Great post. I took good 30 mins to understand the quote by Alan Watts, it was too intriguing. The idea of the contoller and the controlled. Our whole life is a battle between the two, most of the times we seek to control ourselves, clearly we forsee a division between the two. The times when we are at peace, both the entites seem to converge. This also reminds me of Jiddu Krishanmurti quote, "The highest form of intelligence is to observe yourself without judgement". Now I think I somewhat understand what he means, we should seek to understand the divided controller and controlled. Thankyou for this!
I'm glad you enjoyed the post! I love the Alan Watts quote; it took some time for me to grasp it as well, which only makes me love the quote more. It's a complete shift in how I perceive reality. Thanks for sharing the Krishanmurti quote -- so good!
My reaction to "self-discovery" as an explorable concept is that there are multiple things being bundled into that package, all things you allude to, but there's confusion being caused by their interchangeability in discourse.
I think it's probably a cultural romantic notion foremost; it's not so much that people have a strong innate need to "find themselves" versus desiring others see them as a persona package characterized as "on a perpetual journey of self-discovery" etc. Much of this definitely seems to be having a requisite cultural milieu for it. Secondly, as you say, it seems to be a coping strategy for some, plus or minus in tandem with the above; people who are avoiding from some unpleasant obvious truth about themselves.
Thirdly, "self-discovery" as a packaged product designed to foster a sort of "useful" personality for someone else's convenience. Looking at that Four Self-Awareness Archetypes, I'm reading it thinking "why does it feel like someone is trying to make me feel bad for not fitting very neatly into the upper right box, OH Harvard Business Review, got it." This kind of thing is very unsettling to me.
All said I think it's good and healthy to be intensely curious about the nature of your own consciousness but I don't know we should encourage people to either make that their entire personality, engage the concept superficially for entertainment, or use it as a cudgel against people deemed insufficiently self-curious.
> Thirdly, "self-discovery" as a packaged product designed to foster a sort of "useful" personality for someone else's convenience. Looking at that Four Self-Awareness Archetypes, I'm reading it thinking "why does it feel like someone is trying to make me feel bad for not fitting very neatly into the upper right box, OH Harvard Business Review, got it." This kind of thing is very unsettling to me.
Great point. I was also hesitant about the HBR chart -- a lot of nuance about the self is lost with Instagram-friendly charts like this. But I'll admit, a small part of me loves to understand people and the world this way; I tend to gravitate toward black-and-white thinking (and then pull myself away from it, often through writing).
Thanks for reading; great comment and lots for me to think about!
It strikes me as rather sinister when anyone uses personality horoscopes to subtly imply that there's a "correct" type of person to be. It's sort of bad enough when people do this individually but it seems especially Bad when it's large, societal institutions like something called the Harvard Business Review that do it--it becomes harder to avoid questioning whether they want people to be better people qua better society or because they want better employees. (The longer version if this take is: https://scpantera.substack.com/p/anger-at-how-other-people-waste-their)
I’m on my phone so I can’t type out all the thoughts I want to type out for this but yeah, I’ve had moments where I’ve been surprised by how someone would react in a situation. Even though I’m not sure if what they’re saying will be accurate if it were real, it’s still a marker of how they perceive themselves that I wasn’t privy to before. I find that gap in perception interesting.
And I do resonate with the idea of accuracy over completeness. There’s simply more to the idea of continually “updating” our models of ourselves, with snapshots, if you will rather than assuming it’s an accumulative property.
p.s. I almost wish the subtitle were the title because I love it that much lol
It’s so interesting! It happened to me the other day with someone I’m really close to (but I’m stubborn and my immediate thought was “ha, they don’t know themselves as well as I know them!” lmao)
I’m glad this resonates with you, I was worried people might see the difference I called out, between accuracy and completeness, as too pedantic. But I’m just so sick of the mainstream understanding of self-discovery. Thanks for reading :)
The other problem with the notion of a perfect self-understanding is that introspection is often a self-feeding thing - the more you introspect, the more you come up with things to introspect about. Personally I've observed in many people (and myself!) a tendency to let introspection be a form of narcissistic navel-gazing that doesn't actually lead to positive meaningful differences in how they live life.
Great post. I took good 30 mins to understand the quote by Alan Watts, it was too intriguing. The idea of the contoller and the controlled. Our whole life is a battle between the two, most of the times we seek to control ourselves, clearly we forsee a division between the two. The times when we are at peace, both the entites seem to converge. This also reminds me of Jiddu Krishanmurti quote, "The highest form of intelligence is to observe yourself without judgement". Now I think I somewhat understand what he means, we should seek to understand the divided controller and controlled. Thankyou for this!
I'm glad you enjoyed the post! I love the Alan Watts quote; it took some time for me to grasp it as well, which only makes me love the quote more. It's a complete shift in how I perceive reality. Thanks for sharing the Krishanmurti quote -- so good!
My reaction to "self-discovery" as an explorable concept is that there are multiple things being bundled into that package, all things you allude to, but there's confusion being caused by their interchangeability in discourse.
I think it's probably a cultural romantic notion foremost; it's not so much that people have a strong innate need to "find themselves" versus desiring others see them as a persona package characterized as "on a perpetual journey of self-discovery" etc. Much of this definitely seems to be having a requisite cultural milieu for it. Secondly, as you say, it seems to be a coping strategy for some, plus or minus in tandem with the above; people who are avoiding from some unpleasant obvious truth about themselves.
Thirdly, "self-discovery" as a packaged product designed to foster a sort of "useful" personality for someone else's convenience. Looking at that Four Self-Awareness Archetypes, I'm reading it thinking "why does it feel like someone is trying to make me feel bad for not fitting very neatly into the upper right box, OH Harvard Business Review, got it." This kind of thing is very unsettling to me.
All said I think it's good and healthy to be intensely curious about the nature of your own consciousness but I don't know we should encourage people to either make that their entire personality, engage the concept superficially for entertainment, or use it as a cudgel against people deemed insufficiently self-curious.
> Thirdly, "self-discovery" as a packaged product designed to foster a sort of "useful" personality for someone else's convenience. Looking at that Four Self-Awareness Archetypes, I'm reading it thinking "why does it feel like someone is trying to make me feel bad for not fitting very neatly into the upper right box, OH Harvard Business Review, got it." This kind of thing is very unsettling to me.
Great point. I was also hesitant about the HBR chart -- a lot of nuance about the self is lost with Instagram-friendly charts like this. But I'll admit, a small part of me loves to understand people and the world this way; I tend to gravitate toward black-and-white thinking (and then pull myself away from it, often through writing).
Thanks for reading; great comment and lots for me to think about!
It strikes me as rather sinister when anyone uses personality horoscopes to subtly imply that there's a "correct" type of person to be. It's sort of bad enough when people do this individually but it seems especially Bad when it's large, societal institutions like something called the Harvard Business Review that do it--it becomes harder to avoid questioning whether they want people to be better people qua better society or because they want better employees. (The longer version if this take is: https://scpantera.substack.com/p/anger-at-how-other-people-waste-their)
I’m on my phone so I can’t type out all the thoughts I want to type out for this but yeah, I’ve had moments where I’ve been surprised by how someone would react in a situation. Even though I’m not sure if what they’re saying will be accurate if it were real, it’s still a marker of how they perceive themselves that I wasn’t privy to before. I find that gap in perception interesting.
And I do resonate with the idea of accuracy over completeness. There’s simply more to the idea of continually “updating” our models of ourselves, with snapshots, if you will rather than assuming it’s an accumulative property.
p.s. I almost wish the subtitle were the title because I love it that much lol
It’s so interesting! It happened to me the other day with someone I’m really close to (but I’m stubborn and my immediate thought was “ha, they don’t know themselves as well as I know them!” lmao)
I’m glad this resonates with you, I was worried people might see the difference I called out, between accuracy and completeness, as too pedantic. But I’m just so sick of the mainstream understanding of self-discovery. Thanks for reading :)
The other problem with the notion of a perfect self-understanding is that introspection is often a self-feeding thing - the more you introspect, the more you come up with things to introspect about. Personally I've observed in many people (and myself!) a tendency to let introspection be a form of narcissistic navel-gazing that doesn't actually lead to positive meaningful differences in how they live life.