You need some alone time. You think that if you just block everything out, and think, and dig deep enough, you might just find what you’ve been looking for, your true self. You’re too influenced the people around you, you want to dig into something individual. No matter how hard you try, you’re never going to find it.
Why?
We human beings are social creatures. The true self doesn’t exist because we’re the sum of the interactions amongst each other. You act differently with different people or in different situations. Those contexts change you.
The self you are while you are alone only exists while you are alone. It isn’t any more your “true” self than how you are at school or work.
We’re all part of the Collective Mind
I’ve already explored how individually, we’re less rational than chimps.What makes us humans special is what we can do socially. Together we can come up with new cultural practices and technologies that have allowed us to build everything we have- the collective mind. We’re all interconnected and constantly drawing from each other. If you look at a picture of the neurons in our brain, it looks a lot like a picture of a social network. The social network also works a lot like a web of neurons. New messages shooting off and activating new neurons or people who then spread their own messages in response.
We’re not just individuals. What makes us unique as a species is our collective mind which we use to think together and solve problems together. You can never find your true self spending time alone because we arent individual creatures like tigers or eagles, we’re social creatures, like ants or bees, and exist within that social context.
Think of Yourself as a Verb not a Noun
Stop thinking of yourself as a noun and start thinking of yourself as a verb. We’re part of a constant reaction, were always changing with our environment, as we learn, as we’re around new people.
The Greek Philosopher, Heraclitus explored the constant change of the universe, writing,”No man ever steps in the same river twice”. The river may look the same at first, but the water that defines it it constantly shifting and changing. We need to think of ourself as the river, our bodies change slowly but everything else changes constantly. The beauty of being humans is that we can guide and shape how we change.
We can shape and reshape ourselves into anything we want to be.
“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?”
― Michel Foucault
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