Why does one crave to become better?

Following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Acharya Prashant (AP): There is a person who is dreaming about betterment and sitting at her place, she is visualizing how things would be after betterment. And she says that the visualization energizes her, and fantasizing about the endpoint makes her happy. This is the situation. Let’s go into it.

I think of betterment because I take myself as deficient, right?

Questioner (Q): Yes, sir.

AP: If I don’t take myself as incomplete or deficient, I cannot think of betterment. In contentment, it is absurd to think of further improvement. We are talking of the ‘I’ sense. The ‘I’ sense that takes itself as lacking in something. Because it takes itself as lacking in something, so it thinks of betterment.

What we miss here often, is that the thought and the thinker will always share the same quality; the action and the actor will always share the same quality; the imagination and the one imagining will always be of the same quality.

Now, if I say that I am imagining precisely because I do not like the way I am, I want to change because I do not feel alright with the way I am, then who am I in my own estimation? Somebody deficient, somebody incomplete.