WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE?

Self-improvement is a trap; the idea should be to leave yourself behind. What is required is not more of yourself, but less.

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It is 1964 and my father is up a ladder in a secondhand bookshop on the Charing Cross Road. This is how we'd spend our Saturdays, hunting for old stuff: philosophy, psychology, fiction and politics.

My father, an Indian, was also looking for something in Buddhist and Taoist texts that would give him, as he put it, 'direction in life', which his parents had failed to engender in him.

Years later, without knowing it, I found myself following him. I too would scour bookshops in London, and later in New York and Canada, where I was teaching, searching for works of literature, or for books on psychology, where I might find the key to some kind of liberation.

After I left home, I was aware there was something lacking in me. Something was wrong, I wasn't who I wanted to be. I knew I had to become a different kind of person. My life became consumed by this quest for 'self-improvement'.

We boomers always wanted to be new people, free from the constraints of our conservative parents: we would open our minds with drugs, experiment with our sexuality, make new kinds of families, and be innovative with our work.

Today, self-improvement means redesigning yourself for an already existing system; smoothing off your rough edges so you can find employment and then rent a flat. Self-help gurus and influencers prey on people's insecurities. They have the answers for how to live, what to buy, and how to master your neuroses and become a super-capitalist.