It was not until classes started last week that I began to seriously ponder why I came to Yale. Of course, Yale’s excellence as a university is the main premise. But amidst the harsh New England weather, I couldn’t help but think of the milder winters and hotpot dinners from my hometown. I am here for an education, for knowledge and recognition, for glory and friendship. I am here to change, to learn and love, to molt into a future self. These ideas are simple and universal, and they’re nothing I didn’t already know. What disquieted me was the realization that all my hopes for university life are images of perfection in the Platonic sense; I am here under some vague notion of self-improvement, as if under a roofbeam raised high.

The idea of a more perfect self looms above our reality like a newly obsolete beauty standard. Life is imperfect, and our expectations shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Like the utopianism that underpins the backbone of many political movements, it is quite human to harbor some vision of perfection for ourselves in the back of our minds; it’s important to dream. But these dreams are only useful insofar as they motivate us to want. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek put it succinctly: “if the obstacle to perfection is removed, then perfection itself also disappears.” We move onto new dreams when our dreams come true. What we desire is the possibility of perfection, instead of perfection itself. Ideals are only possible as an image projected through imperfect realities. 

We are not quite sure what to do with our dreams except to move towards them, but we might as well be productive about it. After all, self-improvement is slightly easier than self-acceptance: if we are constantly becoming a better version of ourselves, then who we are in the moment doesn’t really matter. So we send out applications, make to-do lists and sign up for something else. We meet new people, work hard, play harder. We do more, do less, do better. Under the ubiquity of self-improvement, our very own personhood is reduced to a product, to be advertised to others in personal websites, CV’s and dating profiles. We see self-improvement ad infinitum all around us, in every iteration of youth. Personal growth is the pinnacle of the neoliberal condition, and we do it right. We are Yalies, we are young people in our prime.

In the 1929 political philosophy book “The Revolt of the Masses”, Ortega y Gasset asserts that the self-improvement mindset sets people above the rest: “those who demand much of themselves and assume a burden of tasks and difficulties” are in a higher class of their own. In a 2020 n+1 editorial, self-improvement is diagnosed to be a qualifier of the cultural elite: “self-improvement, for all that it smacks of the self-help shelf at Barnes & Noble, is also […] the rallying cry of the only kind of elite worth having.” In this sense, the act of self-improvement also acquires a moral dimension: we improve ourselves to live up to an elusive something outside of ourselves. Self-improvement is a state of constant forward motion. Self-creation, on the other hand, is a twofold process of rejecting who we are not, and coming up with who we are with the former as an axiom.

Some of us want four years to dream, and some of us want four years to make dreams come true. The late Eve Babitz had it right: “Once it is established you are you and everyone else is merely perfect, ordinarily factory-like perfect … you can wreak all the havoc you want.” Perhaps growing up is realizing that perfection exists hand in hand with mediocrity, and that they are nothing more than a faint, factitious line that we all reach for as an afterthought. In our field of vision are both the roofbeam raised high and a brighter college year. Why improve ourselves if we can create ourselves instead?

JEAN WANG is a sophomore in Jonathan Edwards College. Her Column, “Frames of Preference”, runs every other Friday. Contact her at jean.wang@yale.edu.