If you’re here for the travel stuff, I posted a bunch of new pictures yesterday here. Enjoy 🙂 Here’s my favorite:
I got to Barcelona on Wednesday, having done exactly zero planning about where I wanted to stay and what I wanted to do. I have never done something like that before and the last couple of days have been pretty great (the rest of Paris was excellent, by the way, but I guess will remain unblogged for now – oh well. Except that hanging out by the Eiffel Tower at night is unexpectedly really awesome and hilarious).
I’ve discovered that in this sort of free-form context I fall pretty quickly into Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – it’s hard to focus on slowing down and appreciating what’s around me if I’m hungry or I have to pee. I’m getting better at flexing the muscle of predicting this without moving into a more agenda-driven mindset so that I can stay in the moment, and also ignoring my stomach/bladder when I see something cool. So that’s good. Honestly I haven’t done too much of note here yet except a lot of wandering around and thinking, and I’m pretty comfortable with that. I am going to an electronic show in a couple hours (Egyptrixx @ Nitsa) which may or may not result in a night of note, we’ll see.
What I HAVE been doing is reading through J.P. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, and reflecting a lot on my state as a human. Specifically, trying to better understand and synthesize some of my persistent fears and anxieties (with the goal of reducing or at least better channeling them over time). One possible conclusion I’m moving towards is that those fears may have, at their root, some fundamental insecurities I have about myself and who I am. I’ll write more about the fears later, and touch today on the insecurity.
I can exude a lot of confidence in certain situations, but at the core I often have major doubts that I am as capable, exciting and enjoyable to be around as a decent amount of evidence in my life (awesome friends) would seem to suggest I am. The two main rationales I have come up with for this doubt in the past are that either a) my friends feel sorry for me, or b) that I am tricking them somehow. I stopped really thinking about (a) a long time ago, but (b) is nagging. One argument that I have for (b) is something I have referred to as the “Calculated Self” vs the “Real Self”.
I remember very clearly getting to 9th grade as a somewhat reserved, weird (in a weird way, not in an interesting way), and not especially social person. I decided one day that I wanted to be exciting, weird in a funny and charming way, and social. Obviously, it was because of a girl. By the end of high school I had pretty much succeeded in this goal (although not with the girl, hah) and was perceived to be thus by most of my peers. But I had an idea that this new, interesting person was my “calculated self”, a persona I had created who was different from (yet somehow vaguely anchored in) the old reserved me who was my “real self”, and somehow less genuine as a result. Today I have a lot of traits from both of those personas that all evidence would suggest run pretty deeply into my being, but I’ve often wondered if some were somehow more “real” than others.
Sartre talks a lot about how we define what is the essence of a person, thinking through the personas we can put on and what someone means when they say “that action did not seem like the Real You”. He writes that humans are uniquely born knowing that our lives are not everything that they could be, and that we sometimes make decisions that are not consistent with who we perceive ourselves to be (I am not the “Real Me”). He refers to this “lack” in each of us, this ideal version which we can conceive of even though it has never existed in the past. He thinks that we are continually surpassing ourselves to close the gap on the “lack” and get closer to the “Real Me”. As an existentialist he is of course rather pessimistic about this and considers it to be the doom of the human condition, and while I disagree with that bit the idea is quite enlightening. He jumps from this to a discussion of our conscious perception of time – our individual past, fixed and unchangeable in time and space like a mountain (although of course our memory of it can change), our present instant which is full of choice and always in flux, and our future which presents a multitude of paths and final Real Selves at the end.
I had always conceived of my Real Self as a fixed point in the past, something I was born into, a fixed property of my being. But reading this brought me to the insight that my Real Self is not at all in the past but is out there somewhere in the future, not a fixed point but fluid. My past is like a mountain that I am continually building beneath me which allows me to climb ever closer to this Real Self, and based on my choices and experiences that mountain may bring me to a completely different point than I expect – but at that point it is real.
There is no Calculated Self opposed to a Real Self – only my intentional, thoughtful choices and my intuitions/reactions/emotions – the combination forms who I am and these two influence each other (e.g. the Conscious and Unconscious). The way my thoughtful choices today influence my future reactions/emotions is one of the primary mechanisms I have to influence my eventual Real Self – for example, where I focus my thoughts and energy, who I surround myself with, what habits I form and what I read. And of course other factors outside my control, both internal and external, will also shape it. I have also been reading Thinking Fast and Slow and it suggests a lot of modern psychological research carries out these ideas.
So when my friend says to me, “that action did not seem like your Real Self”, I can interpret that as “the person I think you want to be and are likely to be, based on your past and your present impulses, at the end of this grand experiment of life”. That interpretation makes a lot more sense to me than a fixed point in the past, and also makes me feel a lot better about who I am now. I guess the idea of a real self that only exists in the future has also been staring me in the face for most of my life in biblical texts, but the focus there is a bit different so I never made this leap until now.
So yeah, this was a big breakthrough for me today, as I was sitting on the beach enjoying the sun and drinking sangria. Thinking more about the nature of the past, and present choices also led to some other breakthroughs in how I conceive time and how that relates to the fears I mentioned earlier – more on that later.
I’m going to go dance now.
-E
Tunes for this post: I have been thinking about Caribou lately as he is working on a new album, and also slacking on new tunes so far while I travel.. oops. But I dug up this old 7 hour live mix from him, I haven’t listened to it but seems worth a share so I listen to it later 🙂 Caribou aka Daphni live from Bussey