exercise in directing your attention to what is meaningful and beautiful, and really breathing it in. Really living it. Consciousness has no level. It has breadth, depth, and height. Instead of trying to direct your attention away from the fame you crave, why not sit with that desire for a moment, to really accept it is there, and to seek to understand it, why it is important to you, where this desire comes from… This changes personal growth work from an act of self-denial or repression to a coming into consciousness.
How can we think about consciousness?
The best way to think about consciousness is to shrink the universe down to the size of a room. Now, try to be conscious of what is inside this room. Your consciousness, relative to the vastness of the universe, is going to be as small as a particle of dust.
You can try to think of the infinite vastness of the universe, but only by reducing focus, and your vision of the universe will be vague and blurry, and in large part, a hallucination. Instead of thinking of consciousness as a predictable staircase with a clear, linear direction, it is better to imagine that your consciousness has height, depth, and width.
You can increase the depth of your awareness, but you will lose height or breadth. You can increase the breadth of your awareness, but you will lose height or depth. Personal growth is a little like trading beads; you can gain a bead, but only by giving up another. We think of some men as gurus, exceptionally wise and deep, but it is not that they are more conscious than we; it is that they are differently conscious.
They have developed an impressive, interesting, and important consciousness for us in our spiritual growth, but in other areas, they will still have to learn. So don’t be surprised if the guru is as curious about you as you are about them. You may think that you’re going to an Ashram or shrine to learn from a master, but they are only going to accept you if they feel that they have something that they can learn through you. I’m going to become a father in October, and I’m so excited to get to learn from my child. I want to experience the world the way that they do. I expect my kid(s) will teach me more than I will ever be able to teach them.
You are already a master
To me, you’re already a guru. You’re already a master. Your consciousness of yourself, your world, and your own perspective is incredibly deep and refined. What you are thinking about is fascinating, original, and thought-provoking. You should start a Substack or a YouTube channel and share it with the world. Why don’t you do that right now? I think other people like you or in a similar situation would love to hear your stories. I think it could help people.
You know far more than me about what it is like to be you – and to have lived your life – and to have worked in your career – and to have had the kind of relationships and experiences that you have had. If books were written about your life, and I got to hear your stories and insights, and to take in the awareness you had, it would provoke a million aha-insights in me; it would change my world. It would change my consciousness.
But Erik, you might be saying. I spend most of my days scrolling TikTok. I think so many stupid thoughts. I have so many difficult emotions, my life has been hard on me, I never got to go to school, I never got to learn, I never got to have the career I wanted to have… How could you possibly call me a master?
Because you’ve learned from that. You know what that is like, far more than I ever will, and I can try to preach to you about how you should do things differently, why you should put down your phone, why you should reframe your past, why it’s not too late to get an education. But I don’t know you or your life. It’s still going to be up to you where you go from here. And those experiences that you’ve had, they might have just guided you right where you were meant to go, right to this moment.
And in this moment, you have a choice, the same choice you’ve had in every moment, to choose to direct your attention and awareness into something meaningful, something important, something that is interesting to you. You can choose to direct your awareness away from stupid thoughts and distracting social media. Your consciousness has depth, breadth, and height, and you can exercise it, direct it, and change its shape and form. It won’t make you hit a level-up screen. But it will change your understanding of the universe. It will transform your life.
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