Words by: Samuel White 
Art by: Luca MacIsaac 

There are benefits to the world of self-growth; healthy meals and organised lives can definitely help clear up problems. We may feel capable of being perfectly effective in whatever we set our minds to, and that by conquering ourselves, we can conquer the world. But do we actually understand what we are buying into?

Whatever you want to call it, be it self-growth, personal improvement, self-help, etc., the lifestyle it represents is a suffocating cage. We see it growing up in school, in our media and the aspirations projected onto us. A million messages are dangling in front of our young eyes, telling us that to have a great life we must be more, see more, have more and do more. It promises children and teenagers that the only way to achieve success is to adopt an established set of behaviours that allow them to work harder than ever before (even if they end up needing therapy).

The perceived importance of self-growth increases with us, so that by the time we reach university, we may be sold on the glory it promises. If we wholeheartedly believe the premise that success is achieved by practising an increasing number of established behaviours, we risk replacing our identity with the contents page of an unoriginal self-help bestseller. To mitigate this, we must ask ourselves the immortal Pink Floyd question: “Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?” (Wish You Were Here, incredible song btw!)

If the lifestyle of self-growth is the ‘cage’, what is ‘the war’?

‘The war’, or the path of truth as I believe Pink Floyd meant it, is the act of living life according to your own lived experiences and not a set of ideas you didn’t even create. Those of us who choose to undertake ‘the war’, who go where life takes us and trust in ourselves, are at odds with the world of self-growth since it doesn’t trust you to find your way of living. This means that our wonderfully personal qualities, such as a refusal to sleep before 4 am or a penchant for rather messy relationships, are replaced with a universally applied 8 am rise and a beige marriage. Think about what draws you to the ones you love. I’d wager it’s not their ability to get an essay submitted before the due date, but instead something more personal. I know that I connect to people’s passions and the unique way they see the world.

In a world of self-growth, a part of each and every person is at risk. The cage wants you to sacrifice your unique beauty for a level of mechanised efficiency second only to mass-market AI. When we learn to trust our lived experiences and not get swept away by the tide, we can live a special kind of life, one where we can truly thrive.

I’m gonna sit on my roof for hours watching the stars go by, wanna join me?

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Dear Sky,

Please hold me down. Whether

By beer bottles or cigarette butts,

By shooting stars or silent sonder

Keep me here.

Keep me here on

These tiles and

Let the wind rush me.

Let it slide off my skin like

Half-baked insults.

Let it pass me by like

A ship for which I have no ticket.

Keep me here, dear sky.

Do not let me become

A mere passerby