The ‘self-improvement’ movement is the latest tool to keep one from actually waking up while believing the opposite. It’s pretty effective at that. - Gergely Gombos

I agree. (I’ll add… unless someone or something is challenging those beliefs.)

I can land on both sides of the self-improvement coin. Here’s what I mean:

Just getting an education is self-improvement. In that sense, it’s not a bad thing.

On the other hand, learning to become a reader of the Runes or tea bags, maybe not so much. The thing is, while I don’t want to discount the value of intuition and self awareness, sometimes the ego can run away with notions that have little to no foundation in reality. Or if they do have some kind of genuine reality present or embedded in there somewhere, the user is often disconcertingly disconnected. This is as true of the right-leaning NRA or left-leaning Greenpeace as it can be of certain religious practices, or giddy self-help courses, or false prophet pyramid schemes.

And that, to me, gets to the heart of wholesale criticisms of self-improvement: that there are people who, intentionally or not, get swept away with something that poses as self-improvement but in practice defines self-improvement in either very narrow terms or in false equivalency terms.