Your emotions are a signaling mechanism. They are your subconscious mind’s toolkit for protecting you from dangers, improving your circumstances, and navigating an otherwise incomprehensibly complex world. Every emotion has some adaptive purpose: fear keeps you safe; anger enforces your boundaries; sadness slows you down; joy speeds you up.

The first step towards living better is to recognize that your subconscious mind is trying to tell you things you don’t yet know (primarily through your emotions, but also via other channels like your dreams). A lot of people struggle to realize even this basic fact; they think of emotions as a disruption: a distraction from, say, their career development, or an impediment to their capacity to “be rational.”

your emotions are worth heeding because they carry wisdom your conscious mind doesn’t have access to. And at that point you must embark on the second step—the much harder step—of figuring out what it is that your mind is trying to tell you.

an attitude of curiosity rather than doubt. Embodiment rather than intellect. You find the answer by allowing yourself to be playful, generative, and spontaneous; not by being methodical, intentional, and constricted. Sit back and feel your way to the answer

The perceived ‘self’ is an amalgamation shaped by quasi-independent personalities influenced by genetics, upbringing, memories, and trauma. Much of our behavior is driven by animalistic passions and irrepressible emotions.And I think that’s what we hate: We hate not being the boss of our own heads. We hate not being in control. The puppet wishes to overpower the strings—parts of her own body—that keep her upright and sensible.

Girard told us that imitation is the texture of the human experience, that we are constantly orchestrated by desires, and that we are fluid beings who are always becoming more like who we look up to. So, in this light, trying to become the best version of yourself creates an impossible loop: You need the best version of yourself to exist so you know what to strive for in order to become it, but the best version of you can not exist if you do not become it first. Chicken and egg.

the marionette can not be its own puppeteer; that would be a paradox. Trying to improve the self is like Narcissus staring at his reflection: Neither you nor your reflection—who you want to be—changes. You can not improve yourself by staring back at yourself in the same way that a mirror can not become a portrait.1 Self-deficiency implies that external help is needed. You are imperfect at best. You can not produce something from nothing, multiply without a multiplier, or draw straight with crooked lines.

Instead of self-fulfillment or self-actualization, perhaps we are meant to self-deny so we can make room for a Savior. The reason is in its name: Christ-ian, meaning Christ-like, suggests that we shouldn’t be imitating or striving to be some imaginative best-version-of-myself, but rather, someone completely external and objectively Good to the perfect degree.

I'm not sure I agree with *everything* you wrote above, but as I've gotten older, I find myself turning less to self-help books, articles, etc., and more to just hanging out with friends and family.