Episode 238 - The Importance of Tension

There’s a presupposition to all self-help, self-improvement, and philosophy as a way of life topics: that growth is good. Self-help and self-improvement, after all, is improvement OF the self, though not necessarily just FOR the self. Even the philosophy of Stoicism presupposes that growth is a good thing. Their eudaemonic state is often described as “flourishing”, which is often imagined as a blooming flower. And that is growth. However, why is growth important? And how do we keep growing?

Episode Transcript

Introduction

There’s a presupposition to all self-help, self-improvement, and philosophy as a way of life topics: that growth is good. Self-help and self-improvement, after all, is improvement OF the self, though not necessarily just FOR the self. Even the philosophy of Stoicism presupposes that growth is a good thing. Their eudaemonic state is often described as “flourishing”, which is often imagined as a blooming flower. And that is growth. However, why is growth important? And how do we keep growing?

Why Do We Obsess Over Growth?

Consider how many self-help books there are, how many podcasts on self-improvement are popping up, and how Stoicism is having a resurgence, along with other philosophies. This isn’t an arbitrary part of human experience. Growth is absolutely vital.

Vital for what, though? As I preluded earlier, we have a lot of presuppositions, us homo sapiens. We often take things as obvious. However, if you take a broader look at the cosmos you’ll see that a lot of the things that we take for granted in terms of what we want or desire are everything but obvious.

You don’t see raccoons having a discussion on self-improvement. And we can even go a step further because the cosmos (and the Stoic god) includes inanimate objects: why don’t rocks value self-improvement?