Our stubborn refusal to let the world fall apart is painfully costly. Yet, someone has to put in the energy to maintain the shape of things.
There are always offers of ease, often with a new language of priorities sidestepping difficulty. This is merely another entropy: the entropy of self.
Tag: identity
- Theme: Self
Entropy vs. Tenacity
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1–2 minutes - Theme: Self
The paradox of Social Approval
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1–2 minutesIf you live for other people’s approval (i.e., the need to be liked), you must always submit to them, making you detestable.
This unlikeable “contingent self” is the paradox of seeking external validation, which of course, we all need.
- Theme: Self
Murdering the Symbolic You
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1–2 minutesYour symbolic existence is your identity. When our truth or life purpose is threatened we react as though death is imminent.
To kill my illusions is to kill my identity, the “I”.
This is an act of murder in which humans gleefully participate to “reveal the truth.”
- Theme: Growth
“I – it” or “I – thou” or beyond “I”
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1–2 minutes“I” to “it” is our self-to-object relation, which is the vast majority of how we relate to the world.
“I” to “thou” requires reciprocating relations.
A third way to relate is to move behind the “I” into a universal lacking any exchange because it is all one. - Theme: Self
Triggering
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1–2 minutesAny probing question forcing a reconsideration of self is indeed triggering, but why do we hide, victimize, or lash out when asked to look inside? or respond honestly?
We exhibit a deep defense mechanism: some part of our psyche knows personal insight can destroy us. - Theme: Culture
The Problem with the Hero’s Journey
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1–2 minutesFate must call you to become a hero, and you must draw forth your unique (separate and special) individuality to complete your journey.
The question is: how do you motivate a mass of people (community or society) without falling into individualism, where every person believes they need to be the hero?Source: Acid Horizon podcast on Magical Realism - Theme: Self
Self-talk failure
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1–2 minutesI find that by telling myself what “not to do” I become focused on that behavior. “Don’t do that thing” turns into doing that exact thing.
However, I fall into deep engrossment by distracting myself with a different task.
I am not doing that thing I don’t want to do because I’ve not given myself the opportunity (time or energy) to even think about it. - Theme: Self
Losing yourself in the community
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1–2 minutesThere is a fine line between self-acceptance and communal spirit.Self-acceptance means keeping your responsibilities separate from others to be genuinely who and what you are. Having confidence in yourself allows you to have confidence in others, prompting community spirit with your comrades.
However, it is easy for self-acceptance to revert to social acceptance. Make sure your community action affirms the "I" rather than giving it away. - Theme: Self
everything is emotional, everything is personal
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1–2 minutesWe live in a society, not alone in space. We think of and desire the other; even when alone, we shape ourselves for others.
Every decision involves how we see ourselves through others, and every joy or disappointment comes from the success or failure to align to the other. And so, the striving is always emotional (from our desires), and the alignment is subjectively judged, letting every misalignment create fear and hurt.
Knowing that we are fueled by emotion, craving an oddly shaped personal outcome, we can work backward from the hurt to find the fear that stemmed from a failed alignment of how we fit into the world.
- Theme: Self
Individuals are Unequal
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1–2 minutesKarl Marx, in 1875, critiques seeing workers as only workers, diminishing them through categorization and ignoring their diversity of human beings.
Contradictorily, to be “brought under an equal point of view” is a social form we apply to better measure and account for equality.
“… unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored.”