How (and why) to get over yourself (part 2)
The antidote to self-obsession is readily available, but tastes unfamiliar
In part 1, we broke down how hyper-individualism, inflated ego, self-involvement, and an emphasis on your uniqueness leads to depression, loneliness, and lower self-esteem.
So… how do you get over yourself? How do you become less individualistic and self-involved?
And if you accept that you’re ‘just a normal person’, are you condemning yourself to a faceless life?
The solution to self-involvement is simple. Start seeing yourself in context, and you’ll realize you’re not unique. While it seems like a ‘downer’, it’s actually the opposite. Realizing how much you have in common with other people is a precursor to living a happier life.
Emphasizing your similarities with other people doesn’t mean you have to act like them, give up your dreams, or change your hobbies. It just means you’ll no longer define your identity by your peculiarities.
1. Identify your narrative
First, write down a description of how you see yourself. What experiences, perspectives, attributes, or assets make you feel valuable or unique?
These could be things like:
“I’m an actualized spiritual being, most people go through life on auto-pilot. But not me. I’m enlightened.”
“I’m more attractive / wealthy / intelligent than average, and this makes me valuable.”
“I have a unique life story, living in multiple places, which has given me a unique perspective others can’t imagine.”
“I understand how the world really works.”
“I’m more sensitive or in touch with myself than other people.”
“I’m working on building the next big thing. I’m an innovator. Other people just live in the world built by people like me.”
“I have a lot of followers. People think I’m important.”
2. Put your narrative in context
Accept how many other people have that same narrative.
Here’s an example: “I’ve always been an artist and writer and had a unique perspective. I felt like an outsider. Then, I moved to New York to discover myself, and had a spiritual awakening. But there are hundreds of thousands of people like me in New York.”
Initially, that might seem depressing… but only if you’re reliant upon your accomplishments or uniqueness for defining your happiness.
If you want to set aside your dogma, the research is clear on what you should value instead of uniqueness.
3. Identify more with your relationships
Close relationships are the #1 contributor to a happy life. Seeing yourself as unique gets in the way of relationships, while identifying yourself more by your relationships (I’m X’s brother, I’m Y’s friend, I’m a member of Z club etc.) helps you focus on investing in yourself in ways correlated with happiness.
The funny thing, to me, is how much this flies in the face of prevailing views like “you don’t need a partner, you can be happy on your own.”
Don’t depend on the validation of others for your self-worth, or lose yourself in relationships. But defining your identity by, in part, sustained healthy relationships helps you emphasize their value on your life.
Because humans are not solitary earthworms, digging our way through the mud of life alone. We are social creatures.
Putting it all together: the Rat Park analogy
There’s a famous study called Rat Park. Through the early 1970s, scientists had learned about addiction by offering individual rats in cages the option of morphine-laced water or normal water. The rats always went for the morphine-laced water, from which scientists concluded that drugs were intrinsically addictive.
Whole papers and addiction models were based off those studies on rats. And then the science came crashing down.
A Canadian psychologist named Bruce Alexander believed that you can’t treat a rat as an individual; rats are social creatures (like you and me). So he re-ran the experiments, but instead of isolating rats, he let them exist as they would in nature, in a social context.
The result? Rats no longer compulsively chose morphine-laced water.
‘A rat’ cannot be behaviorally modeled as an isolated individual. And neither can you.
Imagine a rat avoiding belonging because of a misguided insistence on defining itself by what sets it apart. That rat values its independence above all else. As a result it lives a shorter, more confused, depressed life. That’s modern American culture in a nutshell.
So set your ego aside. Get out of your own narrative, be a part of something, and stop seeing yourself as unique. You can thank me later.