I always took it as improving yourself generally requires comparison to others and an almost “fake” push to appear better to others and that was a form of masturbation. It’s something to make you feel good and stroke your ego. Abandoning who you “were” and destroying yourself, and in the case of the movie fighting amongst other things, was a kind of freedom to discover more about yourself or to become completely different and it would be more “real” in that the changes made to you simply happened in reaction to the self destruction. It wasn’t something you aimed for because you see a goal as a reflection of society around you and how you think you should fit in.