Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

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> I feel like I trick myself all the time - to guide myself towards becoming what I want to be

This is the central principle of human psychology and interpersonal behavior, IMO.

Kurt Vonnegut nailed it: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful about what we pretend to be”

That racist jerk? He’s probably not really a racist jerk, he’s just pretending to be one to fuck with people. Except! That is no different than “actually” being a racist jerk.

Same thing with compassion or anything else, including intelligence. When a stranger is helping you pick up stuff you dropped, or a coworker is reasoning thought a complicated problem, it doesn’t matter if they’re “just pretending”. That is who they are, to them and to you.

My personal formulation has evolved into a small riff on Vonnegut’s insight: I think that our entire personality is simply the sum of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Change the stories you tell yourself, change yourself.

I agree. I've been interested in how the stories we consume, whether presented to us by ourselves or others, affect our personalities. Thank you for pointing me to Vonnegut.

One thing I feel is often overlooked in this conversation are our physical urges, specifically the ones motivating us to action that is different from what the 'character' we want to be would do. That adds noise to our personality, and widens the gap between what we are and what we want to be.

Urges are interesting. I agree they add noise and in dramatic cases completely take over personality (seeing a rattlesnake, for instance).

There’s also an interesting intersection with stories. I know when I’m pretty hungry my chain of thought is basically “I’ve got enough extra pounds I’m not going to starve, I’ll eat eventually, it’s not that important”. A close friend often tells me she has to eat as soon as she’s hungry or else she gets irritable and distracted. I sometimes wonder if that’s prescriptive or descriptive.

Physical urges can be considered some form of "subconscious" narrative (or even raw sensory narrative, e.g. hunger), while the "character we see ourselves as" is the more conscious narrative. The gap between these two reveals how latent, subconscious trauma can affect our emotions and desires, in the "Jungian shadow" sense. The conscious narrative is easier to manipulate, while the unconscious narrative is harder to, requiring "shadow work" as Jung called it.

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