9 ms·

How We Got to Be So Self-Absorbed: The Long Story

184 points by acsillag 8y ago

pacifi30 8y ago
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...
RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
asdfman123 8y ago
"I'm not a selfish entitled narcissist," I say as I open an NY Times article in incognito mode to avoid the paywall.
- sublimationary 8y ago
  If it makes you feel any better, most of The New York Times is just advertorials and a subversive promulgation of government agendas. In a sense, it's already all bought and paid for, as with most "news" outlets, and the same is true for HN, albeit with a specialization for technology.
asdfman123 8y ago
"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.
- cirgue 8y ago
  Also, being positive solely for the sake of being positive short-circuits our ability to process a decently large chunk of life. This isn’t to say that being a whiny grouch is good, but that sugarcoating things is not a healthy way to look at the world. Sometimes life sucks. Sometimes shitty things happen. Sometimes people are assholes. Take away the ability to credibly discuss those things as negative, and you take away the ability to comprehend and solve some very real problems.
  - wahern 8y ago
    > Take away the ability to credibly discuss those things as negative, and you take away the ability to comprehend and solve some very real problems. I think it follows that you also take away the ability to honestly reflect upon and comprehend one's own behavior. For this reason I've come to the belief that the trend to encourage people to "never regret" limits self-growth and even limits empathy[1]. Maybe it's the latent Catholic in me, but regret and shame are very primitive and _necessary_ emotions. Yes, they're often abused by society and individuals to harm others. But to recognize that doesn't require that they should be denied or suppressed. Empathy and sympathy can be manipulated to harm people, too; that doesn't mean people should instead become hardened sociopaths. The only difference here is that empathy (especially when received) is pleasurable, while regret and shame are painful. But to believe that distinction makes one legitimate and constructive and the other illegitimate and destructive is fundamentally hedonistic and narcissistic. These emotions are largely environmental inputs (directly or indirectly, immediate and latent) that we need to learn to affirmatively assimilate to better understand ourselves and the world around us. Denying, suppressing, or categorically desensitizing oneself to these emotions is not assimilation; quite the opposite. [1] For example, by obscuring one's own hypocrisy--living by a rule that says never judge oneself is much easier than living by a rule that says never judge someone else. So it exacerbates an asymmetry between understanding one's own secret motivations and understanding someone else's secret motivations.
thrav 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Curtis's docos (and some parodies of them) are excellent at many levels.
  - techer 8y ago
    Which parodies?
    - lovemenot 8y ago
      "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 8y ago
        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
brazzledazzle 8y ago
The review is worth reading but the conclusion's succinctness struck me: "In other words: If you want self-esteem, earn it."
- majos 8y ago
  There's another half to this advice: if you have clearly improved yourself, you should consciously add on some self-esteem. I say this as someone who was depressed about who I was, affected a lot of (positive, by most standards) change in myself over several years, but didn't catch my self-esteem up for several more. The initial painful spark to improve yourself can be good and is I think underrated today, but nurturing it can hurt you even as it makes you strong.
- matte_black 8y ago
  But then what do you do when you have the self-esteem? What comes next?
  - brazzledazzle 8y ago
    Helping other people.
- taneq 8y ago
  This is something missing from so much of the "positive self esteem" movement. It seems so phoney trying to make someone happier with themselves without trying to actually address any of their self-criticisms.
hulton 8y ago
I would have enjoyed this article more if all it had written was, "Social Media."
bitwize 8y ago
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.
danschumann 8y ago
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.
pnathan 8y ago
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 8y ago
  > libertarian fascism What does this mean?
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    There's a marked ... level of association, at the very least, between major parts of the conservative and Rothbardian/Randian Libertarian movements, and straight-up fascist action or ideology. The Daily Beast had an excellent article on this in August, 2017: http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-insidious-libertarian-to-alt-right-pipeline http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-insidious-libertarian-to-al... Also The New Yorker, "Are Bosses Dictators? | The New Yorker": https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/are-bosses-dictators https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/are-bosses-dicta... And though a blog, this also cites Jane Meyer's Dark Money and the Kochs: https://bennorton.com/the-libertarian-fascist-alliance/ https://bennorton.com/the-libertarian-fascist-alliance/ Mark Ames has covered Reason Magazine's Holocaust denial: https://pando.com/2014/07/24/as-reasons-editor-defends-its-racist-history-heres-a-copy-of-its-holocaust-denial-special-issue/ https://pando.com/2014/07/24/as-reasons-editor-defends-its-r... National Review: https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/08/libertarians-sometimes-become-fascists-heres-why/ https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/08/libertarians-sometime... The case of William Regnery II, owner of Regnery Press, a libertarian and conservative publisher dating to the 1950s: https://www.buzzfeed.com/aramroston/hes-spent-almost-20-years-funding-the-racist-right-it https://www.buzzfeed.com/aramroston/hes-spent-almost-20-year... I suspect this gets a bit off track for the thread, but you asked an I answer.
zakum1 8y ago
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.
maroonblazer 8y ago
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.
- icantdrive55 8y ago
  Never forget a EST seminar I was dragged to in the ninties. I really tried to keep an open mind, but it was just a money grab in the end. 1. The very attractive main speaker had a PHD, and let everyone know--at nausium. (After the event, I went up to talk to her, and she claimed it was from Stanford. I called Stanford the next week and she never went there. She was a highly skilled speaker though--weird, but brilliant on EST's part.) 2. A guy in the crowd stood up, and said, "I'm spending this months rent on the down payment for the course." (I think he was telling the truth--sadly.) 3. The women in the back of the room who signed people up after the "religious" seminar, were all paid models. (I just asked one of them. I had a hard time believing such stunning women were just fellow EST members. The one girl I talked with was sent to the event by her agency. 4. The sad part is there are people are still so gullible to just, "Wish it--want it--do it!" By Brian Griffith
megaman22 8y ago
Can we please just blacklist the NY Times? Their articles are garbage and induce flame wars about non-tech subjects.
bvinc 8y ago
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 8y ago
  > 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.
- lowracle 8y ago
  I can say from my personal experience that the moments that felt the most lonely in my life were the days I spent going to the university library working on projects / thesis, seeing hundreds of people around me, but not being able to interact with them. Everyday my brain was punishing me for not engaging in possible social interactions. I spent two months traveling alone and didn't felt lonely at all. So yeah I think the negative effects of loneliness are just the consequences of a natural mechanism to force us to be social.
svyft 8y ago
How come a lot of paywalled articles end up on the first page of HN these days?
lerie82 8y ago
How did this make the front page? It's trash. It's an opinion, not fact and definitely not news.
dalbasal 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Yes people are putting all of their eggs in one basket when practicing intellectualization for such long stretches of time.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

184 points by acsillag 8y ago

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...

RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

asdfman123 8y ago

"I'm not a selfish entitled narcissist," I say as I open an NY Times article in incognito mode to avoid the paywall.

sublimationary 8y ago
If it makes you feel any better, most of The New York Times is just advertorials and a subversive promulgation of government agendas. In a sense, it's already all bought and paid for, as with most "news" outlets, and the same is true for HN, albeit with a specialization for technology.

asdfman123 8y ago

"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.

cirgue 8y ago
Also, being positive solely for the sake of being positive short-circuits our ability to process a decently large chunk of life. This isn’t to say that being a whiny grouch is good, but that sugarcoating things is not a healthy way to look at the world. Sometimes life sucks. Sometimes shitty things happen. Sometimes people are assholes. Take away the ability to credibly discuss those things as negative, and you take away the ability to comprehend and solve some very real problems.
- wahern 8y ago
  > Take away the ability to credibly discuss those things as negative, and you take away the ability to comprehend and solve some very real problems. I think it follows that you also take away the ability to honestly reflect upon and comprehend one's own behavior. For this reason I've come to the belief that the trend to encourage people to "never regret" limits self-growth and even limits empathy[1]. Maybe it's the latent Catholic in me, but regret and shame are very primitive and _necessary_ emotions. Yes, they're often abused by society and individuals to harm others. But to recognize that doesn't require that they should be denied or suppressed. Empathy and sympathy can be manipulated to harm people, too; that doesn't mean people should instead become hardened sociopaths. The only difference here is that empathy (especially when received) is pleasurable, while regret and shame are painful. But to believe that distinction makes one legitimate and constructive and the other illegitimate and destructive is fundamentally hedonistic and narcissistic. These emotions are largely environmental inputs (directly or indirectly, immediate and latent) that we need to learn to affirmatively assimilate to better understand ourselves and the world around us. Denying, suppressing, or categorically desensitizing oneself to these emotions is not assimilation; quite the opposite. [1] For example, by obscuring one's own hypocrisy--living by a rule that says never judge oneself is much easier than living by a rule that says never judge someone else. So it exacerbates an asymmetry between understanding one's own secret motivations and understanding someone else's secret motivations.

thrav 8y ago

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 8y ago
Curtis's docos (and some parodies of them) are excellent at many levels.
- techer 8y ago
  Which parodies?
  - lovemenot 8y ago
    "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 8y ago
      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

brazzledazzle 8y ago

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

majos 8y ago
There's another half to this advice: if you have clearly improved yourself, you should consciously add on some self-esteem. I say this as someone who was depressed about who I was, affected a lot of (positive, by most standards) change in myself over several years, but didn't catch my self-esteem up for several more. The initial painful spark to improve yourself can be good and is I think underrated today, but nurturing it can hurt you even as it makes you strong.
matte_black 8y ago
But then what do you do when you have the self-esteem? What comes next?
- brazzledazzle 8y ago
  Helping other people.
taneq 8y ago
This is something missing from so much of the "positive self esteem" movement. It seems so phoney trying to make someone happier with themselves without trying to actually address any of their self-criticisms.

hulton 8y ago

I would have enjoyed this article more if all it had written was, "Social Media."

bitwize 8y ago

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.

danschumann 8y ago

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.

pnathan 8y ago

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 8y ago
> libertarian fascism What does this mean?
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  There's a marked ... level of association, at the very least, between major parts of the conservative and Rothbardian/Randian Libertarian movements, and straight-up fascist action or ideology. The Daily Beast had an excellent article on this in August, 2017: http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-insidious-libertarian-to-alt-right-pipeline http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-insidious-libertarian-to-al... Also The New Yorker, "Are Bosses Dictators? | The New Yorker": https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/are-bosses-dictators https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/are-bosses-dicta... And though a blog, this also cites Jane Meyer's Dark Money and the Kochs: https://bennorton.com/the-libertarian-fascist-alliance/ https://bennorton.com/the-libertarian-fascist-alliance/ Mark Ames has covered Reason Magazine's Holocaust denial: https://pando.com/2014/07/24/as-reasons-editor-defends-its-racist-history-heres-a-copy-of-its-holocaust-denial-special-issue/ https://pando.com/2014/07/24/as-reasons-editor-defends-its-r... National Review: https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/08/libertarians-sometimes-become-fascists-heres-why/ https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/08/libertarians-sometime... The case of William Regnery II, owner of Regnery Press, a libertarian and conservative publisher dating to the 1950s: https://www.buzzfeed.com/aramroston/hes-spent-almost-20-years-funding-the-racist-right-it https://www.buzzfeed.com/aramroston/hes-spent-almost-20-year... I suspect this gets a bit off track for the thread, but you asked an I answer.

zakum1 8y ago

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.

maroonblazer 8y ago

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.

icantdrive55 8y ago
Never forget a EST seminar I was dragged to in the ninties. I really tried to keep an open mind, but it was just a money grab in the end. 1. The very attractive main speaker had a PHD, and let everyone know--at nausium. (After the event, I went up to talk to her, and she claimed it was from Stanford. I called Stanford the next week and she never went there. She was a highly skilled speaker though--weird, but brilliant on EST's part.) 2. A guy in the crowd stood up, and said, "I'm spending this months rent on the down payment for the course." (I think he was telling the truth--sadly.) 3. The women in the back of the room who signed people up after the "religious" seminar, were all paid models. (I just asked one of them. I had a hard time believing such stunning women were just fellow EST members. The one girl I talked with was sent to the event by her agency. 4. The sad part is there are people are still so gullible to just, "Wish it--want it--do it!" By Brian Griffith

megaman22 8y ago

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

bvinc 8y ago

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 8y ago
> 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.
lowracle 8y ago
I can say from my personal experience that the moments that felt the most lonely in my life were the days I spent going to the university library working on projects / thesis, seeing hundreds of people around me, but not being able to interact with them. Everyday my brain was punishing me for not engaging in possible social interactions. I spent two months traveling alone and didn't felt lonely at all. So yeah I think the negative effects of loneliness are just the consequences of a natural mechanism to force us to be social.

svyft 8y ago

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

lerie82 8y ago

How did this make the front page? It's trash. It's an opinion, not fact and definitely not news.

dalbasal 8y ago

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 8y ago
Yes people are putting all of their eggs in one basket when practicing intellectualization for such long stretches of time.

deleted 8y ago

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