I have this compelling drive to improve others that most times ends with me in trouble, as others don’t necessarily want to improve and are happy where they are. It also makes me unpleasant to be with, a never-pleased father figure. Is there a way out of this compulsion?
Eleanor says: There used to be a man not unlike this in my workplace and whenever I saw him a circus MC voice would start playing in my head: “Roll up, roll up, it’s the incredible unsatisfiable man: no shortcoming too small, for two cents he’ll criticise his life but for free he’ll criticise yours!”
You don’t want to be the incredible unsatisfiable man. I think knowing that is already a good sign.
Perhaps it might help to reflect on the pain you might cause. It is an awful, hollowing feeling to be perpetually found wanting. Sometimes, in moments of frustration we fire off critical adjudications of others and because they came out heated, we expect them to burn off quickly: flares that burst bright but fade. In reality these adjudications linger in other people’s minds for a horrifyingly long time. People carry reports of their inadequacies around like chalkboards hanging off their necks.
Even if you’re just pushing someone in one area – Get more exercise! Apply yourself at work! – the background assumption that you’re the judge and they’re the defendant can leak into the whole relationship, or worse, into how they see themselves. Aside from being hugely unpleasant and infantilising, that’s ultimately counterproductive. People are less likely to seize hold of life or make big changes if they’re constantly hearing that they’re not an authority, or that their preferences and judgments aren’t good enough.
Given the risk of inflicting that damage, you’d want to be mighty confident in your judgment of how others should improve. But I’m not sure any of us are entitled to judgments about how others ought to change. Improved for whom, if they’re happy with how things are? For you? Why should your assessment of their life or company matter to them more than their own? It’s totally possible that what you read as not “wanting” to improve is in fact a contentedness lots of people only dream of: perhaps they think they’re enough just as they are.
It might help to focus on the other side of traits you object to. Aspects of personality seldom have just one face; the same feature that makes someone grate can explain their best parts too. The tightly wound person who fusses over plans is also the only reason anything gets done. The person who can’t be induced to care about work is often admirably connected to their friends, or anchored in the present. And even the same force that makes someone frustratingly critical can make them doggedly determined in their own projects. Perhaps you could try to see the things you’re trying to “improve” as just one offshoot of a whole branching trait that extends deep into a person’s personality; rip it out and you’d change all the positive things too.
Perhaps lastly you could ask for help from the people this affects. You could say, “I know I pester you about things I think you should do, I don’t know why I do it. How does it make you feel when I do that?” That alone might level things; undo some of the hierarchy we impose when we tell others where they’re failing. And perhaps learning how this affects them could shift the stakes from being “in trouble” to the fact you might be genuinely causing someone else pain – that might stick more as a motivation.
Constant judgment doesn’t tessellate well with understanding or equality, so if you want those things in your relationships, the judgment has to go. If you’re compelled to push for improvement, perhaps that can be the one to strive for.
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