The "Won't Fix" Philosophy: Why Self-Improvement Culture is Broken and What Actually Works

The self-help industry has a fundamental problem: it's built on the premise that you're fundamentally broken and need fixing. Every major framework of the last two decades falls into one of two camps: Stoic Acceptance (your problems are features, not bugs) or Relentless Optimization (you can solve everything with the right habits and systems). But what if both approaches are missing something crucial?

The Third Option: "Won't Fix"

In software development, when engineers encounter a bug that's expensive to fix, introduces more problems than it solves, or has become so integrated into the system that removing it would break everything else, they tag it "Won't Fix." It's not that the bug doesn't exist or that nobody noticed it—it's that the cost of fixing it exceeds the benefit.

This is the approach I want to propose for personal development: the reasonable, rational recognition that most of your personal flaws are "Won't Fix" bugs, and the single most productive thing you can do about them is stop trying to patch them.

Why Self-Improvement Culture is a Perpetual Rewrite

Fred Brooks observed that when engineers build the second version of a system, they tend to over-design it, cramming in every feature and fix they wished they'd included the first time. The result is almost always bloated, late, and worse than what it replaced.

The lesson developers have extracted from fifty years of living with Brooks's observation is simple: don't rewrite from scratch, and work with what you have.

Self-improvement culture is a perpetual second-system rewrite of the self. You're constantly trying to architect Human 2.0, the version of you that's disciplined and calm and focused and doesn't check their phone 96 times a day (which is, by the way, the actual average for American adults, according to Asurion's widely cited research).

But Human 2.0 never ships. You keep accumulating half-finished refactors and abandoned meditation streaks alongside a growing sense that something is fundamentally wrong with your willpower.

The Wrapper Pattern: Working With What You Have

The alternative to rewriting yourself from scratch is the wrapper pattern. When you have a piece of legacy code that works but has an ugly interface, you don't rewrite it. You write a thin layer around it, a wrapper, that presents a clean interface to the rest of the system while leaving the messy internals untouched.

The legacy code keeps doing what it always did, and the wrapper translates between the old system and the new requirements.

What Wrappers Look Like in Practice

Let's say you're chronically late. The Acceptance camp says: release your attachment to punctuality. The Optimization camp says: build a 47-step morning routine with buffer time calculated to the minute. The Won't Fix approach says: you're going to be late, so build a wrapper.

Tell people 2 PM when you mean 2:30. Set your clocks ahead. Automate your calendar reminders to fire 15 minutes earlier than the defaults. You haven't changed yourself, but you've written an adapter layer between your actual personality and the world's expectations.

The Science Behind "Won't Fix"

Epictetus, who spent years as a slave in Rome before gaining his freedom and building one of the most influential schools of Stoic philosophy, would probably say that this approach surrenders moral agency. You're supposed to become virtuous, not fake it with systems.

And there's something to that objection. But Epictetus also spent most of his philosophy drawing sharp lines between what you can and can't control. Is your core temperament something you control?

The Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) show remarkable stability across adult lifespans, according to decades of longitudinal research in personality psychology. You can nudge them, but you can't overhaul them.

If Epictetus were working in DevOps, I suspect he'd be a wrapper advocate.

Giving Up Correctly is Its Own Liberation

In Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Stevens, the butler, reflects on the decades he spent perfecting his professional dignity at the expense of, well, everything else. His entire life was a refactoring project: eliminate the personal, optimize for service, become the ideal version of what a butler should be.

By the end of the novel he's technically excellent and profoundly diminished. He optimized the wrong thing for forty years because he never stopped to ask whether the specification itself was flawed.

Won't Fix is the practice of questioning the specification. Most of the things you're trying to fix about yourself are only problems relative to some imagined ideal of a person you were never going to be.

Your distractibility is a bug in the "focused knowledge worker" spec but might be a feature in the "person who notices interesting things and connects them unexpectedly" spec. Your sensitivity and your stubbornness, your tendency to monologue about niche topics at parties: all Won't Fix, and all load-bearing, and all probably okay in the big, heat-death-of-the-universe scheme of all things.

The Productivity of Acceptance

Stop trying to ship Human 2.0. Tag the bugs, write the wrappers, and get back to building something worth building. The most productive version of you probably looks a lot like the current version of you, plus a few well-placed adapter patterns and minus about thirty self-help books worth of guilt about not being someone else.

The self-help industry's entire business model depends on convincing you that every single bug in your system is fixable, that with the right framework, the right habits, the right coach, you'll finally refactor yourself into a clean, well-architected human being.

But how many of your core personality traits have actually changed in the last decade? The honest answer, for most people, is... very fucking few.

So here's the radical proposition: maybe the problem isn't that you're not trying hard enough. Maybe the problem is that you're trying to fix the wrong things. Maybe the most productive thing you can do is accept that most of your bugs are "Won't Fix" and start building around them instead of beating yourself up for not being able to eliminate them.

Because at the end of the day, you're a codebase of sufficient age. And like any mature system, you've accumulated dependencies, workarounds, and features that would be expensive to refactor. The question isn't whether you can become perfect—it's whether you can build something useful with what you actually have.

And the answer to that question is almost certainly yes.