No, the title of this post isn’t misspelt. The post is about how this ‘me’, this brain’s construct that evolved to try to make sense of the world, has seemingly come to terms with itself. That’s not to imply ‘I’ actually had a role in this, or that there’s some advice or prescription in this post. It’s just an observation of what seems to be happening in this brain. For what, if anything, that’s worth.
It’s pretty clear that we are living in an incredibly stressful time, and chronic stress almost inevitably leads to both physical and mental illness. Our bodies employ a variety of coping mechanisms to try to deal with this stress and the resultant illnesses. Most of them don’t work very well — these bodies evolved over a million years or more to deal with acute, short-term stress, not chronic stress and its consequences. Chronic stress is an unnatural situation, and nature usually deals with its occurrence by drastically intervening to eliminate it, employing methods such as famine, pandemic disease, and system collapse.
However, we no longer live in a natural world, but in a fragile, prosthetic one. Blocked by the prosthesis from dealing with this cancer as it would normally, nature is forced to use workarounds to restore peace and balance, and they take longer and are of necessity much harsher. Our species has propagated its experiment with a massively overcrowded cage, what we call ‘civilization’, for so long that it now threatens all life on Earth as it explodes out of control and collapses.
I don’t mean to imply any judgement or blame by calling human civilization a cancer. We evolved the only way we could have under the circumstances, and all our behaviour is conditioned. No one has done anything ‘wrong’. The horrific current state of our world, facing multi-system collapse that will inevitably produce great human suffering, is the only thing that could have evolved from the human experiment. We can’t fix it, or even mitigate it. All we can do is observe it, and try to dodge the fragments as the entire shuddering flywheel of civilization comes apart.
Part of that observation, I think, is observing one’s ‘self’, the centrepiece of this strange brain-fabricated model of reality that presumes to control a body and make decisions, even though any serious investigation reveals that the self does neither. All it does is conduct post-event analyses to try, hopelessly, to make sense of what the body has already done. For no useful reason. That’s just how it’s evolved. Nature tried out this “consciousness” thing, thus far with very mixed results.
For most of my own life, this self and this body did a rather poor job (not its fault; that’s just how it was conditioned) of coping with chronic stresses. Half of my life has been spent under the brutal weight of depression — the Noonday Demon. The fact that as I’ve grown older the depression has lifted had nothing to do with anything this ‘self’ did, though I’m grateful that it’s happened. The dread, the fear, the anxiety, the bewilderment and sense of helplessness remain, but since I know that ‘I’ can’t ‘fix’ this — that both ‘I’ and this body are simply acting out their conditioning, without volition, free will or agency — these emotions seem to carry much less weight than they used to. And this dread, fear, anxiety, bewilderment and sense of helplessness seem to afflict almost everyone I know these days.
A lot of people I know are aghast when I say we have absolutely no free will — it seems totally defeatist, nihilistic even, to suggest that ‘we’ — these selves we identify so completely with — have no say in what happens to ‘us’ or to anyone or anything else, including these bodies we presume to inhabit.
I remember how, unlike most people, I responded to the realization that near-term, centuries-long civilizational collapse was inevitable with enormous relief rather than horror. And perhaps similarly, the realization that this body is going to think, say and do just what it has been conditioned to do, given the circumstances of the moment, and that my ‘self’ will have absolutely no role in it, has been liberating to me, rather than distressing.
It has freed ‘me’ up to be the only thing ‘I’ can be — an observer, a chronicler.
That’s perhaps part of how this ‘me’ can now seemingly live with its self: No more blame, no more shame, no more guilt or regret — or at least, none that lasts more than a fleeting moment in the face of this realization of our lack of agency. There is still some dread and anxiety about future suffering, but much less than when I felt some personal responsibility for preventing or mitigating that suffering. And there is still some envy and some hatred arising from judgements, but I’m able to poke fun at myself for feeling these emotions when I ‘know’ that what has happened wasn’t under anyone’s control. Even the worst behaved of us, it seems, are just acting out their conditioning. How can we hate them for that?
Relieved of responsibility (although this self is still relentlessly testing whether it somehow shoulders some responsibility), this self is increasingly starved of the oxygen it needs to make judgements. And without judgements, all that’s left to it is simple observation.
It’s finally starting to accept that it’s not the body’s commander, but merely its recorder, its journalist.
Still, both this body and this imagined self continue to be conditioned by biology, culture, and the circumstances of the moment. It doesn’t take much for a righteous demonstrator or an angry accuser to reintroduce in me, if only briefly, feelings of guilt and shame for not doing ‘more’ to make the world, or my small part of it, ‘better’, or at least not ‘worse’. But these are no longer chronic feelings. They can obtain no purchase in this disillusioned self, and so they dissipate quickly.
The other factor that has seemingly made it easier for ‘me’ to live with this ‘self’ is a recently conditioned self-awareness. For most of my life, there were no rewards for me to be self-aware, either at work or in my personal relationships. And sometimes, especially when I felt ‘responsible’ for my self, and what my body did, brief episodes of self-awareness were largely self-punishing. Better, it seemed, to be oblivious. I didn’t particularly like my self, so why would I want to be more self-aware?
Over the course of the last 15 years, post-retirement, however, I have been being conditioned mostly by very smart and very self-aware women, and they, and the more relaxed circumstances of my life, have seemingly made me into a different, more self-aware person.
Much of my anxiety and depression festered and became unmanageable earlier in my life because I was simply unaware of the fact that I was anxious and depressed. My approach at coping had always been asking my self ‘what am I anxious and depressed about?’ and naming the ‘reasons’ and concluding that my anxiety and depression were in fact perfectly justified. That judgement was perhaps valid, but it was not at all helpful.
Now, my growing self-awareness reminds me that my residual anxiety, distress, and fear, are often triggered by memories about ‘similar’ situations earlier in my life, many of which ended badly and led to self-judgemental shame, regret, guilt, and other negative emotions that have never been examined or discharged.
And that self-awareness also reminds me that my anxiety when it arises is not serving me well — it is debilitating me rather than enabling me to address a stressful situation competently. But I had to be ‘re-conditioned’ to become self-aware enough to even see that.
No advice in any of this, of course. My conditioning led me to meet and spend time with smart, self-aware women, which led to them conditioning me to be more self-aware. No choice in any of it.
Another astonishing (in retrospect) learning that has come from growing self-awareness has been discovering my ikigai — the things that bring joy to my life.
My 2008 book Finding the Sweet Spot was about finding the intersection of what (in your work life) you love to do, what you are uniquely competent at doing, and what’s needed in the world. Recently I’ve come to realize that I could never find that ‘intersection’ myself, in part because I didn’t have the self-awareness (or the experience) to actually know what I loved, or would love, doing. I’d just never thought about it.
And now I have, and so, whenever I am considering doing something, I remind myself whether and how that activity ‘fits’ with my ever-evolving ikigai. And, with that context, what I’m doing these days is frequently much more enjoyable than what I would likely otherwise be doing, had I continued to be as un-self-aware as I was for so much of my life.
Again, no advice is proffered here. Just an observation about how I have seemingly come to be more comfortable, more attuned to, and better able to cope with this messy, complicated, and unmanageable ‘self’. I’m guessing that will be helpful as the ‘circumstances of the moment’ inevitably deteriorate in the coming years.
As the challenges of collapse loom ever closer, I think I can now be honest enough with myself to acknowledge that the skills, energies and capacities I will bring to the table to deal with that collapse will not be of much use to those I find myself with as that happens. But I can also shrug off feeling shame or guilt for that fact, and, more and more, I can also largely discharge the classic feelings of anxiety and dread about the future that plagued me for much of my life, even though that future looks increasingly dire.
For the first time since I was a small child, I think I am finally comfortable living with this self that has, in accordance with its conditioning, caused such distress and unhappiness throughout my life. I can laugh at it, shake my head at it, see it for what it is.
Perhaps, in a way, I am no longer my self. And that, I think, is a good thing.
