self help
Everybody seems to be so obsessed with knowing yourself. In today’s terms, to know yourself — seems to mean being able to to describe your personality in a consolidated way. As if you are designing a sims character and selecting your traits from a predetermined list of synonyms — brave/anxious, bold/shy, kind/selfish. The problem I seem to have with this is the seemingly endless contradictions I have within myself. By today’s standards, to know yourself does not seem to encompass the possibly of both sides. You can’t be good and bad. You are either good or bad. You can’t be independent and be addicted to love, you are either fiercely independent or you are obsessed with boys. Nietzsche thought that to be human is to try to fit our parts into a whole. To be human is not to be born into a precise and definite “whole”, but to try to fit the contradictions within ourselves and make peace with all sides. Some of these pieces we are born with — a predisposition if you will — but other parts we develop along the way. The parts within us do not fit easily together, we cannot be as easy to summarize as the character description in a Netflix original. Instead, we have to acknowledge that to be human is to be a walking contradiction. We have parts of us that would fit into the standard of “being a good person”, but we also have parts buried deep within that are innately selfish and dark. It would be wrong of us to deny those “bad” parts of our whole; instead, we need to acknowledge them, make peace with them, and decide from which part of our whole we want to act out.
Right now, we struggle with an identity quest ALL THE TIME. Always trying to figure out what makes you happy and fulfilled; afterall, everything in your life can be negotiated, so why wouldn’t you make it the happiest life you could possibly have?
In the past, you always had an idea of who you are — you are the son of someone, you probably will do what your father did, if you are a woman you will work around the house — and all of these goals are very normative. But now, we spend a large majority of our time just trying to answer the question of “who am I?”
There’s an enormous industry for self help, all riding on the (false) belief that we are self made, need self growth, self care, and that everything is about the SELF. Everything is so focused on the self as the center of all experiences; and yet, the sense of self has never been more fragile, because today’s sense of self stands alone — self sufficiency to a fault.
