Self-improvement has become our most polite form of condemnation. I say growth, but it feels more like a performance evaluation.
I remembered something new yorker In this manga, therapist Butterfly tells Caterpillar, “The important thing is that you really have to want to change.”
That’s certainly true. we give advice. If you want it and take responsibility for it, nothing will change. We are caterpillars, unsure of whether things will work out and are quick to blame ourselves or others when they don’t.
The message that we need to improve ourselves is relentlessly appealing and conveyed by experts who speak with the confidence of those who have already arrived. Great literature is more subtle. from Iliad and odyssey to crime and punishment and pride and prejudicemoral certainty often hides fear, and sometimes hides how little we see.
Different times, same movement: certainty as cover.
Two more recent novels continue where the others left off. They are important because they reveal what is at the root of the argument. Because Thomas Mann magic mountain It’s so famous that I decided to go back. The story takes place in a mountain sanatorium where everyone has too much time to think because of tuberculosis. Critics call it a social comedy. It still feels like homework. Eventually, even Hans Castorp’s endlessly deep conversations begin to be recorded. At the very least, tuberculosis is quite serious. you’re not quite done magic mountain It will last longer than that.
A newly established author, Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, continues in Mann’s footsteps more effectively. Her characters are at another mountain retreat, but the predicament is close to home. It’s not time and tuberculosis, as Mann does, but borders and gender. Relationships become strained. The conversation goes off track. If you exchange too much about your gender identity, your friendship will fall apart.
Tokarczuk’s novel title empsiumlocation. Empusa—A shape-shifting female spirit from Greek mythology known for unsettling men and revealing their fears. Educated, liberal, self-proclaimed rational men rehearse long speeches about the innate inferiority of women. They pride themselves on objectivity. They evoke science. They praise civility. But what animates their discussions is fear.
This novel shows how seemingly neutral ideas, such as medical, evolutionary, and anthropological, often serve as a means of protecting damaged identities. Men assert hierarchy out of vulnerability rather than strength. The more I talk about reason, the more my anxiety oozes out.
The dynamic feels painfully modern. Moral language can mask evasion. Ideological certainty precludes self-examination. Rhetoric of order avoids vulnerability. Political discussions often cover personal anxieties. What passes for principle is often protection.
Mann’s characters live in a rarefied atmosphere and are too intelligent to worry about it. Tokarczuk writes with literary flair in Jennifer Croft’s outstanding translation. A discussion that may seem boring reveals something that is difficult to ignore. It is the fear of reason passing by.
Critics have described the book as slippery. Set in a sanatorium in 1913, it utilizes the structure of a historical novel and injects it with gothic elements, hallucinatory folklore, and black humour. If magic realism opens a window into a world where the impossible is commonplace, empsium It’s near the hall of mirrors. The female spirit destroys the male reflection that refuses to see itself.
Perhaps only fables can convey what happens when the limits of rationality are exceeded. This novel has no discussion. It exposes. This shows how easily public life can drift into cruelty when certainty is safer than attention. Desire for certainty rarely turns into love of truth. Often it’s a rejection.
Where Mann asks whether it is possible to return to life after abstraction, Tokarczuk asks whether that “life” was ever complete in the first place. What passes for the everyday is shaped by exclusions, ideologies, and suppressed voices, especially regarding gender and the body. Sometimes what we think is common sense turns out to be something we have learned not to question.
Tokarczuk left the mountain with questions about what remains when conventional logic fails. Men demand order because they fear things will fall apart. It’s easy to find them. Especially for women, it’s even harder to see yourself because you may be more aware of that logic than you think.
We like to think that our faith comes from a place of clarity, that we have risen above the confusion and reached a place of solidity. But the novel suggests another possibility. Part of what feels like clarity is a sense of security, a way to calm yourself down when things start to move.
That’s not the message I want to hear. Don’t say it’s defensive when I feel strongly about something. So what would happen if I were you? Do you think I’m wrong about that? Perhaps I should too. When things start to fall apart, it may be time to question what actually exists.
And maybe it’s time for what another spirit calls “the amazing gift of not trying too hard.” In the manga, the caterpillar’s transformation has nothing to do with effort or desire. It becomes what it is.
Imagine that.
notes and reading
Olga Tokarczuk—Wisława Szymborska is the first Polish Nobel Prize winner in literature to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1996). She draws on diverse religious traditions in her novels. A former Roman Catholic and influenced by Carl Jung, she treats religion as an active force in contemporary cultural and literary life. See Karina Yazyńska, “Tender Sin: Olga Tokarczuk’s Exercises in the Post-Secular Imagination” Criticism: Study of modern novels (2023).
supernatural elements empsium It reads like a return to the repressed: the irrational, the feminine, and the rest.
Empzium: A health resort horror story—Olga Tokarczuk (2022).
magic mountain—Thomas Mann (1924).
“The gift of not trying hard”—Nadia Boltz-Weber, Lutheran pastor and author The Corners (Substack, April 21, 2026). “God, please help me not to be an asshole” is as common a prayer as I have ever prayed in my life.
Benoît Denise-Lewis “Please try your best to change yourself.” new york times (April 12, 2026). “Change is more mysterious than the self-help industry can tolerate in silence.”
Josie Cox “New York Life” audience’s world (April 13, 2026). “Probably unrelated to the pursuit of downsizing, I feel a little better. I don’t know what helped in the end. I still eat a lot of bagels…They’re surprisingly nonjudgmental.”
reference. Ephesians 3:20-21. “Now to him who works in us to do far more than all we could ask or imagine, be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus forever and ever. Amen.” Adapted from a translation by David Bentley Hart.
oasis and sandstorm
bless this land
Approximately 2+2=5
Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
