
How We Got to Be So Self-Absorbed: The Long Story - acsillag
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/21/books/review/selfie-will-storr.html
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asdfman123
"There was always a dark side to the Human Potential Movement. If a positive
attitude and a sense of self-worth are what matters for success, then failure
is always your own fault."

I always thought my alma mater, Stanford, was backwards about students
suffering from depression for exactly that reason. Promoting positivity is
great, unless it means ostracizing and shaming people who are already
suffering. It was hard to be there because the highest ideals were positivity
and productivity, and if you're depressed you're neither.

As I get older I realize more and more what a complex organism a human society
is. If you change one factor, you can easily change other ones without meaning
to.

~~~
paidleaf
> It was hard to be there because the highest ideals were positivity and
> productivity

It's interesting how language/vocabulary changed as well. "I'm upset because I
wasn't productive today". When did people get told that their lot in life was
to be productive. And who told them to think or talk like that? How did people
start to view themselves as machines whose worth is measured by production?
Also, where did the "motivation or get motivated" craze come from. All of a
sudden, it's "Are you motivated?" or "Get motivated". For what? Why? All of
the sudden it's motivation and productivity.

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grigjd3
We've been moralizing work in the US at least my whole life.

~~~
solarkraft
Productivity was also important before advanced civilization, though.

~~~
grigjd3
Let's keep our concepts where they belong. Moralizing work and productivity
are not only different things, but come from different fields.

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thrav
The BBC documentary “Century of The Self” available on YouTube also highlights
the ways in which everything happening at Esalen were leveraged to manufacture
more consumerism. Great watch.

~~~
dredmorbius
Curtis's docos (and some parodies of them) are excellent at many levels.

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techer
Which parodies?

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lovemenot
"This is a short story about the rise of the Collageumentary, And how the
medium swamped the message"

The Loving Trap [https://youtu.be/x1bX3F7uTrg](https://youtu.be/x1bX3F7uTrg)

~~~
dredmorbius
That's the one I had in mind (it's brilliant), though it's become a bit of a
genre itself:

[https://youtube.com/results?search_query=adam+curtis+parody](https://youtube.com/results?search_query=adam+curtis+parody)

Corbett Report offers a good, longish (45m) take, non-parody:

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=njJz6zrmy_s](https://youtube.com/watch?v=njJz6zrmy_s)

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maroonblazer
I did a couple Lifespring courses back in the early 90's at the behest of my
dad - which was surprising given he is a staunch Roman Catholic - who found
them enlightening. I too found them to be eye-opening. The experiential
learning approach was profoundly effective.

E.g. one exercise conducted on the very first day - so that no one really new
who anyone else was - involved 5 minutes of wandering around the room in
silence, approaching another and looking at them for approx 5 secs. You then
had to say one of two things: "I trust you." or "I don't trust you."

There was only one person who I labeled as untrustworthy. I vividly remember
his image and that he looked like the stereotype of a used car salesman.
However by the end of the seminar I found him to be a smart, witty, sensitive
and caring individual. The exact opposite of my initial evaluation.

I knew that one shouldn't "judge a book by its cover" ever since I was little
but that experience and others like them in those seminars really set me back
on my heels. I still recall it when I have an initial adverse reaction to
someone new.

Unfortunately after finishing the 2nd seminar the whole Amway/pyramid-scheme
aspect of it kicked in and completely turned me off and I cut ties altogether.
However I still think that I might be a little worse off for not having gone
through that.

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zakum1
A significant problem of the self esteem and positive thinking movements is
the way in which it removes focus from the structural political, social and
economic reasons that so strongly influence “success” and therefore
“happiness” in the world. I think we will see the pendulum swing back as
narcissistic populist politicians unwittingly remind us of this.

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dalbasal
Lately I'm becoming convinced that we give ideas far too much credit. Greek
individualism, introspective theology, Ayn Rand or the human potential
movement... these are ideas.

I think we're overthinking. We are fantasticaly intellectual creatures, and I
personally enjoy ideas like these a lot. But, I think most of our psyche is
just much simpler, more primitive.

What is the social setting we are living in, is it adequate? Do we have enough
friends, shared mission, sense of collective belonging. Are we secure in our
social lives? What is the condition of your life as a homo sapien?

Think of it this way. If we were alien zookeepers designing the sapien
enclosure for maximum ethical zookeeping, what are the ideal conditions in the
enclosure? What conditions would make the exhibits stressed or depressed.

Ideas matter, but indirectly. Does your introspective theology come with a
community, how does that community interact?

~~~
pokemongoaway
Yes people are putting all of their eggs in one basket when practicing
intellectualization for such long stretches of time.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
I think part of the reason is that more and more of our identity is tied to
ourselves. In the past, identity was a function of your parents, your birth
place, your nationality, etc. Now this is no longer the case. The advantage is
much greater freedom and mobility. The disadvantage is that you have to be
more involved in defining your identity.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
In some ways this isn't a bad thing, history has shown us there are plenty of
politicians willing to use national identity to whip up and justify
intolerance.

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danschumann
The other week my internet went out. I felt disconnected, like there was a
part of me reaching out, hungry, for entertainment and more, and it felt like
it was just landing on the ground.

Perhaps a part of self absorption is self discovery, finding a kindredness
with others(and now we can kindle that with unlimited numbers online), which
makes us feel the ability to constantly reinvent, which becomes an ongoing
experiment.

In a way self absorption could be: how do we process and make relevant, to our
own experience, all this new information the internet brings.

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bitwize
The Human Potential Movement actually has very deep roots in early 20th
century "New Thought". New Thought and Human Potential memes have been used to
keep sales forces motivated for decades, and are currently extensively used by
multilevel marketing organizations to keep their independent distributors from
bailing once they realize the promised riches aren't coming in.

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brazzledazzle
The review is worth reading but the conclusion's succinctness struck me: "In
other words: If you want self-esteem, earn it."

~~~
matte_black
But then what do you do when you have the self-esteem? What comes next?

~~~
brazzledazzle
Helping other people.

------
bvinc
This is just not the direction I would have gone to explain why we're all so
self absorbed. I wouldn't think the focus on kids having self esteem would
affect very much at all.

The way I look at it, we're social creatures, meant to live in tribes in close
contact with our people. But capitalism and technology keep us isolated and in
competition with each other. We live in houses with yards and fences and don't
talk to each other. Social communication is now mostly done in isolation
through a screen. Even music, which should bring a community together, is
mostly now a solitary act done in private to drown out the rest of the world.

What do you guys think of this line of thought?

~~~
loggedinmyphone
> We live in houses with yards and fences and don't talk to each other.

Yes, ironically, putting more people together creates more isolation. People
live in extremely dense apartment housing in cities - and still don't know
their neighbors, or want to know them.

We think of the world as moving in the direction of coming together; of
connecting. Yet "belonging" and "apartness" are duals of each other. Without a
sense of separate and exclusive group identities, we are all equally alone.

Consider that starvation was not a major cause of human death before the
development of cities. In the hunter-gatherer days, a band would perish or
survive together. Only when settlement and agriculture became the norm would
we sit and watch our neighbors die of starvation.

When I hear Zuckerberg say he believes in connecting people, it makes me
cringe. We're already over-connected. When you're connected to everyone,
you're connected to no one. Isolation and ultimately self-absorption come from
a loss of the clearly defined ingroup vs outgroup rivalry we thrive on.

We strive for universal human brotherhood; yet "kindness for all means
coldness to your neighbor." There may be a way forward past both tribalism and
contemporary nihilism, but we won't get there on the thin gruel of rational
morality.

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pacifi30
TLDR -: Knowing self is valuable info but like everything - in moderation.

Good viewpoint but this article does the same thing as Esalen did - look
inside and find your worth to extreme...of course every thing has a dark side
and so the Esalen approach led to failure is because of self....

As I see, there are two ways to look at this. 1\. We are all in a
actors/actress in this play called life and there are always going to be good
moments and bad moments. So human potential movement has its dark/bad side and
there's that. 2\. Secondly, I have been on a journey inwards so this is my
perspective. It's valuable to look inside and find the authentic you..though
the way our human society functions, we tend to follow/do what other people
tell their image of us...so it's valuable to see one's authentic self. When I
say authentic self, to me it means that one is able to find something worth
doing that is also paying their bills...

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pnathan
A _ton_ of weird stuff from that time seems to run through Esalen. I will read
this or that history of computing/hippies/etc and boom, Esalen.

Strange how influence works.

Anyway, beyond that... this is something I've been contemplating for a long
time. I would actually agree with the other HN poster that New Thought was a
contributing factor. I also locate part of the hyper-individualism at play
today in the reaction to the Soviet Union's collectivism and Nazi Germany's
mass movements. There seemed to have been a certain "inoculation" that was put
in people's heads that "collaborating in large groups was e.v.i.l."; this
later cropped out to Reagan's nostrum "government is the problem", along with
the decline of labor, etc. The Me Decade was what, the 70s, and then on into
the 80s. I recently read "We were as gods", a memoir & history about growing
up in a Vermont commune in the 70s and how those communes fell apart. The
author locates the major root cause (out of many factors) in the inability to
form a proper governance mechanism and in the heavy "can't tell ME what to do"
individualism in the movement.

So.... we have selfies, dysfunctional governments, libertarian fascism, and
gig economies today. There _are_ links here between all 4. (Although, an
astute observer remarked that "self portraits" are an old tradition of
painters, so it's prudent not to point a finger too, ehm, _pointedly_ at the
moderns).

Anyway, I view movements such as the DSA as a sign of a more healthy society
struggling to come into being - the individual is important - _but so is
society and the group_. N.b., this isn't particularly _liberal_ as an idea
goes - I seem to remember remarks on this from the Mass. Bay Colony chiefs,
and at least one part of that concept goes back to early Christian writings.

~~~
throwaway37585
> libertarian fascism

What does this mean?

~~~
coldtea
Means Atlas not only shrugging, but wanting to lead and coerce the "sheeple"
towards what "he knows" is best...

~~~
throwaway37585
This seems vague. Elaborate?

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svyft
How come a lot of paywalled articles end up on the first page of HN these
days?

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megaman22
Can we please just blacklist the NY Times? Their articles are garbage and
induce flame wars about non-tech subjects.

