Like most of those around me, I feel the pull of expressive individualist ideas: I think it is a hugely important part of being human to be ourselves and express ourselves, in ways that express our own individuality and are not the same as others’. Yet there is also a grave danger in this ideal.

The danger is that we get so caught up in celebrating and expressing ourselves as we are that we refuse any attempt to get better: not merely “you deserve love just the way you are” (which is true of anyone), but “you are perfect just the way you are” (which is true of no one). And that approach is terribly destructive. We are naturally full of harmful impulses. Our selves just-as-we-are can be full of bad impulses that hurt us and make our lives worse, in ways that lead to self-destructive – and other-destructive – behaviours.

It can be dangerous to point to someone’s quick temper or vengefulness or emotional fragility or callous indifference and shrug and say “that’s just how he is” – if it is someone who considers us a friend or loved one and could be willing to listen to our advice. (With someone who is not going to listen to us, we may just need to accept this as one of the many external bads in the world that we cannot change – but when we can help someone live a more flourishing life than they are, it is usually a good thing to try to do so.) It is significantly worse when we justify those things as “that’s just how I am.” We need to give ourselves more credit – that is, we need to acknowledge at least some ability to change. And most of all, we should not celebrate those aspects of ourselves that go wrong.

I happen to suffer from generalized anxiety disorder and have many narcissistic personality traits. These are not things to be celebrated and affirmed; they’re flaws, they’re problems, they make my life a lot worse. To the extent that I can fix them, I should. They’re difficult to fix, and it’s dangerous to act as if they have been fixed when they haven’t; that way lies the bodhisattva complex, where we want to be angels but act like beasts. But their presence is like the presence of disease or famine or war: even when we can’t eliminate them, we need to acknowledge their badness as badness.

A decade ago Daniel Mallory Ortberg offered a hilarious caricature of the use of personality differences to justify one’s bad behaviour: “Sorry I murdered everyone, but I’m an introvert.” While nobody I’m aware of actually goes to the extreme that Ortberg is satirizing, its treatment of one’s personality traits as self-evident justification for any action bring out the direction in which expressive individualism goes badly wrong. (“I shouldn’t have killed them, but at the same time, it’s not wrong for me to need space to reflect and recharge before I’m ready to interact with people.”)

In our current era, the problem expresses itself strikingly as the celebration of mental illness, the taking of mental illness as an identity. Duquesne University professor Patrick Lee Miller had long asked students to write papers telling him who they essentially are. In a now-deleted tweet from 2022, he noted a disturbing trend:”There has been a dramatic shift in the last two years. Roughly three quarters of these college students define themselves as suffering from a mental illness, most often anxiety. This was rare when I started a decade ago.” Survey research backs him up: a Skeptic Magazine survey found that 67% of men and 72% of women born after 1997 believed “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.”

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with diagnosing mental illness at a higher rate. The more we notice our mental problems, the more possibility we open up of treating them and alleviating them. We were very poorly served by an approach that stigmatized mental illness and viewed it as something to be hidden. But what will not help us alleviate them is to define that illness as part of who we essentially are, as so many young people now do. If we do that, we have effectively given up on getting better. We might have been better off without the diagnosis in the first place.

There are plenty of reasonable criticisms that can be made of the medical model – that is, the model of our serious mental problems that defines them as illness. But the really good thing about conceiving mental illness as illness, is that illness is something you treat. You don’t celebrate it, you don’t let it define who you are. Ideally you cure it, and if you can’t do that, you treat the symptoms as best you can so that it doesn’t define your life. (This is a key reason it’s important not to define homosexuality or transgender identity as a mental illness: if they were that, they wouldn’t be identities worth celebrating.)

Insofar as we have an individual teleology, it must mean being our best selves. It is not good enough to say of a bad behaviour “but this is me!” Charles Taylor, introducing expressive individualism in The Malaise of Modernity (aka The Ethics of Authenticity), describes it as “an ideal that has degraded but is very worthwhile in itself…” (23) Expressive individualism degrades, in Taylor’s view, by sliding toward “soft relativism” and subjectivism about value, according to which

things have significance not of themselves but because people deem them to have it – as though people could determine what is significant, either by decision, or perhaps unwittingly and unwillingly by just feeling that way. This is crazy. I couldn’t just decide that the most significant action is wiggling my toes in warm mud. Without a special explanation, this is not an intelligible claim… (36)

Rather, Taylor notes, our self-expression itself depends on other people, and is developed in dialgoue with them. In that dialogue, and in our experience, we can learn what about ourselves needs to change – the ways in which we fail to be our best and truest selves.

Now nondual Buddhists like Wangchuk Dorje rightly point out that self-improvement is itself something one can push too far: since getting better is a long and slow process, one is going to be filled with flaws and imperfections at any given moment, and one paradoxical aspect of self-improvement is learning to be at peace with those imperfections that have not been eradicated in that moment. Still, that doesn’t get us out of the need for self-improvement in general. We need to accept the things we can’t change, but we do also need to change the things we can – whether those things are outside of us or inside.