I've recently had a thought. I've been trying to improve myself for like a decade, but have very little to show for it. The more I tried, the more I seemed to sink into a hole of self sabotage, vice, resentment and insecurity. The purpose of my life for the last ten years has basically been to make myself look better in the eyes of other people. To appear more virutous, more capable, more enlightened, more intellegent. But the more I've tried to acheive that. The farther I get from all of it. My ego has become enormous, while my actual capabilities have stayed stagnant, and my vices have become worse, as I sink deeper into distractions for how much self hatred I've built up over the years.
I think that all of this evidence results in the conculsion that I've been doing this wrong the entire time. I started out wanting to become a "virtuous" person. And the Stoics said that in order to do that you need to focus on what you can control, focus on yourself. So I focused on myself, and it turns out I have no self control. The result was misery and stagnation.
I think what I really need to do is look outside of myself. I need to find an external goal that I can work toward that has nothing to do with my own self improvement or making myself look better. The problem is, I've spent 10+ years caring about nothing except myself. And now that I'm trying to think of something external to dedicate myself to, everything seems kind of arbitrary and pointless.
Any advice on how to find something worth wile to work on? A lot of the advice I've seen so far is stuff like "what would you want people to say about you at your funeral" but that's once again pointing the focus back on myself, and I think that's counter productive.