To Hell With Personal Growth

I deleted my habit-tracking app yesterday.

Three years of meticulously logged meditation sessions, workouts, and morning routines—gone. 

And I have zero regrets.

I've spent half a decade trying to become someone else: the blogger with the perfect morning routine, the optimized stack, the color-coded productivity system.

My e-reader holds 47 unread self-help books. My browser bookmarks are cluttered with "life-changing" systems I never implemented. Each purchase was meant to fix something. Each book promised transformation. 

It was, frankly, exhausting - and I'm not convinced it made me any better than I ever was. 

Let me save you some money: The transformation industry is a scam.

Not because the advice is bad (although it frequently is), but because it sells a lie:

"You are a problem to be solved."

...And with enough optimization, enough Atomic Habits, and enough "personal development," you'll arrive at some mythical destination where everything clicks.

But you won't.

I sure didn't.

The best days of my life weren't optimized. They were messy, unplanned, and wouldn't look good on any social platform. They involved take-out Pizza for dinner and staying up too late, talking about nothing. They came from following curiosity instead of calendars.

They were messy. 

God, I miss that mess. 

Growth matters. But there's a difference between growing because you're genuinely curious and growing because you're trying to fix imagined deficiencies. 

One feels like play. The other feels like punishment.

I'm done punishing myself.

I read. I learn. I push into uncomfortable spaces. But I do it because I want to, not because some expounder told me I should. 

The self-improvement industry doesn't want you to know this: You're already worthy of existing. You don't need to earn the right to take up space. You don't need to optimize your way to someone else's permission to be alive.

You're not a project.

You're not a problem.

You're a person.

And sometimes, being a person means deleting your habit tracker and eating Pizza by the pound.