SOMETIMES I get tired of always striving to be better — of knowing there are ways, endless ways, I can improve myself. When I feel really down, I think of how far we have to go…It’s not going to happen.

Self-improvement is a deeply embedded American trait. The notion that we can constantly make ourselves better is, in theory, a great idea.  But when does it become too much?

“There’s a tendency to seek and seek and seek and never find” (from a website with The motto? “Stop Waiting. Start Living.”) “It becomes one more addiction.”

It’s not that trying to find ways to improve ourselves is a bad thing — not at all. “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” the poet Robert Browning wrote. But when we’re constantly reaching rather than occasionally being satisfied with what we have in front of us, that’s a recipe for perpetual dissatisfaction.

“We grew up with the idea that we can do anything,” …”But we took that to mean that we have to do everything. And many women took it as you have to do everything perfectly.”  1,000 mothers in their 30s and 40s were surveyed nationwide. They found that the women broadly fell into two categories: “never enoughs” and “good enoughs.”  Never-enough women felt they had to be the best at everything and often agreed with the sentiment that “I need to be a superstar even if it kills me…”

None of this may seem particularly new. You can’t have it all. Perfection is the enemy of the good. But the struggle to find the balance between stagnation and stress — sinking into a rut or racing on the hamster wheel — resonates even more now in these economically down times, when even your best efforts don’t seem to be reaping the rewards you expected.

“In our culture, there are so many different messages about being successful, and we try to implement all of them…We need the courage to choose which definition of success we want.”

But we can’t go around with the idea that “one day I’ll arrive; one day I’ll be whole,” she said. “It’s an illusion that one day I’ll be fixed.”

Such constant searching, she said, leads to a sense that you’re waiting to live your life rather than living it. Or you’ll feel that you’re always falling short, because rarely is the road to self-improvement easy or straightforward, and it’s certainly not the same for everyone.

This striving for self-improvement and the belief that we can all achieve success if we just work hard enough and figure out the right path, has political, not just personal, ramifications.

David Brooks, a NY Times columnist, wrote that Americans “always had a sense that the great opportunities lie just over the horizon, in the next valley, with the next job or the next big thing,” adding, “None of us is really poor; we’re just pre-rich.”  The reality, she said, is “a lot of people are finding that ‘I don’t want to aspire to what I always thought I wanted to aspire to.’ ”

After all, as we’ve learned, there’s no point in pushing this self-improvement thing too far.