The Good Life is no longer Good enough

Over the last few months we’ve been putting in a lot of work to create a set of ‘dashboards’ that allow us to easily and systematically monitor various student, administrative and financial aspects of school life.  It makes a lot of sense for all of us in school to be able to share certain views and indicators as a basis for discussion and action, and I am confident these dashboards will help organisational improvement. 

The metaphor of a personal dashboard is no longer a metaphor

This trend towards data and tracking is also evident in our personal lives; and here I am not so sure about the improvement.  In recent years taken I have taken to tracking how many steps I take each day, which books I have read, how much I sleep, how many people read this blog, what weights I lift and how often... with a little effort I could tell how often I have listened to music from which decade, on which day my petrol consumption is minimised and what hours of the day I tend to spend more money online.  I have even wondered about an individual life dashboard: a one page stop to tell you how things are going – medically, financially, spiritually, in relationships….  I am sure there’s an app for it somewhere. 

It’s a truism that advice tends to reflect the priorities and beliefs of the culture that spawns it.  Previous generations’ talk of a ‘good life’ reflected a rather static and fixed view; these days it’s all about change and improvement.  I read last week’s blog on goals and I wonder if I have fallen victim to the cult of self-improvement that dominates modern life, and I worry that this goes hand in hand with increasing quantification.  Of course education is at some level always about getting better at something, and we have to measure, but maybe these notions are being applied well beyond their proper scope.  The good life may have sufficed for Plato and Aristotle but it's no longer enough - we seem to need the optimised, or even perfect life.  I wonder if this well-meaning attention to progress leads to a relentless pressure to progress – and that can lead to inescapable stress that we are never good enough.  The worst thing is when this pressure is internalized - something that we do to ourselves.  We see it in some of our students’ over-focus on grades and specific University destinations.  I suspect it is also related to phenomenon of increasing rates of mental illness in schools around the world.

Motivating a desire to improve must be some form of dissatisfaction with the current state, and it’s interesting to note that dissatisfaction is the engine of consumerism; there are whole industries devoted to making us feel we are not complete without this or that product – or better yet, several variants of the product (the compliant and obedient consumer is not content to own just one pair of jeans).

What would stepping off the treadmill look like?  In his hilarious Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze, Psychologist Svent Brinkman writes how he in all seriousness proposed to his colleagues at Aalborg University that they “strive to become a mediocre institute”.  While his proposal was rejected, there seems to be a refreshing element of self-acceptance there.   So in addition to New Year’s Resolutions about self-improvement, I’m trying to have a parallel set of New Year’s resolutions to not bother about getting better at a whole load of things too.  I suspect they will be a bit easier than the original set.