The Limits of Self-Improvement: 1. The Illusion of Control
What we can control, and where we must surrender
An essay about the balance between control and surrender, and the missing meaning in the modern mindset movement.
1. The Illusion of Control
There is a strange contradiction in our time.
Never have people spoken so much about “mindset”, discipline, and self-improvement, and yet so many feel empty, tired, and lost inside.
Even though we have placed the self at the center of everything, something essential is still missing.
“Grow beyond yourself.”
“Think bigger.”
“Be the best version of yourself.”
It sounds strong, inspiring, even wise.
We read about routines, morning rituals, success strategies, high performance, and self-mastery.
The modern mindset culture has rediscovered the value of effort but forgotten what that effort is for.
It speaks of “self-optimization” - as if we could perfect ourselves, as if the imperfect could be made perfect by willpower alone.
However, the more we strive to achieve that imagined perfection, the deeper we sink into a subtle kind of exhaustion.
Hasn’t this race for perfection long turned into a chase after our own shadows?
All of it circles around the same center: the self.
How to improve it, strengthen it, polish it, elevate it.
Yet rarely do we ask – for what purpose?
What seems like progress often becomes an endless search for a better version of the same ego: more discipline, more productivity, more calm, more control over a life that can never be fully controlled.
In the end, all this striving places the self at the center of the universe.
It becomes a refined form of egocentrism - dressed as self-growth, but in truth driven by self-absorption.
We exhaust ourselves for things that cannot fill the soul.
We chase ideals that will never make us content, because they can never stop us from wanting more.
It’s like running endlessly without knowing where the road leads.
Yes, we might live longer, feel smarter, stronger, more efficient, yet we cannot escape death.
It’s a race against time, trying to delay what cannot be delayed.
The modern mindset is driven by fear: fear of aging, fear of failure, fear of ending.
But when the ultimate purpose is missing, discipline turns hollow, and success becomes a quiet kind of pain.
We’ve been taught that everything depends on attitude: happiness, success, satisfaction.
But whoever keeps working on themselves without end begins to live under a silent assumption: that they are still not enough.
Even our search for balance has become a product.
We buy calm as if it were a product.
We consume mindfulness.
We schedule “me-time”, read about serenity, and still, it never arrives.
Because the root of the problem is not a lack of method, but the lack of a purpose beyond the self.
If the goal of life is the self, its pleasure, success, and happiness, then everything remains finite.
You can plan, work, and meditate, yet in the end there will be silence - death.
And if everything you worked for ends there, what remains?
Perhaps this is where the modern mindset meets its limits.
It shapes willpower and endurance.
It seeks perfection only to glorify the ego, but it cannot refine the soul.
Our purpose is not to satisfy the self, but to please Allah.
We strive not to become flawless, but faithful.
Not to master life, but to serve with sincerity.
What is a perfect mindset worth if it leads nowhere beyond itself?
Maybe what many call burnout is not just mental or physical exhaustion, but the tiredness of a soul that keeps trying to carry itself alone.
Anna @ Min Sakinah