Rule #2: be self-aware (but how?)
Most people are not as aware as they think
In a previous essay I asked if self-awareness can be taught. Do you think you are self-aware? How can you know?
In the essay I explained it this way:
To become more self-aware you have to be self-aware enough to realize how self-aware you are not. It’s a paradox. Unless something happens that forces you to realize how inaccurate your view of yourself is, you can go through life never even knowing who you are.
It’s funny how sci-fi movies like the Terminator center on the fear of computers becoming self-aware. It’d be bigger news if most people became self-aware. Most of us aren’t aware of ourselves at all. Just ask our neighbors, coworkers and spouses. We laugh at other people who seem unaware of their own nature yet magically believe we are immune.
Since then I’ve learned more about cognitive bias, which is the scientific research documenting how limited are brains are in many ways, including self-awareness. We have big egos, bad memories and we’re prone to seeing things how we want to be them rather than how they are. Self-awareness might not have been that important in the history of our survival so our brains aren’t that great at it yet.
In that essay I listed activities I’ve pursed to try and became more self-aware. They included:
Meditation (I meditate at least a few times a week)
Keeping a journal (and reading it periodically, which I’ve done since 1990)
Seeing a therapist (a safe person you can be completely honest with)
Asking close friends and colleagues ‘What am I not aware of about myself?’
But these are just activities. We can do them but pull our punches. You can lie to your therapist or your journal. Growth is painful, or at least comes with some difficult emotions (embarrassment, fear or disappointment). And who wants more of those things in their life?
This is why we’re often forced into growth (and self-awareness). It’s only when life gives us painful, tough situations that we’re forced to grow. And on the other side we often feel we’re wiser, stronger or more self-aware and glad for it. Then again, some people never grow much no matter what happens to them. Socrates famously said: “I know nothing” as a way to never fall into the trap of thinking he was really self-aware. So that he would always be open to discovery. Alan Watts and many others had similiar rules or attitudes.
On the self-awareness commitment paradox, I wrote:
A teacher can only provide the opportunity, not the commitment. It’s easy to do any of these things without conviction. “Yes, I tried meditation. Didn’t work.” But why didn’t it work? That’s the question someone serious would ask. Or what does the teacher suggest might work? What if the thing you need to become aware of is that you give up too easily? How can you ever learn that if you don’t know it?
I have a confession: this is a challenge I’m having with this book project itself.
I’m early into the writing of this book and trying to do some of it in public with all of you.
As I mentioned last week I have a book’s worth of rules of my own. I could just go write that book: but what good are more rules? I’m not that famous and I’m not a great writer. And many of these rules sound the same, don’t they? They are platitudes, which people say but often don’t follow. A more accurate title for these sorts of works is something like, rules I (want to believe) I live by, or rules for virtue signaling. Can we do better than this?
This is why my approach so far on this substack has been to offer rules but question them too. To be uncertain on purpose. To write something that never assumes the rule itself is enough, and points out the traps in these rules and how not to fall into them, which this short post has tried to do.
What do you think? Or to put it another way and practice this rule: what am I, as the author of this project, not aware of so far?
What day of the week should I share new posts? I’ve been sporadic so far, but can line up with your timing preferences (substack only allows 5 choices):
What do you think? Or to put it another way and practice this rule: what am I, as the author of this project, not aware of so far?
You may not be aware of how important monitoring your feelings and your feeling about those feeling can be to becoming more self-aware. Some people would argue that feelings don't matter—only facts do. But feelings are facts.They are nature's fast path to telling us what is really important. For instance, when I'm aware of my anger triggered by someone saying something derogatory abut my character, I could become angry about that anger, without knowing it, and lash out at the person with a "YOU don't know what YOU are talking about." But when I am aware of my anger and accept it as a natural and okay fast path response, I might respond, "I was angry hearing about my character deficiencies, but now I recognize I do have deficiencies. Would you share some more feedback?" My hypothesis is that when I am behave congruently— equally balancing my needs and desires, the others' needs and desires, and the interaction context—I am optimally self-aware.
I think there's a strong correlation between being self-aware and world aware.
I decided long ago that I don't quite trust people who, to use my metaphor, don't have their scanners scanning and sensors sensing. Because if they are oblivious then they may act as if they don't care about the world and me. My metaphor for them is going around with little pig eyes.
As for meditation, that specific example taught me something: For a college class, I was trying to set up a reinforcement schedule for me to achieve a goal of meditating. I failed. I formally concluded that a goal was not appropriate for me if I was not motivated enough to go home and tell people about it.