So I recently finished reading the book Selfie by Will Storr about we've come to be self-obsessed society. It's a read I recommend to any Non-fiction reader. I ended up highlighting half the book because it resonated with me. If I haven't convinced to go read it, here are quotes that may.
1. "When the chimp has finally fought his way to the top of the tribe, he doesn't lead purely through violence. He must also be a canny politician."
2. "So we're tribal. We're occupied with status and hierarchy; we're biased towards our own in-groups and prejudiced against others. It's automatic. Its how we think. It's who we are. To live a human life is to live groupishly."
3. "Despite the din and wizardry of modern life, despite how separate we feel from the beasts, the truth is that we are great apes that sit in the primate superfamily Hominoidea. We are modern yet ancient, advanced yet primitive. We are animals."
4. "We're all to some degree, anxious and hyperactive PR agents for our selves."
5. "All human selves fundamentally want is to get along and get ahead."
6. "Whether you call someone a hero or a monster is all relative to where the focus of your consciousness may be. A German [fighting in WWII] is as much a hero as the American who was sent over there to kill him"
7. "We're moving around the world, doing things and feeling things and saying things for myriad unconscious reasons whilst a specific part of our brain constantly strives to create a makes-sense narrative of what we're up to and why. "
8. "Imagine for a moment, that a human works like this: you're a zombie, just behaving automatically, sometimes chaotically and the only reason you think you're in control of your behavior is that you have a dishonest voice in your head that tells you that you are.
9. "The Greeks, more than any other ancient peoples and in fact more than most people on the planet today, had a remarkable sense of personal agency - the sense that they were in charge of their own lives and free to do as they chose."
10. "The average citizen of Athens saw the pursuit of excellence as a way of becoming a better and more useful member of society"
11. "Turning our lives into myth, is what adulthood is all about"
12. "One problem with thinking about culture's influence is that it's invisible to its wearer."
13. "In contrast to the Greeks, with their islands and city tats and their concomitant view of reality as a collection of individual objects, China's rolling, isolated, conquerable plains and hills produced a species of self that worked best as part of a group."
14. "As in all these things, California set the scale for America. Basically the further west you go, the more individualistic, the more delusional about choice, the more the emphasis on self-just-about-everything."
15. "In the East stories are different. It isn't so much riches nor the love of the maiden, nor the bravos of the many that tend to form the structure of their tales."
16. "Life is change that yearns for sustainability"
17. "The self begins to fail when we lose control of our narrative."
18. "People believe when you're richer you'll be happier. When you focus on the goal, you don't commit suicide. But what happens when you get there and its not what you expect?"
19. "The fact is that when we're working out who we need to be in order to get along and get ahead, we're not just taking our information from stories. Being tribal animals we're also constantly scanning our environment for people who seem to have, in some way mastered the secrets of a successful life."
20. "A basic cue we look is 'self-similarity', for the straightforward reason that we're likely to learn salient things by deciding to follow people who are like us in some fundamental way."
21. "In our hunter-gatherer pasts, it would've made sense to copy the actions of the hunter who wore many necklaces of teeth made from his kills, for example as his success cue demonstrated high competence. It seems likely that designer clothing, expensive manicures and fast cars are today's equivalents of these attention-magnetizing displays."
22. "But we just don't rely on our own sense of who's skillful and successful when we work out who to copy. As a highly social, groupish species, we tend to look at who other people consider worthy of attention"
23. "If someone gives out prestige cues, we're naturally triggered into this behavior, especially if that person is part of our perceived in-group. The mind isn't worried about whether it actually makes sense - whether this person's sphere of excellence is actually useful in judging the product they happen to be selling"
24. "Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative."
25. "If who we are is, to a significant extent, our culture and if that culture is partly composed of the arguments, discoveries, feuds, prejudices and mistakes of dead men and women, then those arguments, discoveries, feuds, prejudice and mistakes live on, in some form, inside us. We've internalized them. They've changed who we are. They're recorded in our brains as patterns of synaptic connections. They are us."
26. "I love too, the comfort of the crowd: being enveloped in a mass of others whilst safe in my status as a stranger."
27. "To get along and get ahead in this kind of tribe, you had to be accepted by the group. That meant being witty, smart, open, upbeat and attractive . The emphasis on hardiness of character transformed into an emphasis on maintaining a sunny and winning disposition."
28. "At its very simplest, a self is a way that we can make sense of the things that happen to us. You need to have a sense of self in order to organize your life events into a meaningful story."
29. "I am not what I think I am and I am not what you think I am; I am what I think you think I am... We dread insult and crave good reputation."
30. "There is no authentic core to us, no essential happy and perfect version of the self that can be exposed by stripping back the repressing expectations of society. Different versions of us emerge depending on where we are, what we're doing, who we're with and how aroused we happen to be. "
31. "We are those worried and anxious people who have a massive discrepancy between who we are and and who we need to be... We are distracted from the truth of our situation, which is that we have personal flaws that are deep and many, that our lives are ultimately pointless, that we live in a realm of chaos and injustice and that we and everyone we love are going to die."
32. "Who we are is a construction and how much of that construction is built from the lives of others - many of whom we've never heard of, are long dead and who, it turns out, were wrong."
33. "If the age of perfectionism is one filled with opportunities for us to feel like failures, then the rise of neoliberalism, the financial crisis and the harshly competitive world it's all left with us is clearly a major part of it."
34. "It would be kind of global online encounter group in which the currency was the self and its gold standard was personal openness and authenticity. The future of the internet would be social. It would reassert the power of the 'I'. Its platforms would flatten hierarchies further giving every 'I' a voice, a character, a presence, a brand"
35. "You had to be a better you than all the other yous that were suddenly surrounding you. You had to be more entertaining, more original, more beautiful, with more friends, have wittier lines and more righteous opinions, and you'd best be doing it looking stylish in interesting places with your breakfast healthy, delicious and beautifully lit."
36. "In the age of perfectionism we're more likely to simply accept we shouldn't rely on the collective organism, whether it be government or corporation, to take responsibility for us.... It means we tend to judge people who actually need help and judge ourselves harshly when we need it."
37. "Neo-liberalism beams at us from many corners of our culture and we absorb it back into ourselves like radiation.. And if you're becoming a better person that often requires buying many things or regulating your body according to what a proper neoliberal citizen should be - someone who's healthy and active and participating and a self-starter."
38. "The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia."
39. "We live our lives in story mode. Our minds make sense of the world using simplistic observations o cause and effect. They confabulate, weaving a useful, makes-sense narrative out of what they're feeling and seeing that casts their owners in a heroic light."
40. "What's important though, is the understanding that voting decisions are rarely about coldly rational economic calculations, or simple racism or misogyny."
41. "Everyday, millions of us who are needled and outraged by the hysterically stated views of those with whom we don't agree. Our irritation pushes us into a place of fiercer opposition. The more emotional we become, the less rational we become, the less able to properly reason. In an attempt to quieten the stress, we begin muting, blocking, de-friending and unfollowing. And we're in an echo chamber now, shielded from diverse perspectives that might otherwise have made us wiser and more empathetic and open."
42. "When you are in an echo chamber with a bunch of people who are fairly similar to you, you start saying things that would not be socially acceptable else. Like 'All religious people are idiots'"
43. "We're a highly social species. Almost every thing we do impacts on someone else, in one way or another. Changes we make to our environment form ripples that spread out, far into the human universe. These ripples are easy to ignore. Especially for us Westeners, many are invisible. But they're there, no matter how convenient or seductive it might be to pretend otherwise and deny responsibility for anyone but our own sacred selves."
44. "Although seeking approval from social media isn't inherently a bad thing, the cycle of constantly needing it is"
45. "We always knew these people [celebrities] who were genetically gifted and more talented than we are. But now anyone can be a star and that makes everyone thirsty."
46. "Social media is associated with diminished well-being and lower life satisfaction, because people are always looking at other people with better lives."
47. "The irony of the new digital world that's enabled the rise of these kinds of incidents is that it relies for its success on some of our most ancient parts. We're tribal and we're wired to want to punish , sometimes savagely those who transgress the codes of our in-group. These are powerful and dangerous instincts that can easily overwhelm us."
48. "Here's the truth that no million-selling self-help book, famous motivational speaker, happiness guru or blockbusting Hollywood screenwriter seems to want you to know. You're limited. Imperfect. And there's nothing you can do about it."
49. "We are part nature, part nurture, formed by biology, culture and experience."
50. "The social world is a maze of circus mirrors, each exaggerating one facet of our self and diminishing another, while the essential core remains."
51. "Western culture wants us to buy the fiction that the self is open, free, nothing but pure, bright possibility; that we're all born with the same suite of potential abilities, as neural 'blank slates' as if all human brains come off the production line at Foxconn."
52. "We're lumps of biology, mashed and pounded into shape by mostly chance events. Our 'human potential' is limited. But this isn't the model of self that our culture keeps showing us. Instead we're presented with an individual who has total free will and an ability to become whoever they choose. And who they choose to be is an extroverted, slim, individualistic, optimistic, hard-working, popular, socially aware, yet high self esteeming individual with entrepreneurial guile."
53. "Put a lizard on an iceberg and it's miserable. Now release it into the Sahara. The core of who the lizard is hasn't altered in the slightest and yet it's become happy."
AND FINALLY...
54. "Would I like to be a less neurotic person? Well, no, because I probably wouldn't have done the most interesting things in my life."
1. "When the chimp has finally fought his way to the top of the tribe, he doesn't lead purely through violence. He must also be a canny politician."
2. "So we're tribal. We're occupied with status and hierarchy; we're biased towards our own in-groups and prejudiced against others. It's automatic. Its how we think. It's who we are. To live a human life is to live groupishly."
3. "Despite the din and wizardry of modern life, despite how separate we feel from the beasts, the truth is that we are great apes that sit in the primate superfamily Hominoidea. We are modern yet ancient, advanced yet primitive. We are animals."
4. "We're all to some degree, anxious and hyperactive PR agents for our selves."
5. "All human selves fundamentally want is to get along and get ahead."
6. "Whether you call someone a hero or a monster is all relative to where the focus of your consciousness may be. A German [fighting in WWII] is as much a hero as the American who was sent over there to kill him"
7. "We're moving around the world, doing things and feeling things and saying things for myriad unconscious reasons whilst a specific part of our brain constantly strives to create a makes-sense narrative of what we're up to and why. "
8. "Imagine for a moment, that a human works like this: you're a zombie, just behaving automatically, sometimes chaotically and the only reason you think you're in control of your behavior is that you have a dishonest voice in your head that tells you that you are.
9. "The Greeks, more than any other ancient peoples and in fact more than most people on the planet today, had a remarkable sense of personal agency - the sense that they were in charge of their own lives and free to do as they chose."
10. "The average citizen of Athens saw the pursuit of excellence as a way of becoming a better and more useful member of society"
11. "Turning our lives into myth, is what adulthood is all about"
12. "One problem with thinking about culture's influence is that it's invisible to its wearer."
13. "In contrast to the Greeks, with their islands and city tats and their concomitant view of reality as a collection of individual objects, China's rolling, isolated, conquerable plains and hills produced a species of self that worked best as part of a group."
14. "As in all these things, California set the scale for America. Basically the further west you go, the more individualistic, the more delusional about choice, the more the emphasis on self-just-about-everything."
15. "In the East stories are different. It isn't so much riches nor the love of the maiden, nor the bravos of the many that tend to form the structure of their tales."
16. "Life is change that yearns for sustainability"
17. "The self begins to fail when we lose control of our narrative."
18. "People believe when you're richer you'll be happier. When you focus on the goal, you don't commit suicide. But what happens when you get there and its not what you expect?"
19. "The fact is that when we're working out who we need to be in order to get along and get ahead, we're not just taking our information from stories. Being tribal animals we're also constantly scanning our environment for people who seem to have, in some way mastered the secrets of a successful life."
20. "A basic cue we look is 'self-similarity', for the straightforward reason that we're likely to learn salient things by deciding to follow people who are like us in some fundamental way."
21. "In our hunter-gatherer pasts, it would've made sense to copy the actions of the hunter who wore many necklaces of teeth made from his kills, for example as his success cue demonstrated high competence. It seems likely that designer clothing, expensive manicures and fast cars are today's equivalents of these attention-magnetizing displays."
22. "But we just don't rely on our own sense of who's skillful and successful when we work out who to copy. As a highly social, groupish species, we tend to look at who other people consider worthy of attention"
23. "If someone gives out prestige cues, we're naturally triggered into this behavior, especially if that person is part of our perceived in-group. The mind isn't worried about whether it actually makes sense - whether this person's sphere of excellence is actually useful in judging the product they happen to be selling"
24. "Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative."
25. "If who we are is, to a significant extent, our culture and if that culture is partly composed of the arguments, discoveries, feuds, prejudices and mistakes of dead men and women, then those arguments, discoveries, feuds, prejudice and mistakes live on, in some form, inside us. We've internalized them. They've changed who we are. They're recorded in our brains as patterns of synaptic connections. They are us."
26. "I love too, the comfort of the crowd: being enveloped in a mass of others whilst safe in my status as a stranger."
27. "To get along and get ahead in this kind of tribe, you had to be accepted by the group. That meant being witty, smart, open, upbeat and attractive . The emphasis on hardiness of character transformed into an emphasis on maintaining a sunny and winning disposition."
28. "At its very simplest, a self is a way that we can make sense of the things that happen to us. You need to have a sense of self in order to organize your life events into a meaningful story."
29. "I am not what I think I am and I am not what you think I am; I am what I think you think I am... We dread insult and crave good reputation."
30. "There is no authentic core to us, no essential happy and perfect version of the self that can be exposed by stripping back the repressing expectations of society. Different versions of us emerge depending on where we are, what we're doing, who we're with and how aroused we happen to be. "
31. "We are those worried and anxious people who have a massive discrepancy between who we are and and who we need to be... We are distracted from the truth of our situation, which is that we have personal flaws that are deep and many, that our lives are ultimately pointless, that we live in a realm of chaos and injustice and that we and everyone we love are going to die."
32. "Who we are is a construction and how much of that construction is built from the lives of others - many of whom we've never heard of, are long dead and who, it turns out, were wrong."
33. "If the age of perfectionism is one filled with opportunities for us to feel like failures, then the rise of neoliberalism, the financial crisis and the harshly competitive world it's all left with us is clearly a major part of it."
34. "It would be kind of global online encounter group in which the currency was the self and its gold standard was personal openness and authenticity. The future of the internet would be social. It would reassert the power of the 'I'. Its platforms would flatten hierarchies further giving every 'I' a voice, a character, a presence, a brand"
35. "You had to be a better you than all the other yous that were suddenly surrounding you. You had to be more entertaining, more original, more beautiful, with more friends, have wittier lines and more righteous opinions, and you'd best be doing it looking stylish in interesting places with your breakfast healthy, delicious and beautifully lit."
36. "In the age of perfectionism we're more likely to simply accept we shouldn't rely on the collective organism, whether it be government or corporation, to take responsibility for us.... It means we tend to judge people who actually need help and judge ourselves harshly when we need it."
37. "Neo-liberalism beams at us from many corners of our culture and we absorb it back into ourselves like radiation.. And if you're becoming a better person that often requires buying many things or regulating your body according to what a proper neoliberal citizen should be - someone who's healthy and active and participating and a self-starter."
38. "The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia."
39. "We live our lives in story mode. Our minds make sense of the world using simplistic observations o cause and effect. They confabulate, weaving a useful, makes-sense narrative out of what they're feeling and seeing that casts their owners in a heroic light."
40. "What's important though, is the understanding that voting decisions are rarely about coldly rational economic calculations, or simple racism or misogyny."
41. "Everyday, millions of us who are needled and outraged by the hysterically stated views of those with whom we don't agree. Our irritation pushes us into a place of fiercer opposition. The more emotional we become, the less rational we become, the less able to properly reason. In an attempt to quieten the stress, we begin muting, blocking, de-friending and unfollowing. And we're in an echo chamber now, shielded from diverse perspectives that might otherwise have made us wiser and more empathetic and open."
42. "When you are in an echo chamber with a bunch of people who are fairly similar to you, you start saying things that would not be socially acceptable else. Like 'All religious people are idiots'"
43. "We're a highly social species. Almost every thing we do impacts on someone else, in one way or another. Changes we make to our environment form ripples that spread out, far into the human universe. These ripples are easy to ignore. Especially for us Westeners, many are invisible. But they're there, no matter how convenient or seductive it might be to pretend otherwise and deny responsibility for anyone but our own sacred selves."
44. "Although seeking approval from social media isn't inherently a bad thing, the cycle of constantly needing it is"
45. "We always knew these people [celebrities] who were genetically gifted and more talented than we are. But now anyone can be a star and that makes everyone thirsty."
46. "Social media is associated with diminished well-being and lower life satisfaction, because people are always looking at other people with better lives."
47. "The irony of the new digital world that's enabled the rise of these kinds of incidents is that it relies for its success on some of our most ancient parts. We're tribal and we're wired to want to punish , sometimes savagely those who transgress the codes of our in-group. These are powerful and dangerous instincts that can easily overwhelm us."
48. "Here's the truth that no million-selling self-help book, famous motivational speaker, happiness guru or blockbusting Hollywood screenwriter seems to want you to know. You're limited. Imperfect. And there's nothing you can do about it."
49. "We are part nature, part nurture, formed by biology, culture and experience."
50. "The social world is a maze of circus mirrors, each exaggerating one facet of our self and diminishing another, while the essential core remains."
51. "Western culture wants us to buy the fiction that the self is open, free, nothing but pure, bright possibility; that we're all born with the same suite of potential abilities, as neural 'blank slates' as if all human brains come off the production line at Foxconn."
52. "We're lumps of biology, mashed and pounded into shape by mostly chance events. Our 'human potential' is limited. But this isn't the model of self that our culture keeps showing us. Instead we're presented with an individual who has total free will and an ability to become whoever they choose. And who they choose to be is an extroverted, slim, individualistic, optimistic, hard-working, popular, socially aware, yet high self esteeming individual with entrepreneurial guile."
53. "Put a lizard on an iceberg and it's miserable. Now release it into the Sahara. The core of who the lizard is hasn't altered in the slightest and yet it's become happy."
AND FINALLY...
54. "Would I like to be a less neurotic person? Well, no, because I probably wouldn't have done the most interesting things in my life."
Thanks for sticking around. Have a great week ahead!
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